With Usabilla it is easy to add additional information to your participants by adjusting the URL to your test. Adding this additional information just got a lot more useful, because we added filter options directly in the sidebar when you analyze your test.

Before I show you the filter options, I will quickly recap how you can alter URLs.

Adding information to participants with the test URL

Let’s say I want to be able to filter people based on whether they clicked on the link distributed via Twitter, or via Facebook. When I finish my test and activate it, I get a participate link, like this one:

http://participate.usabilla.com/1236

I can add information to a participant by appending text to the URL he or she will click. The text is composed in the fashion ?Category=Information, and added directly at the end of the URL. For my example, I will distribute the following two URLs for the same test on Twitter and Facebook:

http://participate.usabilla.com/1236?Src=Twitter

http://participate.usabilla.com/1236?Src=Facebook

I can add more information by composing the URL as follows: ?Category=Information&Another_category=Information. I might want to send out a link at different times, and track that as well, for example.

http://participate.usabilla.com/1236?Src=Twitter&Time=6pm
http://participate.usabilla.com/1236?Src=Twitter&Time=8pm
http://participate.usabilla.com/1236?Src=Facebook&Time=6pm
http://participate.usabilla.com/1236?Src=Facebook&Time=8pm

This is a straightforward example, but combine this with forms that can send information in URLs and you have a lot of power at your disposal. Have a look at our post about integrating Wufoo forms with Usabilla to learn more.

Filter participant data in your sidebar

You find the filtering options in your participant sidebar when analyzing your test. If you don’t have any added testdata, you will only see the Usabilla-specific participant information (total points, total notes, and ID). These are handy to filter out someone who left a large number of points, for example.

Default filter options

In my example test I have an additional ‘Src’ and ‘Time’ category which I can use to filter. In the example below I show all participants that have the value ‘Twitter’ in the category ‘Src’:

Fill in the information, and click the + button

I can combine filters to my hearts content! Here I want all the people who followed the link that was send out via Twitter at 6pm (beware that I use dummy data for this example, hence the same participants show up):

We hope you like this just as much as we do. Don’t hesitate to let us know what you think!

Related posts on our blog

• Enrich your Usabilla feedback with Wufoo surveys
• 5 Effective Ways for Usability Testing to Play Nice with Agile
• The perfect task: optimizing usability tasks and questions
• What Does It Take to Be a User Experience Designer?
• UX Designers: Culture Affects Your Job

Do you want to power-up your Usabilla test results? You can easily do so by hooking up a Wufoo survey to your test. Set up a form in Wufoo and redirect users to the URL of your test. You can include their answers in the URL and store these with your Usabilla test results.

Let’s have a look at a brief example case to see how simple it is to exchange data between Wufoo and Usabilla.

1. Come up with a test case

For this example case, let’s go with a simple one task test. Let’s assume, we want to find out if men and women pay attention to the same elements on our homepage. You might also be interested in the name and age of participants to provide some context.

2. Set up your Usabilla test

We’ve set up a simple Usabilla test like usual. This test includes only our homepage and one of our standard tasks: “Click on the elements that draw your attention the most.” We then published the test and looked up the URL of the test.

Figure 1 - Test URL for one Usabilla test

3. Set up a Wufoo form

To be able to use the redirect feature, make sure you have a paid Wufoo account. No worries, you can easily downgrade your account any time.
Now set up a Wufoo form that includes fields for all the information you would like to collect from your participants. For our test case, this means we included a field for participants’ name, their gender, and age:

Figure 2 - Wufoo form setup

4. Specify the redirect URL for your Wufoo form

We click on the tab “Form settings” to use a custom redirect URL, after participants submitted the form. Copy-paste the Usabilla test URL to the field in the tab Redirect to Web Site.

Figure 3 - Redirect to Website

5. Attach variables to your redirect URL

Next thing we need to do, is add the name and the age, and gender of the participants as variables in the URL of your Usabilla test. Everything you add to this URL will be stored with the results of this participant. This sounds complicated, but really it’s not. All you need to know is that you can add a variable to a URL by using the following format:

?variablename={variable}

In order to combine different variables, link them with &:

?variablename1={variable1}&variablename2={variable2}

In our case, we would like to store the Name, Age, and Gender from participants in the Usabilla test:

?Name=XXXXXX&Age=##&Gender=X

In Wufoo, you can access every form field with a unique API ID. You can use these API ID’s to tag the redirect URL. This way you will add the variables to the URL of your Usabilla test. You can access the API ID by clicking on the link Template Tags below the URL of your form rule.

Figure 4 - Click Template Tag to access your API IDs

You get an overview of your forms and the different fields. Every form field is assigned one unique API ID.

Figure 5 - Every form field has a unique API ID.

To access the content of a form field, replace variable with entry:Field+API ID. In our case, the API ID for name is the number 8, for age it’s the number 6, and for gender 5. We therefore access our participants name, age, and gender with the following string:

?Name={entry:Field8}&Age={entry:Field6}&Gender={entry:Field5}

Last thing we have to do, is add the variables to our redirect URL:

http://participate.usabilla.com/6576584364ec3d5c7cbbb0?Name={entry:Field8}&Age={entry:Field6}&Gender={entry:Field5}

Figure 6 - Customized redirect URL with variables

In order to later identify our different participants and link them back to the data in Wufoo, it can be handy, to also include a Wufoo participant ID to the URL. This ID makes sense if you ask for more information than you want to transmit in the URL. To include a Wufoo participant ID, just add the following variable to your URL:

WufooID={entry:EntryId}

Figure 7 - Customized redirect URL with variables & Wufoo ID

6. Analyze customized test results

Once you have invited participants to participate in your test, you can analyze your test results with Usabilla just as you are used to. Usabilla automatically displays all customized variables that you included in the redirect URL.

Figure 8 - Analyze both Wufoo and Usabilla data together

With the new filter feature, you can filter your results. For example, choose one of the variables you imported from Wufoo and filter all participants that match a defined condition.

Figure 9 - With the variable gender as filter and can select only female participants

Related posts on our blog

• Participant information and the new filter feature
• How the leading Dutch news network was improved with user feedback
• Why do you trust Mint? Takeaways from a visual survey
• Using Usabilla for simple A/B testing
• How Beauty Brands Seduce You With Emotional Design

We made it easier to make your test go viral. From now on, tests created with a paid plan have an ‘Enable Sharing’ checkmark in the test details:

This option is always enabled for tests created on a free plan. When enabled, your participants can click on a Facebook and Twitter button at the end of the test, which make sharing the test much easier:

Good luck testing!

Related posts on our blog

• The paradox of technology and 5 ways to avoid it
• How the leading Dutch news network was improved with user feedback
• 5 Quick wins for your website’s user experience
• The power of colors on the Web
• Five things you can test under five minutes

You created a Usabilla test, and you want to get as many participants as possible. Here is a tip that will help you create a default twitter message that your participants can spread. In this way you’ll encode your tweet into a URL that you can embed to the “Redirect URL” in your Test.*

Redirect users to a default twitter message you created

Step 1: Make the “Invite Participants” URL twitter-friendly by shortening it.
There are number of services out there. Our favorite is bit.ly

Copy the “Invite participants” URL,

and paste it to bit.ly to shorten it.

Step 2: Type your message into a URL Encoder/Decoder.
Don’t forget to include the short URL you created in Step 1.

Step 3: Add the encoded URL from Step 2, after http://twitter.com/?status=

and press enter. Voila!

*Alternatively, you can embed the URL in your thank-you page and ignore the Redirect URL.

You want to see how it works in action? Participate in this short test.

Related posts on our blog

• Participant information and the new filter feature
• Enrich your Usabilla feedback with Wufoo surveys
• Usabilla’s Monday Tweet Scoop
• How user scenarios help to improve your UX
• 5 Effective Ways for Usability Testing to Play Nice with Agile

Hi %YOURNAME:%,

In some situations, a test calls for a more personal welcome message than a variation of ‘Dear participant’. I’m glad to announce that as of today, our developers made this possible. We are humans after all, not machines. The sound of our name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language. If you don’t believe Dale Carnegie, believe the research that shows personalization increases response rates.

Personalize your introduction

A personalization tag and URL

With a little bit of magic, paid accounts now have the ability to personalize the introduction and ‘thank you’ text of tests. This is done by adding a custom tag in the test, and using a personalized URL. The basic format of the personalization tag is %<variable name>:<default value>%, and the URL is customized by appending ?name=variable+name at the end of the test URL you send out. See this example:

<h1>Hello %name:you%!</h1>

Assuming the URL to start your test is http://www.usabilla.com/rate/20a/start, by adding the ‘name’ get parameter the message will be personalized, so if you direct the user to http://www.usabilla.com/rate/20a/start?name=John+Doe, the resulting message will be:

<h1>Hello John Doe!</h1>

The string between the colon and the ending percentage sign of the personalization tag is the default value, should someone access the test via the original URL, they still can get greeted the boring, impersonal way:

<h1>Hello you!</h1>

Obfuscate the URL you say? Sure.

Technical bonus for those familiar with ROT–13 and base64 encoding: these can be used by adding the letter r or b before the name= part in the URL. The John Doe in our example can be translated as http://www.usabilla.com/rate/20a/start?rname=Wbua+Qbr or http://www.usabilla.com/rate/20a/start?bname=Sm9obiBEb2U=. This way, the personalisation of the URL is not obvious. You can easily convert text to ROT-13 here, and work some base64 magic over here.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. We will gladly help you with this new feature.

Related posts on our blog

• No Related Post

Usability testing has been a fundamental tool in the UX arsenal for decades now. The value of actually meeting your customers and letting them experience your product makes a significant impact to the shape of that product. In it’s most formal version, testing can be a multi-day, multi-thousand $/€ process that delivers final analysis days if not weeks later. With many organizations moving to an Agile philosophy and methodology, UX practitioners are finding it difficult to integrate formal usability testing into this faster-paced, iterative approach to software development.

See? Lions and zebras can get along. So, too, can Agile and Usability Testing.

The main challenge is time. The need to keep the teams moving forward, coupled with typical two-week development cycles between releases (aka sprints) doesn’t provide an obvious point to insert testing. Indeed, fitting a formal usability testing cycle into a series of two week sprints is challenging if not impossible. Instead, consider the following techniques to help get that critical customer feedback and still keep your team’s momentum.

1. Start small.

Jakob Nielsen has proven through scientific method that 5-8 is the optimal number of participants for qualitative tests. Consider testing only 3 people each time instead. The goal of agile usability testing is to clear the boulders from the road – not to provide pixel-level design direction. Three participants will, very quickly, validate (or not) your product’s core workflows and give your team a sense of where to focus next.

In addition, three participants take less time to test than 5+. Whereas a traditional rubric would have a team tied up for a day or two, a 3-person study can be completed in a morning. This is especially helpful if you don’t have a dedicated research staff. Your UX generalists can test, get feedback quickly and be back optimizing the design within one day.

Finally, three participants are cheaper. There is greater value in testing multiple iterations on more customers than one design on many customers. It allows you to move forward more quickly and keep your Agile team’s momentum.

This approach assumes you are performing moderated usability testing in the context of a lab, work site or some other location. As an additional data point, consider using remote usability testing as a way to provide additional perspective on your findings.

2. Test *every* week.

Pick a day (preferably not Monday or Friday) and make that your “testing day.” Every week, on that day, you’re in the lab, coffee shop, or customer site testing. Make it clear to your teams that this is testing day. Put recurring meeting invitations on your calendar and forward out to stakeholders. The night before testing day, send out a reminder with a participant schedule.

The goal is to make that day synonymous with testing. Teams should stretch to get work into that day’s test and use the cadence to drive productivity.

What ends up happening is the organization becomes accustomed to a steady stream of qualitative insight coming from the UX and product teams. Testing day becomes a target for quick-turnaround validation and the team becomes almost reliant on that stream to ensure the quick decisions made at iteration planning line up with business and user goals.

In weeks where testing day gets de-prioritized (hey, it happens), a concurrent micro-study using an automated online tool can maintain the flow of insight until you get back on track.

3. Show them whatever you have ready.

Customers will react to whatever you put in front of them. Yes, the reaction will differ based on what that item is or it’s fidelity but you’ll get *some* feedback — and that’s much better than nothing.

If you have code in production or a qa environment, show it. If you have wireframes or mockups, show them. If you can string together a series of mockups in fireworks, visio or even PowerPoint, do that and show it to real customers. A napkin sketch is also viable. Anything that will get your ideas in front of users will provide value. Even if you have nothing, it’s still worth sitting down with a customer and talking about their pain points.

4. Invite everyone (or bring the testing to them).

*Note: this tip assumes you have some kind of lab onsite. If you don’t, and typically do remote usability testing, guerrilla testing or site visits, point #5 below is most crucial to your success.

Key to getting the findings from these weekly tests into the iteration is buy-in from the rest of your scrum team and the organization as a whole. The most effective way to do this is to get the engineers, product managers and stakeholders to the testing sessions.

Most testing software broadcasts over your local network and if yours doesn’t you can always use Webex or GoToMeeting to broadcast. Setup multiple viewing areas convenient to your team. Ensure they know where to go and how to turn viewing on.

Another option is to enable viewing at each person’s desk. Again, most usability and general screensharing software allows this. This is most convenient as it doesn’t require the team to go anywhere to participate.

After viewing one or two customers the team gets a sense of where the problem areas are leaving you free of the responsibility of convincing them later. In addition, most team mates start to like the immediacy of the feedback on their work and start attending regularly without much reminding.

5. Report back quickly.

This one is critical. Turn feedback around to your team and to the organization as quickly as possible. No need for a fancy report or designed layouts. Type up a quick executive summary followed by recommendations for the pain points discovered and send out via email. Many tools offer some kind of findings visualization that allows you to, very quickly, generate a scatter plot or heat map of user activity. Ideally you should keep a copy of the findings in a commonly accessible place like a wiki or shared folder.

The goal here is twofold. One, you are getting customer feedback to the team so they can adjust their work accordingly. The other goal is to tell the broader organization that, despite moving quickly, you’re validating your approach with real people.

*5.5 – Use an outside recruiter.

Getting the right customers to your studies is critical to the validity of your findings  Keeping up the pace of recruiting participants to your studies on a weekly cadence, however, is a time consuming endeavor. It is highly recommended that you find a resource external to your team to perform this task. If you can afford it, hire a recruiter who specializes in this task. If not, minimize time on task for this by spreading the work across the team using a shared calendar.

Agile development practices pose some challenges to traditional usability testing methods. However, with a bit of modification and a focus on outcomes as opposed to output, getting to validated learnings can be successful and rewarding.

What’s been your experience? Share your feedback in the comments.

This is the first guest post on our blog, and we plan to do more. Interested in writing a post for us? Please contact loucas@usabilla.com

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• How user scenarios help to improve your UX
• The perfect task: optimizing usability tasks and questions
• Improving usability for participants
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Lets dish out some quick ways to test and improve your product. Long tests with a lot of tasks certainly can have their place (for example in the early stages of a design). However, many of our customers are improving their website by running multiple, recurring, and short tests.

Recurring tests are easy to setup and manage. They are of the ‘set and forget’ type. Participating only takes a couple of minutes and is fun to do. It’s also a good example of agile design: small improvements can be made to the existing product quickly. Can’t you just taste the low hanging fruit?

On to the examples!

1. Time and measure your main call-to-action

Test your call-to-action by asking “Where would you click to start to use this product?“. This way you can find out how long it takes users to make a decision, and if that decision was correct. This will measure the effectiveness of your call-to-action button inside the context of the rest of your product. See the post by Paul on a call-to-action comparison of different sites to see how other sites perform on this test.

 

Call-to-action test on Vimeo.com

2. See how users go about contacting you

Don’t have your doors closed to your customers. Make it easy for them to find you and contact you with testing the effectiveness of your contact link with a Usabilla test. On most sites only a small portion of your visitors will click on the contact button or link on your site. This means web analytics will not give you a lot of useful data to work with. With a Usabilla test, you can find out which element users click when you ask them to drop you a line. You can also see how long it takes them.

3. Get context-sensitive feedback on design elements

Imagine you are a web designer and made a header for a new site. Instead of directly asking around for feedback, setup a Usabilla test with the design, and invite a couple of friends and/or respected peers. You can explain what kind of feedback you are looking for and wait for the results. Because the participants can stay anonymous, feedback will tend to be more honest. Also, the feedback will be visible right on the design. This makes confusing feedback about ‘that third yellow button on the right’ a thing of the past.

4. Find out which elements makes people trust you

A Usabilla test can give thorough insights in your product with subjective questions like: “Which elements make you trust on this website, and why?“. Usabilla visualizes feedback in heatmaps, so you can see which elements people pick out. Participants can also can leave notes behind, right where they click. See our test about trust of the Mint website for details on measuring trust.

 

Collected feedback on the task “Which elements do you trust, and why?”

5. Test the wording used in your product

The wording of your copy, hyperlinks or other elements on your page can have a big impact on your users. You can A/B test your designs with different wording as explained by Sabina in the post about different worded copy on the NesCafé site. You would be surprised how intriguingly worded content can make your users more eager to explore your site.

What to take away from this

With tools like Usabilla, usability testing is no longer restricted to expensive face to face solutions. You can ask your following on Twitter or Facebook to help, mail your newsletter subscribers or poll users on your site. The way Matthew setup his test is a good illustration of how to quickly find participants.

Using recurring small remote tests, testing your product is not a one-off deal anymore. You can easily integrate them in your day to day workflow. The results will be worth it. Setup your free account, so you can test your own product.

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• How the leading Dutch news network was improved with user feedback
• Underdogs beat Expedia in usability showdown
• How Beauty Brands Seduce You With Emotional Design
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In our post Craft better content with 3 basic communication models we talked about different levels of communication and the impact of their absence on the message we communicate. In this post we go a step further and take a look at test questions and how to make sure our test participants understand the questions we ask, and feel comfortable to answer them.

Task or question

Usabilla offers two kinds of test questions: One-click tasks and open questions. A one-click task only, includes one answer option. One-click tasks can be used for A/B testing, measuring performance, or to find out about questions like: How do people approach my website?, Where do they expect to find information about xy?, or Where do they click for action xy?.

Open questions on the other hand contain multiple answer options, are more general, and participants can add notes to share their opinion. Open questions can be used to collect feedback on questions like: What do users think about my website?, Do they trust me?, or Do they like my design?

Short and sharp

There are two formal aspects to consider when designing test questions. First of all, try to keep your test questions as short and precise as possible. No one likes to read a novel when asked to participate in a short survey. So, keep your participants motivated by sparing them any unnecessary reading. Secondly, be specific. The broader your questions are, the more diverse the answers will be. Know what you want to test and formulate specific questions to get the information you are looking for.

Focus on your participant

As with anything that you do for your clients, a Usabilla test should be user-centred. Keep in mind the missing communication channels and that your participants cannot ask questions halfway through the test. The first advise we give here is to keep it simple. Use language that is easy to understand and try to avoid jargon. Jargon might either scare participants off or alter your test results because questions were misunderstood.

Be aware of your participants’ background and foreknowledge. Don’t expect them to be experts in your field, unless, of course, they are. If you feel that certain information is needed to understand your question, offer it. If you are uncertain about your participants’ level of foreknowledge, you might want to offer optional extra information and mark it as such. This way participants can choose for themselves if they want to read or skip it.

Last but not least, be cool, polite and kind. Remember, you want something from your participants, keep that in mind when designing your questions, introduction, and thank-you pages.

Prevent priming

Priming is the increased sensitivity to a stimuli due to prior exposure to a similar stimulus. Don’t worry, this sounds way more complicated than it is. Let us explain: A lot of times, we want to test whether or not, or how easy users find certain elements on our website. For example we want to find out how long it takes participants to find the ‘sign up’ button. Now if we ask: “Where do you click to sign up for our product?”, we prime our participants with the words “sign up”. This means they already know exactly what to look for and are likely to find the button faster than if we had avoided the exact wording. An alternative, neutral question would be: “Where do you click if you want to start to use our product?”. Try to not prime your participants and choose words for your questions that do not occur on your test interface.

In short…

To sum up, we can say that a test question is not necessarily a good test question. We have identified several aspects to keep in mind when setting up your next Usabilla test. Good user-centered tasks should be short and precise, simple, and prevent priming as much as possible. It’s always a good idea to do some test runs of a test with a selected group of users, colleagues or friends and double check your questions before launching your test for a bigger audience. Our preview mode enables you to dry-run a test without storing any data. Ask your guinea pigs for feedback on spelling, writing style, and comprehensibility.

Further reading

In the chapter on Automated Research in their book Remote Research, Bolt & Tulathimutte offer very nice examples on task specificity and priming.

Related posts on our blog

• Transparent Usability
• 5 Effective Ways for Usability Testing to Play Nice with Agile
• Remote usability: a comparison of online services
• How the leading Dutch news network was improved with user feedback
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There are many many online tools out there that help you test and improve almost any aspect of your website. It can be very convenient to not only look at these tools separately, but to combine their advantages into one single test. Matthew Niederberger, a specialist when it comes to online optimization, shares his experience with such an ‘hybrid’ test case on his blog actualinsights.com. We are very happy to get some great insights about how Matthew set up a complete usabillity test in only three hours combining Usabilla with Wufoo, Kampyle, and Mailchimp. Aim of the test was to find out about users preferences for different design variations.

First, Matthew set up a Usabilla test which included the different design variations and carefully thought through test questions. Secondly, he added a Wufoo survey to the Usabilla test in order to collect additional valuable information from his test participants. He used Kampyle to identify participants and set up a panel for his test. With Mailchimp,Matthew created a mailing list based on his panel, set up a customized invitation email including a call-to-action button, and sent out the invites to his participants.

It seems that this approach just has been the right one: “We found the answers we needed with 19% of the participants without giving any incentive other than the guarantee that their voices would be heard and acted on.”

See Matthew’s post Free usability testing, no really! for the full story.

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• The perfect hyperlink: choose your words carefully
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• My time as an intern at Usabilla
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Option 1: Redirect users from Usabilla to SurveyGizmo

(1) Redirecting users to Surveygizmo and (2) adding the ID of the participants to the redirected URL.

Option 2: Embed a survey on your thank-you page

Note: the iframe option is not available for free accounts.

Copy iframe from Surveygizmo.

Go back to your Usabilla test, and paste the code in the custom thank-you text.

Paste iframe to custom thank-you note in Usabilla.

Tadaaa! You have embedded SurveyGizmo in the thank-you text.

Embed survey in thank-you text

To see the results with the ‘?ub_pid=#######’ variable of your participants, you just have to follow the next steps in SurveyGizmo:

Export SurveyGizmo report in CSV/Excel

Include URL variables in report

Select URL variable: ub_pid

URL variable in an Excel report

Click here to see it in action in one of our demo surveys:

http://usabilla.com/rate/17990670714d9dca1f6085f/start

Option 3: Submitting form data to a Usabilla test

Need help?

Feel free to contact us if you need any help  combining your Usabilla test with an external survey. We’d be happy to help you to set up a test, export your results, or combine Usabilla with other tools.

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• Feeding the hunger of data junkies with Google Docs
• From Plain User Testing to an Integrated UX Approach
• The paradox of technology and 5 ways to avoid it
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