Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage - #7: User Testing
At this stage of a project within the BBC's New Media department you'd probably want to do some user-testing. You haven't built anything yet, but you may have a selection of visual treatments you'd like to get some responses from, and you would want to test the users interaction with the proposed page to see whether they can achieve tasks easily enough.
Before you've actually got the finished article to test there are a couple of different techniques you can use.
Paper testing is one, where you use visual mock-ups of the site, and ask people to point on paper to where they would click to perform certain tasks, and can gauge general reactions to visual designs. This isn't ideal, of course.
Building mock-ups for the screen is another option. This can be done in a couple of ways. I've seen it achieved by making a very large flat image of the design you are testing, and then making image map hot-spots to simulate where the HTML links would be. Alternatively, if you have very quick HTML developers in your team, a proof-of-concept demo page can do the trick even better.
The BBC does user-testing either by putting the work out to usability testing agencies, or conducting the tests in-house. Putting the work out to agencies has a strong advantage that people don't have to visit a BBC building. This can be really important if you are testing a new service, and you want to gauge how the user reacts to a vanilla version without any preconceptions about the BBC attached to it. For testing done in-house, the BBC sometimes invites people via message boards or via newsletters - making sure it gets to test new features on the exact people who will be using them.
The key thing with any user testing is to make sure that the tasks you ask the user to perfrom really show whether your solutions have met their goals. I'm not in a position to test the ideas for my reboot:bbc.co.uk entry - but I can at least specify which tasks I would have tested - and then I am going to make some assumptions about what would happen. I'd want to test the following things about my propsed redesign:
- I'm nervous about planning to merge the News and the Sports headlines into one block. One task would be to ask the user to find the Sports headlines, and see how long it takes them to succeed.
- I've proposed abolishing the directory - I'd want to ask users to look for some deep content, maybe a recipe, or information about a specific character in EastEnders, then observe whether they are successful just using search and the A-Z letters.
- I need to know whether My Inbox is going to work - I'd want to see users trying to set up access to an online mail service - is it easy? Do they trust the BBC with their details?
- Around the player area I would like to see a user demonstrate how intuitive they find it to change channels and programmes, and probably show them a couple of variations.
- I also want to find out if people value the editorial content, and that is something that I would hope the person conducting the test would be able to tease out during the session.
After a usability study is conducted, generally the BBC will receive a report with reccommendations. My best guess about my competition entry so far is that:
- People will find the lack of BBC News and BBC Sport headings confusing, and they should re-instated
- Links to popular content underneath the A-Z in a mini-directory would be useful for some users
- My Inbox is complicated, but users would trust the BBC with their details
- Users "liked" the idea of editorial content, but actually do not click on it very often.
- Users understand the concept of BBC One, BBC Two, News 24 much more than they understand the concept of BBC in-house departmental brands like Entertainment, Drama, Lifestyle etc.
At this stage the BBC would probably make some changes based on the reccommendations, and then proceed to the build phase of the project. But I'm my own boss for this design, so I'm going to carry on regardless ;-)
- 10 May 2006 12:53
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