A Little Known Idea for Evaluation: User Interface Test

…does the concept User Interface ring a bell? What a User-Interface test?

As I hinted to in my last post, I think the evaluation step is maybe one of the most important steps a marketing plan can include, yet many lack. Doing evaluation, allows one to:

• Reflect on the strengths of the campaigns
• Document the process so there’s no reinventing the wheel for next time
• Identify areas for improvement
• Lets you gain and track client feedback
• Find ‘lessons to learn from’
• Calculate ROI and compare to previous years/cases

For best evaluation results, one should meet with a team, get outside feedback, talk to the client(s), key associates or other employees who had a hand in the project. Now, it the fun part. I want to introduce to you a great, but commonly unknown tool to add to your evaluation methods: the User Interface Test.

User Interface is a concept that describes how users interact with a website. If you’ve ever had any of the following questions, then conducting a User Interface test might be right up your alley:

1. What should be on the homepage?
2. Should the main graphic be video, a slideshow, a moving graphic, etc.?
3. Where should the ’search’ button go?
4. Is our website easy to use?
5. How functional is our website?
6. What’s the message our users are getting?
7. What would make our website easier to use?
8. When someone first comes to our site, what’s the first thing they see?
9. What would get users to spend more time on our pages?
10. Does everything on our site communicate our message?
11. Does our content engage the reader?
12. What is someone expecting when they come to our site?
13. Is the site easy to use?
14. Is our site customize-able?
15. Does our site have a professional tone? or an appropriate tone?
16. Does our site speak relevance to those trafficking the site?
17. Does the design capture attention?
18. How do our users interact with our site?

If you find yourselves asking these questions and similar others, then a User Interface test could be right up your alley! To test your User Interface, you can use either quantitative or qualitative approaches. Four qualitative approaches are outlined below.

1. Time to Task: Tests ability for tester to complete an action to user’s satisfaction in a decent time.
2. Accuracy: Tests the accuracy of the website and the information found.
3. Emotional Response: Tests how the testee responds to their overall experience on the site or in conducting their tasks.
4. Recall/Repetition: Tests ability to recall the process it takes to find desired information. Also looks as how the testee’s ability to recall where he or she is on the website and how he or she arrived there.

To create quantitative results, one can have testee fill out forms measuring various categories on a scale of 1-5 (customization, professionalism or tone, design, organization, usefulness, relevance, and interactivity.)

Hope this little research tidbit, and way of evaluating your website comes in hand. =)