[Hidden-tech] user testing for an ecommerce site

[Tim Boudreau]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 11:59 AM, Simon Alciere <alciere at simonstamp.com>
wrote:

> Dear Hidden Tech,
>
>
>
> Our new ecommerce website needs to be tested before it goes live.
> I've heard that the way to do it is with half a dozen paid volunters. They
> use the site to make a purchase, talking out loud while they do it. We
> videotape.
>
> Does anyone have experience with this?
>

Are you talking about testing if the site functions correctly, or
*usability* testing (which is what is usually done with volunteers and
video taped)?

For functional testing, that can be automated - yes, you could use
volunteers to do that, but you're better off using a testing tool such as
Selenium - http://docs.seleniumhq.org/ - so that the tests can be
automated, and run whenever there is a change in the site, so that you know
if any change broke something.

For usability testing, yes, the most effective way to do that is
volunteers, and video taping is a good idea because you want to go back and
see what they did, and you don't want to interrupt the volunteer to ask
"why did you do that?" because that's going to alter your results - you
want to give them a task and turn them loose to figure out how to do that,
and then look at what they actually did, identify false starts or things
they did that didn't work, so that you can tune your site to users'
expectation of it (the user is always right). Other worthwhile metrics are
how long it took to perform a task, and the number of clicks or keystrokes
required - generally, the more work you put between a user and their goal,
the more users you lose.

I've done some of that sort of thing many years ago in my work on NetBeans
- it's pretty simple - if you have a computer and a video camera or
smartphone and a list of tasks to complete, that's about all you need.  The
important things are to butt out while they're doing the work (if you want
to know why someone did something, review it on the tape and ask them
after), to take notes while reviewing them (a spreadsheet is handy), and to
be willing to make changes if a significant number of users do something
"wrong".

-Tim

-- 
http://timboudreau.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20161011/8e7934c5/attachment.html