ServiceOntario is hosting conversations and usability testing sessions this March and April.

These sessions will explore how online services can be improved for Driver’s Licenses, Vehicles, and Health Cards.

Help improve ServiceOntario online

When: Daytime or evenings, March 1 to April 30
How long: Up to 90 minutes, online or phone interviews

To participate, contact Field Source

Phone: 1-866-667-5868
Email: research@fieldsource.ca

Selected participants will receive an incentive of $50. Please respond before March 31, 2021.

Aidez-nous à améliorer ServiceOntario en ligne

ServiceOntario vous invite à participer à son étude en cours visant à améliorer ses services en ligne liés à la carte Santé, au permis de conduire et aux services relatifs aux véhicules.

Quand: le jour ou le soir, du 1er mars au 30 avril
Durée: jusqu’à 90 minutes, d’entrevue téléphonique ou en ligne

Pour participer, communiquez avec Field Source

par téléphone: 1-866-667-5868,

par courriel: research@fieldsource.ca,

sur le site Web: ontario.sayyeah.com

Les participants sélectionnés recevront un montant incitatif de 50 $. Veuillez répondre avant le 31 mars 2021

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It’s easy – just join us on July 11th or the 17th at either the Toronto Reference Library or the North York Central Branch to share your thoughts on the TPL website.

In partnership with TPL, we’re holding usability testing sessions to expand access to the library’s online offerings.

Interested in participating? We’ll need an hour of your time, and your honest feedback as you explore the TPL website. The session will be facilitated by a moderator and researcher from Say Yeah and potentially a TPL staff member.

We’ll be taking notes from participants on how to improve online access to library services.

You’ll share and discuss your experiences with the TPL website.

Please note: Video and audio recording will be used. If you are uncomfortable with being recorded, this isn’t the session for you. A few other basic qualifications are listed below, too.

Please take a moment to answer a few short questions to confirm your availability and interest:

Not a TPL user? We’d still love to speak with you about your experiences as a Torontonian.

Start Survey

Qualifications:

• Users must be comfortable using a standard web browser (e.g. Chrome or Safari)
• Users should have a Toronto Public Library card.
• Users must be at least 18 years old.

We look forward to speaking with everyone interested in improving our city’s library services. Please share the survey to grow our groups!

Go to the survey

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Say Yeah has a great opportunity ready and waiting for you! All we need is your time, openness, and honest opinion about public services that assist library users across Toronto. But first, we need to know if you’re interested and available to help us for an April or May usability testing session.

We’re looking for Torontonians to help us improve library services by participating in a usability testing session at the Toronto Reference Library.

We will be conducting 45-60 minute usability testing sessions at the Toronto Reference Library. You will share a room with a test moderator and researcher from Say Yeah along with Toronto Public Library staff.

We’ll be taking notes on how we can improve services throughout our discussion, with a focus on making it easier for you and other Torontonians to benefit from how you interact with the Toronto Public Library and tpl.ca.

Video and audio recording will be used to for further analysis following the usability testing session.

Confirm your interest by filling out the usability test session survey

If  you are interested in participating in a usability testing session with Say Yeah at the Toronto Reference Library over the coming weeks, please fill out our online survey.

Start survey

User testing requirements

For the purposes of this test:

• Users will need to be comfortable using a standard desktop web browser such as Chrome or Safari with a trackpad.
• Users should have a Toronto Public Library card.
• Users must be 18 years old and over.

We’re grateful for everyone who’s interested in making a difference in Toronto. Please feel free to share the survey with your friends and family.

Go to the survey

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I’m not talking about your users not finding your product useful or if there’s even a market for your product. In fact, if you’re testing an in-market product without having an answer to those questions, you’re asking those questions too late.

So let’s assume you’ve found a market ripe for your product or the services described on your website. You understand the pain points of your users and have developed a product that solves those market needs. Your next step is to ensure your product meets those needs intuitively and elegantly.

As a business owner or designer of a digital product, you can always gain new insight by understanding the behaviour of your actual users, which is why user testing has become increasingly important in how a product or website is shaped.

Luckily, there are a number of user testing tools and techniques that are available to nearly everyone these days which can help you find out where your users are succeeding and struggling with your product.

The Free Way: Google Analytics

The tool that every website should be using; Google Analytics is a free source of complex analytical data for your website. Typically, Google Analytics is seen as a marketing resource, but what many business owners may not know is that Google Analytics can also be used to aid in understanding user behaviour.

How you can start: Some key elements of Google Analytics which relate to user behaviour are goal tracking and funnel tracking. These are a little more advanced to set up and analyze, but just about everyone can get started by looking at Bounce Rates and Exit Pages.

As a website owner, you should be looking for pages with a high bounce rate as this may be indicative of an issue with that page. By using Google Analytics to measure the bounce rate and exit percentage of each of your pages, you’re letting your users speak to you through their actions. If a high percentage of users are leaving your website through a specific page, you want to be sure that there’s an appropriate call to action on that page or that this exit behaviour isn’t otherwise detrimental. If you’re seeing a high bounce rate, especially 90% or higher, that means the traffic that’s getting to that page first is not ideal and may point to an issue with your advertising, keywords, or other targeting.

The Hard Way: In Person or Remote Testing

One of the oldest ways to conduct user testing, having one of your target customers test out your product in-person or with a remote testing tool such as usertesting.com.

Pro tip: you can get a free, quick test of your website here.

How you can start: One of the biggest things to keep in mind when user testing is that your tester should be as close to your ideal user as possible. Not a close friend who has no connection to your target market. And not anyone involved in the design or development of your product as they’ll be unable to provide unbiased feedback.

The next biggest challenge is in the test questions you ask these users. What most people don’t realize is that the questions you ask and the way you interact with users can greatly influence the outcome of a usability test.

The best approach is to provide your users with tasks to perform within your product and first observe how they choose to accomplish these tasks. This includes how they react to the language on the screen, the calls to action, the menus and navigation requirements, and the flow from screen to screen as they look to complete these tasks that have been set out before them.

Learn more about our approach to usability testing

The Best Way: Screen Recordings

The best solution for a business to begin learning how to conduct user testing is through screen recordings. As a relatively new technology, this wonderful addition to the user testing toolkit may not be top of mind. Luckily providers such as Hotjar and MouseFlow have made this technology much more accessible to website owners—as simple as adding a small snippet of code to your website with a reasonable monthly fee for a whole lot of added insight.

How you can start: The first thing you should do is start looking at screen recordings around the most important parts of your website. How are people interacting with your most important content? Your calls to action? Your forms?

Pro tip: consider those exit pages you saw in Google Analytics. Pick one of those exit pages and watch the recordings which all ended on that page. What patterns can you see? Are people missing your call to action? Skipping over your most important content?

Consider what can you do to provide more value on this page and better suit it to the stage of the buying funnel your customers are in, or the task your customer is trying to perform in your product.

In the end, using screen recordings combines the ease of Google Analytics with much of the insight of in-person user testing, while helping you gain new insight by unobtrusively letting the user show you what works and where they’re getting stuck.

Looking for more insights on user testing tools and processes?

Check out these related articles, or get in touch with us to plan your next steps.

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It’s not necessarily a costly and time consuming endeavor. In fact, a few friends and some food may be all you need to get some great insight on how to improve your system.

Here are some introductory user testing methodology tips to help you get started towards building a better experience for your users. Note that I’m using the term ‘website’ to describe a product or system, but this process can be applied to any activity that requires user interaction.

Assembling a team of testers

The first step in user testing is assembling a group of people to test your website. This may require some bribery in the form of food and drinks, or some gift cards or money. An easy way to assemble a test group is to invite friends, family, or business associates. Whenever possible, try to assemble a group of people who are representative of your target market. This may involve going outside your social circle and may require some extra financial incentives for your participants. You should also avoid using people who have directly worked on the project (ie, developers or other stakeholders) because their knowledge of the website may be too intimate to offer new insight.

Define tasks

It’s important to provide your testers with a selection of tasks you would like them to complete. The tasks should be as specific as possible without guiding the user. For example, you could ask the user to ‘Comment on an article’. This may entail creating a user account, logging in, clicking on an article, reading it, then adding a comment. You don’t want to provide a step by step account of how to add a comment. The goal is to allow your user testing participants to figure it out on their own, and watch for points of struggle or failure.

Stay quiet

Have you ever watched a movie, and then watched it again with someone who has never seen it, only to have them ask a hundred questions about the plot as it’s unfolding? They’re looking for answers rather than letting the plot unfold and explain itself. The same thing can happen if you’re around to answer questions or concerns about your system while users are testing it.

You need to discourage questions from your users while they’re actively working through assigned tasks. The goal of user testing isn’t to ensure that your test groups understand how to expertly navigate your website. The goal (at least one of the goals) is to identify the problem areas so you know what to fix. If you walk your users through the system, you’re only hurting your ability to find the problems that will affect your real world users when your website is launched.

The best way to discourage questions is to go away. If you leave your users alone, rather than watch over their shoulder, you won’t be there to guide them. Setup a camera (webcam or otherwise) and candidly record the user as they work.

This can be a hard thing to do, and you might feel the urge to defend your website when you see a user struggling and swearing. Resist this urge! People using your website once it’s released won’t have the luxury of asking for your help, and neither should your test group.

Don’t ask what they think

Asking a user what they think about feature XYZ will result in them telling you they’d prefer if the colour was blue instead of red. When it comes to interacting with your system, their opinion is less important than their actions. Your users are going to relate to your app based on previous experiences. Their success or failure in interacting with your system is going to depend a lot more on their subconscious recollection of similar interactions they’ve experienced than what they consciously think.

Rather than querying them on their thoughts about how things work, you need to watch their actions and expressions and draw appropriate conclusions. For example, confused and frustrated facial expressions and hand gestures are a good clue that something isn’t making sense to the user. Aimlessly clicking around, browsing back in the web browser, and high usage of navigation elements are indications that your user is having trouble figuring out where to go or how to find what they’re looking for.

It’s helpful to encourage your testers to verbalize how they’re interacting with the site as they’re doing it. For example, you’ll have a better idea of a user’s mindset if they say “I’m submitting my web form. Waiting? What’s happening now? Is there an error? This is taking forever.” as they click a ‘Submit’ button, than if they just sit there staring blankly.

Keep notes about any interaction you think the user enjoyed or is struggling with and ask them about it after they’re done. You’re not looking for their opinion on how to fix something they think is broken, rather how they felt about trying to achieve their goal. Feeling and emotion play a significant role in the experience people will take away from using your system. Don’t expect users to be delighted with every interaction, it’s possible that anything north of neutral emotion is a successful outcome.

Most users are going to have suggestions on how to fix some element of your website to fit their needs. It’s important to listen carefully to their suggestions. While it’s quite probable that you’ll gain insight from feature suggestions, it’s important not to get carried away trying to meet everyone’s needs. Keep your project goals in mind and avoid scope creep at all costs. Remember, attempting to build something that is ideal for everyone will render it useless to everyone. And the more features you add, the harder it is for people to use your product and for your team to maintain it.

Measuring success

How you define a successful user test varies depending on your goals. If you’re introducing a new, novel interaction, just having users understand what you’re trying to achieve could be enough.

It’s important to figure out what you want to get out of user testing, and what you plan to do with the information collected. User testing shouldn’t be an activity just for the sake of checking it off a todo list. No matter how you define your success, the purpose of user testing should be to beat the hell out of your system in an effort to discover ways to enhance interactions that make your system more usable, and more enjoyable to use.

Looking to plan and conduct a step-by-step usability test?

If you have an existing app, website, or other software you’d like to conduct some user testing with, dig into our detailed three step Plan, Test, Analyze process for conducting an effective usability test. By understanding this user testing methodology, alongside the tips in this article, you’ll have the framework you need to level up your user testing game.

Learn the three steps of an effective usability testing

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