Inspired by insights from Optimal users, we’ve reimagined study creation to bring you a beautifully streamlined experience with the new Study Flow tab.

With the new Study Flow, you’ll: 

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⚡ Enjoy faster study set up: Messages & instructions and Questionnaire tabs are combined in a single tab - called Study Flow - for faster editing and settings customization.

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✨ See it all at a glance: Easily visualize and understand the participant experience—from the welcome message to the final thank-you screen—every step of the way. 

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🎯 Duplicate questions: Save time and quickly replicate questions for surveys, screening questions, and pre- and post-study questions. 

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⭐ Experience enhanced UI: Enjoy a modern, clean design with intuitive updates that minimize scrolling and reduce mental load.

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🗂️ Collapse and expand sections: Easily navigate studies by collapsing and expanding sections, making it easier to build out specific parts of your study.

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This Study Flow tab is available across all Optimal tools, except for Qualitative Insights. 

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What’s next?

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We’re not stopping there. We have some significant improvements on the horizon designed to give you even greater flexibility and control.

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Advanced logic: Enhanced logic capabilities is one of our most highly requested features, and we’re thrilled to introduce new capabilities to help you build your ideal study experience – available for surveys and other tools. We will first introduce “display logic”, allowing for: 

• If answer is X for Question Y, then hide/show Question Z.
• If answer is X for Question Y, then hide/show specific answer options.

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Customizable sections: Organize your questions into different sections to build a better study experience for your participants. For example, segment your questions into relevant groupings, such as demographics or product usage. With custom sections, you can add new sections, rename, reorder, duplicate, and move questions between different sections.* 

*Note: Questions cannot be moved to/from the screening questions section.

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These upcoming features will empower you to create dynamic, tailored study experiences for different audiences with ease for more valuable insights. 

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Start exploring the new Study Flow now.

User research and design can be tough in this fast-moving world. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in what we’re doing, or what we think we’re supposed to be doing, that we don’t take the time to look for other options and other ways to use the tools we already know and love. I’ve compiled this list over last few days (my brain hurts) by talking to a few customers and a few people around the office. I’m sure it's far from comprehensive. I’ve focused on quick wins and unique examples. I’ll start off with some obvious ones, and we’ll get a little more abstract, or niche, as we go. I hope you get some ideas flying as you read through, enjoy!
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#1 Benchmark your information architecture (IA)

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Without a baseline for your information architecture, you can’t easily tell if any changes you make have a positive effect. If you haven’t done so, benchmark your existing website on Tree testing now. Upload your site structure and get results the same day. Now you’ll have IA scores to beat each month. Easy.
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#2 Find out precisely where people get lost

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Use Tree testing Pietree to find out exactly where people are getting lost in your website structure and where they go instead. You can also use First-click testing for this if you’re only interested in the first click, and let’s face it, that is where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck.
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#3 Start at the start

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If you’re just not sure where to begin then take a screenshot of your homepage, or any page that you think might have some issues and get going with First-click testing. Write up a string of things that people might want to do when they find themselves on this page and use these as your tasks. Surprise all your colleagues with a maddening heatmap showing where people actually clicked in response to your tasks. Now you’ll know have a better idea of which area of your site to focus a tree test or card sort on for your next step.

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#4 A/B test your site structure

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Tree testing is great for testing more than one content structure. It’s easy to run two separate Tree testing studies — even more than two. It’ll help you decide which structure you and your team should run with, and it won’t take you long to set them up. Learn more.
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#5 Make collaborative design decisions

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Use Optimal Sort to get your team involved and let their feedback feed your designs — logos, icons, banners, images, the list goes on. By creating a closed image sort with categories where your team can group designs based on their preferences, you can get some quick feedback to help you figure out where you should focus your efforts.
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#6 Do your (market) research

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Card sorting is a great UX research technique, but it can also be a fun way to involve your users in some market research. Get a better sense of what your users and customers actually want to see on your website, by conducting an image sort of potential products. By providing categories like ‘I would buy this’, ‘I wouldn’t buy this’ to indicate their preferences for each item, you can figure out what types of products appeal to your customers.
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#7 Customer satisfaction surveys with surveys

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The thoughts and feelings of your users are always important. A simple survey can help you take a deeper look at your checkout process, a recently launched product or service, or even on the packaging your product arrives in — your options are endless.

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#8 Crowdsource content ideas

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Whether you’re running a blog or a UX conference, Questions can help you generate content ideas and understand any knowledge gaps that might be out there. Figure out what your users and attendees like to read on your blog, or what they want to hear about at your event, and let this feed into what you offer.
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#9 Do some sociological research

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Using card sorting for sociological research is a great way to deepen your understanding of how different groups may categorize information. Rather than focusing solely on how your users interact with your product or service, consider broadening your research horizons to understand your audience’s mental models. For example, by looking at how young people group popular social media platforms, you can understand the relationships between them, and identify where your product may fit in the mix.
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#10 Create tests to fit in your onboarding process

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Onboarding new customers is crucial to keeping them engaged with your product, especially if it involves your users learning how to use it. You can set up a quick study to help your users stay on track with onboarding. For example, say your company provided online email marketing software. You can set up a First-click testing study using a photo of your app, with a task asking your participants where they’d click to see the open rates for a particular email that went out.

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#11 Quantify the return on investment of UX

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Some people, including UX Agony Aunt, define return on UX as time saved, money made, and people engaged. By attaching a value to the time spent completing tasks, or to successful completion of tasks, you can approximate an ROI or at least illustrate the difference between two options.

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#12 Collate all your user testing notes using qualitative Insights

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Making sense of your notes from qualitative research activities can be simultaneously exciting and overwhelming. It’s fun being out on the field and jotting down observations on a notepad, or sitting in on user interviews and documenting observations into a spreadsheet. You can now easily import all your user research and give it some traceability.

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#13 Establish which tags or filters people consider to be the most important

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Create a card sort with your search filters or tags as labels, and have participants rank them according to how important they consider them to be. Analytics can tell you half of the story (where people actually click), so the card sort can give another side: a better idea of what people actually think or want.

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#14 Reduce content on landing pages to what people access regularly

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Before you run an open card sort to generate new category ideas, you can run a closed card sort to find out if you have any redundant content. Say you wanted to simplify the homepage of your intranet. You can ask participants to sort cards (containing homepage links) based on how often they use them. You could compare this card sort data with analytics from your intranet and see if people’s actual behavior and perception are well aligned.

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#15 Crowd-source the values you want your team/brand/product to represent

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Card sorting is a well-established technique in the ‘company values’ realm, and there are some great resources online to help you and your team brainstorm the values you represent. These ‘in-person’ brainstorm sessions are great, and you can run a remote closed card sort to support your findings. And if you want feedback from more than a small group of people (if your company has, say, more than 15 staff) you can run a remote closed card sort on its own. Use Microsoft’s Reaction Card Method as card inspiration.

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#16 Input your learnings and observations from a UX conference with qualitative insights

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If you're lucky enough to attend a UX conference, you can now share the experience with your colleagues. You can easily jot down ideas quotes and key takeaways in a Reframer project and keep your notes organized by using a new session for each presenter Bonus — if you’re part of a team, they can watch the live feed rolling into Reframer!

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#17 Find out what actions people take across time

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Use card sorting to understand when your participants are most likely to perform certain activities over the course of a day, week, or over the space of a year. Create categories that represent time, for example, ‘January to March’, ‘April to June’, ‘July to September’, and ‘October to December’, and ask your participants to sort activities according to the time they are most likely to do them (go on vacation, do their taxes, make big purchases, and so on). While there may be more arduous and more accurate methods for gathering this data, sometimes you need quick insights to help you make the right decisions.

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#18 Gather quantitative data on prioritizing project tasks or product features

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Closed card sorting can give you data that you might usually gather in team meetings or in Post-its on the wall, or that you might get through support channels. You can model your method on other prioritization techniques, including Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix, for example.

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#19 Test your FAQs page with new users

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Your support and knowledge base within your website can be just as important as any other core action on your website. If your support site is lacking in navigation and UX, this will no doubt increase support tickets and resources. Make sure your online support section is up to scratch. Here’s an article on how to do it quickly.

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#20 Figure out if your icons need labels

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Figure out if your icons are doing their job by testing whether your users are understanding them as intended. Uploading icons you currently use, or plan to use in your interface to First-click testing, and ask your users to identify their meaning by making use of post-task questions.

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#21 Give your users some handy quick tools

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In some cases, users may use your website with very specific goals in mind. Giving your users access to quick toos as soon as they land on your website is a great way to ensure they are able to get what they need done easily. Look at your analytics for things people do often that take several clicks to find, and check whether they can find your ‘quick tool’ in a single click using First-click testing.

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#22 Benchmark the IA of your competition

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We all have some sort of competitors, and researchers also need to pay attention to what they get up too. Make life easy in your reporting by benchmarking their IA and then reviewing it each quarter for the board and leaders to be wowed with. Also, not a perfect comparison, as users and separate sites have different flows, but compare your success scores with theirs. Makes your work feel like the Olympics with the healthy competition going on.

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#23 Improve website conversions

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Make the marketing team’s day by doing a fast improvement on some core conversions on your website. Now, there are loads of ways to improve conversions for a check out cart or signup form, but using First-click testing to test out ideas before you start going live A/B test can take mere minutes and give your B version a confidence boost.

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#24 Reduce the bounce rates of certain sections of your website

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People jumping off your website and not continuing their experience is something (depending on the landing page) everyone tries to improve. The metric ‘time on site’ and ‘average page views’ is a metric that shows the value your whole website has to offer. Again, there are many different ways to do this, but one big reason for people jumping off the website is not being able to find what they’re looking for. That’s where our IA toolkit comes in.

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#25 Test your website’s IA in different countries

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No, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to go to all these countries to test, although that’d be pretty sweet. You can remotely research participants from all over the world, using our integrated recruitment panel. Start seeing how different cultures, languages, and countries interact with your website.

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#26 Run an empathy test (card sort)

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Empathy – the ability to understand and share the experience of another person – is central to the design process. An empathy test is another great tool to use in the design phase because it enables you to find out if you are creating the right kind of feelings with your user. Take your design and show it to users. Provide them with a variety of words that could represent the design – for example “minimalistic”, “dynamic”, or “professional” – and ask them to pick out which the words which they think are best suited to their experience.

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#27 Recall test with first-click testing

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This is a technique that is a great way to find out if you have the correct visual hierarchy on the page. For example, a client may come to you and say you need to make the logo bigger as they are worried people won’t spot the branding. A recall test will test if this is correct and check whether people are seeing the things you want them to see on the page. Show your design to a user for a small amount of time (five seconds, for example) and ask them to recall what they see, and the order in which they recall it.

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#28 Take Qualitative Insights into the field

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Get out of the office or the lab and observe social behaviour in the field. Use Qualitative Insights to input your observations on your field research. Then head back to your office to start making sense of the data in the Theme Builder.

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#29 Use heatmaps to get the first impressions of designs

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Heatmaps in our First-click testing tool are a great way of getting first impressions of any design. You can see where people clicked (correctly and incorrectly), giving you insights on what works and doesn’t work with your designs. Because it’s so fast to test, you can iterate until your designs start singing.

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#30 Multivariate testing

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Multivariate testing is when more than two versions of your studies are compared and allows you to understand which version performs better with your audience. Use multivariate testing with Tree testing and First-click testing to find the right design on which to focus and iterate.

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#31 Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) with tree testing

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Yes, a good IA improves your SEO. Search engines want to know how your users navigate throughout your site. Make sure people can easily find what they’re looking for, and you’ll start to see improvement in your search engine ranking.

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#32 Test your mobile information architecture

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As more and more people are using their smartphones for apps and to browse sites, you need to ensure its design gives your users a great experience. Test the IA of your mobile site to ensure people aren’t getting lost in the mobile version of your site. If you haven’t got a mobile-friendly design yet, now’s the time to start designing it!

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#33 Run an Easter egg hunt using the correct areas in first-click testing

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Liven up the workday by creating a fun Easter egg hunt in Chalkmark. Simply upload a photo (like those really hard “spot the X” photos), set the correct area of your target, then send out your study with participant identifiers enabled. You can also send these out as competitions and have closing rules based on time, number of participants, or both.
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#34 Keystroke level modeling

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When interface efficiency is important you'll want to measure how much a new design can improve task times. You can actually estimate time saved (or lost) using some well-tested approaches that are based on average human performance for typical computer-based operations like clicking, pointing and typing. Read more about measuring task times without users.

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#35 Feature prioritization — get some help for your roadmap

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Find out what people think are the most important next steps for your team. Set up a card sort and ask people to categorize items and rank them in descending order of importance or impact on their work. This can also help you gauge their thoughts on potential new features for your site, and for bonus points compare team responses with customer responses.

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#36 Tame your blog

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Get the tags and categories in your blog under control to make life easier for your readers. Set up a card sort and use all your tags and categories as card labels. Either use your existing ones or test a fresh set of new tags and categories.

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#37 Test your home button

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Would an icon or text link work better for navigating to your home page? Before you go ahead and make changes to your site, you can find out by setting up a first-click testing test.

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#38 Validate the designs in your head

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As designers, you’ve probably got umpteen designs floating around in your head at any one time. But which of these are really worth pursuing? Figure this out by using The Optimal Workshop Suite to test out wireframes of new designs before putting any more work into them.

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#39 ‘Buy now’ button shopping cart visibility

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If you’re running an e-commerce site, ease of use and a great user experience are crucial. To see if your shopping cart and checkout processes are as good as they can be, run a first-click test.

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#40 IA periodic health checks

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Raise the visibility of good IA by running periodic IA health checks using Tree testing and reporting the results. Management loves metrics and catching any issues early is good too!

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#41 Focus groups with qualitative insights

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Thinking of launching a new product, app or website, or seeking opinions on an existing one? Focus groups can provide you with a lot of candid information that may help get your project off the ground. They’re also dangerous because they’re susceptible to groupthink, design by committee, and tunnel vision. Use with caution, but if you do then use with Qualitative Insights! Compare notes and find patterns across sessions. Pay attention to emotional triggers.

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#42 Gather opinions with surveys

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Whether you want the opinions of your users or from members of your team, you can set up a quick and simple survey using Surveys. It’s super useful for getting opinions on new ideas (consider it almost like a mini-focus group), or even for brainstorming with teammates.

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#43 Design a style guide with card sorting

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Style guides (for design and content) can take a lot of time and effort to create, especially when you need to get the guide proofed by various people in your company. To speed this up, simply create a card sort to find out what your guide should consist of. Find out the specifics in this article.

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#44 Improve your company's CRM system

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As your company grows, oftentimes your CRM can become riddled with outdated information and turn into a giant mess, especially if you deal with a lot of customers every day. To help clear this up, you can use card sorting and tree testing to solve navigational issues and get rid of redundant features. Learn more.

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#45 Sort your life out

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Let your creativity run wild, and get your team or family involved in organizing or prioritizing the things that matter. And the possibilities really are endless. Organize a long list of DIY projects, or ask the broader team how the functional pods should be re-organized. It’s up to you. How can card sorting help you in your work and daily life?

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#46 Create an online diary study

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Whether it’s a product, app or website, finding out the long-term behaviour and thoughts of your users is important. That’s where diary studies come in. For those new to this concept, diary studies are a longitudinal research method, aimed at collecting insights about a participant’s needs and behaviors. Participants note down activities as they’re using a particular product, app, or website. Add your participants into a qualitative study and allow them to create their diary study with ease.

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#47 Source-specific data with an online survey

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Online survey tools can complement your existing research by sourcing specific information from your participants. For example, if you need to find out more about how your participants use social media, which sites they use, and on which devices, you can do it all through a simple survey questionnaire. Additionally, if you need to identify usage patterns, device preferences or get information on what other products/websites your users are aware of/are using, a questionnaire is the ticket.

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#48 Guerrilla testing with First-click testing

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For really quick first-click testing, take First-click testing on a tablet, mobile device or laptop to a local coffee shop. Ask people standing in line if they’d like to take part in your super quick test in exchange for a cup of joe. Easy!

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#50 Ask post-task questions for tree testing and first-click testing

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You can now set specific task-related questions for both Tree testing and First-click testing. This is a great way to dive deeper into the mushy minds of your participants. Check out how to use this new(ish) feature here!

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#51 Start testing prototypes

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Paper prototypes are great, but what happens when your users are scattered around the globe, and you can’t invite them to an in-person test? By scanning (or taking a photo) of your paper prototypes, you can use Chalkmark to test them with your users quickly and easily. Read more about our approach here.

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#52 Take better notes for sense making

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Qualitative research involves a lot of note-taking. So naturally, to be better at this method, improving how you take notes is important. Reframer is designed to make note-taking easy but it can still be an art. Learn more.

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#53 Make sure you get the user's first-click right

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Like most things, read a little, and then it’s all about practice.We’ve found that people who get the first click correct are almost three times as likely to complete a task successfully. Get your first clicks right in Treejack and Chalkmark and you’ll start seeing your customers smile.

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#54 Run a cat survey. Yep, cats!

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We’ve gained some insight into how people intuitively group cats, and so can you (unless you’re a dog person). Honestly, doing something silly can be a useful way to introduce your team to a new method on a Friday afternoon. Remember to distribute the results!

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#55 Destroy evil attractors in your tree

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Evil attractors are those labels in your IA that attract unjustified clicks across tasks. This usually means the chosen label is ambiguous, or possibly a catch-all phrase like ‘Resources’. Read how to quickly identify evil attractors in the Destinations table of tree test results and how to fix them.

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#56 Affinity map using card sorts

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We all love our Post-its and sticking things on walls. But sometimes you need something quicker and accessible for people in remote areas. Try out using Card Sorts for a distributed approach to making sense of all the notes. Plus, you can easily import any qualitative insights when creating cards in card sort. Easy.

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#57 Preference test with first-click testing

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Whether you’re coming up with a new logo design, headline, featured image, or anything, you can preference test it with First-click testing. Create an image that shows the two designs side by side and upload it to First-click testing. From there, you can ask people to click whichever one they prefer!

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#58 Add moderated card sort results to your card sort

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An excellent way of gathering valuable qualitative insights alongside the results of your remote card sorts is to run a moderated version of the sorts with a smaller group of participants. When you can observe and interact with your participants as they complete the sort, you’ll be able to ask questions and learn more about their mental models and the reasons why they have categorized things in a particular way. Learn more.

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#59 Test search box variations with first-click clicking

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Case study by Viget: “One of the most heavily used features of the website is its keyword search, so we wanted to make absolutely certain that our redesigned search box didn’t make search harder for users to find and use.”

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#60 Run an image card sort to organize products into groups

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You can add images to each card that allows you understand how your participants may organize and label particular items. Very useful if you want to organize some retail products and want to find out how other people would organize them given a visual including shape, color, and other potential context.

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#61 Test your customers' perceptions of different logo and brand image designs

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Understand how customers perceive your brand by creating a closed card sort. Come up with a list of categories, and ask participants to sort images such as logos, and branded images.

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#62 Run an open image card sort to classify images into groups based on the emotions they elicit

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Are these pictures exhilarating, or terrifying? Are they humoros, or offensive? Relaxing, or boring? Productive, or frantic? Happy memories, or a deep sigh?

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#63 Run an image card sort to organize your library

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Whether it’s a physical library of books, or a digital drive full of ebooks, you can run a card sort to help organize them in a way that makes sense. Will it be by genre, author name, color or topic? Send out the study to your coworkers to get their input! You can also do this at home for your own personal library, and you can include music/CDs/vinyl records and movies!

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#64 HR exercises to determine the motivations of your team

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It’s simple to ask your team about their thoughts, feelings, and motivations with a Questions survey. You can choose to leave participant identifiers blank (so responses are anonymous), or you can ask for a name/email address. As a bonus, you can set up a calendar reminder to send out a new survey in the next quarter. Duplicate the survey and send it out again!

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#65 Designing physical environments

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If your company has a physical environment in which your customers visit, you can research new structures using a mixture of tools in The Optimal Workshop Suite. This especially comes in handy if your customers require certain information within the physical environment in order to make decisions. For example, picture a retail store. Are all the signs clear and communicate the right information? Are people overwhelmed by the physical environment?

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#66 Use tree testing to refine an interactive phone menu system

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Similar to how you’d design an IA, you can create a tree test to design an automated phone system. Whether you’re designing from the ground up, or improving your existing system, you will be able to find out if people are getting lost.

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#67 Have your research team categorize and prioritize all these ideas

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Before you dig deeper into more of these ideas, ask the rest of the team to help you decide which one to focus on. Let’s not get in the way of your work. Start your quick wins and log into your account. Here’s a spreadsheet of this list to upload to card sort. Aaaaaaaaaaand that’s a wrap! *Takes out gym towel and wipes sweaty face.
*Got any more suggestions to add to this list? We’d love to hear them in our comments section — we might even add them into this list

Mobile app testing with users before, during and beyond the design process is essential to ensuring product success. As UX designers we know how important usability is for interaction design, but testing early and often on mobile can sometimes be a challenge. This is where usability testing tools like Chalkmark (our first-click testing tool) can make a big difference.

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First-click testing on mobile apps allows you to rapidly test ideas and ensure your design supports user goals before you invest time and money in further design work and development. It helps you determine whether you’re on the right track and whether your users are too — people are 2 to 3 times as likely to successfully complete their task if they got their first click right.

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Read on for our top tips for mobile testing with Chalkmark shared through an example of a study we recently ran on Airbnb and TripAdvisor’s mobile apps.

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Planning your mobile testing approach: remote or in person

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There’s 2 ways that you might approach mobile app testing with Chalkmark: remotely or in person. Chalkmark is great for remote testing because it allows you to gain insights quickly as well as reach people anywhere in the world as the study is simply shared via a link. You might recruit participants via your social networks or email lists or you could use a recruitment service to target specific groups of people. The tool is also flexible enough to work just as well for moderated and in-person research studies. You might pop your study onto a mobile device and hit the streets for some guerrilla testing or you might incorporate it into a usability testing session that you’ve already got planned. There’s no right or wrong way to do it — it really depends on the needs of your project and the resources you have available.

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For our Airbnb and TripAdvisor mobile app study example, we decided to test remotely and recruited 30 US based participants through the Optimal Workshop recruitment service.

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Getting ready to test

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Chalkmark works by presenting participants with a real-world scenario based task and asking them to complete it simply by clicking on a static image of a design. That image could be anything from a rough sketch of an idea, to a wireframe, to a screenshot of your existing product. Anything that you would like to gather your user’s first impressions on — if you can create an image of it, you can Chalkmark it.

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To build your study, all you have to do is upload your testing images and come up with some tasks for your participants to complete. Think about the most common tasks a user would need to complete while using your app and base your mobile testing tasks around those. For our Airbnb and TripAdvisor study, we decided to use 3 tasks for each app and tested both mobile apps together in one study to save time. Task order was randomized to reduce bias and we used screenshots from the live apps for testing.

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For Airbnb, we focused our mobile testing efforts on the three main areas of their service offering: Homes, Experiences and Restaurants. We wanted to see if people understood the images and labels used and also if there were any potential issues with the way Airbnb presents these three options as horizontally scrollable tiles where the third one is only partially shown in that initial glance.

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For TripAdvisor, we were curious to see if the image-only icons on the sticky global navigation menu that appears when the page is scrolled made sense to users. We chose three of these icons to test: Holiday Rentals, Things To Do and Forums.

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Our Chalkmark study had a total of 6 tasks — 3 for each app — and we tested both mobile apps together to save time.

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Our tasks for this study were:

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1. You’ll be spending the holidays with your family in Montreal this year and a friend has recommended you book yourself into an axe throwing workshop during your trip.

2. Where would you go to do this? (Airbnb)

3. You’ve heard that Airbnb has a premium range of places to stay that have been checked by their team to ensure they’re amazing. Where would you go to find out more? (Airbnb)

4. You’re staying with your parents in New York for the week and would like to surprise them by taking them out to dinner but you’re not sure where to take them. Where would you go to look for inspiration? (Airbnb)

5. You’re heading to New Zealand next month and have so many questions about what it’s like! You’d love to ask the online community of locals and other travellers about their experiences. Where would you go to do this? (TripAdvisor)

6. You’re planning a trip to France and would prefer to enjoy Paris from a privately owned apartment instead of a hotel. Where would you go to find out what your options are? (TripAdvisor)

7. You’re currently on a working holiday in Melbourne and you find yourself with an unexpected day off. You’re looking for ideas for things to do. Where would you go to find something like this? (TripAdvisor)

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‍Task order was randomized to reduce bias and we used screenshots from the live apps for testing.All images used for testing were the size of a single phone screen because we wanted to see if they could find their way without needing to scroll. As with everything else, you don’t have to do it this way — you could make the image longer and test a larger section of your design or you could focus on a smaller section. As a testing tool, Chalkmark is flexible and scalable.

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We also put a quickly mocked up frame around each image that loosely resembled a smart phone because without it, the image looked like part of it had been cropped out which could have been very distracting for participants! This frame also provided context that we were testing a mobile app.

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Making sense of Chalkmark results data

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Chalkmark makes it really easy to make sense of your research through clickmaps and some really handy task results data. These 2 powerful analysis features provide a well-rounded and easy to digest picture of where those valuable first clicks landed so that you can evolve your design quickly and confidently.

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A clickmap is a visualization of where your participants clicked on your testing image during the study. It has different views showing heatmaps and actual click locations so you can see exactly where they fell. Clickmaps help you to understand if your participants were on the right track or, if they weren’t, where they went instead.The task results tab in Chalkmark shows how successful your participants were and how long it took them to complete the task. To utilize the task results functionality, all you have to do is set the correct clickable areas on the images you tested with — just click and drag and give each correct area a meaningful name that will then appear alongside the rest of the task results. You can do this during the build process or anytime after the study has been completed. This is very useful if you happen to forget something or are waiting on someone else to get back to you while you set up the test!

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For our Airbnb and TripAdvisor study, we set the correct areas on the navigational elements (the tiles, the icons etc) and excluded search. While searching for something isn’t necessarily incorrect, we wanted to see if people could find their way by navigating. For Airbnb, we discovered that 83% of our participants were able to correctly identify where they would need to go to book themselves into an axe throwing workshop. With a median task completion time of 4.89 seconds, this task also had the quickest completion time in the entire study. These findings show that the label and image being used for the ‘Experiences’ section of the app appears to be working quite well.

We also found that 80% of participants were able to find where they’d need to go to access Airbnb Plus. Participants had two options and could go via the ‘Homes’ tile (33%) or through the ‘Introducing Airbnb Plus’ image (47%) further down. Of the remaining participants, 10% clicked on the ‘Introducing Airbnb Plus’ heading, however at the time of testing, this area was not clickable. It’s not a huge deal because these participants were on the right track and would have likely found the right spot to click fairly quickly anyway. It’s just something to consider around user expectations and perhaps making that heading clickable might be worth exploring further.


83% of our participants were able to figure out where to go to find a great restaurant on the Airbnb app which is awesome! An additional 7% would have searched for it which isn’t wrong, but remember, we were testing those navigational tiles. It’s interesting to note that most people selected the tiles — likely indicating they felt they were given enough information to complete the task without needing to search.

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For our TripAdvisor tasks, we uncovered some very interesting and actionable insights. We found that 63% of participants were able to correctly identify the ‘Forums’ icon as the place to go for advice from other community members. While 63% is a good result, it does indicate some room for improvement and the possibility that the ‘Forums’ icon might not be reasonating with users as well as it could be. For the remaining participants, 10% clicked on ‘Where to?’ which prompts the user to search for specific locations while 7% clicked on the more general search option that would allow them to search all the content on the app.


63% of participants were able to correctly identify the ‘Holiday Rentals’ icon on the TripAdvisor app when looking for a privately owned apartment rather than a hotel to enjoy Paris from, while 20% of participants appear to have been tripped up by the ‘Hotel’ icon itself.


With 1 in 5 people in this study potentially not being able to distinguish between or determine the meaning behind each of the 2 icons, this is something that might merit further exploration. In another one of the TripAdvisor app’s tasks in this study, 43% of participants were unable to correctly identify the ‘Things To Do’ icon as a place to find inspiration for activities.Where to from here?

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If this were your project, you might look at running a quick study to see what people think each of the 6 icons represent. You could slip it into some existing moderated research you had planned or you might run a quick image card sort to see what your users would expect each icon to relate to. Running a study testing all 6 at the same time would allow you to gain insights into how users perceive the icons quickly and efficiently.

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Overall, both of these apps tested very well in this study and with a few minor tweaks and iterations that are part of any design process, they could be even better!

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Now that you’ve seen an example of mobile testing in Chalkmark, why not try it out for yourself with your app? It’s fast and easy to run and we have lots of great resources to help you on your way including sample studies that allow you to interactively explore both the participant’s and the researcher’s perspective.

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Further readingCreate and analyze a first-click test for freeView a first-click test as a participantView first-click test results as a researcherRead our first-click testing 101 guideRead more case studies and research stories to see first-click testing in action

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Originally published on 29 March 2019

The word “persona” has many meanings. Sometimes the term refers to a part that an actor plays, other times it can mean a famous person, or even a character in a fictional play or book. But in the field of UX, persona has its own special meaning.

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Before you get started with creating personas of your own, learn what they are and the process to create one. We'll even let you in on a great, little tip — how to use Chalkmark to refine and validate your personas.

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What is a persona?

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In the UX field, a persona is created using research and observations of your users, which is analyzed and then depicted in the form of a person’s profile. This individual is completely fictional, but is created based on the research you’ve conducted into your own users. It’s a form of segmentation, which Angus Jenkinson noted in his article “Beyond Segmentation” is a “better intellectual and practical tool for dealing with the interaction between the concept of the ‘individual’ and the concept of ‘group’”.

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Typical user personas include very specific information in order to paint an in-depth and memorable picture for the people using them (e.g., designers, marketers etc).

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The user personas you create don’t just represent a single individual either; they’ll actually represent a whole group. This allows you to condense your users into just a few segments, while giving you a much smaller set of groups to target.

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There are many benefits of using personas. Here are just a few:

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• You can understand your clients better by seeing their pain points, what they want, and what they need
 
• You can narrow your focus to a small number of groups that matter, rather than trying to design for everybody
 
• They’re useful for other teams too, from product management to design and marketing
 
• They can help you clarify your business or brand
 
• They can help you create a language for your brand
 
• You can market your products in a better, more targeted way

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How do I create a persona?

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There’s no right or wrong way to create a persona; the way you make them can depend on many things, such as your own internal resources, and the type of persona you want.

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The average persona that you’ve probably seen before in textbooks, online or in templates isn’t always the best kind to use (picture the common and overused types like ‘Busy Barry’). In fact, the way user personas are constructed is a highly debated topic in the UX industry.

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Creating good user personas

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Good user personas are meaningful descriptions — not just a list of demographics and a fake name that allows researchers to simply make assumptions.

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Indi Young, an independent consultant and founder of Adaptive Path, is an advocate of creating personas that aren’t just a list of demographics. In an article she penned on medium.com, Indi states: “To actually bring a description to life, to actually develop empathy, you need the deeper, underlying reasoning behind the preferences and statements-of-fact. You need the reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles.”

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One issue that can stem from traditional types of personas is they can be based on stereotypes, or even reinforce them. Things like gender, age, ethnicity, culture, and location can all play a part in doing this.

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In a study by Phil Turner and Susan Turner titled “Is stereotyping inevitable when designing with personas?” the authors noted: “Stereotyped user representations appear to constrain both design and use in many aspects of everyday life, and those who advocate universal design recognise that stereotyping is an obstacle to achieving design for all.”

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So it makes sense to scrap the stereotypes and, in many instances, irrelevant demographic data. Instead, include information that accurately describes the persona’s struggles, goals, thoughts and feelings — all bits of meaningful data.

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Creating user personas involves a lot of research and analyzing. Here are a few tips to get you started:

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1) Do your research

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When you’re creating personas for UX, it’s absolutely crucial you start with research; after all, you can’t just pull this information out of thin air by making assumptions! Ensure you use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative research here in order to cast your net wide and get results that are really valuable. A great research method that falls into the realms of both qualitative and quantitative is user interviews.

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When you conduct your interviews, drill down into the types of behaviors, attitudes and goals your users have. It’s also important to mention that you can’t just examine what your users are saying to you — you need to tap into what they’re thinking and how they behave too.

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2) Analyze and organize your data into segments

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Once you’ve conducted your research, it’s time to analyze it. Look for trends in your results — can you see any similarities among your participants? Can you begin to group some of your participants together based on shared goals, attitudes and behaviors?

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After you have sorted your participants into groups, you can create your segments. These segments will become your draft personas. Try to limit the number of personas you create. Having too many can defeat the purpose of creating them in the first place.

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Don’t forget the little things! Give your personas a memorable title or name and maybe even assign an image or photo — it all helps to create a “real” person that your team can focus on and remember.

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3) Review and test

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After you’ve finalized your personas, it’s time to review them. Take another look at the responses you received from your initial user interviews and see if they match the personas you created. It’s also important you spend some time reviewing your finalized personas to see if any of them are too similar or overlap with one another. If they do, you might want to jump back a step and segment your data again.

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This is also a great time to test your personas. Conduct another set of user interviews and research to validate your personas.

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User persona templates and examples

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Creating your personas using data from your user interviews can be a fun task — but make sure you don’t go too crazy. Your personas need to be relevant, not overly complex and a true representation of your users.

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A great way to ensure your personas don’t get too out of hand is to use a template. There are many of these available online in a number of different formats and of varying quality.

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This example from UX Lady contains a number of helpful bits of information you should include, such as user experience goals, tech expertise and the types of devices used. The accompany article also provides a fair bit of guidance on how to fill in your templates too. While this template is good, skip the demographics portion and read Indi Young’s article and books for better quality persona creation.

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Using Chalkmark to refine personas

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Now it’s time to let you in on a little tip. Did you know Chalkmark can be used to refine and validate your personas?

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One of the trickiest parts of creating personas is actually figuring out which ones are a true representation of your users — so this usually means lots of testing and refining to ensure you’re on the right track. Fortunately, Chalkmark makes the refinement and validation part pretty easy.

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First, you need to have your personas finalized or at least drafted. Take your results from your persona software or template you filled in. Create a survey for each segment so that you can see if your participants’ perceptions of themselves matches each of your personas.

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Second, create your test. This is a pretty simple demo we made when we were testing our own personas a few years ago at Optimal Workshop. Keep in mind this was a while ago and not a true representation of our current personas — they’ve definitely changed over time! During this step, it’s also quite helpful to include some post-test questions to drill down into your participants’ profiles.

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After that, send these tests out to your identified segments (e.g., if you had a retail clothing store, some of your segments might be women of a certain age, and men of a certain age. Each segment would receive its own test). Our test involved three segments: “the aware”, “the informed”, and “the experienced” — again, this has changed over time and you’ll find your personas will change too.

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Finally, analyze the results. If you created separate tests for each segment, you will now have filtered data for each segment. This is the real meaty information you use to validate each persona. For example, our three persona tests all contained the questions: “What’s your experience with user research?” And “How much of your job description relates directly to user experience work?”

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bove, you’ll see the results for Persona #2. This tells us that 34% of respondents identified that their job involves a lot of UX work (75-100%, in fact). In addition, 31% of this segment considered themselves “Confident” with remote user research, while a further 9% and 6% of this segment said they were “Experienced” and “Expert”.

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These results all aligned with the persona we associated with that segment: “the informed”.

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When you’re running your own tests, you’ll analyze the data in a very similar way. If the results from each of your segments’ Chalkmark tests don’t match up with the personas you created, it’s likely you need to adjust your personas. However, if each segment’s results happen to match up with your personas (like our example above), consider them validated!

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For a bit more info on our very own Chalkmark persona test, check out this article.

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Further reading

   
• "From personas to user stories" - an article by Roman Pichler on how to discover the right stories and integrate them into a sprint.
   
• "Personas make users memorable for product team members" - Aurora Bedford looks at how personas support user-centered design throughout a project’s lifecycle.
   
• "Developing successful personas" - Luke Wroblewski presents notes from a talk by Tamara Adlin who outlines a set of practical ways to align stakeholder, developers, and designers to use personas.
   
• "Describing personas" - Indi Young looks at some of the problems in accurately describing personas.
 

It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun—Ray Kroc

Maccas. Mickey D’s. The golden arches. Whatever you call it, you know I’m talking about none other than fast-food giant McDonald’s. A survey of 7000 people across six countries 20 years ago by Sponsorship Research International found that more people recognized the golden arches symbol (88%) than the Christian cross (54%). With more than 35,000 restaurants in 118 countries and territories around the world, McDonald’s has come a long way since multi-mixer salesman Ray Kroc happened upon a small fast-food restaurant in 1954.

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For an organization of this size and reach, consistency and strong branding are certainly key ingredients in its marketing mix. McDonald’s restaurants all over the world are easily recognised and while the menu does differ slightly between countries, users know what kind of experience to expect. With this in mind, I wondered if the same is true for McDonald’s web presence? How successful is a large organization like McDonald’s at delivering a consistent online user experience tailored to suit diverse audiences worldwide without losing its core meaning? I decided to investigate and gave McDonald’s a good grilling by testing ten of its country-specific websites’ home pages in one Chalkmark study.

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Preparation time 🥒

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First-click testing reveals the first impressions your users have of your designs. This information is useful in determining whether users are heading down the right path when they first arrive at your site. When considering the best way to measure and compare ten of McDonald’s websites from around the world, I choose first-click testing because I wanted to be able to test the visual designs of each website and I wanted to do it all in one research study.My first job in the setup process was to decide which McDonald’s websites would make the cut.

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The approach was to divide the planet up by continent, combined with the requirement that the sites selected be available in my native language (English) in order to interpret the results. I chose: Australia, Canada, Fiji, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, the UK, and the US. The next task was to figure out how to test this. Ten tasks is ideal for a Chalkmark study, so I made it one task per website; however, determining what those tasks would be was tricky. Serving up the same task for all ten ran the risk of participants tiring of the repetition, but a level of consistency was necessary in order to compare the sites. I decided that all tasks would be different, but tied together with one common theme: burgers.

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After all, you don’t win friends with salad.

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Launching and sourcing participants 👱🏻👩👩🏻👧👧🏾

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When sourcing participants for my research, I often hand the recruitment responsibilities over to Optimal Workshop because it’s super quick and easy; however, this time I decided to do something a bit different. Because McDonald’s is such a large and well-known organization visited by hundreds of millions of people every year, I decided to recruit entirely via Twitter by simply tweeting the link out. Am I three fries short of a happy meal for thinking this would work? Apparently not. In just under a week I had the 30+ completed responses needed to peel back the wrapper on McDonald’s.

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Imagine what could have happened if it had been McDonald’s tweeting that out to the burger-loving masses? Ideally when recruiting for a first-click testing study the more participants you can get the more sure you can be of your results, but aiming for 30-50 completed responses will still provide viable results. Conducting user research doesn’t have to be expensive; you can achieve quality results that cut the mustard for free. It’s a great way to connect with your customers, and you could easily reward participants with, say, a burger voucher by redirecting them somewhere after they do the activity—ooh, there’s an idea!

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Reading the results menu 🍽️

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Interpreting the results from a Chalkmark study is quick and easy.

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Everything you need presented under a series of tabs under ‘Analysis’ in the results section of the dashboard:

• Participants: this tab allows you to review details about every participant that started your Chalkmark study and also contains handy filtering options for including, excluding and segmenting.
• Questionnaire: if you included any pre or post study questionnaires, you will find the results here.
• Task Results: this tab provides a detailed statistical overview of each task in your study based on the correct areas as defined by you during setup. This functionality allows you to structure your results and speeds up your analysis time because everything you need to know about each task is contained in one diagram. Chalkmark also allows you to edit and define the correct areas retrospectively, so if you forget or make a mistake you can always fix it.

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• Clickmaps: under this tab you will find three different types of visual clickmaps for each task showing you exactly where your participants clicked: heatmaps, grid and selection. Heatmaps show the hotspots of where participants clicked and can be switched to a greyscale view for greater readability and grid maps show a larger block of colour over the sections that were clicked and includes the option to show the individual clicks. The selection map just shows the individual clicks represented by black dots.

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What the deep fryer gave me 🍟🎁

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McDonald’s tested ridiculously well right across the board in the Chalkmark study. Country by country in alphabetical order, here’s what I discovered:

• Australia: 91% of participants successfully identified where to go to view the different types of chicken burgers
• Canada: all participants in this study correctly identified the first click needed to locate the nutritional information of a cheeseburger
• Fiji: 63% of participants were able to correctly locate information on where McDonald’s sources their beef
• India (West and South India site): Were this the real thing, 88% of participants in this study would have been able to order food for home delivery from the very first click, including the 16% who understood that the menu item ‘Convenience’ connected them to this service
• Malaysia: 94% of participants were able to find out how many beef patties are on a Big Mac
• New Zealand: 91% of participants in this study were able to locate information on the Almighty Angus™ burger from the first click
• Singapore: 66% of participants were able to correctly identify the first click needed to locate the reduced-calorie dinner menu
• South Africa: 94% of participants had no trouble locating the first click that would enable them to learn how burgers are prepared
• UK: 63% of participants in this study correctly identified the first click for locating the Saver Menu
• US: 75% of participants were able to find out if burger buns contain the same chemicals used to make yoga mats based on where their first clicks landed

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Three reasons why McDonald’s nailed it 🍔 🚀

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This study clearly shows that McDonald’s are kicking serious goals in the online stakes but before we call it quits and go home, let’s look at why that may be the case. Approaching this the way any UXer worth their salt on their fries would, I stuck all the screens together on a wall, broke out the Sharpies and the Tesla Amazing magnetic notes (the best invention since Post-it notes), and embarked on the hunt for patterns and similarities—and wow did I find them!

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Navigation pattern use

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Across the ten websites, I observed just two distinct navigation patterns: navigation menus at the top and to the left. The sites with a top navigation menu could also be broken down into two further groups: those with three labels (Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore) and those with more than three labels (Fiji, India, Malaysia, and South Africa). Australia and New Zealand shared the exact same labelling of ‘eat’, ‘learn’, and ‘play’ (despite being distinct countries), whereas the others had their own unique labels but with some subject matter crossover; for example, ‘People’ versus ‘Our People’.

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Canada, the UK, and the US all had the same look and feel with their left side navigation bar, but each with different labels. All three still had navigation elements at the top of the page, but the main content that the other seven countries had in their top navigation bars was located in that left sidebar.

These patterns ensure that each site is tailored to its unique audience while still maintaining some consistency so that it’s clear they belong to the same entity.

Logo lovin’ it

If there’s one aspect that screams McDonald’s, it’s the iconic golden arches on the logo. Across the ten sites, the logo does vary slightly in size, color, and composition, but it’s always in the same place and the golden arches are always there. Logo consistently is a no-brainer, and in this case McDonald’s clearly recognizes the strengths of its logo and understands which pieces it can add or remove without losing its identity.

Subtle consistencies in the page layouts

Navigation and logo placement weren’t the only connections one can draw from looking at my wall of McDonald’s. There were also some very interesting but subtle similarities in the page layouts. The middle of the page is always used for images and advertising content, including videos and animated GIFs. The US version featured a particularly memorable advertisement for its all-day breakfast menu, complete with animated maple syrup slowly drizzling its way over a stack of hotcakes.

The bottom of the page is consistently used on most sites to house more advertising content in the form of tiles. The sites without the tiles left this space blank.

Familiarity breeds … usability?

Looking at these results, it is quite clear that the same level of consistency and recognition between McDonald’s restaurants is also present between the different country websites. This did make me wonder what role does familiarity play in determining usability? In investigating I found a few interesting articles on the subject. This article by Colleen Roller on UXmatters discusses the connection between cognitive fluency and familiarity, and the impact this has on decision-making. Colleen writes:Because familiarity enables easy mental processing, it feels fluent. So people often equate the feeling of fluency with familiarity. That is, people often infer familiarity when a stimulus feels easy to process. If we’re familiar with an item, we don’t have to think too hard about it and this reduction in performance load can make it feel easier to use. I also found this fascinating read on Smashing Magazine by Charles Hannon that explores why Apple were able to claim ‘You already know how to use it’ when launching the iPad. It’s well worth a look!Oh and about those yoga mats … the answer is yes.

"Dear Optimal Workshop

How do you make a small link attractive to people (icon vs. text)?"

— Cassie

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Dear Cassie,

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I'm going to dive straight into this interesting question with a good old game of Pros and Cons, and then offer a resolution of sorts, with a meandering thought or two along the way. Let's kick things off with Team Icon.

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The good side of icons: A picture is worth a 1000 words

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When shopping online, the number above the little shopping trolley icon tells me how badly behaved I’ve been, and if I click on it, I know I’ll get to gleefully review all the shoes I've selected so far. There’s a whole heap of icons out there like this that people have absorbed and can use without thinking twice. Marli Mesibov wrote a fantastic article on the use of icons for UX Booth on the use of icons that is well worth a look. Marli discusses how they work well on small screens, which is a definite bonus when you’re on the go! Young children who aren’t yet literate can easily figure out how to open and play Angry Birds on their parent’s smartphones thanks to icons. And icons also have a great capacity for bridging language barriers.

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The not so good side of icons: We’re too old for guessing games

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On the flipside, there are some issues that may huff and puff and blow that cute little home icon down. Starting with there being no consistent standard for them. Sure, there are a handful that are universal like home and print, but beyond that it seems to be a free-for-all. Icons are very much in the hands of the designer and this leaves a lot of room for confusion to grow like bacteria in a badly maintained office refrigerator. Difficult to understand icons can also seriously hinder a user’s ability to learn how to use your website or application. When icons don't communicate what they intend, well, you can guess what happens. In a great piece advocating for text over icons, Joshua Porter writes about an experience he had:

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"I have used this UI now for a week and I still have do a double-take each time I want to navigate. I’m not learning what the icons mean. The folder icon represents 'Projects', which I can usually remember (but I think I remember it because it’s simply the first and default option). The second icon, a factory, is actually a link to the 'Manage' screen, where you manage people and projects. This trips me up every time."

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If people can't pick up the meaning of your icons quickly and intuitively, they may just stop trying altogether. And now, over to Team Label.

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The good side of text: What you see is what you get

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Sometimes language really is the fastest vehicle you've got for delivering a message. If you choose the right words to label your links, you'll leave the user with very little doubt as to what lies beneath. It’s that simple. Carefully-considered and well-written labels can cut through the noise and leave minimal ambiguity in their wake. Quoting Joshua Porter again: "Nothing says 'manage' like 'manage'. In other words, in the battle of clarity between icons and labels, labels always win."

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The not so good side of text: Your flat shoe is my ballet pump

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Text labels can get messy and be just as confusing as unfamiliar icons! Words and phrases sometimes don’t mean the same thing to different people. One person’s flat enclosed shoe may be another person’s ballet pump, and the next person may be left scratching their head because they thought pumps were heels and all they wanted was a ballet flat! Text only labels can also become problematic if there isn’t a clear hierarchy of information, and if you have multiple links on one page or screen.  Bombarding people with a page of short text links may make it difficult for them to find a starting point. And text may also hold back people who speak other languages.

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The compromise: Pair icons up with text labels

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Because things are always better when we work together! Capitalise on the combined force of text and icons to solve the dilemma. And I don’t mean you should rely on hovers — make both text and icon visible at all times. Two great examples are Google Apps (because nothing says storage like a weird geometric shape...) and the iPhone App store (because the compass and magnifying glass would pose an interesting challenge without text...):

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So what comes next? (You can probably guess what I'm going to say)

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Whatever you decide to run with, test it. Use whatever techniques you have on hand to test all three possibilities — icons only, text only, and icons and text — on real people. No Pros and Cons list, however wonderful, can beat that. And you know, the results will probably surprise you. I ran a quick study recently using Chalkmark to find out where people on the ASOS women's shoes page would click to get to the homepage (and yes, I can alway find ways to make shoe shopping an integral part of my job). 28 people responded, and...

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...a whopping 89% of them clicked the logo, just 7% clicked the home icon, and just one person (the remaining 4%) clicked the label 'Home'. Enough said. Thanks for your question Cassie. To finish, here's some on-topic (and well-earned) comic relief (via @TechnicallyRon)

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