Ahhh… now… er… that shouldn’t happen.  Oooh, yup, that’s not at all clear.  Purrr, Meow, Purrr.  Hmmm… they’re not finding that and why are they trying there? 

Reviewing a usability trial recording is akin to playing the role of a detective.  You can’t be one of those detectives who, week after week, fail to solve the crime.  Nope – you have to instead adopt the persona of the real detective – Like Hong Kong Phooey’s cat Spot.  Hong Kong Phooey may have been the number one super cool guy, but he was simply an amusing figurehead to the real brains of the dynamic duo.  And so it was that I came to review the latest usability trial recordings, pretending to be a cat and preparing to eat the cat equivalent of humble pie.

Paws at the keyboard and watching the session back, it’s often subtle clues you’re looking for.  Why did they move the mouse there when you asked them to do that task?  Why did they think that function could be found there?  Observing the subtleties is one thing, but then trying to work out what led them to think that way is the real trick.

Some are obvious and relate to “signposts” that you have peppered around the user interface.  Button labels, icons and other describing text are typical examples of signposts that a user will absorb as they start to make sense of the interface before them.  Get a signpost wrong, and you run the risk of temporarily throwing the user down the wrong path, or worse, permanently obscuring important functionality.  Get this one right though, and an interface is so much easier to learn and navigate.  This is why solitary icons without an associated label are such a poor way to signpost an interface.  Icons are so ambiguous and can be interpreted to mean something different by every new user.  A text label, by contrast, can at least be translated and if carefully chosen, will be correctly understood by every user.

These are some of the first crimes to be solved by my wily feline senses.

Sometimes you only notice that something is a problem when you observe it being used, and I guess this was our biggest lesson learnt for these particular sessions.  We had a clumsy mix of dialogs and whilst the user’s managed to work their way through it, it clearly showed an inelegant and tortured path we were forcing them down.  As I observed this, the paws were typing at a furious rate.

So what next?  Well, in some cases it’s back to the drawing board to think of how we can redesign problematic areas.  Elsewhere, it’s making small signpost tweaks.  Finally, and most importantly, I need to return this catsuit to the shop before they charge me for returning it late.  It’s not my fault that my tail has got stuck in the zip and the suit designers felt it necessary to oversize the paws.  *sobs* 

12 inch fluffy paws.

Why?

*sobs*

Auntie Mavis.