Usability Consulting

Have you invested significant time, money and resources on your website, only to find it's not getting the kind of traffic you expected? Do you have trouble retaining visitors on your website, or seeing repeat visitors?

Research indicates that people cannot find information they seek on websites about 60% of the time. As a result, your visitors experience wasted time, reduced productivity and increased frustration. The effect on your business is fewer repeat visits, loss of revenue, and customer dissatisfaction.

How can usability research help your organization?

TerpSys knows that the greatest expert in creating a website or application is the user. (See our TerpSys User-Centered Design Methodology). Creating a successful user experience helps your organization increase visitor trust, loyalty and satisfaction, so you get the most out of your online investment. By examining user needs through conducting usability research, we can help you to:

Increase donations
Increase your web site traffic and retain site visitors
Decrease support costs, by reducing time used to field troubleshooting calls
Save development time and costs up front, to prevent maintenance costs later on
Draw user deeper into your site and increase time on site
Help users easily find what they want
Increase trust and satisfaction among your users

How TerpSys can help you.

TerpSys offers a unique four-part Market & Usability Research Process that helps us to determine your users' needs, make recommendations, and help you implement customer-driven changes. Our process consists of the following steps:

Stakeholder Perspective

Understanding the Vision of major Stakeholders is an important information-gathering task during the early stages of the process and it contributes to increased usability and clearer strategy for the assessment. During this process, TerpSys meets with members of your team who have a vested interest in the website's success.

Our goal is to learn about the goals of your organization, identify your key competitors in the marketplace, discover and refine the goals and objectives you have for your website, gather information about your target audience, take inventory of the online assets, and determine the scope and functional requirements of your intended web presence.

Output: Stakeholder Perspective Findings Summary.
Comparative Perspective

Based on the competitors identified during the Stakeholder interviews, TerpSys will compare your website against four to six competitor sites. Our analysis strategically examines specific facets of the site such as Membership Application, Newsletter Sign Up, Navigation Strategies, Search, Resource Library tools, etc. We provide annotated screen shots and a summary of how your website compares to its competitors, with a simple thumb up or thumbs down rating.

Output: Comparative Analysis Findings Summary
Expert Perspective

Upon understanding your Stakeholders' expectations, and the offerings of your competitors', we focus on a principles-based review of your website. Expert reviews are used to identify high level violations of website usability rules. They focus on the functionality, navigation, consistency, and appearance of your website. An expert review can help predict likely problems your users are encountering on your website, without the expense of actually involving the users yet. However, expert reviews can only predict user reactions based on a series of assumptions about the users and their tasks. Therefore, we strongly recommend validating our expert review with usability testing that involves real users completing real tasks.

Once we have identified the characteristics of typical users, scenarios and sample tasks, our usability experts use a process called cognitive walkthrough in which we simulate likely user scenarios by stepping through the action sequence for each pre-identified task and noting any usability problems. We are able to draw on our considerable experience in the field of usability practice to compile a list of problems and offer realistic recommendations for improvement, based on recognized usability principles. An expert review allows us to focus future testing, evaluations, and revisions on the areas that most need it.

Output: Expert Perspective Findings Summary, Heuristic Evaluation
User Perspective
40% of users do not return to a site when their first visit resulted in a negative experience. 83% of users leave a site if they have to make too many clicks to find what they are looking for.

By identifying and addressing areas of concern to your users, you enable your site visitors to accomplish their online tasks more efficiently and easily. Providing your site visitors with better access and an overall positive experience means a greater chance of repeat visits and increased traffic, which, in turn, can promote revenue growth.

The User Perspective includes:
- User Interviews - to gain insight on the primary audience types, assess user experience on the current site and identify needs, motivations, and core site usage scenarios
- Online Surveys - to further validate user interview findings
- User Persona Portraits - to capture and consolidate user interview findings
- Card Sorting - to determine the best schema for organizing and labeling the information on your website
- Usability Testing - to gather real world feedback of your website using remote testing user scenarios. Sessions are recorded, analyzed, and summaries of key issues will be provided as part the recommendation.
About Usability Testing

The goal of Usability testing is to ask users to perform typical tasks with your existing website or web application while we watch, listen, and take notes. For each test, we identify specific concerns and goals and design a test to focus on those concerns.

We try to answer these questions:
- Are the test participants able to complete the task scenarios successfully?
- How fast do participants perform each task (successfully)?
- How many pages (clicks) does it take to complete each task?
- Do participants perform well enough to meet the usability objectives?
- How satisfied are participants with the site?
- What changes are needed to make sure that the site will enable more users to perform more successfully?
This information informs our proposed sitemap and wireframe redesigns with qualitative data. Usability testing can take place anytime before, during, or towards the end of the development cycle.

Output: User Perspective Findings Summary
- User Persona Portraits
- Online Survey Results Observations
- Usability Test Observations
- Card Sort Results
- Summary Findings
Note: As a result of working with numerous organizations that have geographically dispersed users, TerpSys has built skills in conducting remote usability tests. These tests allow TerpSys staff to observe users by walk through tasks on your website using a usability testing package that acts as a screen sharing device with many advanced testing tools.
Key Findings & Recommendations Report
Upon conclusion of our research, we synthesize all of the information gathered during our research and make recommendations based on input from all four perspectives. We compile this information in a graphical presentation that:
- Identifies "quick hits" and long-term enhancements
- Addresses key needs/motivations & impacts to site
- Summarizes online strategies to address needs

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