have a new feature idea, or simply have a question about how something works. Giving them the opportunity to get in touch without having to exit the experience will make the feedback more salient and timely, and will probably also help them describe it better. You can put a simple form on your site that sends submissions to an email address, or you can use a service like Get Satisfaction or UserVoice (although leading your users to a third-party service might reduce the amount of feedback you receive). Log the requests you receive and use them to prioritise upcoming features. Also be sure to track the contact info of those who’ve requested it so you can keep in touch when the feature is ready to be used and tested. Open-ended surveys: If your product has a trial period or a subscription renewal process, now would be the time to find out what your customers really think of you. A survey doesn’t have to be expertly crafted to get great responses from it. The sticklers say that you should only have five or six questions with only one question (usually the last) as an open-ended multi-line text box, but remember that you aren’t trying to get statistically significant responses here. You want to hear from people in their own words, so give them the opportunity to do so. Put a link to a survey in a prominent and consistent location, or link to it in a mailing, in order to get as many responses as possible. SurveyMonkey, Wufoo and Kissinsights are some quick ways to get started. Email: Once a user has got in touch via a survey or a feedback form, now is your chance to get to know them better ... by emailing them back. They’ve told you what, now probe for why. Why is this feature necessary for them? Where have they seen it implemented elsewhere? Why do they
Click map Don’t attempt to second-guess your users: find out where they’re actually clicking on your website by using a service such as Crazy Egg (crazyegg.com). The results will almost certainly surprise you …
use your product in the first place? Ask as many questions as necessary to get at the underlying problem they’re facing, and how it’s relevant to what your company is trying to solve. Phone: When you come across a user who’s particularly vocal or intriguing, ask if they’d mind you scheduling a phone call. You won’t have to spend more than 15 or 20 minutes asking them those follow-up questions about their motivations and attitudes in order to gain a wealth of knowledge you wouldn’t have otherwise. Most people will be more than happy to help without incentive. Take copious notes or record the conversation if you can (with their explicit permission of course) – this stuff is gold.
Tools Remote usability testing The truth is, you can’t always get in the same room as your target users. But with a variety of new tools cropping up, it’s become easier (and more effective) than ever to conduct usability testing remotely via the web. Screen-sharing apps, such as GoToMeeting (gotomeeting.com), WebEx (webex.co.uk) and Adobe Connect (bit.ly/bRnhmN) are the most basic and dependable way to watch while a remote participant takes control of the mouse and keyboard. Many natively allow you to record the session, or you could use something like iShowU (www.shinywhitebox.com/home/home. html) to capture the screen activity and audio. OpenHallway (openhallway.com) is a selfmoderated tool, meaning that no moderator (aka you) is needed. You write up the instructions that you want participants to follow, send them a link, and they walk through the test at their own pace while the tool records their screen activity and audio, and packages it up for you to watch later. Usabilla (usabilla.com) is another selfmoderated tool that lets you gather feedback on pre-defined questions and shows visualisations of where people clicked.
FiveSecondTest (fivesecondtest.com) takes a different approach: users are asked to identify the most prominent elements of your interface after looking at it for only five seconds. You’ll probably be quite surprised by what they see. Online tools aren’t ideal: you can’t fully see expressions and body language; it’s much harder to internalise the findings when you aren’t in the same room; and you can’t ask probing follow-up questions if the test is self-moderated. Find more remote testing tools at remoteusability.com.
Remote viewing You can conduct usability testing sessions from afar with a screensharing app such as GoToMeeting
By capturing just a few good case studies, you’ll be able to understand the whole ecosystem in which your product is being used, not just the specific, current flaw in the design that people are complaining about. Iridesco, the maker of the billing and time-tracking web-app Harvest (getharvest.com), uses many of these techniques to continuously improve their product – they follow the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen, which focuses upon continuous improvement of processes. “We don’t just want to patch,” said co-founder Shawn Liu, “we want to address the core problem.” This might seem like a lot of new information, but the goal should be to make it as easy as possible on your users, not to make it as easy as possible for you. The fewer obstacles you put in their way to share, the more openly and frequently they will, and the more valuable anecdotes you’ll have at your fingertips when the time comes to advocate for the right design decision. For more on design research, see Observing the User Experience by Mike Kuniavsky (amzn.to/4FHczX).
Web analytics
Personal narratives are key for giving us context, but the reality is that people are very bad at telling you the truth about themselves. Put another way, we rarely understand ourselves. That does not invalidate everything you learned in design research; instead it just requires that you balance those qualitative findings with good, hard data. Web analytics are a quantitative way of answering the question: “What are our users actually doing?” Not just, “What are they saying they’re doing?”, but “What are we seeing them do with our product?” Data is a great weapon. Matthew Marco of NavigationArts (navigationarts.com) and formerly a visual designer leading the redesign of House. gov says, “Stats let me refute the client’s notion of how their constituents are behaving.” It’s far more effective to point to actual behaviour than to get in a never-ending battle against presumption. Remember: while web analytics answers the question of what users are doing, no amount of data will tell you why – that’s why you still need to actually talk to people. But
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