User research is a fundamental step in creating a successful website. Focus groups and usability testing as tools for user research reveal lots of interesting information about your website and your users. By gathering user feedback, you can correctly identify user needs and make the appropriate improvements to your website. This is key information for enhancing your understanding of your website’s user-friendliness.
Let’s look at the difference between each field, their positive and negative sides and at which stage of the development process they will be most useful.
Focus Groups
To start with, a focus group made up of 6-8 representatives from the target market a moderator, meet to discuss their approach, attitudes and suggestions on your website. They try to come up with as many ideas and thoughts about your website and what they like and dislike about it.
Advantages
- It’s cheaper because more participants are involve at the same time
Interacting with one participant at a time takes up a lot of logistical resource for facilitating and providing a room and equipment to do the study.
- Your target market is defined in more detail and user opinions & needs are identified
By meeting real people face to face, you are more aware of their users than if you second-guessed them by using demographics information and some web trends. - The data gathered is excellent when you start to finalise concepts and ideas
This information can be used to help guide the design. If the participants explain how they expect the website to work, that’s gold dust!
- New ideas are created through exchange of thoughts among participants
Participants bounce ideas off each other, validating each other’s thoughts, and ideas can snowball in to more sophisticated solutions to website goals. This synergy leads to some excellent ideas being unearthed.
Disadvantages
- One dominant participant may influence thoughts of others
- If this happens, the moderator needs to balance the group so that the other participants don’t withdraw from the sessions.
- If this happens, the moderator needs to balance the group so that the other participants don’t withdraw from the sessions.
- Does not yield information on design quality and how well people use it
- This can be followed up with another group session, showing participants storyboards, wireframes and prototypes of your idea.
Usability Testing
In usability testing, one user and one facilitator interact with your website. The facilitator guides the user through the main tasks and evaluates their competency in performing the tasks in set scenarios and their view of the total experience. The interaction between human and machine (user and system) is analyzed and assessed with the goal of improving designs make it easier to accomplish the tasks in a pleasing way.
Advantages
- Takes longer because fewer participants involved in study
Only 1 participant can be involved in a usability study at any 1 time. This is so problems with the design can be identified for individual users. If users worked together to use a website, they would solve problems as a group, which doesn’t reflect how real users will interact with your site when they are alone. If lots of individuals struggle with the same part of your site, you can clearly see where the problems are.
- Data on individual user, his opinions and needs are identified in detail
The informal interviews that the facilitator can conduct with the participants is a great way to reveal the true thoughts and feelings of real users, which again is excellent information as you go on to improve your website and develop it in the future. - Focuses on user and system interaction and shows precise usage of website, including errors in system and of user
There are some problems you will never realise without watching people use your site. People do some very unpredictable things sometimes, that’s why tumble dryers state that it should only be used to dry textiles and not the family dog. You only learn that kind of thing by observing real users interact with your site.
- Considered more reliable as there is no external influence of user’s ideas and opinions
Running studies where the feedback is anonymized is a great way to get honest, impartial feedback. If people have to speak in groups they may censor their thoughts so they don’t look stupid, controversial or picky.
Disadvantages
- Study results ignored
If can be difficult to get management buy-in to usability and people close to the project overrule usability findings and rely on gut instinct.
- Usability testing done too late in the project
It’s important that usability testing is done early in a project. If it’s done late in a project, it’s too late to do major overhauls to fix serious problems. Companies stick to their deadlines, and you have to watch a website be released that’s obviously flawed.
When To Use Which Method
Focus groups are good when
- Performed in the early phase of the project
- There is not much or no knowledge at all about your target market
- You plan to develop a novel project but you don’t know what the market reception to it will be
Usability testing is good when
- Constructing a new system or website or modifying an existing one
- Incorporating throughout the development phase as a regular tool in determining users’ wants and needs
- Evaluating the functionality of your system
Conclusion
In conclusion, focus groups and usability testing as user research methods are a rich source of information about potential and current customers: their lifestyles, attitude and behavior. Using the right method at the right time can significantly improve the effectiveness of your website.
