Using QFD to prioritise UI improvements
The key to developing highly usable website is to test early and often. One of the many ways of measuring usability is to write clear tasks and gauge the user interaction from end-to-end by using a think-aloud protocol.
How to identify top tasks?
Top tasks can be determined by talking to users and have them describe their tasks. But first, it is important to know who your users are and their goals. What is the main thing that they are here on your site?
Another way of identifying top tasks is to dig into the search log and call-center data. Find out what are the common issues that your users are experiencing.
You may also take a look at your competitor site and gather some useful points on what makes users visit your site instead of theirs and vice versa.
Once you are done in brainstorming the tasks, the next step is to have the list of tasks be ranked in importance by 200-300 users to determine the top 5 tasks.
Quality Functional Deployment (QFD)
Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) is a design planning process driven by customers. This method is useful as it reduces product development time, cut start-up & engineering costs, reduces time to market and design changes which will aid in lower rework, time saving and quality improvement.
Everyone knows the website needs improvement but your engineers hate to tell you that it’s impossible to fix everything. The key question is what should be fixed first.
QFD Matrix
Top user tasks:
- Check balances : 80%
- Make a payment: 65%
- Transfer money: 40%
- See account activity: 75%
- Cancel payment: 20%
Stakeholder’s tasks (requests for enhancement):
- Transaction filter
- Customize views
- Balance by date
- Integrate promotions of related products
Stakeholders tasks are tasks or features that your organization wants to focus on. Each task is placed in the following scale in terms of relationship between voice of the customer and voice of the company:
9 = Direct and strong relationship
3 = Moderate relationship
1 = Weak/Indirect relationship
Blank= no relationship
After the values are being calculated, it is clearer to prioritise the improvement work that matter to the users.