Part of the E-Commerce User Experience Series

This report identifies how we conducted our user research and generated the guidelines for this report series, including a summary of user demographics, how we briefed and interacted with users, and the tasks administered. Usability data is extremely valuable when building a profitable site and this report will help you conduct your own studies.

The recommendations based on any usability study are only be as good as the data and information collected. The quality of this information relies on the methods used to collect the data. We work to establish a standard to measure the methodologies of other studies. We hope to discourage poor-quality imitators while helping our peers, and motivating ourselves, to produce work of even better quality in the future.

Benefits

• Understand the study methodology to help you assess guidelines for your situation
• Learn an effective method for validating designs quickly and reducing the guesswork
• Tips for planning and conducting your own user research

Topics

• Recruiting participants
• Testing location
• Equipment
• Selecting sites to test
• Writing tasks
• Facilitating studies
• Quantifiable measures
• Diary study methodology
• Eyetracking methodology
• Pre- and post-task questionnaires

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)

Research Method

The information in this report is based on two separate rounds of e-commerce studies, including:

• Usability testing
• Diary-based longitudinal study
• Eye tracking

In total, 108 people tested 206 e-commerce websites. The studies took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and China (Hong Kong).