In my latest tip article for our newsletter, I give an overview of remote usability testing. Here’s the summary:
Remote usability testing is an easy and cheap way to identify parts of your website or application that are tripping up, confusing, or frustrating visitors. With $200 and a few hours, you can spot problems that are costing your business tens of thousands of dollars. Follow our real-world example below learn the steps to an effective test.
Read the full article here and share your usability tips or questions below.
Great article John. I wonder how this would be best used for nonprofits. I have a client that’s having issues with their site.
Specifically, they end up getting phone calls from people who want services that this nonprofit doesn’t offer. Apparently, despite every attempt to explain what they do, some people still don’t get it.
They’re also considering a site redesign, so this would be a great opportunity. This kind of testing might catch the issues.
But I’ll need to carefully craft the setup instructions so the audience puts themselves in the mindframe of the two primary audiences of this nonprofit.
Hi Hatef. This sounds like a great thing to use usability testing for. A few thoughts:
1) One of the great things about remote testing being so cheap, fast, and flexible is that you can “test your test.” I.e. you can set it up, purchase just 1 or 2 participants, and run them through it to make sure your scenario and tasks make sense before you purchase a larger group of participants.
2) I definitely find it easier to set up tests for sites that have a broad-appeal product or service. With SugaredSpoon, we were quickly able to get 55+ people who take meds, which makes their testing experience much more realistic and valuable. A niche B2B service provider, say, would find it harder to get testers in their target market and might have to rely more on the scenario (as you suggest you’ll have to do for your non-profit client). UserTesting’s panel is much bigger than the other tools I’ve tried so I’d go with them for niche sites.
3) If people not “getting” what the site/org is about is a problem they’re having, definitely include the Task #1 we included if you use UserTesting. TryMyUI has something I think they call an “impression test” that you can add on to any usability test. And another tool that focuses just on this type of thing you might try is FiveSecondTest (http://fivesecondtest.com/).
Good luck!
Niche remote testing is always going to be tricky with any panel-based remote testing tool (such as usertestng.com or similar) but some tools we’ve found are now adding in the facility to choose your own testers (say, from your existing customer base). That opens up a new dimension to your remote testing.
At this point I’d like to suggest as an alternative looking at Kupima (http://kupima.com) which is along the same lines as User Testing but expands on the richness of the question-based feedback you get. UT allows testers to answer text-based questions but Kupima adds in the ability to define discrete question types, such as checkbox lists, radio-button lists and even ratings-style lists. What makes this more useful is that the results to these types of questions are summarised as charts and a pdf summary document created. Remote testing is indeed moving on and up!
Going back to your comment about ‘getting’ what a site is about – that’s a common problem, and in fact a lot of the value you can get out of remote testing depends on how effectively you set your scenario and questions. What some people don’t realise is that care should be taken over setting the right kind of tasks and questions in order to guide the tester (if required) and solicit the right kind of feedback. Otherwise, extracting insight from the feedback can be a tricky and exhausting process.