SES Usability Testing Sessions

Can your target audience find information they require on your site quickly and painlessly? Social Change Online recently undertook Usability Testing for the NSW State Emergency Service (SES) as part of a requirements gathering process in the redevelopment of their website. Usability Testing is testing a proposed or existing website to see how usable it is: how easy it is to use and how well it meets the needs of the target audiences for the site. This is best conducted fairly early in the development process while changes are relatively

The SES Usability Testing Sessions were conducted by Social Change Online's Usability Specialist, Sue Doust. Sessions involved usability walkthroughs in which representative users were asked to perform a series of typical tasks using paper mock-ups of the site. Areas of confusion or misunderstanding and any difficulty finding information or completing tasks were observed and analysed. In some cases changes were made to problem pages and tested with subsequent participants to check that the changes alleviated the problem. For example, it was found that the term "Operations", used internally to describe most SES activities, was not understood by all test participants. It also emerged that prospective volunteers wanted detailed information about volunteer training provided by SES.

As the SES provides information and services to a diverse range of people with very different needs, a metropolitan location, Sydney, and a rural location, Lismore, were used for testing. Target audiences involved included current and potential SES volunteers, residents and business people in flood-prone areas, journalists, and school teachers.

Other methods for Usability Testing range from card sorting exercises to help determine an appropriate information architecture to eye-tracking research (automatically tracking eye movements across the screen to see what areas are looked at and how quickly information can be found). Generally tests are conducted with representative users of the site but in some situations, an expert analysis of a site is conducted by one or more experienced professionals using a range of criteria and evaluation methods.

There is a very strong business case for Usability Testing in all medium-large projects. The cost of testing is far less than the cost involved in "unbuilding" a site to fix a plethora of (often major) problems once the site is launched. It is a proactive process which ensures that a new website will be greeted warmly and used well by its visitors. People will only visit a site if it is of genuine value, they can find the information they require and use features which are relevant to them. Waiting for site complaints and then reacting is neither a cost-effective nor positive process. Lost business and lost members can result from an untested site.

Social Change Online has since been engaged for the project to redevelop the SES's website.