Video Transcript: How to Conduct a Simple User Test with Jakob Nielsen

Dr. Mel Wilson - Hi. This is Dr Mel Wilson with Web Marketing. Today I'm in San Jose at the conversion conference West, the first of its kind, with Jakob Nielsen,  a pioneer in the field of usability. And Jakob, it's great to see you. Last time I saw you was at the billion dollar summit that Jay Abraham put on in the year 2000  

and a lot of water under the bridge since then. As far as the internet is  concerned, definitely what I'd like to ask you about today from particularly a  small business website, kind of approach is, Do I have enough traffic to conduct  a valid test, and this whole issue of the qualitative and the quantitative and how  they work together, I  

Jakob Nielsen - think it's very important to recognize they do work together.  There are two different types of measurements you can do. One is real  measurement with numbers, also called quantitative, and the other one is a  more qualitative, or insight based test, and so we talk a lot about doing use for  testing, where you get one customer in at a time. So it's not like a focus group  where you have a group of people, it's just one person at a time. So that's a  small sample you can get, and it's too small to only only look at one person, but  you would look at maybe five people in a day. And that small number is actually  enough to get a lot of insight into how your customers use your site, what's  good, what's bad, and so  

Dr. Mel Wilson - forth. I think a lot of people are afraid of this whole thing,  because one, they don't know how to do it, and two, they think it must be some  massive thing. But you're saying five people will help you learn a huge amount  of what you need to  

Jakob Nielsen - learn, right? The vast majority of what you need to know, you  can get out of five people. Then there are always some small extra tweaks and  stuff. And actually, when you want to get really precise, that's when you need  1000s of people and run these more analytical approaches where you can  measure the difference between you have 1% more or less from making your  buy button be orange instead of red. And that's important too, but, but the big,  big, big insights are typically so big that you that they're obvious once you look,  but you had to look, you kind of said, sit back at home and wonder you got  

Dr. Mel Wilson - So let'st say, I bring in five people who are part of my target  audience. What kinds of things do I have them do? What? How do I participate  in this as the site owner?  

Jakob Nielsen - Right? The main thing is to have them do realistic tasks. So you cannot tell ask people. Take a look at my site. Do you like it? Well, they always  say they like it because they're polite, but they have to do something, and in 

doing something, that's where you can see them being tripped up. Or they will  say, Well, I wouldn't really want to do this in this site, because whatever the  reason so we're doing things is really  

Dr. Mel Wilson - important. Would you list five tasks to complete in the site and  give them the list ahead of time? Or do you give them those one by one after  they complete? Or, yeah, we  

Jakob Nielsen - only give people one task at a time, and the reason is that  people are very different in how fast they are. So one person might be able to do maybe even 10 things an hour. We typically run these sessions for an hour, and  other people might only be able to do two. But if you give them a set of five,  they'll feel very inadequate by having failed the last three, and you'll just people  are just different.  

Dr. Mel Wilson - So as you start something like this, figure out what what do I  really want people to be able to accomplish? And then watch them accomplish a series of tasks, one at a time, exactly. So if I'm the site owner or the developer,  Where do I sit during this where do they sit? And what interaction do we have?  Right?  

Jakob Nielsen - Typically, we would just sit right next to the user. So they will sit  at the computer, they will have their hands on the keyboard, the hand on the  mouse, and you we call them the facilitator. The facilitating the study will just sit  right next, so maybe a little bit back, so that they don't, you don't intrude on them too much, and they kind of focus on the computer. This is if you're doing a small  study. Now, if you're doing it in a more elaborate corporate setting. We would  typically do it more in a one way, mirror, special laboratory, but you really do not  need that. That's only if you want to have 10 people sit on the watch, because  then you're going to stick them  

Dr. Mel Wilson - behind the mirror. Now, do I? Do I allow them to ask me  questions? Or how does that work?  

Jakob Nielsen - Well, they can ask the questions, but you cannot answer them,  because it's very valuable to know what they would like to know. But if you tell  them the answer, then they wouldn't get it from the site. And the question is that  the study is, can they find out from the site? So if they ask, Can I do such and  such? You say, you can do whatever you want. If they ask, is such and such a  case? You say, Well, try to find out. And so you never really give them the  answer. You'll like, bounce it right back to them, and you encourage them to talk  about what they're seeing. They should think out loud. Keep up a running 

monolog. Do you record something like this? Yes, we'll typically record it on the  computer and also with a little webcam. But that's not actually necessary. The  only thing you have to have is a notepad. Yeah, just take notes and you, I  guarantee you will scribble down entire notepad full of changes to your site.  

Dr. Mel Wilson - This is the minimalist view of user testing, but it's it. It brings a  great deal of valuable results with just five people, yeah. Now let me ask you,  there's a program out there called usertesting.com What are the pros and cons  of that compared to a face to face? Well, sitting beside the person, as you see it, right?  

Jakob Nielsen - Well, I think the plus is that it's even easier to do, because you  don't have to get these people to come into your office. You can just sit at home  and you kind of like request the study. Now the downside is actually sort of two  downsides. The first is that you don't have as detailed screening and recruiting  

criteria. So usually we want to be very particular about who we get in to be really sure they really truly in our target audience, not just like the general public, but  very specific people. The second thing is that when you sit next to people, you  just kind of get much more from them, that if you just get a recording of what  they did was why I say we do record it, but the recording is a really secondary,  the primaries, being with the person seeing them also, just like actually, literally  seeing them, seeing their their posture, their their shock, their their frustration,  frustrations quite often, to be honest. Yeah,  

Dr. Mel Wilson - okay. Well, thanks for sharing with us. Simple tip, but huge  upside, if you do it, tell me about your business and what you do.  

Jakob Nielsen - My company is called Nielsen Norman Group, and we do these type of user test studies, and so we do them for companies as consulting, but  we also publish these reports with our findings. And we also have a conference  several times a year where you can come and learn how to do it yourself. So I  certainly recommend people go to that called usability week, a full week's worth  of all this stuff,  

Dr. Mel Wilson - and you have a blog that comes out every couple weeks. Tell  me about that,  

Jakob Nielsen - that is called usit.com and it's every two weeks, a regular  newsletter comes out with an article about some of the things we found out  there is research. Yeah, that's the fridge. Definitely. It's something I read 

Ralph Wilson - regularly and learn little tidbits that you can dump on your  highlights. On your highlights. Thanks for joining with us. This is Ralph Wilson.