BlobFisk.com

There is a lot to be said in favour of testing with paper prototypes, the main advantage being that you can test concepts very early without a large overhead of design and/or development. I found these videos linked to on an article on the Interaction Designer’s Coffee Break.

“Drive-thru” interface testing

More

GUUI Sketchy Wireframing Stencil

I am a very big fan of sketchy wireframes, which I was introduced to by Ben Gilmore. There is an interesting discussion on them over at the IxDA, but my feeling is that they are a really powerful way of showing wireframes.

The informal appearance makes them more accessibile to people outside the Information Architecture sphere, and I have noticed that I get far better reaction to them and get better feedback on them than I got from more traditional straight edge wireframes. They also reduce the confusion that the wireframes in some represent the visual design of the page.

More

I recently carried out some user testing on the Channel 4 news site, looking at the site in general, but also the new blog  area – where Jon Snow (one of the lead news presenters) is blogging. We wanted to find out how people reacted to blogs and the plugins that you can get for them.Here are some of my main takeaways.

Try to avoid using Blog standard labels

The people we tested were daily web users, who were super fans of news and news sites. However, when we asked them what “Blogroll” was, they didn’t know or understand the concept. The label was too far into the real of industry jargon. I know what it means, as do all blog owners and regular blog users. However, people who only read blog posts from a link they clicked don’t understand it.

We’re now looking at ways to re-label our blogroll – “Recommended Blogs” or “Recommended Sites” are the current favourites, with “Blogs we like” still hanging on.

More

Eye tracking heatmap of the Channel 4 homepage

A couple of weeks ago we carried out some Eye Tacking testing on the Channel 4 website and I posted our initial findings soon afterwards. I’d now like to talk a little about the methodology that we used.

In traditional eye tracking studies the participant is presented with a page (in the case of web testing), given a period of time to look at the page, generally 15 seconds, during which the places that their eyes look is captured. This provides some very valuable feedback in that it shows where users look first, in what order they look at things and how long they look at things for.

However, it is merely a capture of the first look, and not linked to any task. People generally come to a website for a reason – they have a goal. When we carried out our eye tracking, we blended it with qualitative testing also. We carried out the initial gaze capture, but also tacked eye movement during specific task completion.

More

I am currently conducting user testing on the e4.com website (which is why I haven’t posted in a few days!), which I really enjoy. There is nothing more valuable than testing with real users. We work from a script that we use to take our participants on a certain journey through the site, testing features and content as we go.

The test that I’m currently working on is designed more to examine the langauge we use on the site. Is the wording of link meaningful, do headers make sense, how do users decide what to click on? We’ve found some really interesting things. The demographic for this site is young, web savvy users. Unsurprisingly, images are the main deciding factor on what they choose to click on.

More