Free Usability Testing

YOU may have access to free usability testing

Yes, free usability testing is alive and well and even you, dear reader, can find it and use it. Free usability testing is also called “customer feedback” and is readily available in the form of comment cards, web forms, or telephone transcripts. At my company, I read transcripts from chat conversations we have with our customers. It clearly puts into perspective what issues our customers are dealing with, what products or services they are trying to acquire to help them with their issues, and any comments or feedback they have about usability issues, such as difficulty using web pages or web forms when trying to purchase services.

Now I’ll be the first to tell you that customer feedback in and of itself is not the same as conducting actual usability testing with users in a 1-on-1 environment. However, it is a great source of general usability feedback, and in the sense that it’s real users, trying to accomplish real tasks on your real applications, can be a treasure chest of helpful usability clues which point you in the direction of further sleuthing usability issues.

Customer Feedback is free usability testing

This customer feedback is a form of free usability testing, in the sense that your firm probably already collects customer feedback from a variety of sources, and customers will tell you (sometimes in painful detail) what’s bugging them or what’s making them unhappy.

The first trick is finding the feedback, and then the real tricky part is analyzing the feedback and knowing what actions to take based on any suspected usability issues found. Much of the customer feedback you read may not necessarily align with usability issues. Don’t fret, keep on digging. You may not be able to act on much of the customer feedback you read, again, don’t fret, simply note any issues or concerns that others in your firm may need to know about, and forward as necessary. Eventually, if you read enough, you’ll soon begin seeing a pattern of recurring comments about a particular issue or problem that is usability related, and THAT my friends is the free usability testing you’ve been searching for.

Analyzing customer feedback

When analyzing customer feedback, I try to bucket the recurring comments into three or so groups of usability related items:

The first group is critical usability issues, for example a large number of comments about a task in a web form that gives error messages. Critical issues are usually highly specific to a process or task and are narrow in focus. These are issues that if resolved, could add a larger amount of completed transactions for your form. Now please don’t expect the comments from users to provide detailed usability explanations of what the task was, and what the error was that causes the task to fail. Customers don’t understand the details of a process and more than likely are just going to say something like “your web site sux, it crashed on me.” You’ll have to do some sleuthing, but should be able to idenfity the issue fairly quickly.

The second group is important usability issues, which as the name implies are usability issues that should be addressed, but are not deemed “critical.” These issues may or may not be easy to fix, and may appear to be more broad natured. They are important in the sense that by addressing them, you can either fix usability issues or add functions or features that provide a better customer experience. For example, you may see many feedback comments from customers that are complaints about not having certain information available when they are reviewing their customer service account information online. You may not be able to immediately acton on this type of information, but by tracking the number of requests for this function over time, you can build a case for adding this new feature to your existing customer service application.

The third group is general usability issues, which is a bucket of either one-off usability items, or modest usabilty issues that you already know about. It helps to track these issues, if only to put forth a case of potential usability enhancements in the future. Examples of this type of usability feedback may be issues about the speed of the web site, or the inability to change the formatting of displayed information, or any other item that has to do with usability, but is not repeated in other customer feedback comments.

Usability Feedback in Comments

Although it takes time, pouring through the comments received from your customers is a great source of free usability testing. Don’t have feedback forms on your web site or in your internal applications? Get them! Make a case for why comments are so important to your organization. By using real customers, and their real feedback about your products, services or applications, you’ll be making use of a great form of usability information.