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Usability Testing for the Web by Vikram V. Ingleshwar, Yahoo!   printer-friendly format   recommend to a colleague Today's sophisticated Web applications make tracking and listening to users more important than ever. Objectives

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Sections 1: Objectives 2: Standards

Today's Internet user has more choices than ever before, with many competing sites offering similar services. This proliferation of options provides ample opportunity for users to explore different sites and find out which one best suits their needs for any particular service. Users are further served by the latest generation of Web technologies and services, commonly dubbed Web 2.0, which enables a better, more personalized user experience and encourages user-generated content.

Although there is considerable debate over the definition of Web 2.0 (and much criticism of it being merely a marketing buzzword), the term is useful in distinguishing key innovations, such as weblogs, social bookmarking, tagging, wikis, RSS feeds, Ajax, Web APIs, and online Web services, that have significantly altered the Web user experience since the 1990s.

As the Web matures and evolves, users increasingly view it as a platform for applications, and they demand a much greater degree of personalization and control. As such, it's important for Web developers to discover and closely track certain user feedback, such as their motives for coming to a particular site, areas of the site they find difficult and/or confusing, and the features they like the most. Retaining existing users, encouraging them to spend more time on the site, and bringing in new users have become greater challenges than ever. Usability testing is a way of addressing these challenges.

When the Internet was in its nascent phase, it was viewed as merely one of many sources for getting information. As PC and Internet use has increased across the globe, users have become more savvy and know more precisely what kind of information they are looking for on the Web and how they would like to receive it. This has made usability testing an essential part of the testing cycle. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, to the detriment of any particular Web application. We need to change our mind-set and adopt usability testing as a part of the everyday testing cycle.

This article looks at the challenges of usability testing, particularly within the context of the current wave of Web 2.0 technologies. It does not necessarily present solutions, but instead highlights most of the challenges, issues, and difficulties you might face in your own projects.

Objectives of Usability Testing

Usability can be defined as the degree to which a given piece of software assists the person sitting at the keyboard in accomplishing a task, as opposed to becoming an impediment. Usable systems are most often assessed according to these three criteria:

• Ease of learning and learning retention
• Speed of task completion
• Error rate and subjective user satisfaction/quality of service

There are a few basic principles to consider, based on these criteria:

First and foremost, make your application easy to use. This will reduce user churn, prevent calls from frustrated customers, and help keep people on your site. But what is the benchmark that says that a Web application can be easily used by anyone who visits your site? This is a tricky question, because what's easy for some people might be difficult for others (just as integration in mathematics is simple for some people and a sleep killer for others). So the question is, how can you know if your Web application is simple to understand or if users have to go through the help pages to find out exactly how things work? One simple technique is to give your application to the QA team to test without permitting them to read the functional spec or product requirement document. You needn't remove the help pages entirely, but users shouldn't be forced to consult the help pages often; and on each subsequent visit to a site they should be able to remember whatever they learned during their first time using the application. If they have to refer to help pages each time they visit your application, then there is something truly wrong and you need to take corrective action.

Also, many sites expose their APIs to developers, who then add this functionality to existing applications. Do users feel comfortable using these new features? A good site will make users feel comfortable learning new features and inspired to explore the site further.

Make your application fast. Fast is a relative term; you should always make sure that the speed of your application is on par with that of your competitors. To increase the responsiveness of services, many sites now use Ajax technology, which makes Web applications behave more like desktop applications. This is an intermediate solution between the slower response times provided by Web servers and the normally faster response times of desktop applications.

Another technique to increase responsiveness is to overlap or clump together operations without making things look too messy. Find out different permutations and combinations of performing an operation in your application, then analyze which repetitive tasks could be overlapped or achieved in a single step (aka, refactoring). One way of doing this is to use Web server logs to find out which pages users visit most and which pages they find difficult to use. For example, suppose you have an e-commerce site that leads users through a six-step (page) process. If the Web server log shows that many users are leaving the site during page four, chances are that page has a problem. Perhaps the user is finding it tedious to input so much information, or perhaps the server process itself is failing. Mining the Web server logs is a good technique to track user behavior closely, but it's a tedious, time-consuming task. Later in the article I discuss multivariable testing, which can help resolve this issue.

Listen to your users. Many times I have reported issues to sites and failed to receive any acknowledgment. If you want these loyal customers to keep giving valuable feedback, you should immediately prioritize the issue and get it resolved in a timely manner. Allowing users to send feedback easily and making them feel that you are listening to them is very important.

You can also provide a very Web 2.0 user-feedback feature on your site, where users can comment on the site's features and discuss them with others. This is very good way to find your users' pulses and discover what you are doing, both right and wrong.

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