Testing Your Marketing Efforts as a Freelancer

In today’s freelancing climate, one of the best things you can do in terms of marketing yourself is to think in what I like to call “Test Terms.” What does this mean? When a food company is developing a new product to release into the market, they don’t simply travel in a straight line from recipe to manufacturing to stocking the shelves at the grocery store. What happens is they perform a series of tests, which allow them to tweak their product until it gets just the right kind of response they’re looking for.

As a designer, it’s eminently possible to plan out a system that allows you to do the same thing, with similar results. However, many people remain stuck on one method of promotion, believing they’re too busy working to devote too much time to marketing themselves.

But the sad paradox of that belief is that, by not adjusting the way they market themselves, these freelance designers will always be too busy scraping by. They’re not getting the exposure they need to be choosier about the types of jobs they can take on, because the only jobs available are the ones that limited exposure gets them.

Everyone Tests Everything

One of the best ways to test consumers’ reactions to new food products is to get their direct feedback. Starting with just one local area, a company will test out a variety of different approaches to everything about the product. And I mean everything. Do people in this small town like the taste of this new product, or do they hate it? If they hate it, it’s back to the test kitchens to improve the recipe. Are they repelled by the packaging?

Get that designer back in here – time to revise! Are the ads falling flat? Well, you get the idea.

Image Source: Testing Statistic via Shutterstock

Every tiny detail of this new product gets tested and re-tested, adjusted and refined wherever needed. After they’ve made enough improvements that people are now responding well to the product, it’s time to take it to a new area. This process gets repeated again and again until there’s a hugely positive response and people are stockpiling the new food item like they’re preparing for Armageddon.

A similar process happens, by the way, in the movie business, the government (think road signs or jury duty summonses aren’t tested? Think again), and other consumer industries like toys and games.

Testing is a proven strategy to improving a product’s chances of success, and as a designer, you can very easily start taking advantage of some of these sophisticated testing methods to place yourself practically in the lap of your most desired clients. Of course you can and do test your approaches to design, but trying out new ways of marketing is easier to implement in your regular schedule than you might think.

Sharpen Your Pencils

Start with your main marketing approach, which might be your website, your business card, your cover letter, or your resume. How well does this approach work for you? Are the clients beating down your door, or is something not quite working the way it’s supposed to?

If you regularly hand out business cards at networking events, are they completely up to date? Do they display the important information clearly? Are you giving them to the right people? That last one is an important detail that many creative freelancers miss.

Image Source: Sharpen Your Idea via Shutterstock

Business cards are practically useless if you don’t use them properly. At a networking event, the people you typically end up chatting with aren’t people who can provide you with tons of high quality work. They’re people just like you – struggling entrepreneurs who need services on the cheap. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work with these people, but it’s important to keep in mind the overall value of a client when you’re passing out those expensive business cards.

How good of a return on your investment will you be getting? Test out handing your business card to a different sort of person than you ordinarily would, and see what type of response you get.

In a similar way, your website may or may not be bringing you the steady stream of work that it could be. You may be the most brilliant, multifaceted designer the world has ever seen, and yet if no one knows about your work, you might as well be invisible.

The real key to getting better quality clients is not to put as much of your work “out there” as you possibly can. It’s making sure that the work you’ve done is being seen by the maximum number of eyeballs. In the design world, the best way to do this, in my opinion, is by doing a personal side project that you really love and are passionate about.

The Gold Standard Of Eating

It turns out that as a designer operating a business as a freelancer, you should be adjusting everything you do to market yourself – all the time. What do I mean by adjusting? In many restaurants, well before the rush of customers comes in, chefs create something called a Gold Standard, a single plate that sets the, well, standard for all the plates the kitchen will produce for that day. It’s such an important part of the culinary process that the plates used in most restaurants – the ones you eat your main course on – are known as Gold Standard Plates.

The original Gold Standard is a test plate – any changes to the dish are tried out there first. If something is off about the flavor, the ingredients, or the arrangement of the items, the Gold Standard will be the laboratory where those things can be tweaked.

Image Source: Fine Gold Ingots and a Gold-Nugget via Shutterstock

As a designer, incorporating a similar philosophy will be helpful in streamlining your marketing process. Creating your own “Gold Standard” of promotion will allow you to make quick adjustments locally, to one portion of your marketing campaign, before you roll out those changes to everything else. Whether it’s your website’s analytics, your business card, or your resume, zoom in on one single marketing material and find out what works and what doesn’t.

Usually the information you learn is transferable to other parts of your marketing package, and you may even discover that one or more of your marketing materials are unnecessary. You definitely need to have a website if you design them for a living, but what about business cards? A CV? Social media? How well are these things really working to directly deliver you the clients you want?

Different types of clients care about different things. Maybe your clients don’t care so much about your resume, but they would really love to read your blog or Twitter updates. Other clients might be the exact opposite – it’s essential to know your market and be able to provide them the proof they’re looking for that tells them you’re the designer for the job.

What Do You Think?

What areas do you utilize testing, and how well do they benefit your self-promotion as a freelancer? Are there any areas where you could incorporate more ways to test the response of your target audience?

The post Testing Your Marketing Efforts as a Freelancer appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.

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Testing Your Marketing Efforts as a Freelancer

How to Test Web Navigation with Card Sorting and Tree Testing

Websites, apps, software, any product with a menu needs a way to get around. While your navigation can be fun, creative, or at times unorthodox, it always needs to be functional first. When discussing usability testing for information architecture, you’ll often hear about the two most effective tests: card sorting and tree testing.

IMAGE: NetFuel

Both tests are simple and easy to conduct, and both tests yield vital data to maximize the organization of your site. Card sorting comes before you create your structure, so you can understand how your users naturally organize your site. Tree testing comes after, as a way to validate your success or point out room for improvement.

More on Hongkiat:

• Usability Testing: What You Need To Know?


• 7 Steps To Better Website Feedback


• A/B Test Results And Case Studies For User Experience Design

Card Sorting

The beauty of card sorting is in its simplicity. All you do is write the different elements of your product on note cards or Post-It notes, then have your participants organize them in a way that makes the most sense to them.

If that’s even too much to handle, you you can also go with a usability testing tool like OptimalSort, which can analyze the data for you. Either way, the result gives you a solid understanding of how your target users would intuitively navigate your product.

IMAGE: Smashing Magazine

Card Sorting Variations

There are a few different strategies to card sorting, depending on your needs. Donna Spencer, card sorting expert and Founder of Maadmob, shares her personal experience in an article for Boxes and Arrows. For such a simple activity, there’s plenty of variation and controls that will affect the kind, and validity, of data you receive.

The initial distinction to make is open or closed, explained below:

Open Sorting – Users are provided only with the elements cards, and then are left to group them however they see fit. Once grouped, users are asked to give names to the groups themselves. This is recommended for generating new ideas since you can work backwards from the users’ natural thought processes.

Closed Sorting – As with open sorting, users are given the elements cards; however, they are asked to categorize them into predefined groups. This is recommended if you’re working within the restrictions of pre-existing categories, as with updating an already developed website structure. 

Open vs. closed is the primary decision, but there are other methods for varying your results:

Groups vs. Individuals – Groups allow users to work collaboratively, for better or worse, and can help you learn about multiple users at once; however, group dynamics might affect your results. 

Remote vs. On-location – Online software tools allow you to test more users in a faster time, yet you’re unable to directly observe their decision-making processes. On-location gives you a fuller understanding of how your users came to their decisions, but requires more planning and scheduling.

Card Sorting Guidelines

Of course there’s room for customizing your card sorting, but William Hudson, UX Strategist and Consultant, lists some general benchmarks that can apply to any method you choose. Most useful, he lists the approximate times you can expect people to sort a given number of elements:

• ~20 minutes for 30 elements


• ~30 minutes for 50 elements


• ~60 minutes for 100 elements

Using this time structure, you can plan out in advance how long the tests will take to administer, once the cards are written or the software established. However, in our personal experience, these guidelines are a bit generous – one of our closed card sorts involved 47 cards and four categories, but only required an average of three minutes to complete.

Another universal rule is to avoid complex language on the cards. Big words – at least words with many syllables – and technical jargon run the risk of confusing the test-takers, or them misinterpreting the meaning. While simple wording is good advice in general for the language usage of a product, it’s essential for card sorting since overly complex labeling will disrupt the natural thought processes.

A lot of experts agree on the merits of card sorting. Pierre Croft, IA and UX expert for Decibel Digital encourages card sorting because it can help deflect the bad ideas of HIPPOS (highest paid people in the room) who might not know how to build a good website. He also lists out some pointers to keep in mind when preparing your test:

(1) Don’t mix parent and child categories – In other words, use categories from the same level, or else you will confuse your participants.

(2) Have blank cards and pens handy – While this is standard procedure for open card sorting, it’s also quite useful for closed card sorting. After the formal testing is done, you can provide a couple blank cards for participants to write down additional categories. While the information might be “off-the-record,” it could bring to light some useful insights.

(3) Don’t intervene – Intervention will obscure the data, so avoid the temptation. Of course give the test-takers some guidance if they’re confused, but only for issues not related to the results.

(4) It’s OK if users don’t group everything – A lack of grouping can be just as telling as a fully complete one. If this happens, make sure you ask the user why. If you’re running a closed sort and not everything is sorted, you can also provide blank cards to see why the existing categories weren’t chosen.

(5) Set time limits beforehand – This makes scheduling easier in general, and gives the participants an idea of how much time to spend on their tasks.

(6) Limit your cards – If your website has hundreds or even thousands of pages, you can choose only first and second-level pages to keep things manageable. For example, “Contact Us,” “Terms of Agreement,” and other utility pages can be omitted since they can be found on almost all websites out there (so you wouldn’t really be testing anything unique to your site).

Tree Testing

On the opposite spectrum of card sorting, tree testing allows you to test the information architecture after its designed. Tree testing works by stripping out the visual elements of your navigation system to see how the basic structure fares on its own. With a tree test, you examine only the labelling and hierarchy of your content.

Martin Rosenmejer of Webcredible calls tree testing one of the most important steps early in the design process. In a nutshell, a tree test involves participants finding different information on a clickable sitemap (or “tree”).

Using a usability testing tool like Treejack, you then record task success (clicking to the correct destination) and task directness (certainty of users that they found what was needed). It’s a foolproof method for seeing how well your users can find their way around your product.

As displayed above, when we redesigned Yelp’s website, we provided a tree representing the support site and then gave users 10 tasks (for example, finding information on what to do with bad reviews). Because the overall task success rate was 53% and directness was 46%, we knew that the IA needed changing – but we knew exactly where to make those changes.

Simply put, a site search bar (or a three-line hamburger menu) is just not enough if the navigation is poor because users won’t know what is available to search. The rule of thumb for web design is to make the user think as little as possible, because searching requires users to recall from memory, it negatively affects the UX.

If we’ve sold the idea of tree testing on you already, Jeff Sauro, Founding Principal of MeasuringU, goes into details about how to properly run them. He explains that tree testing is used primarily for two reasons:

(1) Determine a product’s searchability – How well can users navigate the site, and what areas cause the most problems with navigation?

(2) Validate a change – Did a recent update correctly fix the problem, or are further revisions necessary?

Tree testing is, at heart, a statistical test. As with other quantitative tests, the data will be more accurate with more participants. How accurate? Check out this chart to find the smallest margin of error within your means; we recommend aiming for 20% error or better.

Conclusion

We can’t stress enough the importance of information architecture – if the content isn’t structured logically with a simple flow, it might as well not exist. That’s why these early tests can help identify and solve the problems before they actually become problems.

The strength of tests like these is that the data is modeled after the users’ natural behavior, and when it comes to testing your IA, no tests do it better than these two.

Editor’s note: This is written for Hongkiat.com by Jerry Cao. Jerry is a content strategist at UXPin where he develops in-app and online content for the wireframing and prototyping platform. For advice and case studies on 30 different types of usability tests, check out The Guide to Usability Testing.

Now Read:
7 Steps to Better Website Feedback

How to Test Web Navigation with Card Sorting and Tree Testing

How to Test Web Navigation with Card Sorting and Tree Testing

Websites, apps, software, any product with a menu needs a way to get around. While your navigation can be fun, creative, or at times unorthodox, it always needs to be functional first. When discussing usability testing for information architecture, you’ll often hear about the two most effective tests: card sorting and tree testing.

IMAGE: NetFuel

Both tests are simple and easy to conduct, and both tests yield vital data to maximize the organization of your site. Card sorting comes before you create your structure, so you can understand how your users naturally organize your site. Tree testing comes after, as a way to validate your success or point out room for improvement.

More on Hongkiat:

• Usability Testing: What You Need To Know?


• 7 Steps To Better Website Feedback


• A/B Test Results And Case Studies For User Experience Design

Card Sorting

The beauty of card sorting is in its simplicity. All you do is write the different elements of your product on note cards or Post-It notes, then have your participants organize them in a way that makes the most sense to them.

If that’s even too much to handle, you you can also go with a usability testing tool like OptimalSort, which can analyze the data for you. Either way, the result gives you a solid understanding of how your target users would intuitively navigate your product.

IMAGE: Smashing Magazine

Card Sorting Variations

There are a few different strategies to card sorting, depending on your needs. Donna Spencer, card sorting expert and Founder of Maadmob, shares her personal experience in an article for Boxes and Arrows. For such a simple activity, there’s plenty of variation and controls that will affect the kind, and validity, of data you receive.

The initial distinction to make is open or closed, explained below:

Open Sorting – Users are provided only with the elements cards, and then are left to group them however they see fit. Once grouped, users are asked to give names to the groups themselves. This is recommended for generating new ideas since you can work backwards from the users’ natural thought processes.

Closed Sorting – As with open sorting, users are given the elements cards; however, they are asked to categorize them into predefined groups. This is recommended if you’re working within the restrictions of pre-existing categories, as with updating an already developed website structure. 

Open vs. closed is the primary decision, but there are other methods for varying your results:

Groups vs. Individuals – Groups allow users to work collaboratively, for better or worse, and can help you learn about multiple users at once; however, group dynamics might affect your results. 

Remote vs. On-location – Online software tools allow you to test more users in a faster time, yet you’re unable to directly observe their decision-making processes. On-location gives you a fuller understanding of how your users came to their decisions, but requires more planning and scheduling.

Card Sorting Guidelines

Of course there’s room for customizing your card sorting, but William Hudson, UX Strategist and Consultant, lists some general benchmarks that can apply to any method you choose. Most useful, he lists the approximate times you can expect people to sort a given number of elements:

• ~20 minutes for 30 elements


• ~30 minutes for 50 elements


• ~60 minutes for 100 elements

Using this time structure, you can plan out in advance how long the tests will take to administer, once the cards are written or the software established. However, in our personal experience, these guidelines are a bit generous – one of our closed card sorts involved 47 cards and four categories, but only required an average of three minutes to complete.

Another universal rule is to avoid complex language on the cards. Big words – at least words with many syllables – and technical jargon run the risk of confusing the test-takers, or them misinterpreting the meaning. While simple wording is good advice in general for the language usage of a product, it’s essential for card sorting since overly complex labeling will disrupt the natural thought processes.

A lot of experts agree on the merits of card sorting. Pierre Croft, IA and UX expert for Decibel Digital encourages card sorting because it can help deflect the bad ideas of HIPPOS (highest paid people in the room) who might not know how to build a good website. He also lists out some pointers to keep in mind when preparing your test:

(1) Don’t mix parent and child categories – In other words, use categories from the same level, or else you will confuse your participants.

(2) Have blank cards and pens handy – While this is standard procedure for open card sorting, it’s also quite useful for closed card sorting. After the formal testing is done, you can provide a couple blank cards for participants to write down additional categories. While the information might be “off-the-record,” it could bring to light some useful insights.

(3) Don’t intervene – Intervention will obscure the data, so avoid the temptation. Of course give the test-takers some guidance if they’re confused, but only for issues not related to the results.

(4) It’s OK if users don’t group everything – A lack of grouping can be just as telling as a fully complete one. If this happens, make sure you ask the user why. If you’re running a closed sort and not everything is sorted, you can also provide blank cards to see why the existing categories weren’t chosen.

(5) Set time limits beforehand – This makes scheduling easier in general, and gives the participants an idea of how much time to spend on their tasks.

(6) Limit your cards – If your website has hundreds or even thousands of pages, you can choose only first and second-level pages to keep things manageable. For example, “Contact Us,” “Terms of Agreement,” and other utility pages can be omitted since they can be found on almost all websites out there (so you wouldn’t really be testing anything unique to your site).

Tree Testing

On the opposite spectrum of card sorting, tree testing allows you to test the information architecture after its designed. Tree testing works by stripping out the visual elements of your navigation system to see how the basic structure fares on its own. With a tree test, you examine only the labelling and hierarchy of your content.

Martin Rosenmejer of Webcredible calls tree testing one of the most important steps early in the design process. In a nutshell, a tree test involves participants finding different information on a clickable sitemap (or “tree”).

Using a usability testing tool like Treejack, you then record task success (clicking to the correct destination) and task directness (certainty of users that they found what was needed). It’s a foolproof method for seeing how well your users can find their way around your product.

As displayed above, when we redesigned Yelp’s website, we provided a tree representing the support site and then gave users 10 tasks (for example, finding information on what to do with bad reviews). Because the overall task success rate was 53% and directness was 46%, we knew that the IA needed changing – but we knew exactly where to make those changes.

Simply put, a site search bar (or a three-line hamburger menu) is just not enough if the navigation is poor because users won’t know what is available to search. The rule of thumb for web design is to make the user think as little as possible, because searching requires users to recall from memory, it negatively affects the UX.

If we’ve sold the idea of tree testing on you already, Jeff Sauro, Founding Principal of MeasuringU, goes into details about how to properly run them. He explains that tree testing is used primarily for two reasons:

(1) Determine a product’s searchability – How well can users navigate the site, and what areas cause the most problems with navigation?

(2) Validate a change – Did a recent update correctly fix the problem, or are further revisions necessary?

Tree testing is, at heart, a statistical test. As with other quantitative tests, the data will be more accurate with more participants. How accurate? Check out this chart to find the smallest margin of error within your means; we recommend aiming for 20% error or better.

Conclusion

We can’t stress enough the importance of information architecture – if the content isn’t structured logically with a simple flow, it might as well not exist. That’s why these early tests can help identify and solve the problems before they actually become problems.

The strength of tests like these is that the data is modeled after the users’ natural behavior, and when it comes to testing your IA, no tests do it better than these two.

Editor’s note: This is written for Hongkiat.com by Jerry Cao. Jerry is a content strategist at UXPin where he develops in-app and online content for the wireframing and prototyping platform. For advice and case studies on 30 different types of usability tests, check out The Guide to Usability Testing.

Now Read:
7 Steps to Better Website Feedback

How to Test Web Navigation with Card Sorting and Tree Testing

How to Test Web Navigation with Card Sorting and Tree Testing

Websites, apps, software, any product with a menu needs a way to get around. While your navigation can be fun, creative, or at times unorthodox, it always needs to be functional first. When discussing usability testing for information architecture, you’ll often hear about the two most effective tests: card sorting and tree testing.

IMAGE: NetFuel

Both tests are simple and easy to conduct, and both tests yield vital data to maximize the organization of your site. Card sorting comes before you create your structure, so you can understand how your users naturally organize your site. Tree testing comes after, as a way to validate your success or point out room for improvement.

More on Hongkiat:

• Usability Testing: What You Need To Know?


• 7 Steps To Better Website Feedback


• A/B Test Results And Case Studies For User Experience Design

Card Sorting

The beauty of card sorting is in its simplicity. All you do is write the different elements of your product on note cards or Post-It notes, then have your participants organize them in a way that makes the most sense to them.

If that’s even too much to handle, you you can also go with a usability testing tool like OptimalSort, which can analyze the data for you. Either way, the result gives you a solid understanding of how your target users would intuitively navigate your product.

IMAGE: Smashing Magazine

Card Sorting Variations

There are a few different strategies to card sorting, depending on your needs. Donna Spencer, card sorting expert and Founder of Maadmob, shares her personal experience in an article for Boxes and Arrows. For such a simple activity, there’s plenty of variation and controls that will affect the kind, and validity, of data you receive.

The initial distinction to make is open or closed, explained below:

Open Sorting – Users are provided only with the elements cards, and then are left to group them however they see fit. Once grouped, users are asked to give names to the groups themselves. This is recommended for generating new ideas since you can work backwards from the users’ natural thought processes.

Closed Sorting – As with open sorting, users are given the elements cards; however, they are asked to categorize them into predefined groups. This is recommended if you’re working within the restrictions of pre-existing categories, as with updating an already developed website structure. 

Open vs. closed is the primary decision, but there are other methods for varying your results:

Groups vs. Individuals – Groups allow users to work collaboratively, for better or worse, and can help you learn about multiple users at once; however, group dynamics might affect your results. 

Remote vs. On-location – Online software tools allow you to test more users in a faster time, yet you’re unable to directly observe their decision-making processes. On-location gives you a fuller understanding of how your users came to their decisions, but requires more planning and scheduling.

Card Sorting Guidelines

Of course there’s room for customizing your card sorting, but William Hudson, UX Strategist and Consultant, lists some general benchmarks that can apply to any method you choose. Most useful, he lists the approximate times you can expect people to sort a given number of elements:

• ~20 minutes for 30 elements


• ~30 minutes for 50 elements


• ~60 minutes for 100 elements

Using this time structure, you can plan out in advance how long the tests will take to administer, once the cards are written or the software established. However, in our personal experience, these guidelines are a bit generous – one of our closed card sorts involved 47 cards and four categories, but only required an average of three minutes to complete.

Another universal rule is to avoid complex language on the cards. Big words – at least words with many syllables – and technical jargon run the risk of confusing the test-takers, or them misinterpreting the meaning. While simple wording is good advice in general for the language usage of a product, it’s essential for card sorting since overly complex labeling will disrupt the natural thought processes.

A lot of experts agree on the merits of card sorting. Pierre Croft, IA and UX expert for Decibel Digital encourages card sorting because it can help deflect the bad ideas of HIPPOS (highest paid people in the room) who might not know how to build a good website. He also lists out some pointers to keep in mind when preparing your test:

(1) Don’t mix parent and child categories – In other words, use categories from the same level, or else you will confuse your participants.

(2) Have blank cards and pens handy – While this is standard procedure for open card sorting, it’s also quite useful for closed card sorting. After the formal testing is done, you can provide a couple blank cards for participants to write down additional categories. While the information might be “off-the-record,” it could bring to light some useful insights.

(3) Don’t intervene – Intervention will obscure the data, so avoid the temptation. Of course give the test-takers some guidance if they’re confused, but only for issues not related to the results.

(4) It’s OK if users don’t group everything – A lack of grouping can be just as telling as a fully complete one. If this happens, make sure you ask the user why. If you’re running a closed sort and not everything is sorted, you can also provide blank cards to see why the existing categories weren’t chosen.

(5) Set time limits beforehand – This makes scheduling easier in general, and gives the participants an idea of how much time to spend on their tasks.

(6) Limit your cards – If your website has hundreds or even thousands of pages, you can choose only first and second-level pages to keep things manageable. For example, “Contact Us,” “Terms of Agreement,” and other utility pages can be omitted since they can be found on almost all websites out there (so you wouldn’t really be testing anything unique to your site).

Tree Testing

On the opposite spectrum of card sorting, tree testing allows you to test the information architecture after its designed. Tree testing works by stripping out the visual elements of your navigation system to see how the basic structure fares on its own. With a tree test, you examine only the labelling and hierarchy of your content.

Martin Rosenmejer of Webcredible calls tree testing one of the most important steps early in the design process. In a nutshell, a tree test involves participants finding different information on a clickable sitemap (or “tree”).

Using a usability testing tool like Treejack, you then record task success (clicking to the correct destination) and task directness (certainty of users that they found what was needed). It’s a foolproof method for seeing how well your users can find their way around your product.

As displayed above, when we redesigned Yelp’s website, we provided a tree representing the support site and then gave users 10 tasks (for example, finding information on what to do with bad reviews). Because the overall task success rate was 53% and directness was 46%, we knew that the IA needed changing – but we knew exactly where to make those changes.

Simply put, a site search bar (or a three-line hamburger menu) is just not enough if the navigation is poor because users won’t know what is available to search. The rule of thumb for web design is to make the user think as little as possible, because searching requires users to recall from memory, it negatively affects the UX.

If we’ve sold the idea of tree testing on you already, Jeff Sauro, Founding Principal of MeasuringU, goes into details about how to properly run them. He explains that tree testing is used primarily for two reasons:

(1) Determine a product’s searchability – How well can users navigate the site, and what areas cause the most problems with navigation?

(2) Validate a change – Did a recent update correctly fix the problem, or are further revisions necessary?

Tree testing is, at heart, a statistical test. As with other quantitative tests, the data will be more accurate with more participants. How accurate? Check out this chart to find the smallest margin of error within your means; we recommend aiming for 20% error or better.

Conclusion

We can’t stress enough the importance of information architecture – if the content isn’t structured logically with a simple flow, it might as well not exist. That’s why these early tests can help identify and solve the problems before they actually become problems.

The strength of tests like these is that the data is modeled after the users’ natural behavior, and when it comes to testing your IA, no tests do it better than these two.

Editor’s note: This is written for Hongkiat.com by Jerry Cao. Jerry is a content strategist at UXPin where he develops in-app and online content for the wireframing and prototyping platform. For advice and case studies on 30 different types of usability tests, check out The Guide to Usability Testing.

Now Read:
7 Steps to Better Website Feedback

How to Test Web Navigation with Card Sorting and Tree Testing

Tips, Tricks and Tools of Screenshot Click Testing

Your website is one of your crowning achievements, a web-monument available for everyone to admire. The website’s aim is to attract as many people possible – that is your goal. You do everything to develop and make it perfect, and you know the website like no one else.

But did you ever ask yourself how others know it?

Do you know what grabs most attention on your website according to its users? Do you know which part makes your visitors trust you? Do you know where they click to find the information they’re looking for?

If the answer is no, then you are in trouble. After all, it is impossible to improve your website and make it open and attractive for others if you have no idea how people perceive it. But the solution for this problem is basically one click away. It is an affordable and quick method to evaluate data about your users’ experience: I hereby present you screenshot click testing.

It is very simple to understand: users’ clicks on the website are being recorded, and later they are presented as a convenient heat map, available for further analysis. Based on the data you can basically check what works, and what fails.

The sooner you do the tests, the better – you can start optimizing your website right away. Screenshot click testing is an ideal solution to evaluate concepts at an early stage, after all you do not need to have a working website to verify your ideas. You can test prototypes, wireframes or even rough paper sketches.

The sketch and the wireframe from Balsamiq.

First of All: Prepare Yourself

Have a clear understanding of what you what to accomplish. You need to put yourself in a potential visitor’s shoes and think about why they visit your page. Do they look for information? Do they want to see the potential benefits of using your product? What are they looking for? These are the basic questions you need to find an answer for.

The following step is to think about your goals from a business perspective. You want to create particular quick user paths to give your potential customers what they look for as fast as possible, leaving customers satisfied with their decisions. You also want to maximize conversion rate at the same time.

According to a study by WebUsability, you should “work hard to ensure that the first click is a correct click”. They found a direct correlation between the success rate and the item the visitors clicked first. 36% of the users abandoned tasks if they chose the wrong item. What does that mean for your business? Well, if your potential customer doesn’t find the info they are looking for fast, they will leave and your business suffers.

Form Your Hypothesis

Once you are prepared, you need to form a list of hypotheses about your website. You, as an owner or creator, have a very good idea of your webpages inner workings because you’ve invested time and money to make it perfect. By forming a hypothesis you can narrow down the possible issues that you need to cover. Your hypothesis can be in a form of a short statement such as:

• Important information is easy to find for the user


• It’s clear for the visitor where should they click to buy the products


• The calls to actions are visible and direct

These are just examples to get you on the right track of thinking about hypotheses. After forming them it’s high time for you to test if your potential clients think the same (and chances are they don’t!)

Not all hypotheses are easy to test.

Screenshot Testing Tasks – Short and Snappy

Once you have the theories formed, you have to think about possible tasks for participants of your study. Your key goal is to make them short, snappy and to the point. No long descriptions. Be like Hemingway.

If you need to provide some background, put your user in a hypothetical situation: “You are waiting for your pizza, but it is taking too much time. Where would you click to check how long it takes for your order to arrive?” Don’t overdo it, though. Try to achieve the perfect balance between being informative, yet concise. If you need inspiration, here are some tasks which proved to be very effective over the years:

• Click on the first thing you noticed on this page


• Click on the element that you like the most


• Click on the most important element of this page


• Click on the element that you would remove from this page


• Where would you click to do X?

If you need more, check out a sample list here.

UsabilityHub’s quick study.

Choose Your Weapon

The next step in the process is to choose the right screenshot testing tool. You are lucky, because there are many useful solutions available on the market, and they will surely make your testing easier. Here is a list of some possible choices for you to consider:

• OptimalWorkshop


• UsabilityHub


• UsabilityTools


• Usaura

This is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are many other available tools – do your research and find out which one of them suits your needs best.

Once you’ve chosen your tool, it would be good to know how they work. Basically, the logic behind the tools and their steps is pretty clear:

• Upload the screenshots


• Set up tasks (that is why the list of tasks comes in handy, as you can simply start setting them up instead of figuring them out at this stage)


• Share a link to your test


• Analyze the full online report once you are satisfied with the number of answers

What you should focus on during the search for your perfect tool is the report part – that’s where the meat is. If you are new to the testing world, you should look for a tool which provides you not only with raw data but also with a coherent visualization to give you better understanding of how people handle the tasks.

A sample visualization from Optimal Workshop:

So much data you could go bananas.

You should brace yourself for the fact that each test will most probably reveal issues you didn’t expect. There is a possibility that you’ll learn that your hypotheses are true or that your assumptions and expectations are totally different from the ones your website visitors have. And that is completely normal – this is why tests are conducted, so you can learn about the users’ behavior, and you can decide what to do in order to improve the website.

Testing is not hard, but actual data interpretation and finding out what to do is. Your solutions could be ineffective, and will require even more testing. That is completely fine. You want to achieve the perfect design and solve the problems. You can be lucky and nail it at the first test or you can struggle for a while until you have that a-ha moment – you never know. But don’t worry, as you can ask specialists for help with interpreting the results. So, test away – the browser window is the limit.

Screenshot Click Testing – Wrap Up

1. Form hypotheses about your website


2. Create a list of short task for your users based on your hypotheses


3. Choose a right tool


4. Start testing:
   
   • Measure how long it takes to complete the task
   
   
   • Measure how many users finished the task
   
   
   • Ask how difficult or easy it was for the user to complete the task
   
   
   • Ask how confident the users felt when they were completing the task
   
   


5. Draw conclusions from the results and adjust your design accordingly


6. Test again!

…and finally…

See how click tests look in real time and help SpeckyBoy Design Magazine!

Now that you are acquainted with the idea of Screenshot Click Testing, it is time for you to see it for yourself. We’ve set up a short test on SpeckyBoy Design Magazine for you to try. Take part in it and see how it works, and how it feels to be a tested user! Start the test.

If you want the see how the results look like, click here.

The post Tips, Tricks and Tools of Screenshot Click Testing appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.

No related posts.

Tips, Tricks and Tools of Screenshot Click Testing

Tips, Tricks and Tools of Screenshot Click Testing

Your website is one of your crowning achievements, a web-monument available for everyone to admire. The website’s aim is to attract as many people possible – that is your goal. You do everything to develop and make it perfect, and you know the website like no one else.

But did you ever ask yourself how others know it?

Do you know what grabs most attention on your website according to its users? Do you know which part makes your visitors trust you? Do you know where they click to find the information they’re looking for?

If the answer is no, then you are in trouble. After all, it is impossible to improve your website and make it open and attractive for others if you have no idea how people perceive it. But the solution for this problem is basically one click away. It is an affordable and quick method to evaluate data about your users’ experience: I hereby present you screenshot click testing.

It is very simple to understand: users’ clicks on the website are being recorded, and later they are presented as a convenient heat map, available for further analysis. Based on the data you can basically check what works, and what fails.

The sooner you do the tests, the better – you can start optimizing your website right away. Screenshot click testing is an ideal solution to evaluate concepts at an early stage, after all you do not need to have a working website to verify your ideas. You can test prototypes, wireframes or even rough paper sketches.

The sketch and the wireframe from Balsamiq.

First of All: Prepare Yourself

Have a clear understanding of what you what to accomplish. You need to put yourself in a potential visitor’s shoes and think about why they visit your page. Do they look for information? Do they want to see the potential benefits of using your product? What are they looking for? These are the basic questions you need to find an answer for.

The following step is to think about your goals from a business perspective. You want to create particular quick user paths to give your potential customers what they look for as fast as possible, leaving customers satisfied with their decisions. You also want to maximize conversion rate at the same time.

According to a study by WebUsability, you should “work hard to ensure that the first click is a correct click”. They found a direct correlation between the success rate and the item the visitors clicked first. 36% of the users abandoned tasks if they chose the wrong item. What does that mean for your business? Well, if your potential customer doesn’t find the info they are looking for fast, they will leave and your business suffers.

Form Your Hypothesis

Once you are prepared, you need to form a list of hypotheses about your website. You, as an owner or creator, have a very good idea of your webpages inner workings because you’ve invested time and money to make it perfect. By forming a hypothesis you can narrow down the possible issues that you need to cover. Your hypothesis can be in a form of a short statement such as:

• Important information is easy to find for the user


• It’s clear for the visitor where should they click to buy the products


• The calls to actions are visible and direct

These are just examples to get you on the right track of thinking about hypotheses. After forming them it’s high time for you to test if your potential clients think the same (and chances are they don’t!)

Not all hypotheses are easy to test.

Screenshot Testing Tasks – Short and Snappy

Once you have the theories formed, you have to think about possible tasks for participants of your study. Your key goal is to make them short, snappy and to the point. No long descriptions. Be like Hemingway.

If you need to provide some background, put your user in a hypothetical situation: “You are waiting for your pizza, but it is taking too much time. Where would you click to check how long it takes for your order to arrive?” Don’t overdo it, though. Try to achieve the perfect balance between being informative, yet concise. If you need inspiration, here are some tasks which proved to be very effective over the years:

• Click on the first thing you noticed on this page


• Click on the element that you like the most


• Click on the most important element of this page


• Click on the element that you would remove from this page


• Where would you click to do X?

If you need more, check out a sample list here.

UsabilityHub’s quick study.

Choose Your Weapon

The next step in the process is to choose the right screenshot testing tool. You are lucky, because there are many useful solutions available on the market, and they will surely make your testing easier. Here is a list of some possible choices for you to consider:

• OptimalWorkshop


• UsabilityHub


• UsabilityTools


• Usaura

This is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are many other available tools – do your research and find out which one of them suits your needs best.

Once you’ve chosen your tool, it would be good to know how they work. Basically, the logic behind the tools and their steps is pretty clear:

• Upload the screenshots


• Set up tasks (that is why the list of tasks comes in handy, as you can simply start setting them up instead of figuring them out at this stage)


• Share a link to your test


• Analyze the full online report once you are satisfied with the number of answers

What you should focus on during the search for your perfect tool is the report part – that’s where the meat is. If you are new to the testing world, you should look for a tool which provides you not only with raw data but also with a coherent visualization to give you better understanding of how people handle the tasks.

A sample visualization from Optimal Workshop:

So much data you could go bananas.

You should brace yourself for the fact that each test will most probably reveal issues you didn’t expect. There is a possibility that you’ll learn that your hypotheses are true or that your assumptions and expectations are totally different from the ones your website visitors have. And that is completely normal – this is why tests are conducted, so you can learn about the users’ behavior, and you can decide what to do in order to improve the website.

Testing is not hard, but actual data interpretation and finding out what to do is. Your solutions could be ineffective, and will require even more testing. That is completely fine. You want to achieve the perfect design and solve the problems. You can be lucky and nail it at the first test or you can struggle for a while until you have that a-ha moment – you never know. But don’t worry, as you can ask specialists for help with interpreting the results. So, test away – the browser window is the limit.

Screenshot Click Testing – Wrap Up

1. Form hypotheses about your website


2. Create a list of short task for your users based on your hypotheses


3. Choose a right tool


4. Start testing:
   
   • Measure how long it takes to complete the task
   
   
   • Measure how many users finished the task
   
   
   • Ask how difficult or easy it was for the user to complete the task
   
   
   • Ask how confident the users felt when they were completing the task
   
   


5. Draw conclusions from the results and adjust your design accordingly


6. Test again!

…and finally…

See how click tests look in real time and help SpeckyBoy Design Magazine!

Now that you are acquainted with the idea of Screenshot Click Testing, it is time for you to see it for yourself. We’ve set up a short test on SpeckyBoy Design Magazine for you to try. Take part in it and see how it works, and how it feels to be a tested user! Start the test.

If you want the see how the results look like, click here.

The post Tips, Tricks and Tools of Screenshot Click Testing appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.

No related posts.

Tips, Tricks and Tools of Screenshot Click Testing

Free Ebook: User Testing & Design – Improving Yelp’s Website

UXPin, UserTesting, and Optimal Workshop team up to demonstrate how to run 3 simple usability tests as part of your design process. As an example, they’ve taken on the exercise of redesigning Yelp based on insights from usability testing.

The free e-book User Testing & Design shows you how to decide and plan usability testing, analyze qualitative and quantitative data, and design and iterate accordingly.

The 91-page e-book includes:

• Advice from usability experts like Jakob Nielsen, Donna Spencer, Jeff Sauro, and others.


• Actionable tips for breaking down business objectives into design objectives.


• Usability testing examples showing how to recruit users, write tasks, and turn data into better design.


• Low and high fidelity screenshots of the new Yelp, with step-by-step explanations of the design decisions.

Download the User Testing & Design ebook

Check it out and feel free to share if it’s helpful. We’d love your feedback on the new Yelp design!

For advice and analysis on 20 different usability testing methods, check outThe Guide to Usability Testing. All 3 companies are also running a bundle deal on their services (save 32).

The post Free Ebook: User Testing & Design – Improving Yelp’s Website appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.

Related posts:

1. Free Ebook: Web UI Design Patterns 2014


2. Free Ebook: The Guide to Minimum Viable Products


3. Free Ebook: Guide to Usability Testing

Free Ebook: User Testing & Design – Improving Yelp’s Website