February 2007

Chapter Business

  • Upcoming Workshop: We will be having our first workshop of the year on March 24th at Bentley. The topic is: "Getting the Most Out of Your Interview Sessions: Kick it up a Notch!", to be presented by Meena Kothandaraman. A notice and ability to register online will be out next week.
  • UPA Boston Mini-Conference: Potential presenters should be aware of the following dates:
    • Proposal submissions due: Midnight EST, Monday, March 26th
    • Proposal acceptance notification will be: Monday, April 2nd
    • Final Presentation materials due: Midnight EST, Monday April 30th
    • MiniUPA Conference: May 23, 9am-5pm, networking 5pm-7pm
  • Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR) needs volunteers to help build accessible web sites in the fall. For more information, see http://www.boston-ia.org/current.html#bair.
  • Steve Krug is looking for an intern (undefined role and length of internship), so if anyone knows of anyone interested in constructing their own internship, email Steve through http://www.sensible.com/.

Presentation

Carol was pleased to be visiting the Boston UPA at a time when there was no snow! Before getting started on her presentation, she introduced two local colleagues and collected business cards for a raffle of wireless headphones. She also mentioned that a new edition of the book "Design of Sites" was coming out, called "Design of Sites Using Patterns", as well as a UCD casebook, with contributions from 22 usability professionals, including founders of the UPA (due April/May).

Carol's presentation focused on a study she did comparing two web sites--Club Med and Beaches-using a tool called WebEffective, which her company develops. (The focus of the research was on Club Med, since they were trying to get them as a client but gathered the data for demonstration purposes. During the course of the study, Club Med redesigned their site, so Carol also had before/after screenshots.) WebEffective allowed Carol to gather one-on-one usability data (both quantitative and qualitative) on a large scale, which was combined with in-lab testing to arrive at results and recommendations for improvement.

WebEffective is a combination web stats tool (what page users are on, how long they stayed, etc.) and survey tool (consisting of post task, during task, and post test questions). Unlike a plain web analytics tool, WebEffective allows researchers to watch an intended task and get the "why" by asking users as they work. For example, if a user abandons a registration process, researchers can ask them questions to find out exactly what happened. (Yes, customers/participants can be intercepted to gather information, and Carol has found they are generally eager to provide feedback.) Therefore, WebEffective provides self-reported and actual data that allows researchers to better determine a customer's experience of a site. Of course clients need to come up with key metrics they want to observe, and should use the same ones to see trends (or the effect of a site redesign) over time.

Keynote can do this research for interested companies, or license WebEffective for teams wanting to do the research themselves. Similar tools are available through open source projects as well. The relative cost for lab studies versus using WebEffective are comparable on a per user / per study basis. You can join a Keynote panel to evaluate web sites at http://panel.webeffective.keynote.com/.

Overall, the meeting was very interactive and attendees had lots of questions (captured in a separate Word document).