An increasing number of the websites that we test, particularly redesigned websites, contain some level of social media integration. Social media integration can be very powerful and if implemented in the right way, on the right website can provide an excellent means for a business to communicate with their customers.

Examples of social media bookmark buttons

One aspect of social media integration on websites that interests me is the almost ubiquitous inclusion of social media bookmarking buttons. The most common of these is the Facebook ‘like’ button; however, many websites provide access to a very broad range of similar functions for other social media websites.

In our experience, users tend not to attend to these links during general use of websites. It must be conceded that users may not be in the mindset to spontaneously share information about their usage of social media in the context of a usability session that is not explicitly testing this functionality. Based on our observations so far, it is somewhat  unclear whether the  lack of spontaneous use is due to a lack of prominence, a lack of interest or the test environment, however, when we explicitly test social media bookmarking, we see that a proportion of participants like and use it.

Social media bookmarking has the potential to be a powerful tool in reaching your audience through recommendations, however, when deciding whether to include this functionality it is important to ask the following questions:

1. Does the website audience use social media?
2. Does the audience use social media simply as a means to communicate with friends or also as a means to broadcast information about themselves?
3. Is my content something that users would want to share using social media?
4. How can I use the connections that are made to my audience using social media once they are established?

Eye-tracking can be an invaluable tool and I thought I would share our top 5 tips for using one as part of a usability project.

1 – Over-recruit for your desired sample size – Some participants will not provide sufficient eye tracking data for analysis. This means that you will need to recruit about a quarter more participants than is required for statistically sound analysis of heat maps or gaze plots. It is imperative that this is set as an expectation with stakeholders or clients at the beginning of the project.
2 – Allow plenty of time – In comparison with moderated user testing, more time is generally required for the set-up of the project, the running of sessions and subsequent analysis.
3 – Pilot your study -This will ensure that prior to seeing actual users you are confident the eye-tracker is set-up correctly and working to ensure data is being logged and measuring your stimulus. Without this important step all of the data collected may be useless.
4 – Use a dedicated eye-tracking set-up – This should include a chair on legs (opposed to an office swivel chair) and allowing the moderator to control the eye-tracking equipment (depedning on the eye-tracking hardware this could include the use of a second computer with data logging capabilities). Also, ensure the moderator sits well behind the participant and out of their line of sight.
5 – Is eye-tracking the right tool? – Lastly question whether eye tracking is going to add value to the project. Will it add more than just moderated think out loud user testing alone?

Example eye-tracking heatmap from UsabilityOne

Is there anything you would add to the list for getting the most out of eye-tracking?

For more on eye tracking see Ciaran’s article from the newsletter last year.

We regularly test websites where internal stakeholders of our client organization are a primary, if not sole, user group of the interface that we are engaged to test.

Testing with internal stakeholders can often provide much deeper insights into an interface as they typically have a stronger level of engagement with the interface being tested and better understand content and the organization as a whole. Stakeholders are invariably excited to participate and appreciate the opportunity to share their perspective, however, recruiting these participants involves the following considerations:

• Ensure that you are getting the right staff members and not just any staff members. It is important that recruitment specifications are used to focus recruitment on the staff members that you want to participate. In general, staff participants should be forthcoming and willing to participate, should have appropriate levels of technical expertise and should use the interface that is being tested
• Experts in a system under test can provide useful feedback, however, often don’t encounter usability issues as they are too familiar with the interface. Feedback from expert users is often best elicited in focus group or survey type research
• Ensure that the interface is relevant to the individual staff member. Often some members of a team or department use an interface while others in the group do not. It is important that the participants are, or will be, using the interface
• If testing a new interface, ensure that the staff members have not had significant time to learn the interface. It is often best to enter a usability session with a participant that is new to the interface but who is familiar with the organization
• Do not include staff members that participated in the design or implementation of the interface or in research related to the interface
• When using external recruiters to find internal participants, it is important that the client contact communicates to potential participants that they will be contacted by somebody from outside of their organisation and the reasons for this

As UX researchers we have a body of knowledge that has been built up through both our individual experience and shared wisdom that has come from others within the UX community. This knowledge forms the basis of the basic UX principles that we recommend our clients adhere to when developing a product. The sort of things I am talking about here are: users reading webpages in an F pattern, users’ expectation of search, satisficing (i.e. choosing the first option that looks as though it will meet our needs) and providing users with a sense of control.

Example eye-tracking heatmap from UsabilityOne

We prove our expertise and value to clients through sharing this knowledge with them, particularly when it assists them in understanding user behaviour they have witnessed first-hand while observing user testing of their product. Quite often clients are willing to accept what we say as we are the “expert”, but there are those who want proof beyond what can be seen as our opinion. Even those who accept our expert advice sometimes need more iron clad evidence to sell recommendations to other stakeholders.

This is where research that qualifies the observations we have made as individual UX researchers becomes so valuable. I recently came across this interesting blog post which pulls together research that informs 10 basic UX principles (http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/10-usability-tips-based-on-research-studies/). It is essential to our effectiveness as UX researchers that we are aware of the type of research that this blog references. More importantly we need to understand the research, view it with a critical eye, and weigh up what we see as the advantages and disadvantages of the research methodology and analysis before we share it with colleagues and clients.

PDF’s in general should be avoided as they cause many usability problems. However there are times when PDF’s have their place on the web; for instance if a document is meant to the printed then PDF is the correct medium. If your site contains PDF’s it is vital that users are aware of when a link will open a PDF.

Indicating the presence of PDF links helps to avoid PDF shock; that is giving users a nasty surprise of being dumped into a PDF file. There are a number of different ways of indicating PDF links. One method is to include a PDF gateway page; a page which summarises the PDF content, warns users that they are getting a PDF file, as well as presenting the file size. Gateway pages are supposed to prevent PDF shock as well as let users determine if the PDF is worth opening. However in our labs we often see users experience difficulty with gateway pages. Users assume the gateway page is the ‘result’ and don’t continue to click the PDF file. It is in-fact breaking the link to the real file. Many government websites use this technique and I’m starting to wonder if it really is the best way to display PDF’s.

My preference would be to include the PDF symbol next to the link along with the file size. If this is included in the link anchor text then screen readers such as JAWS can easily determine the presence of PDF’s. Surely this is enough to determine the presence of PDF’s without the need for a gateway page.

What do you think is the best way of presenting PDF links?

It is highly productive and encouraging when we have the project teams view usability testing sessions. Design & development teams find it easier to digest things when usability issues are highlighted directly by the user than receiving it in an observation report from an external consultant. However, there are few things to mind when you are observing a testing session:

1. Never draw conclusions from observing one or two participants- Observations and findings should always be looked in total and not concluded based on the behavior of a single participant.
2. Keep the decibel level low in the observation room – Even the best sound proofing cannot guarantee for 100% noise reduction. Though participants are well aware that they are being observed, the worse thing for them is to actually hear discussions in the testing room.
3. Observe what participants do and give less emphasis for what they say that they do – Participants tend to get overtly critical or extremely positive during testing sessions. Take notice of actual behavior and less notice to their extreme comments.
4. Hold the urge to ask questions during a testing session – This can be unnerving for the participants and can also be leading in some cases. 
5. Never go astray from the initial objectives set out for the test sessions – Though it is quite tempting to ask participants ‘How do you want to fix the problem?’, Avoid asking such design specific questions. To make testing sessions more effective, let the user to play his/her role rather than asking them to do the designer’s role.

We love when our clients give us exciting and innovative designs to test and often we agree that an interface that is not immediately intuitive is learnable and so can be considered to be usable for the target audience. Several factors affect whether an interface that requires learning time is usable.

1. Does the effort outweigh the benefits? The effort required to learn the interface sometimes outweighs the benefits of presenting that content in a complex interface. We feel that innovation is essential, however, sometimes the user is required to do a little too much to access content and they quickly lose interest in the content and the interface as a whole.
2. Will the initial effort required to come to grips with an interface put the user off? It is essential that the interface provides very simple and intuitive core functionality to ensure that users are not discouraged during initial use. This will allow users to use core functionality and learn more advanced nuances of the interface over time.
3. Does the interface hide the purpose of the website? When the interface is too complex or excessively visually based the purpose of the content it provides can get lost.
4. How often will the user visit the interface? Some interfaces will be heavily used and re-visited regularly. In this instance the user has the opportunity to learn the interface and become familiar with its features and nuances, however, where a user visits the interface irregularly or perhaps only once, the opportunity to learn a complex interface does not exist.
5. Who will use the interface? Different user groups are more willing to learn and explore than others. While it is true that younger and more technically savvy users will get used to an interface more quickly, these are often the ones that give up fastest. In comparison to older users who are often more cautious and systematic in their approach, more proficient users assume knowledge and are typically less forgiving of an interface that requires learning.

As web technologies advance we hope that this will enable designers to create increasingly interesting and innovative interfaces, however, we hope that the users don’t get lost in the process.

Back in the early 1990s I began exploring how task models could be used to support usability evaluation.  Twenty years on, and I’ve found a potential contender in the business world. But first, let’s explore what I mean by task model.

A task model is anything that enables you to graphically represent a task, its components, and the logical and temporal relationships between those components.

In the mid 90s the software engineering community adopted UML (User Modelling Language), along with tools such as Rational Rose transforming UML models into source code. But, what’s available in the User Experience community?

Many task models have been developed by Human-Computer Interaction researchers to support the representation of user interaction with systems. GOMS (Goals, Operators, Methods and Selections rules) and its extensions (Keystroke Level Model or Cognitive Perceptual Model) being the most popular. These models remained mostly in the academic world – complexity being their worst enemy. Other popular models are flow charts or mind maps.

However, you may ask, “What models are there to help us, usability practitioners, represent the interaction between users and systems?”

The potential answer is BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation – http://www.bpmn.org/). It is a notation gaining adoption through the industry world. Its strength is its simplicity. With little explanation, the notation is readily understandable by all stakeholders. Although BPMN’s aim is to represent business processes, it can easily be adapted to represent user interaction with systems and processes.

The figure above presents an illustration of a recruitment process (from http://www.rickgeneva.com/wp/posts/swimlane-lane-or-pool-learn-to-swim-first/). The circles with envelopes represent events that trigger a task to start (the event is the email being sent or received), while the empty circles represent the start and end of the task.

So, why do I use models? I use them to communicate and validate user interactions or processes, to support usability evaluation, to help define the language to be used and/or to create training material.

Twenty years later, and I am still puzzled why models are not more widely used amongst the various members involved in the design and development of digital solutions.

As a new year begins we often reflect on the changes we have observed over the last 12 months. One of the more interesting changes that we have noted, is how people view the online world and the role it plays in their lives.

We have a set of introductory questions we use on most projects across numerous methodologies (interviews, focus groups, one-on-one user tests and card sorts) that break the ice and provide us with some background for each of our participants. These cover things like, common activities online, amount of time online each week, where they access the web and years using the web.

In 2010 we had to change these questions because the web is now so ingrained in people’s lives that our old questions had become difficult to answer.

In the past, people had a clear model of their online lives and were very conscious of being online. Today, being online takes many more forms and is often more subtle. For example, many people are either unaware or confused about whether they are online when using an app on their phone. Further, if we compare the experience of using an app to check your bank balance to logging into internet banking via your desktop the former is a much less involved process which at week’s ends you may have forgotten.

This shift began to hit home in the last 12 months when asking people about what they do online. Some really struggled with the question and responded by saying “well, everything really” . Often, we now have to prompt people to find out about online behaviours such as doing research, banking, buying tickets and booking holidays. In some ways asking about the web is like asking about how electricity impacts your life, it is there but we tend to take it for granted.

Possibly the most telling feedback is that we often hear people say “I don’t really surf the web, anymore”. I always have a chuckle when I hear this. Firstly, the term ‘surf the web’ takes me back to the 90s and secondly it is a term that the digital industry has long forgotten. The statement does emphasise the fact that (mostly) people go online to get things done.

So if online is just another, not too salient, aspect of people’s lives, how does this impact user research? We need to stop thinking of online as a thing (particularly as a mystical and magical land). And start focussing on the various topic areas such as banking or paying bills.

Do you think this is accurate and what trends have you seen?

It’s that time of year. The Christmas parties have been attended and enjoyed, the final presentations delivered and now we are closing our doors until next year.

Thanks for a great year and for reading our blog, we hope you have enjoyed it and we are looking forward to tackling 2011 head on!

We’d like to wish everyone the Season’s Greetings and a Happy New Year from the team at UsabilityOne.

Also – our newsletter has gone out today featuring a great article on the psychology of web optimisation.