I've been tasked with coming up with a way to quantify / asses the overall useability / user experience of our web application on a per-page basis.
What tools and methods do you use to achieve those standards and metrics?
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System Usability Scale?– Benny SkogbergCommented Jan 9, 2013 at 19:24
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As DA01 says below, there are many ways to assess usability. An appropriate methodology depends on the answers to a few questions, starting with: (1) how many pages in will be evaluated? The methodology will differ if there are few compared to many. (2) Do you need the appearance of objectivity offered by numbers, a written description of strengths and weaknesses, or an overall thumbs-up or thumbs-down per page?– user1757436Commented Jan 9, 2013 at 20:54
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Ooops. I ran out of time editing the comment above. Here is more. (3) Whose assessment of usability do you need - usability experts, end users, or somebody else?– user1757436Commented Jan 9, 2013 at 21:00
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@user1757436 there are quite a few pages in the app -- like 40-50. it needs to be assessed by our business contacts as well as our customers, and us.– KristianCommented Jan 9, 2013 at 23:23
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2 Answers
Since a user rarely experiences just a page of your site by itself, I'd say a per-page evaluation is of questionable value. All that said, 'ux evaluation' can be done a number of ways. User testing, user surveys, heuristic evaluation, etc. For starters, I'd start with a heuristic evaluation.
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+1 for heuristics. Nielsen's are the ones we've used in the past, they are usually a good start nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics Commented Jan 9, 2013 at 16:53
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for the sake of a fuller answer, can you please make a suggestion as to who's feedback should make up our heuristics data, and how many people's opinions would be appropriate for a reliable assessment?– KristianCommented Jan 10, 2013 at 19:57
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1There's no hard-and-fast rule about it, but you typically want people with some experience in what you are trying to measure. So in terms of usability and UX, you'd want people that have experience with usability and/or UX principals. One person can be enough, but sometimes it's nice to have 3 as it's good to bounce things off of each other, each person finds unique things, and having an odd number can break any stalemate debates.– DA01Commented Jan 10, 2013 at 21:04
You don't do an 'overall' analysis - rather, you identify the key user behaviours, then measure how often they're happening / being followed to completion using user tests and analytics.
This allows you to value the state of an interface in directly business-oriented terms and define measurable, specific tasks to trial in user testing. More importantly, it also allows you to get support for actioning your findings - if you can't quantify how a bad UI is harming business goals, how can you expect the business to fund further development?
answered Jan 10, 2013 at 13:46
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thank you for the reply. can you give some examples on how you go about collecting that information and the tools / methods you'd use to do it?– KristianCommented Jan 10, 2013 at 16:25
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@Kristian - I'd speak with the project manager or business analyst, ideally when a product / page is first being planned. If you're the PM, then the question is - what user activities are most valuable to the organization? This will depend on your revenue model and how you monetize your service. In e-commerce, it's fairly obvious ("Users need to find the products they want and buy them"), in other domains it can be a little less clear ("We need to encourage social media sharing as part of our 2013 outreach strategy") Commented Jan 10, 2013 at 17:08
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you may be misunderstanding me. I do have all of that information already. my question is about how you gather and record your data. are you suggesting this is simply throwing in booleans and response times into a spreadsheet? or is there a more grand solution?– KristianCommented Jan 10, 2013 at 17:19
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@Kristian - I don't really think you can 'score' matters that way. I don't really think this subject really lends itself to the kind of quantitative analysis you're hoping for. Commented Jan 10, 2013 at 22:07
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so, how do you keep score? how do you keep track of your results? is everything you do merely a discussion with no data to be kept from the exercise?– KristianCommented Jan 11, 2013 at 0:22