Reviewing Usability Study Results

One main purpose for conducting a usability study is to find out how well your design meets users’ expectations, and get some targeted usage data to help evaluate this in practice. However, collecting a lot of data about usage is useless unless it’s actionable. That is, it should quickly let you identify tasks that are problematic, and even better if it let's you identify the problematic step in the task flow.

Making usability study results actionable is the motivation behind how we have designed the study results view. And all this without having to review the results of each and every participant. The idea is to quickly gather insights from the aggregated statistics. We agree that its 's important to understand what a specific user did; however, in order to design for more than 1 user, we rely on how a group of users performed on the task. We should be looking for patterns in the usage and not solo data points.

Naturally, there is no report, without actually setting up a study. To learn about how to set up usability studies for your Indigo Studio prototypes, read the following post: 

Set-up Remote Unmoderated Usability Studies

Remote, and Unmoderated Usability Studies

Usability studies on indigodesigned.com are remote and unmoderated in nature. That is, the study moderator does not have to be present when users participate in a study. The main advantage of this technique is that more than 1 user can simultaneously participate in the study. This also frees you of the need to explicitly schedule time with participants. Participants can participate when they have the time.

The usability studies section on indigodesigned.com shows you any studies in progress or completed in the past. The results are updated in real time. As in, as and when a participant completes a task, the task statistics are updated. The study report consists of the study results overview, a detailed task report, and a click-map view.

Study Results Overview

Study overview provides a high-level summary of how many users participated and completed the task successfully. It shows avg. time required to complete the task and whether users made of use of guidance. If the user used guidance, the task is automatically marked as failed.

Task Details Report

Task details view provides a more granular view of how participants completed a particular task. You can see how many completed, skipped or failed the task. The percentage completed gives you an idea of how early or late did the design fail. The task details view also shows a step-by-step view of the task. If for some reason say most users quit or requested guidance at step 2, you know that’s the part of the flow you need to redesign first. Participants have the option to leave comments while they complete the task or at the end of it. When they do, you will see a comment count next to the tis step.

Click-Map view

The click-Map view shows where the participants ended up clicking. It captures both attempted interactions and successful ones. Successful interactions are those that lead to the next step in the recorded task flow. The click map only shows max. 2 attempts per participants to make the visualization actionable.
The theory is that if the participants were unable to proceed after two failed attempts, there are already significant usability problems to fix.

Summary

Reading not your thing? No problem. We recorded a quick video just for you.

This article provided a quick overview of the usability study report. We describe the different views available to help you identify where things are broken from the users' perspective. However, you will still need to qualify, categorize and prioritize these issues. This is where you, as some one responsible for the UX, will make recommendations. The remote usability studies facilitate making these recommendations faster than moderated sessions.

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