What can you tell about a website in just 5 seconds?
Research in psychology shows that people form reliable impressions of interpersonal trust and emotional intent within seconds. There are even certain visual cues of usability that users immediately detect upon encountering a website. Learn how lasting these perceptions are over weeks and months, and what we should measure.
This course builds on data from over 200 websites and 10,000 users across a dozen countries from remote and lab-based usability tests. It will provide guidance and practice into what we can reliably measure whether we have a few seconds or a few hours with users.

Benefits

• Learn how to measure usability with core usability metrics and how to make the most of usability test data
• Understand how subjective and objective usability metrics can both complement and contradict each other
• Fine-tune your usability testing techniques by mastering the value of measurement

Topics covered

• Human perceptions form quickly
  • Assessing danger
  • Interpreting emotional intent
  • Forming impressions of website attractiveness
• Usability as a combination of attitude and action
  • International usability definition (ISO 9241: Part 11)
  • What we found in 100 usability tests from dozens of companies
  • Most popular measures of usability: Completion rates, task times, satisfaction, and errors
  • Less used but insightful metrics: Confidence, disasters, and Net Promoter score
• Understanding the relationship between metrics
  • How perception and performance are correlated but not identical
  • Evidence for the existence of “usability”
• Measuring perceptions of usability
  • What questions to ask
  • Standardized usability questionnaires: System Usability Scale (SUS) and Standardized Universal Percentile Rank Questionnaire (SUPR-Q)
• First impressions of website usability
  • Experiments in first impressions of website usability
  • Reliability of initial website impressions
• Measuring website performance
  • First-click testing
• Analyzing usability metrics
  • Graphing and descriptive statistics
  • Confidence intervals
  • Is there a statistical difference?
• Retrospective accounts of usability
  • Using surveys to measure perceptions of usability
  • How much does the usability test impact our measures of usability?
• Combining methods to effectively measure and manage the user experience
  • Iterative testing
  • The logic and math behind small sample size iterative testing
  • Usability testing and surveys
  • Recording usability problems in a user by problem matrix
  • Understanding how many usability problems have been detected and are left to detect
  • Using a cause and effect diagram to identify usability problems

Format

The course in an interactive lecture. You will learn to apply and practice new principles and techniques through in-depth exercises, while staying grounded in the research that supports them. Amongst other exercises, you will conduct your own first-click test.

The course also includes:

• Findings from usability studies
• Videos from usability testing of people's behavior in response to a design
• Real-world examples and case studies
• Practical advice derived from the latest research on usability measurement
• Opportunities to ask questions and get answers