Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be running a user-testing workshop at the Engage Your Community conference here in Wellington. This will be the third EYC gathering I’ve presented at, and I’m really looking forward to it.

The workshop is called ‘Fast and Cheap Usability’. It’s targeted at people who haven’t done user testing before, and aims to give an overview of different techniques for testing different things, all of which can be undertaken at little cost (except for time: I will be emphasising that good user testing takes quite a bit of time: to recruit participants, to craft the tests, to run the tests, and to interpret and apply the results).

It’s a hands-on workshop, focused on getting people to try out the user testing techniques for themselves. We’re going to:

• talk about how you can recruit testing participants (and who you should be trying to test)
• run open and closed card-sorting exercises (to test how content should be organised in a website)
• look at ways to assess the usability of content (such as comprehension testing, and uncovering what content is most important to users)
• try some in-person testing (run live task-based tests for sample websites, including those of participants if they’re feeling brave/curious)
• try some online testing tools (including our own IntuitionHQ)

I’ll also be promising people some useful links, so here they are. Some of them go back a few years (the article on card sorting – still my favourite introduction to the topic – is from 2004) but these have been gathered for people relatively new to user-testing:

• Usability Testing Demystified by Dana Chisnell
• Card Sorting: A Definitive Guide by Donna Spencer and Todd Warfel
• Usability Testing with Card Sorting by Kayla Knight
• Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing by Nate Bolt
• Top 6 User Testing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them – Jeff Sexton interviews Patrick Sullivan
• Paper Prototyping – Shawn Medero
• Homepage goals – Derek Powazek

Staying up to date:

• Boxes and Arrows
• A List Apart
• UXBooth
• The IntuitionHQ blog, where Jake posts regularly about trends and topics in user testing, including this recent piece on A/B and preference testing.

And I was inspired by content strategist Kristina Halvorson and user testing expert Christine Perfetti when putting together the workshop – you should definitely put some time aside to check out their presentations from Webstock this year.

Kristina Halvorson on Content/Communication

Christine Perfetti on Adventurous Usability Techniques

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I’m currently writing new copy for the Boost website, which will be relaunching soonish with an updated look and a lot of new information. This has got me thinking about what’s changed about writing for the web in the 5 years that I’ve been doing this, and what’s stayed the same.

[NB: This post follows on nicely from last week's advice on launching with great content]

Let’s start with what’s stayed that same. You still can’t go wrong with the long/short rules:

• long page titles
• long headings
• long link text
• short paragraphs
• short sentences.

Other rules that have become good practice include:

• the disciplined use of numbered and bulleted lists to break up long pieces of text
• following the inverted pyramid style
• delivering one idea per paragraph
• strategic use of keywords in page titles, summaries and headings (without turning into a SEO-crazed keyword monster)
• using the F-shape to stack the most important phrases in headings and the beginnings of paragraphs
• writing tightly, avoiding padding and the passive voice.

Some things I think we’ve become a bit more relaxed about. We now trust people to scroll, and fret less about page length and getting content “above the fold” – a concept in itself becoming less and less relevant as the devices people use to view websites proliferate. (I have to include here my favourite text on scrolling.)

I’ve always had a bit of a bee-in-the-bonnet about link text. Thankfully, the days of ‘Click here’ seem to have passed, and people are writing link text that indicates where you’re going to be taken when you click. Generally, I prefer to be told/shown (and tell/show people) whether the link they’re about to click will keep them within the site they’re currently on, send them off to another site, or (pet peeve) trigger a PDF to start downloading.

Much as I love the Guardian‘s website, I’m often caught out by the behaviour of their links, which sometimes take you to another article, sometimes take you to an external site, and sometimes trigger a canned search. In the example below, ‘Internet Explorer’ triggers a search, ‘high-profile vulnerabilities’ is a link to another Guardian article, and ‘Responding’ and ‘an online petition’ go to two different external sites.

Links in a Guardian article: internal page, canned search, external sites

You can help people with the way you write your link text – see the WC3 guidelines on link text. Or perhaps you’ll read Nicholas Carr’s latest book The Shallows, where he argues that “the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources”, and be inspired to corral the hyperlinks that are normally sprinkled through your text at the end of the page, as Laura Miller did on Salon.

Then again. I often feel like a hypocrite when laying down the law for link text in a blog post. Blog posts, obviously, thrive on links, and often when putting a post together you use your link text in a slightly crafty way: linking to something incongruous to make a little joke, piling up a sentence full of evidence for your argument by pointing to different pages with each word. Blog posts are – along with other forms of conversational writing driven by social media tools – part of the changes to classical/corporate web writing that I’ll come to at the end of this article.

Another rule that’s stood the test of time: avoid jargon and use of acronyms (the TLA is a recurring cause of WTF on the Internet). Don’t use a fancy word if a simple one will do. That said, I’m a fan of the New York Times‘ look-up feature: if you double click on a word, a small question mark appears, and then when you click on the question mark, a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary appears in a pop-up box. Sure, it’s a bit of an insider’s trick, but it’s simple and unobtrusive. Plus, they report back on the words that stump people the most.

New York Times article with the look-up box open

I think the moral of this blog post is that good practice has generally stayed the same when you’re writing for a website, particularly a corporate or government site. But with the introduction of social media, things have changed.

Blogging, tweeting, Facebooking: these new channels demanded new ways of talking with readers, rather than telling them stuff.  And they introduced new challenges for people who write for the web. As Wellington web writing guru Rachel McAlpine observed in a recent blog post:

Yes, it’s true: some communication professionals are still unfamiliar with the working principles of content management systems, search engines, and accessibility. Some profess ignorance or horror when you mention Twitter, Facebook, or even blogging. They still haven’t noticed the C in ICT, or the technical in technical communicators. They barely know what the phrase social media refers to.

This is understandable if retirement is close. But tragically, some of these communication nuns are young, really young—in their twenties. Can you believe it?

First came blogging. For the first time, we were told that a personal voice – one that came from an actual identifiable individual – was important. More informal, sometimes opinionated, sometimes playful; the blogs you return to over and over again are the ones where you are intrigued either by the quality of the content or the quality of the writing.

Then came Facebook and Twitter. These demanded something else again. Timeliness became a new consideration: you have minutes to respond to a tweet. Brevity is obviously even more of a concern than it was with classical web writing, but then again, a number of newbies who I’ve shown Twitter to over the past few years have been surprised to see that “it’s not all in text-speak”. A real voice is even more essential than with blogging. When I started writing for the web, I would never have envisaged I’d be publishing things like this as part of my job:

Talking to people about digital collections on Twitter

As someone who enjoys writing, these new outlets were something of a blessing. Learning to write for the web had had made my style leaner, but it was verging on the anorexic. As Madeleine Schwartz noted in a recent post on the New Yorker books blog, writing about the Yahoo! Style Guide

What room does this leave for actual writing? Stylistic flourishes do not appear to be the book’s main concern. Instead, most advice is directed at generating more page views. All the guidelines have a hypothetical reader in mind—a reader who is constantly in a hurry, would never “jump hurdles” to find a piece of information, and must be roped in at all costs.

Writing for blogs and Twitter let me play again. Sure, the basics still apply. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and unnecessary verbiage won’t do you any favours. But you can’t learn this kind of writing from style guides, just like you can’t grow a personality from self-help books. The people who write for you on the web – scratch that, the people who speak for you on the web – are now found in your web team, your call centre, your development teams.

What interests me is when the two types of writing get mashed together. When you stream your tweets to your homepage, does one kind of writing make the other seem incongruous? Is your corporate site as fun to read as your Facebook page? Should it be? What do you think?

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This is the first entry in a semi-regular series sharing things that we’ve been looking at and reading recently …

Sarah (one of our project managers)

• Broadband becomes a legal right in Finland

• Guggenheim collaborates with YouTube and invites video submissions

Sue (one of our designers, recently returned from a break in the sunny northern hemisphere)

• Eye-candy and inspiration on www.citid.net

• Great experimental fonts (also: free!)

• Lighten up your winter blues: heaps of colour and shapes on Coolhunter

Alastair (one of our developers)

• Firefox 4 introduces more HTML 5 and CSS functionality. One step further towards the death of Flash? Still in beta so one for the developers.

• Excellent! Wayne and Garth spotted in the UK. Party on!

Rachel (our office manager)

• Artist creates masterpiece on an iPad

• World Cup 2010 statistics: all the key data for each team, from the Guardian

(Rachel notes that she’s not as much of a sports fiend as the above link might suggest, and also recommends data/infographic blog Cool Infographics)

Jake (who looks after our usability testing tool IntuitionHQ)

• David Gillis on Fusing Content Strategy with Design, in UX Magazine

• The Real Life Social Network, slides from a presentation by Paul Adams, Senior User Experience Researcher at Google

• Gnarcade – Video Game Invasion: for video game fans, and geeks in general

Courtney (that’s me – project manager)

• Aaron Straup Cope’s magical slippy map showing the world as revealed by geo-tagged photos on Flickr

• Significant Objects, an investigation of art and the market through short stories and eBay

• Swallows and Amazons, the current exhibition at Robert Heald Gallery, which is close to our office – on show until 31 July.

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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:

1. It has to be fast
2. The user must be able to clearly see the task they are being asked to perform
3. 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.

Ensuring the task is clear

Looking at the existing page design there was a lot going on around the task text. We had the number of tasks, the instructional text and the IntuitionHQ logo all fighting for attention.

The current design of the test page - click to enlarge

After a number of iterations this is what we have come up with. The most important change we made was improving the contrast of the task text in relation to the other instructional text. We have also removed the IntuitionHQ logo. The result is a much cleaner and clear area at the top of the page. For users it is now much clearer  what is required and there is less competing for their attention enabling them to concentrate on the page being tested.

An initial mockup of the design - click to enlarge

Above is the initial mockup that we produced. We used this as a guide for the designer to demonstrate what we were looking to achieve. The designer took this and produced the final design below. The final design keeps the task on it’s own and shifts the instructional text to the right hand side. To accommodate a wide range of image sizes the layout of the page has been shifted to a center alignment.

The final design - click to enlarge

Separating the test area from the page

In the initial page the image to be tested was place straight on to the grey background. This was OK but our review suggested that it was not always clear that the test image was separate from the rest of the page. We needed to make this clear while also ensuring that the task and image were clearly related. We solved this by using a border around both the test image and the task text. The result is a clear relationship between the two and separation from the rest of the site.

We think that these changes will make a real difference to the ease with which your users can accomplish tasks within IntuitionHQ tests.

We are busy implementing these now and will be putting them into production later in the week.

Do you think the changes will improve the user experience? We would love to hear your feedback.

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