Many digital agencies are now talking about usability and including it in their offering, but few are incorporating into their everyday process. Here are some reasons why agencies should think seriously about integrating usability and usability testing into their offering.

1 - Generate more business with usability testing

The very simple fact about usability testing is that it always generates a list of recommended amends to the website. Even in the rare scenario that only a few usability issues are uncovered, there is always room to improve the user experience and any good usability expert will feedback recommended changes to better support users. Agencies can therefore use usability testing to open up dialogues with clients (old & new) about making improvements to their website. Contacting old clients to sell them a usability review of their site is a great way to generate a list of site amends which can justify small amends, full redesigns, email marketing campaigns, microsites and so on. This usually works best when offered as a comparative usability test alongside competitor sites.

2 - Increase client confidence in your agency

Clients just want to reach their business goals. If they feel that you are going to make sure their new website really works, by testing it with users throughout the development process, you have an advantage over agencies that don’t provide usability testing. Incorporating usability testing further convinces your client that they are in safe hands. They can be confident that their project will meet the expectations of their customers because you’ll be usability testing it, and amending it, all the way up to launch.

3 - Forward thinking clients expect you to be testing their site with users

We’re seeing a large increase in the number of clients insisting that usability testing is part of their design and build project. The awareness of usability has increased massively over the past couple of years and any client who has done their research will be looking for usability testing as part of your process. Gone are the days when you can just pay lip service to usability, say hello to the days where usability testing is the norm. And if you’re not doing it, you’re losing business to all the agencies who are.

4 - Kill feature creep by focusing on what users really need

Are you finding that your clients have a list of features and content they want, then your internal team makes the list even bigger with their ideas? Your project managers/producers then struggle to fit it all into the agreed price and the team can’t decide what’s in or out of scope. We see this scenario all too often. Usability testing the existing site, or researching user requirements in the early stages of a project, will help you to prioritise all the key features and content based on true user needs. You can then ensure the project delivers for the client and their customers.

5 - Take a step back and make decisions with objectivity

Dave wants it to be a large blue button, Joe thinks it should be a small green button, Sarah doesn’t want it at all, and the client wants it flashing red. Take the egos and personal opinion out of the equation and settle design decisions by focusing on users. Its critical to make sure decision making is based on how it will help your priority users. User profiles (or personas) are excellent to guide this but they won’t remove dispute and disagreement on all design decisions. Settle arguments with usability testing instead; “Hey, you think it should be placed at the top of the page and you think it should be in the left navigation. Lets make sure we test both versions in our next usability test and see which one performs best for users.”

Is your agency taking usability seriously enough?

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We’re seeing a lot of people talking about conducting their own usability tests in house. The topic of DIY testing has been around for some time now with advocates such as Steve Krug and Jakob Nielson. The general principle being that any testing is better than no testing which is an idea we fully believe in.

As a company who offer usability testing it will probably come as no surprise that we would put forward an argument against companies doing their testing in house. But, before I do that I’d like to add that I think its excellent that people are taking user centredness so seriously these days and if teams feel that they want to take testing in house then that can only be a good thing for the future of the industry. If internal development teams feel so strongly about getting usability and user experience right, then of course we would fully support them in doing so.

My concern with what appears to be a rise in DIY usability testing is one of bias. One of the main benefits our clients get from using us is that we’re independent (combined with the fact we’ve been usability testing for nearly 10 years now).

Our word of warning to all those people looking to test their own projects is don’t underestimate the power of bias when testing your own stuff. When we come into a project and observe users interacting with a product or service we don’t have any of the baggage of internal politics, why it has been designed the way it has, who made the decision to put that button there, why its not possible to do this. We simply see things from a fresh, independent perspective which allows us to really see what’s going on.

When a project team comes to observe us testing their product or service with users, at the end of the day when we talk about the findings what they saw is often quite different to what we saw. They saw the detail rather than the bigger picture, they picked up on evidence to strengthen their own pre-existing beliefs, they played out discussions and arguments they’d had when designing it. We didn’t. We had the luxury of seeing what was really happening.

Not being able to see the wood from the trees is something we can all identify with at times. When we are in the day to day detail its really hard to step back and see things from a new perspective. Testing the project you’ve been working on carriers the danger that you may just see what you want to see. You may see things that you instantly dismiss because of the history of how it has been developed, but the real key to improving the experience may be hidden here and you simply can’t see it. Sometimes it takes someone else to spot the patterns going on right in front of your eyes.

Overall the increase in DIY testing has to be a good one because ultimately the winners will be the users. An increase in awareness and appreciation for improving user experience is something we would fully support, so for people with no budget to bring in independent consultants we’d fully recommend giving DIY testing a go. But, DIY testers must be aware of the dangers of only seeing evidence to support what they already believe to be true. Sometimes an independent expert review can be more valuable than an DIY usability test, but that’s a post for another day.

Is your perception of usability in your product or service accurate?

Related services: Usability testing, and User experience audit

Following on from part 1, we have another 5 reasons why products and services so commonly deliver poor usability:

6) Too many cooks

When a project team has too many stakeholders or a large team with no clear project leadership or role definition, the team can suffer from too many conflicting opinions on how the product should be designed. Often, the team will argue among themselves to try to implement interface changes they *think* are the best for the project. If this goes unchecked product development is at the mercy of whims, speculation and ego. Project teams have little or no sanity check on their ideas and tend to lose focus on who they are designing for and what they need.

7) Poorly defined project objectives

We are always surprised at how few projects have clearly defined project objectives when we first engage with a new client. When projects have no clear objectives, the product or service is likely to grow in a haphazard fashion. Over time the project team lose interest with it and the users suffer from a mismatch of features and functionality. A clearly defined set of business objectives balanced with a clearly defined set of user/customer objectives is critical to delivering consistently good experiences to customers.

8) There are no incentives for good usability

Very few teams are given incentives for offering good usability in product development. All too often, companies reward teams for more traditional measures or KPIs (customer satisfaction, budget, traffic, output etc.). It stands to reason that if project teams are not rewarded for improving usability, they will place more emphasis upon the aspects they will get recognised and rewarded for. Setting up regular usability tests with a clear benchmark at the beginning of the project will offer an excellent way to measure and incentivise usability in any project.

9) They are simply not aware usability is poor

We’ve heard many clients tell us that they already know what’s wrong with their product/service, yet they are always surprised when we report usability problems they had not even considered. It is very difficult to know you have usability problems unless you actually conduct usability testing on a regular basis. Customer comments, complaints, and website analytics can sometimes indicate that you have a problem, however they rarely give you insight into what the problem is and why it is occurring. This can only be discovered by observing users interact with the product or service, and many project teams have never done this.

10) Can’t see the wood for the trees

We’ve all experienced the feeling of being so close to something, we can no longer make good decisions. This happens all the time in projects where everyone has such an intimate knowledge of the product or service that they can not step back from it and see the bigger picture. They can start to make decisions which result in poor usability because they can no longer see the project from a user’s perspective. Independent, eternal advice is critical to integrate an objective perspective into their decision making processes and eliminate usability issues.

As we said in part 1, it is not easy to develop highly usable products and services. Eliminating poor usability happens throughout the entire project lifecycle from setting objectives at the beginning, right through to getting regular independent user input after the product or service has been launched.

Do you recognise any of our top 10 reasons for poor usability in your projects?

Related services: Customer requirements capture, Usability testing, and User experience audit

It was only a matter of time before usability and user experience became the main differentiator in advertising campaigns. The recent confused.com TV ad campaigns focus entirely on user testimonials which explain how easy to use the new website is.

Where online companies have stiff competition in an economic climate where providing a good experience is key, we expect to see more and more marketing campaigns to focus on customer experience and website usability.

Below is one of the ads from the campaign.

Can you claim to offer a better customer experience than your competitors?

Related services: Customer Experience Research and Usability Testing

Usability & User Experience is a top career in 2009

The role of Usability Experience Specialist was selected as one of the top careers in 2009 according to the US News website. The article details the typical duties for someone responsible for user experience and usability.

Although we’re not too sure about that job title, we’d have to agree that making products and services easy to use is extremely rewarding, and it’s nice to see the user experience role is beginning to create more media attention than it has been used to in the past. It’s not surprising that there’s more attention on improving experience as more and more customers are demanding great quality customer experience as well as great quality products. We predict that the demand for usability and user experience will increase even more in 2009.

Is the user experience offered by your products and services ready to meet higher customer expectations in 2009?

Related services: Customer Experience Research and Usability Testing

You only really notice the usability of a product when it’s not there. It’s very easy to come up with examples of poor usability, but for the most part, people don’t usually know the reasons for why one product is easy to use, and one is difficult and frustrating to use. Well, it doesn’t happen by accident! Most of the great products out there that we enjoy using have been through intensive user experience design and usability testing.

Here’s our ten most common reasons for why a product has poor usability:

1) Too much focus on features and technology

Many projects start off with project leaders and stakeholders having a strong desire to use latest technology or to develop a product with endless features. Feature development and testing are given a high priority and will often have a dedicated technical team responsible for them. The projects which go wrong are the ones that fail to balance these features against what users really need. Instead user requirements are an afterthought thrown in towards the end of development when much of the interface has already been developed.

2) Designers and developers ’scratch their own itch’

In absence of any contact with real end users, designers and developers have no option than to use their own experiences as a guide.  They end up designing the system according to their own capabilities, understanding and beliefs. Often they will be so deep into the project that they rarely question their decisions. If it works for the way they would use it, then that is good enough.

3) No-one has considered what people really need to use the interface for

It’s easy to get caught up in the detail of a project and immerse yourself in the complexities of how to make a product work well. Sometimes, a project team can be so focused on the inner workings of the system that they fail to step back and question their design decisions from a user perspective. Understanding what users really need, and what situations they are likely to be in when they use the product can completely change the direction of the design.

4) The person with the final say has little or no interface design experience

Often, we will come across a competent and well meaning project leader responsible for the end product who has to make the call on how the product looks and operates. More often than not, this person has little or no experience of user interface design and unwittingly makes decisions without fully considering the impact on the users.

5) Too much focus on quantitative measurement

When a website is doing well, you’ll hear the project team talking about numbers. The number of unique visits, the number of conversions, the number of page views and so on. Unfortunately, the usability of a product or website is not so easily measured. Whilst project teams may know they have a problem with basket abandonment, or low page views on key pages of the site, they rarely understand why users behave the way they do which is key to understanding how to improve usability to fix the issue.

Part 2 of the 10 most common reasons for poor usability.

Do your products or services suffer from any of the most common reasons for poor usability?

Related Services: Customer requirements capture, Usability testing, and Customer experience research

I paid for a train ticket over the counter yesterday. As I completed the transaction I nearly walked off leaving my Debit card in the PIN machine. As I turned back to the machine to retrieve the card the chap behind the counter said something along the lines of, “That was lucky. We’ve already had three people leave their cards here this morning.”

Three people, this morning, have walked away leaving their card in the machine. Can you imagine arriving for a day in London and realising you’ve left your Debit card somewhere? Pretty stressful huh?

If your customers are suffering – take action

So having already experienced people leaving their cards, would it not be courteous to remind customers to remove their cards after the transaction?

Since Chip & PIN, all organisations have had to invest heavily in installing new equipment to cater to the new technology. However, I can’t help but ask myself if some of this technology either hasn’t been thought through properly, or is not being used properly.

Technology shouldn’t create customer experience issues

If the staff working behind a counter are unable to see the Chip & PIN machine it would be useful for their screen to inform them that the card has not been removed. They can then prompt the customer. Like most ‘simple’ fixes, it becomes less simple to fix once the technology is complete.

If the full customer journey and scenarios are planned and mapped out prior to build, these minor details will be catered for. And if customers are introduced to the project early, to test a prototype, the barriers will be highlight and dealt with before these ‘simple’ issues become costly fixes.

Do you involve customers in your project process early enough?

Related services: Customer Journey Mapping and Usability Evaluation & Testing

Let us introduce you to some of the top customer experience blogs we’ve been reading lately.

We’ve found some inspiring stuff here in the past couple of months so we thought it was only fair to share with you. Here’s what we’ve been enjoying in no particular order:

Work. Play. Experience.
What theatre, film and stand-up comedy can teach us about Impressing Customers
http://workplayexperience.blogspot.com/

Church of the customer
A blog all about the power of creating customer evangelists
http://www.churchofthecustomer.com/blog/

Buzz Canuck
What’s on and under the radar of word of mouth marketing
http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com/

The Perfect Customer Experience
Customer experience marketing, marketplace conversations, social media and demand generation
http://contextrules.typepad.com/transformer/

Experience Matters
Unraveling The Mystery Of Customer Loyalty
http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/

Experienceology
How to turn businesses into great customer experiences
http://experienceology.blogspot.com/

One of our major supermarkets does a great pizza, which they make for you whilst you wait. I must say, they do taste good. If you order your pizza at the beginning of your shop, ten minutes later when you’ve picked up your other groceries, it is ready to take away. It has won awards.

I was a little miffed on Friday evening when I had to wait forty minutes for my pizza. Here’s what happened:

On ordering my pizza the young lady informed me that she was on her own so it may not be ready for twenty minutes. Excellent! I’ve been informed about the extra time, and although it is inconvenient I look through the magazine and book department. However, when I return after twenty minutes my pizza is not ready. The poor girl is working through a long list of pizzas, with a queue of people waiting and ordering more.

The employee experience is an important aspect of customer experience

Whilst the pizza backlog grew, two other employees are working at the same counter, but on cooked chickens and Indian/Chinese take away. There are no queues for these offerings, yet the two members of staff have a joke, pack up some chicken, go out back, come back again, pack a couple more chickens, and serve the odd customer. Not once, in the twenty minutes I waited, did I see them look to the poor pizza girl, let alone offer to help out. I got quite angry at this.
When I finally got my pizza I assured the girl that she had done a great job, little good it did her, and paid for my groceries. On leaving I visited the customer services desk to complain and stand up for the girl on the pizza counter. The lady informed me that the other two staff were unable to help out on pizza due to health and safety. On realising how daft this sounded she phoned through to a manager. After a five minute conversation I was informed that the chicken must be closed down before any help can be supplied to the pizza counter. I gave up!

Business process can remove common sense thinking

The help of one member of staff for fifteen minutes would have reduced the backlog and the queue. So the internal process looks to be wrong as employees stick to the process rather than helping their customers.
This can happen with rigid process. Employees do not see things from another point of view because they are blinkered by process. I’m not sure why the Managers didn’t do anything about it. But then I didn’t see any managers. Maybe they were following a process out the back?

Process is good, but it must allow for flexibility to ensure common sense prevails. Especially when good customers experience is at risk. By simply ensuring the process includes some thought provoking questions like:

• Is there a problem here?
• What do I need to do to resolve the problem?
• If this was my company, what would I do differently?

These questions provide the opportunity for all employees to step outside the process to think for themselves.

Does your internal process ensure an excellent experience for your customers?

Related services: Customer Experience Research and Customer Requirements Capture

In recent months I have experienced behaviour from restaurants which I can’t quite fathom. When I receive the bill a service charge has already been added. And not just at my usual 10% rate, which I thought was standard in the UK, but at 12.5% or even 15%.

A tip should reward good customer experience

I am not a skinflint, but I have my own rules for paying a tip. The waiter/waitress has to be a bit special, by doing something nice that makes me enjoy my experience that little bit more. It’s not difficult to wait on me with a smile, to be there when I need a new bottle of wine, to provide a recommendation, or to know where my food is sourced from. And I am happy to pay 10% in cash to the particular waiter or waitress who has made my eating experience a good one.

So when I sit at a cramped table, eating average quality food that I could have made at home, and have difficulty in attracting the attention of the waiting staff (or receive too much attention), I don’t feel inclined to leave a tip. But wait. This already expensive meal, of average quality, has a 15% service charge automatically added to the bill.

The credit card machine provides no obvious option to remove the service charge from my bill payment. The only way to do this is to request it, making the process more confrontational for customers. I’m sure leaving a tip used to be a discreet affair!

In true British style I decide not to make a fuss. But I muse on it for days. Who decided to change the rules? Who has suddenly decided that us Brits are always happy to pay a tip? Who decided that this tip was to be 15%?

My answer? I won’t visit this restaurant again and I’ll warn my friends of it.

Delivering beyond customer expectations must become a priority business objective

I believe this is a case where internal process and business objectives have become the main focus without considering the customer. Yes, the business needs to make more money, and yes the waiting staff would like tips. But surely you are more likely to build loyal customers by focusing on the experience and the food? And surely the customer should have the choice to leave a tip to waiting staff that have waited particularly well?

There are reports that take-away food is becoming more popular as customers “Trade down”, by wishing to spend less with the economic uncertainty that looms. So a restaurant that automatically increases its pricing by adding a 15% service charge is not going to entice customers.

It is also important for restaurateurs to ensure their customers know what will happen to the tips they leave. It is disheartening to think that my tip is being used to top up salary. So it is comforting to see that the law is being updated. However, the choice must remain with the customer.

Understanding customer needs, meeting their expectations, and giving them the choice to tip is far more likely to encourage repeat visits. So companies must balance the business and customer objectives to ensure a sustainable and successful service.

Have you pushed forward your business goals without considering your customers’ goals?

Related services: Customer Profiling, Customer Experience Research, and Customer Requirements Capture