Usability Services

Our Usability services will help you increase bottom‐line performance measures, like revenue, conversion rate, customer loyalty scores, employee productivity and usage rate.

Our user experience research services will help you understand your users and their goals. Users don't always know what they want and their opinions can be unreliable — so we help you get behind your users' behavior.

We offer two types of usability services:

1) Usability Expert Review
2) Usability Testing

Usability Expert Review

Our usability expert review will identify any "usability bloopers" with the web site and show you how to fix them, ensure your web site will meet usability standards, and help you benchmark your website against best practice, or your competition, or the industry as a whole.

What is a usability expert review?

Our human factors experts uses your website and measure the user experience against international usability standards, legislative requirements and proven, best practice principles from psychology. We cover usability areas such as functionality, visual design, efficiency, learnability, navigation and consistency. The difference between an ‘expert review’ and ‘usability testing’ is that we won’t watch users using the website. Still, you get the benefit of our expertise in design and how people use the website. The resulting report will help you improve your website.

The process starts with interviews with the stakeholders, so we understand your goals and requirements. Then we explore the website, using typical usage scenarios as a guide. Finally, we meet with you to review the report and discuss further steps.

Why do a usability expert review?

A usability expert review has the benefit of speed – a report is normally delivered within a week – and it will eradicate any "usability bloopers" with the website. This will improve the quality of your website and enrich the user experience.

When should I do a usability expert review?

You can do a usability expert review anytime. If you do it early in the design process you can build the findings into wireframes and design concepts. If you do it late in development you can anticipate user problems and design workarounds.

Our approach to usability expert reviews

Because our evaluation assesses your website’s usability against a set of principles or best practice guidelines, you can be sure that the problems we find are real and not just someone’s opinion. Our proprietary technique also helps you to compare measurements over time and
across different sites, so you can assess the benefit of any design changes and see how you stack up against the competition.

Our reports normally run to many pages and we present our results at various levels of detail.

All feedback is specific, balanced, honest and solution‐oriented.

How It Benefits You?

• You get results fast because no users are involved in this evaluation.
• Our team identifies major usability problems on your website and provides you with solutions to fix them.
• Identify what areas are affected by the problems – specific user tasks (such as login), design elements (such as navigation), etc.
• Improve user satisfaction.
• Gain insight about the strengths and weaknesses of your website in comparison with competitors or industry peers.
• The evaluation can be performed at any stage of your website development cycle.
• Results can be used immediately or as input for an iterative process.
• You save time and reduce development costs because design issues are detected early in the development, rather after deployment.

Usability Testing

With the insight our usability tests provide, you can make critical design changes that will boost sales and conversion rates, increase usage, and improve customer satisfaction. In a usability study we observe real users doing real work with your website. There's no substitute for this feedback. There are situations when the client says, "What we saw him do wasn't what we expected." This changes the company's strategy for developing their website.

Why do usability testing?

Usability testing provides you with an objective analysis of how your web site is used in real life. Our clients are continually astonished at how this differs from the way they thought their website would be used. The data from usability tests provide critical business intelligence about the way customers behave and about how you stack up compared to the competition.

When should we do it and how often?

Usability testing can be done at any time in the development process. Whether you are prototyping a new website, revamping an old one or just wanting to spruce things up a bit, a usability test can provide you with a wealth of information that will be invaluable to the design/redesign process. Not least, it can prove an excellent motivator for your team.

Remote usability testing

Our remote usability tests will show you how people really use your web site. Because the evaluation takes place in the participant's native physical and computing environment, you are much more likely to observe authentic behavior than with a lab‐based test.

What is remote usability testing?

Remote usability testing is similar to conventional usability testing except that participants don't come to a lab — instead; the participant carries out the test from his or her home or place of work. We ask participants to carry out tasks with the web site and observe their behavior using screen sharing technology. To keep up a good flow of comments, we question participants by telephone as they carry out the tasks.

Why do remote usability testing?

Remote usability testing is a great solution if:

• You want to test a web site or intranet with participants in diverse geographical areas.
• Participants can't or won't come to a lab.
• You need a more "ethnographic" element to your testing.
• You need to do usability testing on a budget (tests are typically 30% cheaper than lab based studies).
• Several people from your organization want to observe the tests but each can spare only 1‐2 hours.

When should I do remote usability testing?

Remote usability testing works best with a live web site or a stable electronic prototype that can be sent to a participant ahead of the test.

How long will it take?

An average user session lasts around one hour and we recommend testing with 5 to 10 users. We therefore suggest assigning at least one full day to user testing. For each day of testing we require time for preparation, analysis and documentation. That means a project with 8 users
can potentially be turned around within 2 weeks.

Our approach to remote usability testing

The project begins with a discussion of your business objectives, web history and aims of testing. With this in mind we will work with you to devise a series of tasks to be performed by users on the website that put these aims to the test.

The next stage is recruiting people who represent 'typical users' to participate in the testing. These 'users' will be required to perform the pre‐defined tasks, and asked to 'talk out loud' as they do them. The tasks are used as a framework, designed to encourage users to explore the
site as much as possible. We adopt a qualitative flexible approach to testing as we believe this provides you with the greatest insight into your customer needs. We listen to your customers, gaining an insight into not only their thoughts, but also their vocabulary.

Using our specialist suite of recording technology we are able to capture the user's actions, reactions, and comments as they work their way through the tasks. Tests can be run anywhere where there is an internet network connection available, whether it's our own offices, onsite
with you and your team, or even at your user's homes. Our remote viewing facility allows you to observe the usability testing sessions without disrupting the user or we can create a more concise highlights video of the critical user issues and present this to the development team.

Our experience has taught us that encouraging all those involved in the website to actually sit down and watch a test as it happens can be a great discussion starter and really make your team feel involved.

At the end of it all we produce a full written report of all the user test sessions along with a series of recommendations for improving your site.

Benefits to You

Specific benefits you will gain from improving usability include:

• Identify problems early in a representative setting, where your team observes users performing real tasks.
• Produce designs that are more accurate and with a better quality.
• Make the user interface more intuitive and easier to use.
• Increase customer revenue.
• Increase customer satisfaction.
• Improve customer productivity by increasing efficiency and effectiveness
• Increase customer loyalty and retention.
• Reduce training and support costs.
• Reduce development and maintenance costs.
• Make the user interface faster to learn and understand.