How to usability test your Axure Prototype

Testing “early and often” has been the mantra for usability testing for the past 20 years. Whether it’s visual mockups, wireframes or a staging server, the sooner you can adjust your design based upon user feedback, the better the end results will be.

The folks at Axure have launched Axure Share – an easy way to upload and publish your RP files so you can user test them remotely. It’s free to use and many WhatUsersDo clients have had terrific results from the service – getting feedback as they build and iterate.

How to do it

1. Generate your prototype in Axure.

2. Upload your prototype to share.axure.com.

3. From within the prototype grab the “Link without sitemap” URL (you don’t want users to see the sitemap that Axure generates).

Removing the sitemap from an Axure prototype

4. Choose the “How easy to use is this early prototype?” template on the WhatUsersDo order form and paste the URL you just copied into the “Website to use” field.

5. Launch your test.

Need help?

Just contact us if you need help designing your test or want to find out more about our remote user testing service.

Enhancements on WhatUsersDo

We’ve just (31st August 2011) pushed some enhancements live that will make it even easier to setup online usability tests using WhatUsersDo. Here’s a quick summary:

1. Even more task templates

We just ran some usability tests on the order form (yes, a taste of our own medicine) and found that setting tasks was too hard for all but the most experienced users. So we have added in over 30 task templates that you can easily choose from and edit to get you started.

2. A choice of exit questions

We don’t believe in long exit surveys. Years of running usability tests shows that what people say afterwards can not be relied upon, is often inaccurate and subject to post-rationalisation. It’s about what users do (not what they think they did) after all!

BUT, asking a single question does have its merits – especially if it relates to perception rather than the specific interaction. You can now ask users a single (and simple) post test question that they type their answer to. By default we use a favourite of our friends at Conversion Factory:

“If there’s one thing that would have stopped you buying from us, what would it be?”

Of course, you can edit this question or even revert to the Website Usability Scale (a favourite of some of our corporate clients). And, if you’re a usability purist, you don’t need to ask a question at all!

3. Bigger Usability Videos

When you play videos they now size to your browser screen. This is one of those… “I can’t believe we didn’t do this before” enhancements. We hope it helps.

Please contact us or leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Getting started with Conversion Rate Optimisation

CRO (or Conversion Rate Optimisation) is all about maximising the number of visitors who take action on your website, be that subscribing, buying or making an enquiry. There are numerous tools (including our own) to help you do this, but where to start if you’ve not done it before?

Google have published a terrific free e-book that’s a good place to start. You can download it here.

A Google tool called Google Website Optimizer features in the e-book (it lets you run conversion experiments on your website),  and here’s a great list of alternative tools (but Optimizer is a great place to start not least because it’s free).

Writing realistic tasks for usability tests

Now that I have finally got round to writing about the best way to write tasks for usability tests, I’ve been beaten to it. This excellent article from David Travis of UserFocus classifies tasks into 6 categories and is well worth a read:

Creating usability test tasks that really motivate users

We’ve found that self generated tasks tend to work best for many of our clients. Here’s some recent examples that have yielded good results:

“Use the site to book your next holiday – think of somewhere you would genuinely like to visit.”

“Use the site to switch electricity suppliers – you can pause the recording while you hunt for an electricity bill or other offline information.”

If you need help writing tasks on whatusersdo.com then contact us and we’ll help out.

Using Live Chat to increase conversions

We love Live Chat at whatusersdo. It’s easy to implement, affordable and great for Customer Service. Now we are using it as a Conversion Tool in its own right to provide fresh insight into what visitors are thinking on specific pages and funnels.

Here’s how it started.

A few months back Google Analytics was telling us we had a problem with a specific landing page. We were seeing high bounce rates coupled with low repeat visits. We wanted to understand why that was happening and needed some qualitative insight into visitors’ thoughts.

As an experiment we installed Zopim (other Live Chat clients are available) on the problem landing page and sat by our computers waiting for visitors to ask us questions. A trend soon emerged, with more than 75% of people asking the same thing.

A few (that is sooo obvious!) slaps to our foreheads and we soon fixed the problem with a small (but important) copy addition to the landing page that did the trick. It was a quick and dirty but very effective way to understand the why behind what Analytics was telling us.

Of course it can’t work in every situation, but we found it insightful and an interesting way to understand what users are thinking.