Contextual Inquiry

We identify opportunities to increase revenues, cut costs, and generate goodwill with customers—even in a difficult economic environment. Our goal is to make the experience of interacting with your website enjoyable for the customer so that you can accomplish your business objectives. Everyone wins.

A usability test is intended to determine the extent an interface facilitates a user's ability to complete their most common tasks using a think aloud protocol.

Quality Usability Studies

Just about anyone can throw together a usability study. Asking your grandma to look at a website and tell you her opinion counts.

Putting together a valid, unbiased usability study takes a bit more effort and experience. Testing results are only as good as the test plan (which unbiased and thoughtfully prepared), recruited participants (who should represent actual users), and moderator (who should be neutral and imbued with the patience to allow someone to fail.)

Done right, a well design usability study will:

• Identify stakeholders and their needs.
• Tell you what's going right, and what's going wrong, with your website (or software).
• Prioritize changes and upgrades based on user generated data (rather than guesses about what your customers want and need).
• Help you decrease support costs, increase user satisfaction, and save on development and redesign efforts.
• Provide qualitative feedback and help improve your interactive experience
• Document a process and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Measure your users' behavior, not their preference. We know what people say they do, and what they actually do are two different things.

Different Objectives, Different Methodologies

Selecting the right usability testing protocol is another important component to developing a quality usability study. Study objectives heavily drive the the protocol used to assess a website's usability. For example, eye tracking isn't always the right tool to assess usability, even though it's often used. (Some firms even refer to eye tracking as the "sprinkles the cake," but it helps sell their services - at a huge expense.)

Traditional Usability Testing

Normal Modes performs usability testing by recruiting users who match your target profile and observing them as they interact with your website or application. Rather than depending solely on quantitative methods, qualitative usability testing helps us provide actionable recommendations to improve critical flows through your site by determining pain points in the user experience.

We then create a report that focuses on the data and design changes that will have the most impact to your business.

User Interviews & Research

Sometimes it's just helpful to have a more holistic understanding of what's motivating user behaviors outside of the application or process.

For example, we can build a great website that tells all about the services that a city provides. But only when we go to the call centers to do user research will we find that 90% of the calls are about three issues: garbage collection, parking, and holiday schedules for public buildings and services.

By conducting user research, we tap into the underlying motivations behind user actions and behavior, and we can better meet everyone's needs.

Remote vs. On-site vs. In-house Usability Testing

Normal Modes has the capability to conduct remote Internet-based usability tests, on-site usability tests at your facility, or in-house usability tests at our lab here in Houston, TX.

What type of usability testing do you need?

Well, that depends entirely on where your users are! Here are a few quick examples:

• Remote Usability Testing - Let's say you're a nationwide e-commerce retailer. In this case, your users are likely spread out across the country so it doesn't really make sense to test users from only one location. Since we can't be everywhere at once, remote usability testing is likely best for you.
• On-site Usability Testing - Let's say your developing a touch-screen kiosk for a manufacturing plant. In this case, you likely have very specific users and it only makes sense to bring the usability test to them.
• In-house Usability Testing - Let's say your developing a new website for Houstonians. In this case we can bring local users into our usability lab here in Houston, TX. This also works well for super-secret development projects that aren't ready for the public domain.

Let us help you decide

Unsure about what usability testing method is right for your situation? Let our seasoned usability team help you decide.

Contact us for more information about how usability testing might help your company increase customer satisfaction, while reducing costs and meeting business objectives.