When you’re developing a website, intranet, extranet or interface, you’re using design to solve a business problem. But the first obstacle you typically encounter is that the various stakeholders involved have different opinions about how people think and work.
To solve your business problem effectively, you need strategies for validating or invalidating those stakeholder assumptions and producing additional insights that help create a great user experience. Those powerful strategies are research and testing.
The research portion takes place at the front end of a design project, with the goal of understanding how your primary users think about different content, terms, tasks and concepts, and how they see the relationships between them. Your primary audience may be internal (employees, for example) or external (clients, customers, the media and so on).
For this initial research, focus groups and task groups may be good ways to gather general insights and feedback. They also offer a means for testing and validating design concepts at a high level, and may give you insight into important factors that were overlooked.
For example, a corporate intranet project typically has to balance a variety of different priorities, starting with the business priorities. By finding out what’s important to users, you’re able to incorporate more intrinsic motivators that encourage users to visit the intranet more often and gain greater use from the resources there.
Even so, focus groups should be considered as a start, not a total solution. One problem that crops up in focus groups is a tendency toward groupthink and bias that distorts your research.
For instance, if your focus group includes people at different levels in the organizational hierarchy, the inequalities may affect the responses you get from different people. If Jack reports to Susan, who’s also in that same user group, Jack isn’t particularly inclined to say something that conflicts with or contradicts Susan.
In a larger focus group session, you might want to take note of those who seem more reserved and those offering dissenting or negative feedback. Consider asking these people for individual follow-up interviews: They may be able to offer valuable constructive criticism that they weren’t comfortable bringing up in a group setting.
Once you’ve completed your initial research and review your findings, you’re ready to start developing and testing design solutions. Hopefully, the research portion of your project has helped you identify good candidates for more in-depth interviews as well as subjects for one-on-one user testing. This user testing may be fairly low-tech — taking notes as users attempt to complete a specific task — or employ screen-recording and eye-tracking software to analyze how users navigate through the interface and where they encounter obstacles and dead ends.
The key here is test early and often. Some organizations make the mistake of waiting to start user testing until they’ve built the site or interface. At that point, if your testing reveals a serious problem with your design, you’ll have to go back and rebuild it. You’re able to save a lot of time and energy by testing your design solutions as you go, using crude wire frames and simple prototypes, and using your findings to shape the final product.
Making good use of research and testing improves the user experience, whether your goal is to create user-friendly tools that clients are happy to use, or to allow employees to quickly find what they need and continue doing their job.
One of the main challenges in the digital workplace is to overcome the “noise” of non-pertinent information. A good user experience draws on research and testing to curate information in a way that reflects a user’s needs, context and understanding of the subject matter, resulting in increased productivity, satisfaction and efficiency.
Learn more about implementing a great website or SharePoint intranet solution by contacting Portal Solutions.
Contributor: Adam Krueger, Creative Director at Portal Solutions
