Earlier this week I noted that before you begin testing in a website redesign project you should ask yourself two questions: 1) What do I want to test? and 2) How do I plan to use the results? I covered Question 1 earlier this week. Here I’m going to talk about setting your expectations for the results and being honest with yourself and your team about what you need from them. How you plan to use the results can inform the testing format and protocol structure.
It’s a given that conducting testing in the course of a website redesign project helps inform further development. For many website redesign projects, though, testing results are also used to get buy-in, defend unfamiliar choices, or generate excitement. Let’s look at examples for each of these scenarios:
Get Buy-in
As the new director of web communications for your institution, you’re leading up the website redesign project, but early on in the project you’re already experiencing resistance to change. Administrators across campus fear IA changes will reduce traffic deeper in the site (to their pages) — “this is the way it’s always been done” and “people have learned how to navigate it like this” are common statements. You know that IA testing will help demonstrate the value of rethinking the site and you know that you’re going to need a large number of participants to convince the loudest naysayers on campus. Knowing this, one-on-one IA testing isn’t going to be the best route for the project. Instead using an online card sorting tool will help you reach a large audience and gather a clear dataset for sharing out across campus, easing concerns about change.
Defend Unfamiliar Choices
Given recent data about the rise of tablets, your project team constructed a homepage layout that includes a left-hand menu that is ideal for tablet behavior, but you’re not sure if your specific audiences will respond well to it. You build your prototype testing so that visitors must interact with the left-hand menu in order to successfully complete tasks or answer questions. From that testing you learn a few modifications need to be made, but overall, your core audiences had no problem adjusting to the left-hand navigation. Later in the project when senior administrators worry about the unusual placement you can point them to the prototype testing results to ease their concerns.
Generate Excitement
After months of hard work, your project team has two beautiful design concepts and needs to select one. While a new IA isn’t going to jazz up a crowd, two fresh design concepts really can. You can use either an online survey or focus groups (or both!) to gather feedback and preferences from the campus community, alumni, and prospective students. While they’re giving your team valuable insight about which concept is most appealing or best represents your brand, you are helping them feel involved in the process and getting them excited about the relaunch. When the new site does go live participants will feel connected to the results.
Knowing what you need to do with these results, in addition to informing the development of the site, helps you select the testing format and protocol structure. If you need to generate excitement, you probably do not want to do a small set of one-on-one testing sessions. If you have to defend an unfamiliar choice you need to be sure your question set forces interaction with that label, feature, or functionality. If you want to walk away with compelling evidence to convince naysayers, a small qualitative focus group probably won’t cut it, but a large survey with quantitative results may do the trick.
There are many other ways you can use testing results, but understanding how the results will help you successfully navigate the path from website redesign project to new site launch is crucial.
In the final part of this testing series, I’ll talk about how to successfully connect with a partner firm for website redesign testing.