In this article, we hear from an experienced UX designer with over 10 years of professional experience in the User Experience (UX) field on his top user testing tips on UX design for accessibility.

Carl Heaton, Co-Founder at H+H Works, first shared a story about a Bangkok restaurant project on the differences between women and men when deciding which restaurant to go to.

Carl received an answer from the audience of men sitting below that they often see reviews and prices first.

Unlike men, women often focus on how the restaurant looks so they can dress up. As a UX designer, he never discovered that there were so many user tests asking about what to wear.

“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
– Dr. Ralf Speth (CEO at JAGUAR)

Intro

“Imagine if we’ve been on any big projects. When we do the project, if we think good design is expensive, we spend 4,000 THB an hour for that designer.

The question is what happens if that designer does it wrong? As a result, the wrong design is going to cost the business a lot of money.

Carl has told a story about Domino pizza. Back in the days of pre-COVID, when life was different, and when we cared about these kinds of things.

There was a blind person who sued the company because he couldn’t order a pizza. The real thing is legislation.” – explained Carl

User Testing Tip 1

“Apps need to expand into new markets, don’t always trust the results from current users.”

This is a travel mobile app. Now their original idea was travel redefined. What they were focused on was functionality.

He can do all of this, he can plan the trip and he focused on it. However, he has to make sure that he goes the right way. Thus, he did a survey.

The survey has come up with the question of why did the customers choose this travel mobile app platform.

There are 12.5% of people who choose this mobile app platform because of the design or convenience of finding a good place when they’re new to a certain place, etc.

In contrast, most of the 50% of people prefer functionality when they choose this platform.

A little story behind this user testing, the whole point of it is to make our systems better.

Therefore, when they were testing the people who were using this platform which were not many people and they loved the functionality.

However, this platform did not have enough users, and lots of abandonment, and didn’t have anybody really signing up and staying with it.

He realized and wondered why he would design something for the very small people want?

After that, he recognized that he needed to design something new.

Thereby, he focused on the story, strapped the shoes on to start discovering, we’ve looked at revealing unique experiences, and then support the local businesses.

That’s what he focused on. Here we got the tip after the real story.

User Testing Tip 2

“Apps are in low session rate, add more actions and content to be part of the series.”

The other story from Carl, about a big retail real estate website. He did some testing about the website that he did. He showed us that quantitative tests are just as good as qualitative. However, quantitative tests are very interesting.

According to Carl, there is a 50% drop-off from all of that content there because it’s pretty pointless. He thought about what he could do, something a lot more interesting.

After that, he tried to look around, and he found some very interesting things from Sweden real estate websites that are really nice, this Sweden website has moved everything up and kept it nice and clean, and this website at the top.

Carl said, “This is the thing that we can do with data analytics. Carl has a story behind this data analytics. When he was when I was trying to teach his students about bounce rate and he was asking his students one question.

What is a good indicator that there’s something wrong with your page that people land on? Most of the students answer about design or navigation.

After that, instead of talking about design or navigation, he talks about the bounce rate. What was happening was that a lot of their pages had a high bounce rate?

With a high bounce rate, the websites had a lot of people reading it, but they were leaving from that same page. From here, data said something to him and he listened to it.

Look at the bounce rate through analytics and see if the intent matches the content. In this case we changed the on-page SEO to reflect the real audience.

If we have a lot of people coming to our blog, or our branding content, we have to add it as part of a series that will make people come back for part two, part three until part five.

These little things that we can learn from data a little number. These two things here set off an entire content strategy for one of the biggest real estate firms in Bangkok.

Another story from Carl, Carl has told about one of his favorite stories, Films Doo.

Film Doo came to Carl with a big confusion. Carl has asked Film Doo how many users do they have and they answer that they have 6,000 users.

Carl continued to ask his Film Doo that how many of those users are paying your money to?

Imagine this Netflix for independent movies. Users are gonna find Rambo seven on there. These are really good movies.

The problem was the people who were coming for some of the specific topic clips on Film Doo were not looking for what they had.

The reason he found out was because of Google Analytics. The bounce rate was 97% and this is user testing.

Carl comes up with new ideas that try to stop using specific clips as Film Doo keywords and try to avoid pushing more content with those words.

After that, this reduces the bounce rate from 97% from users randomly leaving and increases the website’s traffic from 5,000 visitors to 300,000 visitors.

The other interesting story from Carl is that he was working with a resort 35,000 THB a night. This is the resort website on the mobile app.

What they did is the development firm did this with the browser. The card did the test, and he got the key finding such as for users who have never visited the site or do not know exactly what it is about because there is no clear message.

From that, he did the UX design without doing UI design. The results show that at least the users can see the name special offers.

If we are not showing interesting content, then add some sort of loading screen and easily loaded content like a text, some nice text, or something like that.

In short, the user testing is not only about how users use the entire system, but what happens when they land on a page. What will the users see in the first second is more important and we need to optimize that?

To have done user testing for the platforms may have discovered that people mainly used the app for data analytics and not content creation, so recommended it be more data visualization and recommendation based.

The other story is about a business platform. Carl wondered why people use Facebook ad managers. The answers from people are to grow the business, get inspired, manage the ads and stay informed.

More than that, what he found out and people spent all that money to find out that people were using the app just to check the ads. People didn’t want to build or make changes to anything. People just wanted to check it, they can change it. Now it became a lot more visual, it’s a lot more summary based.

Other useful user testing tips to follow:

Users can’t explain what the platform’s for?

Carl has given us advice on what we should do to create a new onboarding process that focuses on how the platform’s unique selling point applies to a specific main point of the user base. For example, explain a video that narrates a users day to day activities and highlights where the pain point arises.

Users don’t know how to complete their task?

From what Carl experienced, we should look back to think about the function’s core intent to make sure that the journey is first seen, then use microcopy to step the user along.

For example, a Facebook ad manager landing on a landing page to then download the app. The Facebook ad manager will answer when it was Christmas time or was it a birthday. Eventually, there’s a lot of contexts we can think about.

Users seem frustrated when looking at a listing page?

As Carl said, we should develop the listing page’s scanning capacity. Drop the elements and improve the comparison between meta and key information.

Users scratch their heads when using the UI?

Focus on the visual hierarchy of typography and assure that the endpoint is specified in the main call – to – action. For example, opening a new account.

Users do not complete the core user task of the system?

Often this is to do with the assumption that people care. When we see people take and share on the platform.

However, most people find a discount, people will start sharing it everywhere. In addition, it’s not the right way that the founders often make up personas to make customers happy.

Therefore, to solve this problem, we go back to the basics of the user personas and match them with real people’s pain points, further ideation workshops with focus groups.

Watch the full live-stream of this talk: User Testing and Accessibility on YouTube

FAQs

User Testing Tips on UX Design for Accessibility