We are experts in usability and user experience research and can help you help you measure the:

  • effectiveness;
  • efficiency; and
  • satisfaction

of your service to your online user and make improvements that deliver a return on your investment.

There are now many different tools and methods to investigate web usability and the user experience, each with its own costs and benefits:

Usability Lab Testing

You can’t beat seeing users actually using your (or your competitors) website. Twelve participant sessions over two days will reveal most if not all of your barriers to sales and opportunities for improvements. Get our free ‘Usability Research Guide’ for more details.

Ethnographic Research

Ethnography means the ‘study of human behavior in its natural context, involving observation of behavior and physical setting’. This method is particularly good for B2B environments for understanding work practices, and is now frequently employed to understand how mobile applications are used in the wild.

Customer Journey Mapping

 Customer journey mapping is an in depth investigation of the bigger picture, with particular regard to trying to understand how the customer researches, decides and buys products and services. Individual journeys are taken by defined personas that represent your market to provide insights.

Remote Usability Testing

Remote usability testing is cheaper than Ethnography and Usability Laboratories. Users are given a task, and then record their thoughts and observations as a video. This is a cheap method to get at issues that can be easily identified, and can be particularly useful to benchmark competitors.

Online Surveys

Surveys can be easily and efficiently delivered online, and are useful (as with the offline variety) to deliver quantitative research. Some new tools, described in our free ‘Usability Research Guide’ are particularly interesting as they start to merge remote usability with survey Q & A.

Analytics

Is this research? Not as traditionally defined, but if you are looking to benchmark behaviours and spot drop out points in your website, this should really be the place to start. Very useful to focus other more expensive research methods.

AB and MVT Testing

Analytics packages almost always offer facilities to test complete versions of pages against each other (AB testing) or competing variations of page elements (Multi-Variate Testing – MVT). MVT can be misleading if a scattergun approach is taken, but with concrete ideas derived from research it is an essential part of optimizing website performance.


Author David Hawdale has eleven years experience researching and designing experiences for the web, and another five with desktop software.