Importance of your users first click

An interesting article from Jeff Sauro in which he talks about how important the first click is. His research indicates that when the users' first click is down the right path, 87% eventually succeed. When they click down an incorrect path, only 46% eventually succeed.

Local government usability testing

I came across a blog the other day by the Camden Borough Council web team. Great to read about a group so committed to putting the user at the centre of a website overhaul. I suppose one positive from the ongoing rounds of cuts in the public sector - and we have to grasp these positives when they arise! - is an increased user focus in the field of web communication and service delivery.

Click analysis - Research group homepages

I recently ran a click analysis study across 10 research institute homepages in our Medical School. The study only collected data on visitors from outside the University network to exclude as many staff and current student clicks as possible. Unsurprisingly, user behaviour and priorities were the same regardless of the design employed.

Remote user testing tools summarised

If you're looking for unmoderated remote user testing, the choice of services at the moment can be overwhelming. This article goes through the different types of services available and lists a few companies you might want to try.

Homepages - good signposting is critical

Regardless of content, features and design, visitor behaviour on university unit homepages is pretty much the same. They're looking for a link to click and they do it very quickly.

Users scroll but rarely read

A couple of useful pieces of research saying pretty much the same thing. While users are happy to scroll, they typically give very little attention to information below the fold.

Both the eye tracking and click analysis reports recommend ensuring critical information is presented at the top, employing scannable layouts and utilising the foot of the page.

Eye tracking research findings

Jakob Nielsen recently summarised an eye tracking study he conducted with 21 users accessing 541 different web pages. He summarises:

Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.

The implications are clear: the material that's the most important for the users' goals or your business goals should be above the fold. Users do look below the fold, but not nearly as much as they look above the fold.

People will look very far down a page if (a) the layout encourages scanning, and (b) the initially viewable information makes them believe that it will be worth their time to scroll.

Finally, while placing the most important stuff on top, don't forget to put a nice morsel at the very bottom.

Scrolling and Attention - Eyetracking research summary by Jakob Nielsen

Click analysis research findings

Click Tale are a click analysis company and published their analysis of 80,000 randomly selected page views in 2007.

• 76% of pages with scroll bars were scrolled to some extent. 22% of these were scrolled all the way to the bottom.
• Page areas near the top of the page get about 17 times more exposure than the areas near the page bottom.
• Page exposure patterns are remarkably similar across different page lengths.
• Page exposure exhibits a small flat rise near the page bottom.

Scrolling research report part 1: Visibility and Scroll Reach - ClickTale.com


Scrolling research report part 2: Visitor attention and web page exposure - ClickTale.com

24 usability testing tools

This evening I went back to a link I blogged back in October on free and paid online usability testing tools. Very disappointed to find that the article now requires registration to read it.

So instead of registering, I just had a bit of a look about for someone else who's written much the same article. And here we are:

24 website usability testing tools - article from www.usefulusability.com

Like I said last time, as and when I try these out I'll blog about them.

Anyone around the University experimenting with these, drop me a line or leave a comment.

Loop 11 online usability testing tool

Another online tool I've been investigating - there seem to be so many available right now...

I've not set a test up just yet, but have tried out the participation demo and registered to get access to a set of dummy results and a free trial.

First impression is that it could well be a useful tool and I'm going to give some thought about what I'll use my free trial credit for. At $350 a test after the freebie though, I don't see this being something I use that often.

Loop 11 records and analyses the interactions users have with your website when undertaking a set of tasks set by you.

Advantages: There's no software for either you or your participants to install to access the service and the analysis of the data collected looks great. I almost always find summarising and communicating the results of tests to be a bit of bind.

Disadvantages: No video footage, no comments from the users. Instead you get details of routes through the site, time on page, screenshots, plus answers to any questions you pose.

So closer to a survey in some ways. I think this is reflected in the number of users they advocate you recuit. The maximum for any test is 1000.

The service is distinct from any other I've come across so far. It will be good for some investigations, and not so good for others. The trick will be working out how best to use it.

Certainly worth a look, if only for the free trial.

Loop 11 online user testing service

How little do users read? - Nielsen article

Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting summary of a 2008 research paper and his own company's findings around how long website visitors spend reading content.

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

This inspired me to look more closely at webstats. Unfortunately, Google Analytics only provide average time on each page so it only takes one person to leave a page open while they go and make a cup of coffee and the data becomes pretty meaningless.

However, my click analysis tool Crazy Egg provides a modal breakdown of time to click (and therefore time on page). So I can see x% clicked after 2 seconds, y% after 5 seconds and so on.

My focus has been on homepages - particularly school homepages full of text - and sure enough, most people read next to nothing.

How Little Do Users Read? - article by Jakob Nielsen

Crazy Egg click analysis tool

Click analysis tools

I've been using a click analysis tool - Crazy Egg - for over a year now and find it a useful addition to webstats. There's another notable click analysis provider - Click Density. I suspect that Click Density is a better, more sophisticated tool but I went with Crazy Egg because their free service was much more generous when I was dipping my toe in the water.

For me, Crazy Egg does two things that our webstats package Google Analytics doesn't do:

• It shows me which links are most popular on a particular page, when the same link appears more than once
• It breaks down time to click statistics into modal groups (less than 1 sec, less than 2 sec, less than 5 sec, 5-10 sec etc). Google Analytics only provides an average, which is obviously skewed every time a site visitor stops mid-surf and wanders off to make a cuppa.

It's great to stick click analysis on a homepage for a few days to illustrate with a heatmap all the click hotspots, and to show to site manager just how many people click through in a matter of seconds. That's the vast majority, in case you hadn't guessed.

All those carefully crafted welcome messages that just never get read...

Crazy Egg
Click Density