Okay, Eyetracking. Eyetracking, remember this lovely diagrams? Where people are looking, bouncing the lasers around people’s eyes? Eyetracking records eye movements, so what you do is you sit somebody in front of your computer screen, your site. You’ll ask them to perform a task on your site and you don’t ask them to talk, because talking they’ll tend to look at you and their eyes will go everywhere. Just ask them to do their thing and you will track where their eyes are looking.
If you think about using the testing where you're observing someone, you’ll see where the cursor goes. Because normally where the cursor is, is kind of where they are looking subconsciously. And you’ll imagine they're talking aloud anyway. Personally, I don’t think this gives a whole lot more value than think aloud usability testing. It gives you a nice diagram, but in terms of usable information. The think aloud, because you're getting someone to think at the same time, you're able to ask the questions. Probably gives you, I would suggest, a better qualitative idea of what’s going on. So I'm a big fan of Eyetracking.
Lot of people like it, because it used a pretty diagram that feels scientific. And also it is quite like it, because once you buy this equipment, it’s very expensive equipment, you need to sell to service in order to get anything out of it. So think carefully about whether or not it’s actually giving you anything more than regular usability testing.
You can of course, after the session, if someone did have a problem. Ask them what they are thinking at that point, but it’s never as good. Because it flies out the head straight away. So these are the pros and cons which I just said. The pro, heat maps, pretty. The con, heat maps, people tend to give too much credence. They tend to read too much into very often.
Paper prototyping. Give you a sense of it, we haven’t got a great time left. Paper prototyping, this is where instead of having a proper website to test, you just design the website on paper. And you show them a paper design, and you say this is our homepage. What do you think? Where would you click if you wanted to do this? And then when they say “I would click here”, just give them a pen and they would go “I would click here”. Okay, this is the dropdown that opens. This is very hand drawn, this is the dropdown that opens. What would you do next? I choose that one. Well, okay. Then you give them a new page if previously drawn, previously in 24. This is what you get. What you do next?
So it allows you to try and get feedback on your design very, very early on before you bothered actually building it. The advantage of this is if you think about the number of times you designed sites, there's always arguments about that really high level of argument, how are we going to design this site? On the top, what are the sections going to be? What's the design philosophy going to be? Those sorts of arguments. They're good for paper prototyping, because you can get feedback on those questions really early on rather than just picking one that the boss likes and then building it up to a proper prototype. Takes time and money. Then you take the documentation, it takes programming effort and then testing it. Because at that point, you can't change the fundamental assumptions really anymore. All you can do is tweak and make the best of what you got. So this is what paper prototyping is quite good. Quick alliterative design at the beginning of the design process. And this is what we just talked about. Where you just put it front of them, get them to point and click, and then you just slide the next sheet under it.
Web analytics. Web analytics is supposed to be manna from heaven. It supposes to be gold. It suppose to be real life data and what people actually doing on your site when they sat at home with their digest as biscuit. With their toddler crawling between their legs. Which is like in sitiu high fidelity as you can get. So in theory, if you got really good web data, you really don’t need the rest of this stuff. You just understand entirely how people are using your site.
Unfortunately, I've got an unfortunate slide. Unfortunately, anyone who’s used web data knows it can be an absolute pig to get a site tag properly reported accurately and have confidence in the data. So very often, web analytics is not the solution to all your problems. It might help identify problems such as you know page one of the request process, you got a hundred people. Think your page got two people, you got a problem here. And then you probably have to go away and find what the problem is, either by tweaking the design and on your real live website, AB testing it, which can be great if you trust the data. If you don’t trust the data at all, which is sad and unlikely, but if you don’t trust it at all. Then you have to use video testing, paper prototyping, something like that. But AB testing is a very good way of trying to find out what's going on.
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