We at CanvasFlip believe that remote usability testing is like a small scoop of ice-cream — It’s small, quick to swallow, delicious, and provides just what you need — Instant way to attend to your craving! Usability testing can be used to quickly serve up profound UX insights in small, manageable portions.
That is why we designed a user testing platform which is perfectly aligned to remote usability testing. The best part of this is, you don’t have to restrict yourself to a single scoop of ice-cream! The more the merrier. Repeating the usability process only makes the design better and better.
First things first — Fundamentals.
While building user testing on CanvasFlip, we have aligned our development to two fundamentals—
- One should be able to test as early as possible (which means user testing with low fidelity prototypes)
- Teams should be able to test often, maybe even twice a week if iterations are quick. (Having said that, we made sure that the process is quick and reports are crisp)
Okay, but how do I do it?
Easy! Is your first design scribble ready on paper? Let’s begin the journey!
This journey will help you map you status in the project. I often come across a common query from first time users — Can I get my prototype made of on a third party tool, for testing on CanvasFlip? Well, no! One has to build his prototype on CanvasFlip.
Sending a prototype for testing —
First of all, you need to have a list of users whom you want to test with. Once that is in place, drop in their email ids in the input field and “Invite for user testing”. Well that’s it! That’s all you had to do.
What to do after you get all the data?
Honestly, after you get the user behaviour data, the ball is in your court and you can extract amazing amount of conclusions from it. But to make affairs simple, CanvasFlip presents the data to you in three forms —
- User videos and user flow
- Conversion funnel
- Interaction heat map
Here’s how most of our users use the user behaviour data —
USER VIDEOS
When users are done with their session, the entire recording will show up in the dashboard as user videos.
How to use it?
- Any project begins with an expectation — “the flow my user will follow”. But most of the times, user’s desired path is quite different than the expectation. User videos are the best way to compare the points of divergence and align the design according to the desired path.
- Not just this, one can also find out the hits and misses by the user. An intelligent way of finding out any left out navigations.
Here’s an example of a user video. This is when I tested the eBay prototype with my users.
There’s quite an interesting story around the desired path that I recently came across — The UC Berkley university was built in several acres of land, but the most interesting fact is that there were no roads constructed in the campus. A couple of weeks passed by since the classes started. That’s when photos were snapped out through satellite. The path that students took were marked out and roads were constructed accordingly. This was to ensure that foot traffic was aligned to the desired path. I believe aligning your design to user’s desired flow is the most important aspect of UX.
CONVERSION FUNNEL
Conversion funnel is a cumulative data that maps all your design screens with the drop-off on each of them. The entire expanded image gives a good estimate of the drop-off and conversion rate.
How to use it?
There are a couple of things one can conclude from conversion funnels apart from studying the conversion rate.
- Finding out the most popular flow — When we have a bulky app or website, the tendency is to create multiple flows to reach the ultimate goal. That’s totally fair to start off with, but with multiple iterations the aim is to spot that most-taken-path and optimise it. With CanvasFlip you can spot that for yourself early in the process.
2. Which CTA has a better performance — Measuring the performance of a CTA is hugely determined by the rate of conversion. With CanvasFlip, this exercise of A/B testing is all the more easier. Duplicate a prototype and replace just the screen with the other version of the Call-to-Action. Segment your users and test each version with a user segment. Compare the conversion rate on each prototype and confidently go ahead with the better Call-to-action.
HEAT MAPS
Heat maps are the visual representation of the density of interaction on different parts of the screen. Heat maps are just g-r-e-a-t for analysing the behaviour of your visitors. They can lead to insights you can’t find using other methods.
CanvasFlip uses hot and cold colours to convey information instantly.
Here are the conclusions a heat map can help you with :
- Which headlines draw visitors in and make them click
- What distracts visitors from your core content
- Whether your navigations are working
- if people can locate search options easily
Using these observations, you can take easy decisions about,
- where to place the content that’s most important to your visitor’s goals
- where most people interact with a page
- the difference between what men and women want from content
- how to use images effectively
All that adds up to an easy way to identify issues that hurt conversions. It’s a bit like having x-ray vision, and I can’t be the only person who’s wished I had that sometimes. 🙂
Huh! Enough said. :) Since you reached the end of the article I am assuming you loved what we built for you. Remote testing with CanvasFlip will surely save lots of money and time. Well then in that case, when are we meeting for coffee? 😉 And shhhhhhhh, “you have unlimited free user testing credits in your CanvasFlip account when you signup”. 😎
