Thoughts on User testing and Findability.

January 13, 2003 | 0 Comments

Had a long discussion today about user testing.  I’ll not get into the specifics.  Afterwards I did some thinking about what kind of user testing is valuable for Web sites specifically — not Web applications or tools.  It seems to me that with most information driven Web sites the main value in having your users test your site doesn’t lie in traditional usability, although there is some value there, but rather in your information architecture — Findability, as Peter Morville, Christina Wodtke and some others call it.
 
There seems to be a whole bunch of questions and discussion as to where IA fits into the whole realm of Web design and development, and how it relates to other disciplines like design and usability.  It’s a tough one to really explain, I’ll agree.  I do think I can shed some light on how usability and IA are inter-related.  At least in relation to informational Web sites.
 
Good IA can increase the usability of a Web site, and in turn usability testing can help to better a site’s IA.  I find in writing usability scripts a good portion of these goes into helping to test the IA or findability of things on the site.  A typical action would be something like, “Find the weather in San Jose, CA for this weekend” and then observing how the user navigates to that information.  In most cases little is learned from observing how the user interacts with the site — most Web navigation conventions have been established and if you keep with those, as most informed designers will do, then you’ll not see many problems from your users.  What you will see is where the user thinks something lives in the IA of the site and how easily that users find that information.
 
An example I’ll use from the hospital.  When we did usability testing for the Intranet we found out quite a bit about where users thought things should live, and in many cases there were huge gaps from one user to the next.  One that jumps to mind is “Policies and Procedures” — a huge section of the site.  Some users thought these would be found in the Staff Resources section, others in Clinical Resources.  Usually this coincided with their job function, support or clinical.  Still others thought these would be found with their related department sections, and others with Training and Education. 
 
In the end these actually “live” in Training and Education, but we have links from within all the other sections. If we’d not tested the findability here, some of our users would be having trouble.  You see what I’m talking about?
 
In a sense we could use design, or UI to solve this IA problem, for example there was some discussion of making a new section for this information, you know, adding a tab.  That may still happen — we’ll see.  But simply adding links within our navigation convention seemed to take care of it.
 
So is usability a worthwhile activity for your Web site?  I think so.  While it can be argued (not sure how strongly but…) that there isn’t much you’ll learn in the way of user interface, navigation or design — my guess is you could very well gain some information the helps your users find what they need and better your IA, which in turn will make your site more usable.

Filed under: IA and Usability