User testing is, in all likelihood, one of the greatest methods for learning exactly how visitors actually behave when interacting with your website, revealing strengths and weaknesses in the usability of your site. Hostao’s design and development philosophy is centered around smooth user-centered experiences. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to set up sessions for user testing, in an effort to derive valuable insights from these sessions for optimizing your websites.
Why Conduct User Testing for Successful Websites
Before delving into the step-by-step process, it is useful to go back to the overall reasons why user testing becomes an indispensable part of any website development or redesign process:
- Increases User Experience: Testing with real users allows you to discover which roadblocks would prevent them from performing their desired activities on your website, such as confusing navigation or unclear instructions.
- Improves Conversion Rate: User testing diagnoses areas where customers who could have converted actually fall off, and you make improvements towards higher conversion.
- Validates Design Decisions: It confirms that the Web site design aligns with the actual needs of your audience, thus avoiding costly redesign further down.
- Helps Reduce Support Issues: By identifying usability issues early on, you reduce the requirements for customer support interventions, making the website intuitive.
For a more comprehensive user-centered approach to web site design and development, Hostao designs.
Step 1: Clear Testing Goals
Identify explicit goals for your user test before you conduct any testing. If you’re not at least somewhat sure of what you’re testing, then the session will yield little useful information. Some common testing goals include the following:
- Testing navigation: Are the users easily able to find their desired information?
- Evaluating checkout: Can users ever successfully complete purchases without getting lost in confusion?
- Checking how mobile responsive the site is: How well will this site perform across different devices?
- Measuring calls-to-action effectiveness: Have the users begun to understand what the intended call-to-action is?
For example, if it is an eCommerce site developed by Hostao, you would need to determine how easily one can find a product in it or put items into the cart and eventually checkout. All of these goals will define how you will set up the tests and what you will give to participants to do.
Step 2: Identify the Right Test Users
Your test will only be good to the extent of the participants you choose. Ideally, you would want to test users who are representative of your website’s target audience. Keep the following in mind when selecting your participants:
- Representation of Target Audience: You want to select users that fit your target audience for your website. For example, you may be making a website for the older people. Testing with somebody younger will not give you very useful information.
- Variety in Levels of Experience among Users: Include both first-time and experienced users in your test.
- Customer Personas: If you have developed personas of your target audience, select participants based on one or more of the following to confirm that usability testing will pick up a range of scenarios on your website.
A general recommendation is to recruit 5–8 participants. In fact, research shows that a small group size like this will find about 85% of usability problems.
Step3: Task and Scenario Preparation
Prepare tasks and scenarios to be performed by your users while testing. These must represent actual goals and objectives of user activities on your site. You should not make task statements such as “explore the web site.” Instead, demand specific, goal-oriented tasks that a user would actually try to attempt when realistic.
Example
- “You are looking for a particular service. Use the site’s navigation to find it.”
- “You want to contact customer support. Where would you go?”
- “Try to make a purchase and check out in five minutes.”
For something like websites built at Hostao, the relevance of the task is especially important for your test runs. If you are testing a website’s product page, tell the user to pretend to buy an item. If it’s some corporate website, send them looking for contact information or downloading a whitepaper.
Step 4: Choose the Appropriate Method of Testing
After setting goals, choosing your users, and creating scenarios, you have to choose a testing method. Depending on your resources and testing goals, the following shall become suitable:
- Moderated Testing: In-Person or Remote: A facilitator guides the participant through the testing session, observing their actions and asking follow-up questions to clarify behavior
Best for: Get as much insight as possible directly interacting, understand thought processes, and get immediate feedback.
Example: The facilitator asks a user to find a blog post on Hostao’s website and probes them as to why they chose specific navigation paths.
- Unmoderated Testing: Users complete tasks in self-paced fashion without real-time direction from the facilitator. Users’ interactions are captured using tools like User Testing and Maze for unmoderated testing.
Best For: Generating information from a more considerable number of participants with minimum time and resource commitment.
- Remote Testing: You allow users to execute the task from their own device, and hence it is more diverse and helps eliminate geographical location.
Best For: Follows the usability of a website on multiple devices (desktop, mobile, and tablet).
Step 5: Conduct User Testing Session
Here are some tips to conduct a successful testing session:
a. Create a comfortable environment:
You can either ask them in person or remote. Just set up the participants and remind them that you are testing your website, not their skills.
b. Record Observations:
Audio and/or video record the session. Take notes. Behavioral and non-verbal cues indicating usability problems may include frustration, confusion, or a pause.
c. Think-Aloud Feedback:
Ask users to talk aloud when trying to complete the user task. In this case, it will enable you to know what they think at one point and why they select something at a particular time.
For instance, if a tester is working on the service page of Hostao’s site and cannot locate the information they need, by requesting him to explain why, you will be able to capture some pain points in his interaction.
Step 6: Analyzing the Findings
Once you have done the tests, now it is time to review and analyze the findings. Here, you should look for patterns across multiple user interactions:
a. Common Challenges:
Are there certain tasks or features that users consistently find difficult? For example, many users might have trouble with a confusing checkout process or unclear navigation links.
b. Unusual User Patterns:
Did users adopt unusual routes to complete a task? This may suggest a failure in information architecture or a misconception between what users want and what the site offers.
c. Success Rates and Time Taken:
Number of successful task completions, as well as time to complete them. If users are always taking longer than required, it may be because that aspect is unclear or inefficient.
Write these down so you can focus your attention on which changes to fix first.
Step 7: Implement Changes and Iterate
Having used the input from your user test to make data-driven improvements to your website, changes might range from:
- Simplification of Navigation: Getting key information or actions in front of users
- Improvement of CTAs: Clear, compelling, and strategically placed calls-to-action.
- Fixing usability issues: Such as confusing checkout processes or unintuitive search features.
Once the changes are made, check the website again for usability issues. And that’s how you confirm having a great quality user experience, consistently.
User Testing Best Practices
There are some best practices you can consider confirming you get the most from user testing:
- Test Early and Often: Do not wait until your website is fully built to test it. The sooner you catch usability issues, the easier-and less expensive-they will be to fix.
- Use Realistic Data: When testing, employ actual product names, descriptions, or blog content rather than placeholder text. This will give you a much closer approximation to real world testing.
- Listen to user feedback: One can avoid bias and focus more on how people really interact with a site. Even though the actions may not agree to the intentions of designing as expected, their feedback adds invaluable credence to improve.
Conclusion
User testing is one of the prime things in building an intuitive web page. Here’s a step-by-step guide that will surely help you conduct an extensive user testing session to reveal all the insights about usability on your site. Whether you are optimizing an eCommerce platform or refine a corporate website, generally, user feedback remains indispensable to deliver seamless and engaging user experience.
At Hostao, we practice user-centered design on all our projects. Whether you’re launching a new project or need to fine-tune an existing website, we can assist you in carrying out best practices for user testing and optimization.
As a master's graduate in Computer Science, I blend my technical expertise with a passion for crafting content that simplifies complex topics. My focus is on creating clear, engaging material that resonates with a diverse audience. By staying current with trends in SEO, social media, and content strategy, I aim to produce content that not only educates but also connects, bridging the gap between technology and its users.
