Making Sense of Your Results You can use affinity mapping to visualize trends in your testing observations. You or your stakeholders can prioritize these insights and use them to justify changes to your designs.
Keep possible solutions separate from observations.
Correct: People had a hard time locating the search bar.
Incorrect: The search bar should be more discoverable.
Formal Reporting Methods Formal reporting methods are more common if there is an outside research team. This may result in a research report.
Research reports may include:
A recap of the study’s goals, its methodology, participant demographics, summarized high-level findings, details of meaningful findings, and close with an emphasis on action items.
Here is a research report template put out by the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy. Students can download their own copy here.
Informal Reporting Methods Informal reporting methods are the most popular means to communicate your findings. They’re perceived as faster and don’t include unnecessary items.
Possible outputs: A slide presentation, a bulleted list, a short email summary, quotes, video/audio clips.
A Sample Usability Report The following is an excerpt from a usability report created by my team for Fly Dubai’s web and mobile site. Far more issues were reported than shown here; this is meant to give you a taste our reporting.
We started with a summary page:
Summary
Two UX architects evaluated flydubai.com
We tested the mobile usability of booking a round trip for flydubai and Alaska Air, an airline site ranked highest in customer satisfaction in North America by JD Power and Associates for benchmarking.
During this process we found many issues that hampered usability and user experience. The most significant of these are discussed in this report.
flydubai has some great functionality, but we found that it is not presented clearly.
We recommend performing a UX overhaul with minimum disruption to the underlying functionality.
On page two we explained our methodology:
Methodology
Expert Evaluations:
flydubai’s desktop site was evaluated by a UX architect by completing the booking process, short of actually reserving flights, for several origin/destination pairs encompassing different date ranges.
flydubai’s mobile web site was evaluated by two of our UX architects in a similar manner.
Usability Testing:
We recruited three participants to test flydubai’s mobile site. One was an Indian female and two were American females, age group between 25 and 45 years of age, who travel by air between 3 and 10 times per year. They use a combination of mobile devices and desktops to research and book flights but book more often on the desktop.
Participants were given instructions to book round-trip flights on both Alaska Air and flydubai, and to select the earliest (flydubai) or cheapest (Alaska Air) flight that left after noon. One booked Alaska Air first, the other booked flydubai first. To facilitate meaningful comparisons, we chose flights that returned similar numbers of results.
Following the tests, participants were given a short questionnaire based on SUPR-Q, which measures the quality of a website’s experience. Results of this, which include one UX architect’s rankings, are displayed on the next page.
Assessment parameters: Trust issues, Ease of Use & Efficiency and Information overload.
On the next page we summarized the major issues.
Major Issues Trust: We tested flydubai along with Alaska Airlines. Alaska Air rated high than flydubai (A score of 1 was best, 5 being worst)
Ease of Use & Efficiency: Data entry instead of using current location, hard-to-use filters, repetitive flight selection
Information Overload and Presentation: It was difficult to locate important information in on-page items, especially on mobile
We followed by analyzing several trust issues, followed by ease of use and other issues. Trust Issues Ease of Use Issues
Additional issues were shown in a similar manner.
Finally, we showed our conclusion and recommended some next steps:
Conclusion:
The functionality of flydubai.com is in line with the industry. However, the user experience needs attention.
This report outlines some of the issues we found most critical.
These issues can be corrected without major disruption to the underlying code.
Fixing the ‘Flights not Found’ and filtering issues would require a modest amount of coding, but many of the others can be fixed by changes in the interaction design, content, and visual representation of the site.
Next Steps:
Consider conducting studies to include other demographic areas within Middle East and CIS region.
Consider commissioning a study into another country to highlight specific cultural feedback and responses.
Our User Experience team will engage with your team and recommend solutions to the issues identified in this exercise.