It really is all about user experience. And user experience is bound up into two elements – usability ease and content quality/relevance. You may have great ease of navigation, but understand this: a visitor comes to your site for information, and that information is housed in your content. If the information does not satisfy a visitor immediately, he will leave and never come back. If you want that visitor to stay, then you need to conduct some usability testing related to your content.
Defining Usability Testing
Usability testing has typically been utilized to test all aspects of a website design, ideally during the actual design phase. Such things as user ability to learn the design, to perform tasks with the design, and to remember the design after a period of absence, can then drive decisions about design changes that will enhance the overall user experience.
Usability testing for content is a “horse of a different color,” however, because it will actually test far more subjective elements of the website. You are looking to fully evaluate your content, both with very specific questions about where information is housed and what visitors may be asked to do, to more evaluative assessments relative to the quality, readability, and usefulness of the content on each page. Yes, you certainly will ask specific content questions, but you will also be asking other questions that have more to do with evaluation than specific details and that will give you a solid understanding of the revisions and refinements you may need to make, in order to keep a user on the site once s/he gets there.
Finding the Right Testers
Of course, you have a demographic profile of your target market – age, socio-economic status, urban/suburban/rural, possibly general leanings on political, economic and social issues, and any other factors that you believe to be important when considering who is a potential consumer. But if you really want a valid test, you will go deeper than this.
You will look for those individuals within your demographic who have actually been doing some research on the product or service you offer, who have already purchased or who are considering purchases within your niche. How do you find them? You use some traditional methods (social media, offices on university campuses, etc.) and you use some sophisticated tools that are now available. You may spend some money for the analytics, but this is not the time to “Cheap Charley” the process. If you don’t spend the time and the money now, and conduct the most valid study you can, you will be a bit like a restaurant that customers come to for barbeque and walk out when they discover that lasagna is the specialty. And to get these participants, you may have to pay them more than what you consider the “going rate” – that’s just a reality.
Use a Moderator
Usability research that only tests the design elements involves very short tester experiences. Once the testers have their tasks, they perform them quickly and it’s all over. Not so with content testing! You are asking users to spend more time, and that time needs to be “supervised” by a moderator who can perform several important functions as the testing process proceeds. Among these functions will be to communicate as the periods of silence get long, to ask questions, and to monitor the user’s activity. Without a moderator, users will tend to speed up and fail to perform adequate testing. They need regular contact and encouragement. They need to be asked to “think out loud” as they pour through pages and pages of content, and the moderator can ask them to explain their actions and to give their thoughts/opinions about what they are reading. While testers may be told to “think out loud” in the beginning, they forget, and the moderator is there to remind them and to encourage them to be thorough.
Devising the Questions
If you were in the education profession, you would understand the concepts of close-ended and open-ended questioning. When teachers want to assess students’ ability to recall factual information or to test for their comprehension of content, then they ask close-ended questions. There is only one right answer. When they want students to think critically, however, they will ask open-ended questions – those that have no single right answer. As you run testing of content on your site, you will need to do the same thing. You will, of course, have close-ended questions – what are the operating hours of the business? How do you sign up for the email newsletters? These question will test how easy it is to find this information. The open-ended questions, however, are a bit more difficult to devise. These questions will be more evaluative in nature, and will require lengthier feedback responses from your testers. As you design your open-ended questions, be certain that you are getting at the following feedback from your testers.
- What is the level of quality of your content? Quality is quite subjective, of course, but if you have the right testers, then their comments are what matter, not your thoughts and beliefs. You may believe that you have great content and be sorely disappointed when your testers say “not so much.” Just remember, the content is for the user not for you!
- What is the level of readability of your content? People do not read web content in the same manner that they do other text. They scan it, looking for key words or phrases that relate to the information they seek. There is an entire body of research out there that relates to eye movement on a page of content, and it will be important that you study that if you are going to place content that results in good “readability.” Check out http://ift.tt/1Hj75yH for more information relative to eye-tracking and usability studies. This stuff is not only interesting but really important. It should drive what content you place where on your pages.
- What is the usefulness of your content? Again, if you have the right testers, and they have already demonstrated an interest in the product or service you offer, then they ought to be able to comment on how useful your content is to their wants and needs, and you should be able to take that feedback and use it to revise and refine your content.
- What is the ease of understanding of your content? Hopefully, you have already tested your content using any of the many readability scales now available, and, based upon your demographic, you know the age level for which you are writing. Now comes the real test. Do your actual testers find it readable?
- Is the content engaging? Did the testers find it interesting enough to them to read in more detail, or were they happy just to continue to scan. If so, you may want to consider a more creative content writer as you make plans to revise and re-write.
Think About Comparative Testing
You can do two things here. Once your tester has completed the usability test of your content, ask him/her to conduct a Google search for your product or service and read through the content on that competitor’s site, answering the same questions as you posed for you site. Or, pick a competitor and direct the tester to that site, have them read that content, and provide a personal evaluation of how yours “stacks up” to theirs.
Content Testing As You Go
Just as quantitative usability studies on you site design occur during the development stages of that design, you should also consider doing the same with the qualitative studies on your content. If you can do this in stages, as each page is developed, you will save yourself the frustration of a much longer revision and re-write if you wait until the very end to have it all tested at once. Revising content along the way, based upon the results of your testing will also help you to design the content that is still to be written.
Content Testing is Relatively New
Quantitative usability testing has been around for a long time, and it is really nicely refined now, so that it gives really valid data on site design. Qualitative testing on content, however, is a newer “baby” and it will continue to become more sophisticated as refinements in strategies and techniques are developed. Still, the information that you can gather from a well-defined and carefully designed content usability study using current methodologies can reveal critically important information.
If you really want to pursue content usability research further, there are a couple of places to go. The Nielson Norman Group has been involved in usability testing or a long time, and they hold regular seminars, webinars, and workshops on content usability testing. Another individual who is quite accomplished in this area is Ginny Redish. She is a specialist in content writing and has many suggestions for content usability testing as well.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1Cu5IRr via local SEO company
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1GcIeuE
No comments:
Post a Comment