King & McGaw Developers

When developing a customer facing site, such as Easyart.com, is it very important to be aware of your users perspective. The recommended way to do this is something known as user testing.

What is user testing

User testing is essentially watching how people use your website/application. Traditionally, this is done by arranging a session for people to come and use your site, where they would be given tasks to complete. The process is recorded and then analysed to see what could be improved.

Mostly due to time and budget constraints, this isn’t always easy to accomplish, but luckily there is now a whole host of affordable services that help us solve this problem.

Choosing a service

When choosing a service for any reason, the important thing is to establish exactly what you need from it. We did some research on user testing and decided that we would need a video of the session along with the audio, and the ability to ask follow-up questions. The service that seemed to be the best fit for us was usertesting.com.

Setting up the test

To kick off the test, we needed a set of tasks. We called this a user journey, and set a list of tasks for the participants of the test to follow, demonstrating the areas we knew we needed to work on.

Getting the feedback

Within the hour, all three of the tests we set-up had been completed and we had access to the videos. Over the next couple of days we watched these videos, listened to the commentaries and read the answers to our follow-up questions, taking notes the whole time.

Almost immediately we identified some key areas that we needed to work on and have already started working on solutions to improve our customers experience on our site.

Going forward

From now on, we plan to run user tests regularly, as we have found it provides a valuable insight into how our site is used and how it can be improved.

User testing will make your site better and usertesting.com is a great tool for helping you achieve this.