Tasks
We phrase a real goal such as «choose one and order it» and observe without intervening.
The method is simple and cheap: the person is given a goal and the observer stays silent and prompts nothing.
We phrase a real goal such as «choose one and order it» and observe without intervening.
We note the places where participants stop, go back, get lost or give up.
We test on phones and in different browsers: what is obvious on a wide monitor does not fit on a narrow screen.
Keyboard control, legibility, contrast. This helps everyone without exception rather than one particular group.
The most troublesome part of any site: excessive fields, unclear error messages, losing what was typed.
The problems ordered by their impact on revenue, with an estimate of the effort to fix.
A study with five participants takes a week including preparing the tasks and writing the report.
We phrase the tasks. A task describes the person's goal rather than a sequence of clicks.
We run the sessions with screen recording, refraining entirely from prompting.
We collect the observations and separate an individual's quirks from recurring problems.
A list of the problems with priorities and proposed solutions.
Observation shows the cause where analytics shows only the effect. The statistics say half the people leave at the payment step but say nothing about why. Someone thinking aloud explains in five minutes what the numbers could never reconstruct.
Existing customers or people from your audience are best. At a pinch, staff from other departments unconnected with the product. Its creators are entirely unsuitable: they click the right thing without looking.
Five people are enough to find most of the problems: the first participants stumble over the same things and after that the findings start repeating. Two studies of five people with fixes in between are worth more than one study of twenty.
Not only can you but you should. A study on a clickable prototype is cheaper and lets you change the structure while it costs nothing. After the code is written, reworking the screen logic is expensive.
Tell us at which steps the analytics shows visitors dropping out. We will run sessions and show the real causes.
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