Bipolar Emotional Response Testing (BERT)

April 27, 2003 | 2 Comments

Down at the hospital we’ve been doing all sorts of usability studies and we’re getting to the point now where we are beginning to get some really good information, not only about our users, but our stakeholders and decision makers as well.  It’s really interesting to run folks within the organization through the same exercises as we do the users of the site.  The results are many times in line, and many times way off the mark.
 
One of the more interesting, and more arcane, things we are doing is running bipolar emotional response tests (BERTs as we like to call them) to see how people identify with different sites, designs and levels of content.  How this works is we show them a series of screenshots or have them free browse a group of sites and then they go through and rank them on a sliding scale of matched pairs, from one extreme to another.  Light to dark, professional to amateur, and friendly to impersonal for example.  Then we plot those answers on a grid with the other answers in a group. It’s a bit hard to explain, here is a picture of one of the charts.  What begins to emerge is a general idea of the “feel” of a site, or design or whatever.
 
We also ask them to do this for a site unseen, a site they would most like to visit.  This helps us match a particular look and feel or design to what they are looking for.  It’s not an exact science but it helps give some direction.  In that sense it’s fairly useful.  Where it’s real use comes into play is as a discussion tool.  You can show a group of responses to people along side the respective screenshots (or whatever you are wanting to get feedback on) and discuss.  So far this has been really helpful.
 
I’m curious to see if anyone else out there is doing this type of testing or something similar.  Also, if anyone knows of a canned application for mapping out this type of test results that would be great.  Right now we just do it by hand.

Filed under: IA and Usability