2. Overview
User Centered Design practices
Usability Test?!!!
Planning your Usability Test
Final word on UT and Usability.

4. Usability in Context
If web development isn’t driven by an alignment of
sustainable technology, user driven content and
business driven goals, the corporate Web presence will
either fail to meet the organization’s business goals, be
troubled by expensive technology challenges or simply
ailienate core users!
- G.A Buccholz, Web Strategist
Usability must be complimented
by strategy

5. User centered
Design
A project based design approach that
puts the intended users of a site at
the centre of its design and
development.
Know your
audience
- Lenny Bruce,
Comedian

6. Typical UCD workflow
1. Define both the business’ and users’ goals &
objectives
2. Research site for development, amass necessary
content, plan wireframes and develop sitemap
3. Develop and (perform technical) testing of prototypes
4. Evaluating design alternatives
5. Test the site with users
6. Analyze usability problems
7. Propose and integrate solutions.

7. Experience Design
A design approach that focuses on the
creation of experiences that produce
desired perceptions, cognition, and
behavior among their clients’ “users,”
“customers,” “visitors,” or Web Design Tip
“audiences.”

9. The Designer’s view
Most good (front end) designers are not
hostile to idea of usability testing. In fact
they like the idea of providing sound design
to shoot down the ridiculous ideas from
clients (internal and external)
- David Jarvis, Sr Front End designer

10. the usability
“Did you knows?”
• 45% of users abandon Websites with poor navigability, slow
response times and confusing content
• 35% of users who experience on a particular site leave that site
for a competitor’s site.
• 52% of companies make no attempt to measure whether users
are successful in finding what they want.
• Conversion rates can be increased by 40% by improving user
experience on e-commerce sites
• Product development cycles can be reduced by 33-50% by
incorporating usability engineering methods
- stats courtesy Triangle Tech Journal

11. User research Methods
• Usability Testing
• Contextual Interviews
• Online Surveys
• Individual Interviews
• Focus Groups
• Card sorting

12. What is a Usability Test?
1. A means to measure how well people can
use some human made object
(e.g web page, a computer interface, a
document or device) for its intended purpose
2. A to determine
how well people can use a product.

13. What is Usability
Testing?
• It is an iterative test whereby real users
personally interacting with the product
• It does not involve focus groups, surveys, market
trials or even product (in this case, a site) release
followed by feedback forms
• It is not based on collecting information on
opinions but observing and documenting patterns
of behaviour user interaction.
• It’s a user centred design (UCD)
practice

14. How does it work
A user is presented with a real scenario and he/she is
asked to perform a variety of tasks.
Observers (including the project team) either viewing in a
secondary location or at some latter point must
Record notes on what the user says or does.
Collect data on paths users take to complete tasks
Identify what problems and deadly errors user
encountered
When and where, users/testers were confused
The information is collected and used during
the site redesign/revision processes

15. Why conduct A
Usability Test?
Simply to understand the dynamics of your own website
To find out how the user interacts with your website (i.e.
usage patterns)
To identify problems and difficulties users encounter
when using their website
To identify what works or what needs to be
reconfigured.

17. UT Project WorkFlow
Plan
Develop your UT proposal, the guiding document for your UT
project. Identify website(s) and/or back end application which
will be the focus of the test. Define short term objectives and
long term goals.
Analyse
Segment and Define your target audience, Develop personas,
recruit participants.
Design
Design site, develop scenarios & tasks and post test
questionnaire
Test and Refine
Test, collect data, prepare report and refine or redesign.

19. Required Resources
Human Resources
Usability Test Lead/Organizer - this person will lead all planning
activities. Communicates with the various groups within the project
team. Involved in recruiting/screening activities. Works with the
project team to plan scenarios. Briefs primary team ands
observers on their respective roles.
Project Team - Department manager, Marketing Manager, web
team, front end designer(s) (UI D or graphics artist), back end
developer. All actively supporting organization activities.
UT Primary Test Team - UT Facilitator and A/V Tech
UT Assistant - will assist UT lead, (in some cases) interviews
prospective recruits, confirms participation of recruits and invited
observers, puts together packages for observers, preparing UT
flash cards and initially greeting and introducing testers to
facilitator.

20. Required Resources
Logistics and Tech Requirements
Computer lab/ or open room (eg. an office).
The room must have reliable internet access. If the room
doesn’t have a computer, source a laptop. The room should be
large enough to comfortably accommodate, tester, faciltator
and
AV Support - Make arrangements to have the session tapped
A separate or adjoined conference room for observers.
It would be better if the footage was viewed in its entirety at
some point time after testing. When all observers can all meet.
Other Resources
Funds

21. Set a Budget
Expense Item Cost
* Recruiting Costs $0.00 - $250 US
Video Taping Cost $500 - $900 US
Gift or Monetary incentive
(x 8 or x 5)
< $100US (x 5/x8)
Computer lab/Room Rental $?.00
(x no of days required)
Stipend for UT facilitator < $50US
Stationery
(notepads, flash cards, etc)
$25.00 - $50 US

22. Define AND SEGMENT Your
Website’s Target Audience
If we want to test the Arthur Lok Jack
Graduate School of Business Website, our
Target Audience consists of:
Usual suspects
Prospective Students
Current Students
Current ALJ Faculty & Staff
Prospective ALJ Faculty & Staff
Alumni
Visitors
The often Overlooked suspects
Visitors - Visiting Guest Speakers, Local and
foreign Faculty, Professionals/Business persons,
HR Managers, Goverment Agencies, foreign
Research Students, Media
Greater UWI Staff - Faculty & Admin

23. Conduct a Task Analysis
After segmenting your site’s audience: Assemble your working
project team - content developers and site developers to do a
task analysis.
What is it? A Task analysis allows you to learn
about your users' goals—what they want to do at
your Web site-and your users' ways of working.
Task analysis can also mean figuring out what more specific
tasks users must do to meet those goals and what steps they
must take to accomplish those tasks.

25. Personas and Recruits
Based on size of test - recruit 5-8 participants.
A several studies on UTesting have shown that 5-8
users typically discover 80% of problems within a given
interface*
Based on your target audience, Develop a user
persona for each of your prospective testers (ut
participants):
User Persona - A Profile which accurately fits the a type
of user who commonly use the website
The User persona represents one of the main groups of
users you have identified as being apart of your target
audience.

26. Sample Persona for ALJ Graduate
school of Business website
User:
Ms. Diana Smith
Target Group
Prospective Post Grad MBA Student
Profession & Qualifications
Media Buying Assistant, Ogilvy Maher,
Trinidad. B.A. UVI
“I want to find a
Key Attributes Masters (business)
task oriented, focused on details, career driven programme either
here in the
Internet Experience Level
Caribbean or
Intermediate -IM’s and occasionally updates abroad which
her facebook and LinkedIn pages but mostly
emails, does work related research. Has DSL bests suits my
at work, Dial up at home. Seldom uses the chosen career
internet at home. track.”
Experience with UWI website
Limited exposure - visited UWI St. Augustine post
grad website twice

27. Recruiting Users
Finding users/testers: Recruit by placing notices on your website
or ads in the paper. Enlist the assistance of people you know in order to find
prospective testers. But don’t recruit close family or friends.
Use a Screening Questionnaire: An important tool for
screening and recruiting qualified participants who will accurately fit your
respective users’ persona.
For each recruit, recruit 2 alternatives.
In case, your 1st choice can not make the test and/or for the purpose of follow
up testing. Note: If you are testing a new site NEVER user the original testers
for a follow up UT.
Contracts & consent forms
Once you have chosen your UT testers - ask them to sign a special UWI
approved Usability Test Contract of Services and/or Video Tape Release
Form - see folder for samples.

28. Recruiting Users
Don’t be lazy!!!!
Recruit persons who are apart of your target audience and are
or will be actual users of the site you want to test.
The most common result of not recruiting the right people -
false results.
The members of your IT team/ or web team are most likely not
going be the main users of your website so why would you use
them for this type of test.
Once more, you are not developing for your needs but your
target audiences’.

29. Organize Your testing Team
Primary Testing Team (team involved in administering test or
interacting with tester)
UT Facilitator, AV Technician, UT Test Assistant
Observation Team
Usability Test Observers include
Website development team - Web Design & Development Team and
Marketing (website and content developers)
Local web administrators - persons within department responsible for
managing and updating content.
Subject matter specialists - persons within department responsible for
developing and providing web content
Managers - IT department, Marketing Department and the Department’s
Management (eg ALJ Director, Marketing Officer)

30. orient your testing Team
Primary test Team Roles
The Facilitator
Greets and takes care of test participant. Makes the user feel comfortable.
Presents scenarios & tasks and asks post test questions
Encourages users to verbalise what they are doing (the process) as well as their
frustrations and issues
Observes and listens carefully the participant
Patiently waits for user to complete task. Moves the tester to the next scenario if they
become stuck for an extended period. Set a maximum time limit for each scenario.
A facilitator should never prompt a user, drop hints or rush the tester
Audio/Video Technician
Tape session (monitor recording equipment)
Note: Before the test, instruct the technician to keep the camera focused on the screen
during the testing session, so you can capture what the user is doing.

32. Usability Measurements
Time on task
How long it takes for the user(s) to complete basic tasks?
Accuracy
How many mistakes did the user(s) make?
Recall
How much does a person remember afterwards or after a period of
non-use?
Emotional Response
How does the user feel about the tasks completed?
The information collected in these 4 areas (during your first test)
should be used as a comparative baseline for further testing.

33. Tester
User:
Mr. Lisle Waldron
Target group
Staff Member
Profession
AV Tech, School of Education
Internet Experience Level
Expert

34. Planning Scenarios
Scenario: A scenario is a short story about a specific user
with a specific goal at your site.
Scenario Planning Guidelines:
• Understanding (information) Consumer behaviour:
Include general questions, in your screen
questionnaire, to find out more about the user, their
surfing behaviours and overall (consumer) interests.
This information will be a boon during scenario
planning.
• Tailor Scenarios!: When developing a scenario it should
be designed to resonate with the user/tester, mirroring
their own experiences and needs.
• Presenting a user with entirely alien scenarios will affect
baseline results particularly recall and accuracy.

35. Presenting The Scenario
Avoid tester fatigue: During a single user testing session,
present the user/tester a maximum of 3 scenarios
Or you can break a single scenario into three parts
Maximum Time given to complete a single task within a
given scenario - 10 minutes.
Instruct facilitator, at the start of each testing session, to
reset the first screen to a page that is offsite, eg search
engine or a portal.(eg. Yahoo, MSN or Google). Most
users have the home pages of theses websites set as their
browser’s default home page.
Never start at the pages/site you want to test!

36. Setting the Tasks
Your task analysis is a key reference
point when you are developing the
scenario and related tasks for the
different users/testers
Use Full-scale, task scenarios
The scenario presents a goal and steps are included to accomplish the task.
A full-scale scenario can either report all the steps that a specific user takes
today to accomplish the task, or it can describe the steps you plan to set up
for users in the new site. They lay out the steps from the user's point of view
rather than from the Web site's point of view.
They explain how the site may support the goal-oriented scenarios that you
started with.

39. Guidelines for UT Observers
Be Unbiased - don’t judge users or their methods of
finding information. If biased observers should opt out.
Focus on what users are doing, their actions and the
route they take to seek out the requested information.
Be quiet - if you are talking or making comments during a
test you aren’t focusing on the user and what they are
doing.
Take notes - all observers should take careful notes.
Your notes will help the project team when they are
compiling & evaluating the results. It may seem pointless
but note everything that the user is doing. What others
may miss, you may catch.

41. Post-Test Interview
Questions
You want to get testers’ impressions of the site after they have interacted with
it. You can use:
• open-ended questions
• closed questions using radio buttons, check boxes, or a Likert scale (rating something on
a numerical scale)
• a standardized satisfaction questionnaire
If you are going to ask open ended questions, ask questions which are not biased, or attempt to
bias the user.
Example questions:
• What is your overall impression of the site?
• How would you describe finding what you were looking for on this site today?
• What is your impression of the search capability?
• What did you like best about the Web site?
• What did you like least about the Web site?

43. Collecting Qualitative data
For your report: You require two things qualitative notes and qualitative data
Data to be collected
• Success measures. Indicate in the report how you will determine "success"
for each scenario.
• Time measures. Total time to complete the scenario? Separate time figures
for navigating and for understanding [time spent on content pages]? Time to
recover from an error?)
• Error measures. Measure errors and what you would count as an error.
• Number Pages. Count the number of clicks or pages visited before finding
information.
• Pathway. Indentify users' paths through the Web site.
• Satisfaction Rating. Administer a satisfaction questionnaire to evaluate
impressions and gage satisfaction levels.

46. TIPS for Testing
When collecting results of the test give more weight to
the actual testing session than post test question
interview session.
Conduct focused usability tests - i.e. a test which studies
a single site or 1 website and directly related sites.
These smaller tests reduce your budget, require maximum
of 5 users and yield better results. You will also be able to
conduct followup tests after redesign
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.: Test. Revise. Test.
Gather your baseline results, incorporate design changes
based on your observations and once revision or redesign
is complete. Then Retest.

47. About Usability
• Mimicry without understanding is not usability.
• Usability is a coordinated effort
• Usability relies on a team effort
• If the vision and design goals of the front end designer (or f/e team)/
webteam are not shared by back-end applications team, the site will
ultimately not be very user friendly.
• If the plan for the interface is inhibited by limited by an inflexible back
end, usability will not be achieved.
• If objectives are not communicated/or input not sought or
adopted across the project team, the site will undoubtedly
not be very user friendly.
• Usability requires real-time maintenance.
• Usability is always a work in progress.
• Consistent usability is key.

48. Usability in Context
Creating a positive user experience should not be taken
lightly. After all it’s about creating business value
through leveraging metrics, heuristics, usability testing,
copy-writing, information architecture, interface design,
information design, workflow and cross browser
compatibility.
In layman’s terms
Making our sites (or applications) useful, usable and user friendly
encourages our users to readily return to it and continue using it.
Consequently UWI will further be able to build long standing
relationships with our clients (end users) through our websites.