Usability Research
Usability and user experience exists to find the truth. Conventional wisdom is just rumor and innuendo. Never work off your gut instinct or what someone once heard, but confirm that what you know to be true is true, and get the data on your market segment, your product, and your users.
Don’t be fooled by bad data or bad methods. Stop using surveys, focus groups, feedback forums, and net promoter scores.
4ourth Mobile can help you with some of these very good methods, to deliver repeatable results, give you good information, and great insights.
Heuristic Evaluations
Very rarely is a product entirely new. Most products replace or improve on something that already exists or compete with another product in the same space.
We often start with a heuristic evaluation or expert review, using our deep knowledge of proven best practices in digital design—the heuristics—to understand and rate the quality of a product or practice.
This allows us to quickly identify key problems, to fix, and to create new ideas you can use. It is best followed up with usability research, card sorts, or other methods to more deeply explore more difficult areas, or come up with good solutions to problems encountered.
Card Sorting & Co-Design
Often you can work directly with representative users to gather insights and develop conceptual designs. In contrast, card sorts engage actual users in organizing and naming complex structures such as categories for your products. Co-design, or participatory design, engages actual users in conceptual product design and page layout.
Usability Testing
During usability-test sessions, participants actually use your product, or a prototype or demo version of it. A moderator asks them to perform specific tasks, while talking about what they are expecting and experiencing, but your main focus is on observing their actual use.
Instead of just getting their feedback or feelings, you can actually see whether people will click where you expect them to, understand the concept, use the product as expected, and even measure how quickly they discover or use certain features.
Ethnography
Formally, this is the study of cultures. In product design, we can see how people do their jobs or use products in their day-to-day lives by observe users with as little intrusion as possible. We go out and see how they actually use the product in the context of their day to day life,
We pay the greatest attention to how they exist in their environment, and what they do that a Web site, digital tool, or mobile app does not support.
Read more about how we do usability testing and ethnography.
Customer Satisfaction
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a very carefully constructed survey that has been around for decades. You can give this survey to users immediately after a usability test or other direct experience with a product, to assess their level of satisfaction with the product. The result is a single number that says how well the product is working.
Create a Research Practice
You should use many of these methods on an ongoing basis—both to continue gathering information for future releases and to monitor a product’s performance over time. Even if you think a quarterly survey or NPS is giving you the data you need, try using these better techniques instead.
A regular program that combines usability testing and SUS is especially helpful and works for many companies that put out successful, high-quality products.
Contact 4ourth Mobile today to find out how your product really works, and what customers really want, to reduces error, rework, and guesswork before you start in on that next product or revision.