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Card Sorting Card sorting helps you build the structure for your Web site, decide what to put on the home page, and label the home page categories. It also helps to ensure that you organize information on your site in a way that is logical to your users. Contextual Interviews
Seeing the user's environment can be very useful. By going to the user, you see the user's environment and the actual technology the user works with. You can answer questions like these:
Heuristic Evaluation
The goal of heuristic evaluation is to find usability problems early in the design of a Web site so that improvements can be made as part of the iterative design process.Heuristic evaluations usually are conducted by a small set (one to three) of evaluators. The evaluators independently examine a user interface and judge its compliance with a set of usability principles. The result of this analysis is a list of potential usability issues or problems. The usability principles, also referred to as usability heuristics, are taken from published lists. Ideally, each potential usability problem is assigned to one or more heuristics to help facilitate fixing the problem. As more evaluators are involved, more true problems are found. Individual Interviews
Individual interviews typically refer to talking with one user at a time (for 30 minutes to an hour) face to face, by telephone, or with instant messaging or other computer-aided means. These interviews do not involve watching a user work. Thus, this is different from interviewing users in a usability testing session or conducting contextual interviews. What can you learn from an interview? Individual interviews can give you a deep understanding of the people who come to your site. You can probe their attitudes, beliefs, desires, and experiences. You can also ask them to rate or rank choices for the Web site content. Personas
A persona is a fictional person who represents a major user group for your site
Personas bring many benefits, including these:
Prototyping
A prototype is a draft version of a Web site. Prototypes allow you to explore your ideas before investing time and money into development.A prototype can be anything from:
A prototype is often the best way to gather feedback from users while you are still planning and designing your Web site. It is a quick way to find out if you are on the right track with your plans and design. According to Nielsen (2003) prototyping results in:
Task Analysis
Task analysis means learning about your users' goals—what they want to do at your Web site-and your users' ways of working. Task analysis can also mean figuring out what more specific tasks users must do to meet those goals and what steps they must take to accomplish those tasks. Along with user and task analysis, we often do a third analysis: understanding users' environments (physical, social, cultural, and technological environments). Segmenting your target audiences by their main goals focuses your site's development on those users' tasks. What are the benefits of a task analysis? A task analysis allows you to:
Usability Testing
In a usability test, representative users try to do typical tasks with the product, while observers, including the development staff, watch, listen, and take notes. The product can be a Web site, Web application, or any other product. It does not have to be a finished product. You should be testing prototypes from early paper-based stages through fully functional later stages.
Use Cases
A use case is a description of how users will perform tasks on your Web site.A use case includes two main parts:
A use case begins with a user's goal and ends when that goal is fulfilled. |
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