Last week at ALGIM Web Symposium, our Senior Project Manager Julian (J) Meadow gave a presentation about usability testing on a budget to a roomful of those responsible for various local government websites.
He discovered that most people in the session had been part of usability testing before, with almost everyone present wanting to do testing on their own sites - but no one had ever run their own testing before.
Here at SilverStripe Ltd, usability testing is one of the many services that we're proud to offer. Usability testing helps you understand how users interact with your site and whether their needs are being met. It helps to uncover any difficulties users are having, and provides valuable feedback on how to resolve these issues. Perhaps you've heard that usability testing is expensive, and you think you can't afford it. The truth is it's not expensive and you can't afford not to do usability testing.
Of course, we understand that your budget might not stretch to bringing in an outside company to do the testing for you. Instead, we’re happy to give you J's slides for free so you can get started thinking about how to run your own sessions.
Some extra points to think about:
- If you find a group of people that you use for testing once, you can reuse the same people again - involve them in card-sorting for IA, user focus groups, and any other testing you might need to do.
- While it might take you up to three days to do your first round of usability testing (including identifying and selecting participants), subsequent test sessions can be completed in less time.
- Do a little a lot - limit the focus of your testing to a specific area or page each time in order to get the most clear results, and the next time you can choose a different area to focus on.
And of course, if you'd like further help from us, get in touch. We also want your site to be as useful as possible!