User Experience Research Tools for the Web

Kevin Leary

June 28, 2012

User experience research tools provide an important step in the process of designing a successful product or website. Unfortunately, it’s rare to see user xperience research conducted during the typical web or application design process. This is because traditional user xperience research processes can be an expensive, difficult process that many companies don’t have the budget for.

Beware of Hasty Generalizations

It’s common for C-level people to make hasty generalizations about who their audience is, and what they want. But how do we know these generalization’s are true? It’s time to challenge the authority at your company with some real user xperience research data.

In the past it was very difficult to get quality data on mainstream users. Luckily, it’s much easier to do this then it used to be. Consider gathering research on your audience with the following tools and techniques.

Website Analytics Data

Google Analytics provides useful insight into the number of people visiting our site each month, what they do on our website, and what makes them leave

Our quest towards logical design decisions begins with an analysis of our existing analytics data. Fire up your analytics software, or schedule some time with an analytics geek at your company to answer key questions about your users.

Key Questions

Where do our users come from?
What are they doing?
When and where do they leave?

Quite often the answers to these questions can be found using a few common analytics metrics.

Metrics To Focus On

Referrals
Visitors, visits and page views
Popular pages and/or landing pages
Bounce rates

Once you have this general data, re-run the same process for users that convert. I promise, you’ll be surprised with the results. It’s easy to focus on your largest source of traffic, but when very few users from that source convert it’s time to re-think it’s true impact.

Usabilla

Usabilla is a hosted usability tool that allows you to collect valuable visual feedback on your live website. Users are given the opportunity to rate and rank aspects of your site that they like, and dislike. This can help you focus on the improving the aspects that truly make a difference to your users, not the people in your office.

Product Demo

People have had great success combining Usabilla with Ethnio to target the most responsive audience groups.

UserTesting.com

A sample UserTesting.com video session created for Enterprise Car Rental

UserTesting.com is a video recording service that claims to be the fastest, cheapest way to find out why users leave your website. For $39, UserTesting.com will select a test subject from your target demographic and record a screencast of them performing a specific use case on your site or application. You’ll receive a video of a visitor speaking their thoughts as they use your site, and a written summary describing the problems they encountered.

UserTesting.com Product Overview

Feedback Army

Feedback Army provides text-based feedback from a specified, general user group.

Feedback Army is a simple, cheap, and effective way to get generalized feedback on a specific aspect of your website. Choosing your specific demographic can be difficult, but for many situations this is the perfect way to get cheap, quick and direct user xperience research on a website. We’ve used this at OpenView to test our responsive mobile website optimizations.

Five Second Test & Clicktest

Users are asked a question, given 5 seconds to view an image of a website, then provide feedback

If your designing or iterating on a landing page, this tool could be a game changer for you. The concept is dead simple: Create a test that users should be able to understand from your design in 5 seconds. This is a crucial test that can provide valuable, and sometimes shocking, feedback for a landing page design.

The creator’s of Five Second Test have created a secondary tool called Clicktest that analyzes how users engage with your interfaces so you can tweak and improve your designs. This is very valuable for landing page user xperience research as well.

Notable

TechCrunch.com used Zurb to easily gather and organize feedback from various project stakeholders

Notable is an application created by Zurb that allow’s you to:

Take any webpage screenshot, sketch or wireframe and exchange notes on specific details with your team. You can quickly reply, vote or suggest a better idea. Our goal is to help you arrive at the best solution in the shortest amount of time.

Silverback

Silverback saved Quicktime videos of what a user does on screen, including a picture-in-picture view of their facial expression’s

Silverback is a nifty little Mac app that allows designers and developers (or anyone in-house really) record a screencast session of someone using an application or website. The screencast includes computer sounds, vocal sounds, and a video of the test subject.

Understand Usability Best Practices

The bible of usability is Steve Krug’s book Don’t make me think. The key point emphasized throughout the book is that a website should be straight forward, simple and idiot proof. If you stop and think about what you’re doing, it isn’t designed as well as it could be.

Key Take-aways from the Book

People scan websites, they don’t read word for word
Users don’t choose the best option, they go for the first thing that is “good enough”
Main stream users don’t take the time figure out how things work, instead they “muddle” through to get what they want
Users do what they want to get what they want, and quite often that isn’t what you initially assume

In Conclusion

Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of how to improve your product(s) with the many easy, simple user xperience research tools available today. What methods are you currently using to gather information about your users? What did I forget to mention in my article? I’d enjoy hearing your feedback.