To begin, or not begin from the homepage?
Of late, there have been discussions around the office, and with some of our clients, as to why in one-on-one user testing we get users to begin each task from the homepage. Following on from the previous blog post ‘Is your homepage, your homepage?’ there are arguments that not all users arrive at the homepage, so getting them to begin from there is not representative of a real world scenario, particularly since Google and other search engines encourage users to arrive deeper into the site.
That being said, even though the majority of your users might be landing deeper in your site, it is not to say that particular content should not be easily accessible from the homepage. Often when users are browsing a site they will use the homepage as a base to access different areas of your site, continually coming back and using the homepage as a reference or starting point. So even though users may have initially arrived deeper in your site, there is a good chance that during their visit they will click through to your homepage in order to locate other content.
Generally speaking, we feel that tasks presented during user testing are largely independent from each other and we encourage users to approach each task as if they had just arrived at the site. While it may be appropriate to base the first task of a testing session on a page other than the homepage, in most cases, we recommend that subsequent tasks begin from the homepage. The homepage provides a logical reset point from which users can begin their next task and provides an opportunity to test the effectiveness of the homepage and site navigation.