There’s no doubt usability is a key element of all great user experiences, how do we apply and test usability principles for a website? This article looks at usability principles in web design, how to test it, practical tips for success and a look at our remote testing tool, Treejack.
Web usability is defined as the extent to which a website can be used to achieve a specific task or goal by a user. It refers to the quality of the user experience and can be broken down into five key usability principles:
Aside from the obvious desire to improve the experience for the people who use our websites, web usability is crucial to your website’s survival. If your website is difficult to use, people will simply go somewhere else. In the cases where users do not have the option to go somewhere else, for example government services, poor web usability can lead to serious issues. How do we know if our website is well-designed? We test it with users.
There are many ways to evaluate web usability and here are the common methods:
Tree testing is a remote usability testing tool that uses tree testing to help you discover exactly where your users are getting lost in the structure of your website. Treejack uses a simplified text-based version of your website structure removing distractions such as navigation and visual design allowing you to test the design from its most basic level.
Like any other tree test, it uses task based scenarios and includes the opportunity to ask participants pre and post study questions that can be used to gain further insights. Tree testing is a useful tool for testing those five key usability principles mentioned earlier with powerful inbuilt features that do most of the heavy lifting for you. Tree testing records and presents the following for each task:
The level of detail recorded on the pathways followed by your participants makes it easy for you to determine the ease of use, learnability, efficiency and impact of errors of your website. The time taken to complete each task and the directness of each result also provide insights in relation to those four principles and user satisfaction can be measured through the results to your pre and post survey questions.
The first click data brings in the added benefits of first click testing and knowing when and where your participants gave up and moved on can help you identify any issues.Another thing tree testing does well is the way it brings all data for each task together into one comprehensive overview that tells you everything you need to know at a glance. Tree testing's task overview- all the key information in one placeIn addition to this, tree testing also generates comprehensive pathway maps called pietrees.
Each junction in the pathway is a piechart showing a statistical breakdown of participant activity at that point in the site structure including details about: how many were on the right track, how many were following the incorrect path and how many turned around and went back. These beautiful diagrams tell the story of your usability testing and are useful for communicating the results to your stakeholders.
Here are seven practical usability testing tips to get you started:
If you missed our live training, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! In this session, our product experts Katie and Aidan discuss why, how and when to benchmark an existing structure using Treejack.
They also talk through some benchmarking use cases, demo how to compare tasks between different studies, and which results are most helpful.
In 2009, Bob Bailey and Cari Wolfson published apaper entitled “FirstClick Usability Testing: A new methodology for predicting users’ success on tasks”. They’d analyzed 12 scenario-based user tests and concluded that the first click people make is a strong leading indicator of their ultimate success on a given task. Their results were so compelling that we got all excited and created Chalkmark, a tool especially for first click usability testing. It occurred to me recently that we’ve never revisited the original premise for ourselves in any meaningful way.
And then one day I realized that, as if by magic, we’re sitting on quite possibly the world’s biggest database of tree test results. I wondered: can we use these results to back up Bob and Cari’s findings (and thus the relevanceof Chalkmark)?Hell yes we can.So we’ve analyzed tree testing data from millions of responses in Treejack, and we're thrilled (relieved) that it confirmed the findings from the 2009 paper — convincingly.
Bob and Cari analyzed data from twelve usability studies on websites and products ‘with varying amounts and types of content, a range of subject matter complexity, and distinct user interfaces’. They found that people were about twice as likely to complete a task successfully if they got their first click right, than if they got it wrong:
If the first click was correct, the chances of getting the entire scenario correct was 87%If the first click was incorrect, the chances of eventually getting the scenario correct was only 46%
We analyzed millions of tree testing responses in our database. We've found that people who get the first click correct are almost three times as likely to complete a task successfully:
If the first click was correct, the chances of getting the entire scenario correct was 70%If the first click was incorrect, the chances of eventually getting the scenario correct was 24%
To give you another perspective on the same data, here's the inverse:
If the first click was correct, the chances of getting the entire scenario incorrect was 30%If the first click was incorrect, the chances of getting the whole scenario incorrect was 76%
Bob and Cari proved the usefulness of the methodology by linking two key metrics in scenario-based usability studies: first clicks and task success. Chalkmark doesn't measure task success — it's up to the researcher to determine as they're setting up the study what constitutes 'success', and then to interpret the results accordingly. Treejack does measure task success — and first clicks.
In a tree test, participants are asked to complete a task by clicking though a text-only version of a website hierarchy, and then clicking 'I'd find it here' when they've chosen an answer. Each task in a tree test has a pre-determined correct answer — as was the case in Bob and Cari's usability studies — and every click is recorded, so we can see participant paths in detail.
Thus, every single time a person completes an individual Treejack task, we record both their first click and whether they are successful or not. When we came to test the 'correct first click leads to task success' hypothesis, we could therefore mine data from millions of task.
To illustrate this, have a look at the results for one task.The overall Task result, you see a score for success and directness, and a breakdown of whether each Success, Fail, or Skip was direct (they went straight to an answer), or indirect (they went back up the tree before they selected an answer):
In the pietree for the same task, you can look in more detail at how many people went the wrong way froma label (each label representing one page of your website):
In the First Click tab, you get a percentage breakdown of which label people clicked first to complete the task:
And in the Paths tab, you can view individual participant paths in detail (including first clicks), and can filter the table by direct and indirect success, fails, and skips (this table is only displaying direct success and direct fail paths):
This analysis reinforces something we already knew that firstclicks matter. It is worth your time to get that first impression right.You have plenty of options for measuring the link between first clicks and task success in your scenario-based usability tests. From simply noting where your participants go during observations, to gathering quantitative first click data via online tools, you'll win either way. And if you want to add the latter to your research, Chalkmark can give you first click data on wireframes and landing pages,and Treejack on your information architecture.
To finish, here's a few invaluable insights from other researchers ongetting the most from first click testing:
There’s no doubt usability is a key element of all great user experiences, how do we apply and test usability principles for a website? This article looks at usability principles in web design, how to test it, practical tips for success and a look at our remote testing tool, Treejack.
Web usability is defined as the extent to which a website can be used to achieve a specific task or goal by a user. It refers to the quality of the user experience and can be broken down into five key usability principles:
Aside from the obvious desire to improve the experience for the people who use our websites, web usability is crucial to your website’s survival. If your website is difficult to use, people will simply go somewhere else. In the cases where users do not have the option to go somewhere else, for example government services, poor web usability can lead to serious issues. How do we know if our website is well-designed? We test it with users.
There are many ways to evaluate web usability and here are the common methods:
Tree testing is a remote usability testing tool that uses tree testing to help you discover exactly where your users are getting lost in the structure of your website. Treejack uses a simplified text-based version of your website structure removing distractions such as navigation and visual design allowing you to test the design from its most basic level.
Like any other tree test, it uses task based scenarios and includes the opportunity to ask participants pre and post study questions that can be used to gain further insights. Tree testing is a useful tool for testing those five key usability principles mentioned earlier with powerful inbuilt features that do most of the heavy lifting for you. Tree testing records and presents the following for each task:
The level of detail recorded on the pathways followed by your participants makes it easy for you to determine the ease of use, learnability, efficiency and impact of errors of your website. The time taken to complete each task and the directness of each result also provide insights in relation to those four principles and user satisfaction can be measured through the results to your pre and post survey questions.
The first click data brings in the added benefits of first click testing and knowing when and where your participants gave up and moved on can help you identify any issues.Another thing tree testing does well is the way it brings all data for each task together into one comprehensive overview that tells you everything you need to know at a glance. Tree testing's task overview- all the key information in one placeIn addition to this, tree testing also generates comprehensive pathway maps called pietrees.
Each junction in the pathway is a piechart showing a statistical breakdown of participant activity at that point in the site structure including details about: how many were on the right track, how many were following the incorrect path and how many turned around and went back. These beautiful diagrams tell the story of your usability testing and are useful for communicating the results to your stakeholders.
Here are seven practical usability testing tips to get you started: