Iterative design – working on IntuitionHQ to improve the user experience and usability
It’s been 5 months since we launched IntuitionHQ, our online usability testing application. We have not quite found the time to write a post about IntuitionHQ but will be writing a couple over the next few months to help you find ways to improve you design and your business with usability testing.
We have however been busy. Over the last couple of weeks we have spent some time identifying areas within IntuitionHQ where we can improve the user experience.
The first area we have focussed on is the test taking page. We evaluated the existing page and came up with a list of things we think the page needs to do in order of importance:
- It has to be fast
- The user must be able to clearly see the task they are being asked to perform
- It needs to be clear where the site ends and the test page begins
Making the list from the user’s point of view was extremely valuable and gave us a clear understanding of what needed to be done.
Improving the speed of the page loads
We started by looking at each of the steps the page takes when loading. It soon became clear that the round trip to Amazon S3 where the images are stored was taking far to long. Further investigation showed that we were searching for the bucket based on the URL each time. Fixing this has brought significant speed gains. (more…)
