I was at a great talk about Trends in Usability Research last night, hosted by
MaineUX/ MaineIxDA . Kyle Soucy of
Usable Interface - a nationally recognized leader in usability testing - talked about some of the newer approaches that people are taking to user research.
It's apparently been a long two years since I was last doing user research, as there's now whole classes of tools that I didn't even know existed. In particular, there's some really interesting online tools that will help you do unmoderated user testing. For most of them, you'll still need to screen and line up your users, but instead of talking to them one-on-one, you can point them at a website and look at the results later.
You'll of course lose some of the detail that you get from individual conversations and being able to ask the user questions one-on-one. But it can allow you to test more users, and thus get some quantitative heft behind your results - which can be particularly persuasive to decision makers.
Here's some of the tools Kyle covered:
- Loop11 : Currently in a free beta stage - request an invite, and you'll get a free login and password. You define the tasks you want your users to conduct, and then send your test participants to your testing site. They see your website (or whatever you're testing) with a header frame that tells them what tasks they're supposed to be doing, and solicits their comments. You can then analyze the results by looking at the success rate for tasks, time to complete, and other useful metrics.
- UserZoom : It's a little harder to get a sense from their website, but I think based on Kyle's talk and their info that this one is an up-market version of Loop11. Kyle estimated it at about $1000 per study, depending on the number of users you're testing.
- Treejack : Free for up to three tasks, or $109/ month otherwise. Very cool in it's simplicity. You upload a set of terms or categories in a hierarchical structure from an Excel spreadsheet, and it creates a simple drill-down interface from them. You then define some tasks (for instance, the term you want your user to look for), and point your test participants at it. They try to find the terms in your structure, and you can see overall success rates and time to complete.
- Chalkmark : By the same folks as Treejack, with the same pricing structure, and even simpler. Upload a screenshot, and define one or more tasks ("Find information about our Executive Director"). It records where they click on the screen, and shows you a heat map of the aggregate results.
- UserTesting.com : Interesting and cheap, but questionable. For $29/user, people will walk through the tasks you define, and you get an actual video of their actions and thoughts, and a write up. However, they're not testing with actual users. Rather, they're paying people to do nothing but sit there and user test sites for all their clients. So it's likely they'll have a somewhat distorted perspective of what it's like to use sites - though better than nothing, certainly, and better than not asking anyone external to your organization at all.
So there's some very cool stuff I knew nothing about! Are there others in this realm that you've had good experiences with?
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