02.23.04
 By
Jared M. Spool
Is your web site chartered with encouraging people
to buy or use your product or service? Is it succeeding? It turns
out there is a simple usability testing technique that can help you
measure how your site communicates your product's inherent value.
Case Study: Zipcar
Zipcar has a very cool service.
If you live in Boston, New York City, North Carolina, or Washington,
DC, you can rent one of their cars for as little time as an hour.
The cars are conveniently located around the city and are perfect
for errands, such as groceries or visiting a doctor in the suburbs.
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Zipcar
customers love the service. They can't stop talking about how wonderful
it is. Many have given up their own cars and now use Zipcar exclusively.
No more paying for insurance, buying expensive gasoline, or trying
to find parking on city streets.
How does someone find out about Zipcar? Maybe they see one of the
brightly decorated cars on the street. Or they hear about it at a
cocktail party.
However they find out about Zipcar, they eventually end up at Zipcar's
web site trying to decide if the service is right for them. How do
the site's designers tell if they've done a good job? How do they
know what to change on the site to help prospective customers decide
if the service is right for them? lines populate the array
with values.
This is a problem that many sites have. Maybe you're
developing an intranet site for the Human Resources group. How do
employees know what value you've put on the site? Maybe you're working
for the EPA and have some great information on how people can help
protect the environment. How do citizens know the information is there
and how they can use it?
Measuring the Communicated Value
To handle these types of problems, we've been using a technique we
call "Inherent Value Testing." Inherent Value Testing gives the team
important information about how well a web site communicates the inherent
value the designers are putting into the site.
As a variant of standard usability testing, Inherent Value Testing
has the same basic structure: users, tasks, and the site you're testing.
The difference is in the details of the test execution.
For example, in a recent project, we used Inherent Value Testing to
help a consumer services client understand if new customers understood
the true value of their service. Our client was similar to Zipcar
-- they already had a strong customer base that was actively using
their services. This group of customers became an important resource
in our project.
Selecting users is a little different when conducting an Inherent
Value Test. For this project, we selected 12 users: six were existing
loyal customers; six were people who met the target profile but hadn't
used the service yet.
Testing in Two Phases
Inherent Value Testing occurs in two phases. In the first phase, we
asked the six loyal customers to give us a tour of the site, sharing
the features they used and liked the best. We listened to their words,
as they were explaining to us what they thought the benefits were.
In the first phase of our recent project, we learned that the existing
customers thought the biggest benefits of the service were the service's
price, the service's high quality, and the exceptional customer support.
(Almost every customer had mentioned how they were confident that
any problems that could arise would be instantly fixed by the customer
care staff.) It was amazing how every customer had practically identical
impressions of the service's value.
In the second phase, we set out to see if the six potential customers
see these same benefits when they visit the site. To do this, we started
with tasks created by the loyal customers. We based the tasks on what
loyal customers liked best about the site and the things they normally
did while there. We created scenarios that would simulate the need
for the service and asked the potential customers to 'role play' through
the scenario.
Surprising Results
As the potential customers used the site, we focused on what they
thought the service was good for. We asked them to tell us what they
liked and didn't like about the service. We watched where they went
on the site and how it convinced them to take advantage of the service.
Everybody was surprised at just how ineffective our client's site
was at communicating those core values that the experienced customers
had raved about. Rarely did a prospective customer encounter anything
that communicated the service's low prices. In fact, each customer
stated outright that they thought the service was more expensive than
familiar competitors, when in fact the service was actually cheaper.
Nor did the prospects see anything that communicated the service's
high quality or exceptional customer support. The prospects even mentioned,
without prompting, they believed the overall service quality would
likely be poor. They said this was because of how difficult they found
the site to use.
Discovering Benefits People Miss
Inherent Value Testing gives an additional perspective: the features
and benefits that even the most loyal customers have missed. Our client
discovered that there was a huge portion of their offerings that nobody
knew about. They knew that sales had always been low for those offerings,
but they had assumed that it was just because they were unpopular.
In our tests, we noticed that the loyal customers weren't visiting
the portion of the site that contained these offerings. As we were
wrapping up the test sessions, we deliberately directed the users
to that section.
The result: the customers thought the offerings were amazing. They
instantly got all excited about the products, spewing out ideas on
how they'd use these services.
One woman, who was an independent documentary producer, was ready
to purchase the service for every member of her cast and crew. She
had used the site dozens of times over the past few years and never
realized these services were available. She was extremely excited
about the "new" offerings (which had been available since long before
she started using the site).
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Inherent Value Testing showed us what was valuable
about the site and its underlying services. It gives us a concise,
easy way to learn how well the site communicates value and where it
falls short.
With the results of this technique, design teams can easily prioritize
changes. Subsequent testing can demonstrate that changes have improved
the design. Inherent Value Testing is one more technique in our user
experience toolbox that gives teams the information they need to create
successful designs.
Want to learn more?
This is just one of the many new topics that Christine Perfetti and
Jared M. Spool will be addressing in our upcoming Spring/Summer Road
show. If you want to know more about how to best produce usable designs
in your organization, you'll want to check out the UIE
Roadshow: Secret Design Strategies and look at the second day's
agenda.
About the Author:
A software developer and programmer, Jared founded User Interface
Engineering in 1988. He has more than 15 years of experience conducting
usability evaluations on a variety of products, and is an expert in
low-fidelity prototyping techniques. Visit http://www.uie.com/
for more usability information. You can reach Jared by calling our
office or by sending mail to jspool@uie.com.
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| From
the Forum: |
| Anyone using Yahoo! Shopping? |
I already have an e-commerce site that is
tied in to our inventory, account files, etc.
Would it be a good idea to have a Yahoo! storefront with
just a few items in it to get some more exposure? If it works,
it seems like an inexpensive way of getting included in more
Yahoo searches. ...
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