Many of our users are often faced with what they presume is a difficult task – including JavaScript in their website. Sometimes it’s the daunting task of getting the IT department to implement the otherwise simple ‘copy and paste’, other times it’s concerns revolving around security, page load time or SEO. The good news is Loop¹¹’s JavaScript does not negatively impact any of those areas. In fact, your website most likely already has similar code inserted within it in the form of Google Analytics.

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One of the advantages that you see as a first mover in a space is that you get to watch your industry grow as more and more services and competitors come online. Loop¹¹ was one of the earliest user testing SaaS offerings and has managed to stay at the top of the tree with our unique unmoderated online user testing service.

We have unabashedly been a quant first tool. That’s not to say you can’t do qualitative user testing research with Loop¹¹, you can. But we know what we are the best at and want to make sure we focus on delivering the highest possible service to our users.

What we’ve noticed, as more user testing offerings come online, is that they are either consciously being sly about whether they are quant or qual, or they don’t adequately understand the difference between the two.

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Are your usability testing responses actually giving you the actionable information you need?

Not if you haven’t designed the right test!

In order to get the information you’re after, you need to determine:

1.  What you want to know

2.  What questions to ask to get the right answers

Figure Out the Usability Info You Need

Have you already identified problems with your platform? Are users routinely aborting at a specific point, or do you get a lot of queries about the same functions or processes? Then this first job is easy—you need to figure out what users are finding difficult, and possibly to test different options for making things easier.

If you’re beta testing or still in the early development phase, the information you’re after might be more general—how are various processes perceived, how quickly can users find what they need and accomplish specific tasks, what design elements are enhancing or inhibiting usability?

Get as specific as possible in identifying the information you need from your usability test, and you’ll make designing your test much easier while making the test far more effective, too.

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Conducting usability tests requires usability testers—a group of people that matches your ideal user as closely as possible in terms of demographics and knowledge level.

Identifying those potential testers can be tough (and we’ll have some tips on how to do that coming out shortly), but even after you know who they are there’s still an additional challenge: getting them to respond.

Here are a few tips for improving your usability test request emails, getting you a better response rate and more accurate, actionable results.

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As explained in a previous post, finding usability testers who best represent the target users of your software or app is an essential first step in making sure your usability test delivers useful results. Finding testers with the right knowledge level and experience gives you far more accurate results, and the more specialized your target niche is the more important a well-matched group becomes.

Expertise is just one element of your usability group that needs to match your target audience, though. Demographics—age, culture, and in some cases gender and more—are also important considerations.

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When it comes to mobile website usability, there are many more things to consider because of the inhibited screen size. The following are seven things you should think about during the design process and check for after your mobile website is complete to ensure that mobile users are getting the best experience.

1. Look for responsive template designs and test them before purchasing.

If you are in re-design mode for your website, be sure to be on the lookout for templates that have a responsive design or are designated as mobile-friendly. Then test the template you are considering on a mobile device before purchasing it. To do this, simply go to the demo site for the template on your mobile phone to see if the design works with your browser. If it doesn’t, see if the template designer offers mobile customization as well.

2. Download mobile compatibility packages for WordPress.

For those using WordPress as a CMS on their own domain (not WordPress.com), you can look into plugins like WPtouch or WordPress Mobile Pack. These plugins will detect whether a visitors is coming to your website from a mobile device and present them with a mobile-friendly design instead of your main one. Be sure to go through the options for these plugins carefully to make sure they are displaying the pages you want visible to mobile visitors and test your website on a mobile device to make sure everything is configured correctly.

3. Don’t use popups or floating elements on your mobile website.

Outside of running into a website that only uses Flash on an iPhone, the next most irritating thing on a mobile website is a popup or piece of floating content. The challenge with these elements is that they are hard to close because the X is generally somewhere outside of where you can zoom. That or there is no way to close it, and no matter where you scroll, the floating social share button, ad, etc. keeps covering the main content. Sure those are easy to manage on a desktop browser, but make sure they don’t appear on your mobile website.

4. Rethink paginated content.

A popular trend on blogs is to paginate posts, so instead of having 1,000+ words on one page, it will be spread across two or three pages. And while this sounds like a great idea for mobile as it would decrease the load time by having less to load on one page, here is the issue. Someone who is in an area with a choppy 3G signal is going be able to load page, but not the rest. Chances are, they will get so frustrated that they won’t try to get back to that content later either.

5. Offer the option to visit the full website.

Assuming that your main website is not all done with Flash, be sure to offer visitors the opportunity to use the full site instead of the mobile website. This way, if they are looking for something not available on your mobile website, they can still access it via their mobile device. Of course, if you do offer this option, make sure that your site isn’t set to automatically redirect every time someone lands on a page from a mobile device. Otherwise, they’ll almost get to where they want to go and then get shipped back to the mobile website again.

6. Add your phone number throughout your website in the text, not as an image.

Smartphones allow website browsers to click on a phone number anywhere on a website to call it directly, but only if the phone number is in the text of the website. A lot of businesses tend to put their phone number in an image just for design / formatting purposes, but this doesn’t help people contact you when needed. As a side benefit, having a local phone number in the text will also help you with local search rankings.

7. Test, test, and test again.

Web designers know to test their latest projects in a variety of browsers because not all browsers are created equal. The same goes for mobile devices. What works flawlessly on your iPhone may not work so well on an Android. Your best bet is to try your mobile website on a few different mobile platforms including iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows. The easiest way to do it if you don’t happen to own one or more of these devices is to slip into your local electronics or mobile sales store and run a few quick tests on the demo devices. Try to test key conversion areas such as submission forms or mobile shopping carts to ensure a good experience for your mobile users from start to finish.

What mobile website usability tips would you like to add to this list? Please do so in the comments!

We’re excited to announce the first of a number of new features for Loop¹¹ in 2012 – Clickstream Analysis. The clickstream analysis will replace the ‘Most common navigation path’ by allowing you to analyze task navigation graphically and instantly understand how visitors navigate a task through your website.

The clickstream report provides a graphical representation of participants’ navigation through the website so you can see their journey, as well as the path they took before abandoning or failing a task.

You’ll notice that we made the visualization highly interactive so you can interact with the graph to highlight different pathways, and to see detailed information about specific pages. For example, if you want to dive deeper into your pages, you can hover over the node to see more information at a glance.

Below you can see an example of a task that performed well in usability testing (in this instance with a task completion rate of 92%). A quick look at the analysis shows that 90% of participants went directly to the success page from the homepage. The orange lines are a visual indication of the magnitude of participants who failed the task at different points in their journey through the website. Navigation through the website is clean and uncomplicated, which should be the case when the participant has a clear direction.

By contrast, the clickstream below is for a task that was performed comparatively poorly, where the task completion rate was only 32%. In this example, there is clearly confusion as to where participants should navigate from the home page to complete the task.

This is our first step in tackling clickstream analysis and we look forward to hearing your feedback as you begin to use the report in the coming weeks. We’re excited to bring you the first of a number of new features for the year, so stayed tuned for more!

As always, we welcome your input on how we can make the clickstream analysis more useful for you, so let us know in the comments below.