For many in the retail industry a regular shop walkthrough is an essential part of the manager’s role to ensure the environment is clean, the products are in the right places, and the shelves are stocked. Do you do the same checks on your website?

Your website is just like a retailer’s shop floor, it’s your front of house. How much time do you spend reviewing your website in a week? How often do your staff, or other team members, spend on the website every week? Ask them. You may be shocked to find that no-one is regularly checking the site. What are you waiting for? Customers to complain? Sales to drop? Traffic to plummet?

Stop waiting and start implementing a set of regular and very simple tasks to ensure that your site is checked on a weekly basis. Websites grow organically and although there’s no substitute for regular usability testing, there are methods you and your team can do adopt to keep a check on your site to ensure usability issues don’t develop as the site grows. After we work with a client to improve the usability of their website we provide them with a checklist to use which helps them maintain usability, you can download it here for free.

Download our Weekly Usability Checklist for you and your team to maintain good usability on your site. Feel free to pass it on to colleagues

Some of these may seem overly simplistic, but many companies are not carrying out these fundamental checks on a regular basis. If you and your staff were to spend 10 minutes a day or an hour a week just running through some of these simple checks you can be confident that you are keeping your front of house in check and giving your site visitors no encouragement to go back to Google to visit your competitors

Are you keeping your site in check?

Related services: Usability testing, and User experience audit

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

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

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