How can we assist you?
Usability Services offers cost-effective and convenient ways to better understand the perspective of your users and to assess the usability of your Web sites and applications.
We offer the following usability services to design teams:
- Usability Evaluations with Eye-Tracking
- Eye-Tracking Studies
- Terminology Reviews
- Category Sorting Analysis (Card-Sorts)
- Focus Groups
- Web Accessibility Reviews
- Lab Services for University Researchers
Usability Evaluations with Eye-Tracking
Our usability evaluation methods are aimed at helping design teams observe the user's perspective on a design. We can help you find out how easy a design is to use, based on user actions and feedback from users. This is our primary usability service.
In our usability lab, a relatively small number of users try out a design, one participant at a time. Using a prototype of the Web design, participants are asked to perform some typical tasks and to verbalize their thoughts as they proceed. By observing the details of this process, a design team learns most of the usability problems that will surface when users complete those tasks.
Real-time eye-tracking is usually included in our usability evaluation sessions so that the design team knows immediately where a participant is looking on the computer screen while using a Web page or application. This provides key information about what the participant had expected.
Usability evaluations assist with:
- Observing the details of the user experience and identifying usability issues
- Showing how users interact with design prototypes or existing designs
- Replacing assumptions about user needs with first-hand knowledge
- Providing an objective basis on which to evaluate a design
- Helping a design team come to a consensus on a final design
- Avoiding re-work and support costs
- Increasing user satisfaction
Eye-Tracking Studies
Eye-tracking studies are projects in which eye-tracking data is collected and analyzed for the purpose of predicting where users will look on a Web page.
They are completed as stand-alone projects, rather than as part of usability evaluations. This is appropriate when there is a need to learn what effect small differences in various design alternatives have on what users see and do.
Sometimes the differences between design choices are so small that a usability evaluation participant may not even notice them consciously. However, eye-tracking can reveal which design succeeds in drawing users' attention to specific design elements.
To improve the usability and effectiveness of a Web design to the maximum, usability evaluations should be performed prior to an eye-tracking study. This is also a cost-effective approach, since eye-tracking studies require many more participants in order to make valid predictions.
Terminology Reviews
Terminology reviews are used to obtain direct user feedback on the understandability of lower-level link names, high-level category names, and other terminology found on Web pages.
Terminology reviews can also be used to assess how meaningful the field labels in purchased software will be for local audiences. When field labels can be easily customized within the software package, this can be valuable in making the software fit the needs of the users.
Category Sorting Analysis (Card-Sorts)
When creating a Web site, it is helpful to know how your users expect to see information organized on the site. To provide this information to a design team, we usually combine a terminology review with a card-sort technique to find out how well users understand the proposed terminology, how they would sort the terms into categories that make sense to them, and what they would call those categories.
We can help design teams with this process for:
- Finding out if users will understand the terminology
- Discovering if users think there are additional items that should be part of a Web site or Web page
- Deciding how to name links on a Web page
- Deciding how to name fields in an application
- Getting ideas on how to organize the content on a Web site or the informational elements to be included in a software application
Focus Groups
At the beginning of a project, teams may need to get the user's perspective on a proposed concept before investing resources to develop it. A group of users discussing the concept provides useful input to a business requirements team about whether a certain kind of product is worthwhile and what features are important in the product design.
We help design teams with focus groups to identify users' needs and preferences through informal group interaction and brainstorming. Project teams developing enterprise-level software solutions at the University are the most frequent users of this service. A Usability Services consultant leads a focus group of 8 to 10 participants from a given audience, while the project team watches from a separate observation room.
Web Accessibility Reviews
Usability Services staff also provide Web accessibility review services for the University's enterprise-level solutions. These reviews are aimed at verifying that Web sites will be usable for everyone, including people with disabilities that require specialized equipment or software to help them perceive, understand, and interact with Web content.
Lab Services for University Researchers
We can also provide lab support and equipment services to University researchers for their own projects in the lab. Eye-tracking operation and consulting is also available for researcher-led projects.
Contact Usability Services
To discuss your needs and how these various services could help you, please contact:
Alice de la Cova
Usability Services Manager
Phone: (612) 624-9365
E-mail: a-dela@umn.edu