Usability Testing Web Sites At the Bureau of
Labor Statistics
Transcript from:
National Institute of Standards and
Technology Symposium
Usability Engineering 2: Measurement and Methods (UE2)
March 3, 1997
Speaker:
Michael Levi, Project Manager
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
levi.michael@bls.gov
Good morning. I'm Michael Levi from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS). I'm going to be talking to you about usability
testing Web sites.
My talk is based on the experiences several colleagues and I
have had working primarily on three Web sites. The first is the
BLS public access Web site, where all of our historical data,
including information about the data, is available to anyone with
a Web browser. The second site is a joint BLS/Bureau of the
Census site for the Current Population Survey. The third is the
beginning of a BLS intranet, where BLS is trying to bring Web
technology inside our fire wall to coordinate within and between
the various program areas.
Why Test Usability?
Now the first question is: "Why do we care, why do we
want to test usability?" or the broader question: "Why
are we concerned about usability in general within our
products?" One answer is that a small group of us just
thinks this is kind of cool stuff, and we have an opportunity to
mess around, so we do. That may be more true than I'd be willing
to acknowledge.
We have, however, also built a business case for usability
within the organization. First of all there is the volume of
requests. Some 80,000 to 100,000 users every month come to the
BLS public access Web site to get our economic data. It makes
sense to make user interaction with the system as straight
forward and as efficient as possible. It certainly saves us money
in terms of hardware, software and support costs. If we can get
by with a slightly less powerful machine because the interface is
good enough that people can get in, get what they want and get
out, then there's a clear dollar savings there.
Beyond reducing the load on the hardware, like every other
agency, the BLS current mandate is to do more with less. One of
the ways that some groups have identified saving money is to try
and redirect at least some of the data requests from the
telephone and from letters to the Web site, people being more
expensive than the Web server. In order to do this the Web site
has to at least approximate the ease of use associated with
interacting with a human being. Obviously we will never reach
that, and we're not saying that we're going to eliminate a human
being at the other end of the telephone, but there's actually a
very large set of standard requests that people come to the
Bureau and ask for, for instance, this month's consumer price
index top level number. Scores of thousands of people want this
information every month; if we can make it easy for them to get
it by themselves, we have saved ourselves a lot of staff time.
Users are going to go to the system that is easiest and cheapest
for them. If the Web site is too cumbersome and annoying, they're
not going to stop making phone calls. If the Web site approaches
the convenience of a human, on the other hand, they may start
using it as their primary information gathering tool. So if we
want to move standard requests from phone calls that take a lot
of staff to the Web, we'd better build a pretty good Web site.
Again related to user support costs, the more usable the
system is the less people would be calling and saying "Well
I found your Web site, but I can't find the top level CPI number,
how do I do it" or sending e-mail or whatever. So the idea
is the more usable access is, the less burden on the Help Desk;
again, presumably, there is some dollar costs savings.
Finally, and on some level the most important, the various Web
sites we're putting up have become the public face of the Bureau
of Labor Statistics. There are many thousands of people whose
only interaction with BLS is the Web site. More and more people
know about us only through our Web site. They never have talked
to a staff member or made a personal visit, they may not have
seen any of our publications. As far as they're concerned, BLS is
this Web site. Simple pride in ourselves and our product mandates
that we put our best face forward, that we make the public's
interaction with our agency as straightforward, as easy, as
pleasant an experience as possible.
This is pretty much the business case that we've made for
taking usability seriously as far as the Web is concerned.
Testing as Part of a Process
Now I'm going to be talking about testing, but want to put
this in context first. Testing is only one part of the process.
You can't "test in" usability. If you have not done any
HCI work before the testing phase, you've pretty much already
failed. But if you don't do the testing we also think your
chances of failure are higher.
When [the previous speaker: Steve Cross, Director of the
Software Engineering Institute] talks about the software
engineering approach to software development and how that's
merging with the HCI approach to software development, I agree
with him 100%. I think there's a usability development life cycle
just like there is a standard software development life cycle and
it follows much the same stages and typically can be done more or
less in parallel.
Like software engineering, an HCI development process starts
with user task and requirements analysis, goes through a design
phase, and ends with a testing stage. As Steve Cross said
earlier, we have moved away from the waterfall metaphor where one
phase flows neatly into the next phase, and processing keeps
going from phase to phase, never backing up, until you're done,
and then you sign off. Instead we are looking at a circular
process where you go through requirements, analysis, design,
implementation, testing and then you do it again and you do it
again and you do it again until you get it right (or until you're
close enough).
Now the first time I heard about an iterative development life
cycle it made sense to me and I thought "I can do
that". Having tried it a couple of times there are two
dangers to look out for that I've come across. First is that you
really do need to iterate. It is not uncommon to get a release
out and then be assigned to the next project and have your staff
taken away because they also have another project. During project
planning you have every intention of iterating the process, but
you never actually get to do it, so what goes out is essentially
a prototype or early version of a piece of software. This early
version never gets revised and the process breaks down.
The other danger is that if the first release you put out is
no good, then it will take a long time for your user base to
regain any confidence in the product. Regardless of how often you
say "We're putting something out for you to look at and to
start using and we will incorporate your feedback rapidly and
improve the product", if the first release is not good
enough people may never come. So it is important that the first
release be pretty decent or at least good enough so that the user
community is willing to use it for a while and to give you
feedback and to look for the second release. That way you can
iterate problems from a position of strength and then you move
forward, but if the first iteration doesn't work, you're in big
trouble.
Testing Site Structure
In my mind, there are two significant aspects of Web site
design: site structure (What is the organization of the site as a
whole? What is the dialogue between the user and the site? How do
you navigate through?) and individual page design (How does the
page look? Where do the individual elements go? What typeface is
used? How many graphics on a page? What are the standard elements
on each page?) These two design modes can be, and I think need to
be, approached somewhat differently as far as analysis, design,
and also testing is concerned.
Starting with the site structure, at BLS we have fairly
successfully implemented three testing techniques. I'm not going
to go into minute detail as to how all these works. Instead I'll
refer you to a
paper that Fred Conrad and I wrote. This paper is a cook book
approach to most of the techniques I'll be talking about during
the remainder of my presentation.
The idea in evaluating site structure is to determine from the
users how they partition the information space, what is their
mental model of the information you will be providing in your Web
site. We have used a fairly standard card sort for this. You
write down a number of leaf pages, like "Consumer Price
Index News Release" or "Employment and Earnings
Statistical Methodology" or "BLS Contacts" on
index cards, one title per card. Give the stack of cards to a
group of users and ask them to sort these into meaningful piles
and put a label on each pile. You aggregate all your users
together (we use the SPSS hierarchical cluster analysis function
for that, but often simply eyeballing the results is sufficient)
and you can come up with a pretty good hierarchy of users'
expectations when they come into a site.
Another technique, which we call a "Category Membership
Expectations Test" works the other way. You say here are six
or eight category names, what sort of information would you
expect to find within each category? Card sort is from the bottom
up, category membership is from the top down.
Icon recognition is where you produce a number of different
possible icons or possible graphics for portions of the site and
you ask the user to match an icon with a category. You are
looking for high recognition and low interference (interference
being where one icon is identified with more than one category.)
These techniques are usually identified as analysis and design
tools, and, in fact, I believe that is when they are best
employed. But we found that they also work pretty work as
evaluation tools to validate a design after it has been
completed. This is especially useful when a Web site has been
built without much up-front analysis or design (and certainly
many sites just grow without careful planning). This kind of
structural test can be very illuminating in determining whether
the site creators successfully met their users' expectations.
Testing Site Pages
As far as page design is concerned, the best place to start is
with a style guide that is given to content providers before they
begin work. There are a lot of good references out on the Web
now. I like the Yale
style guide in particular, but there are a growing number of
quite decent guides. The goal is to get consistent, readable,
legible, comprehensible pages and make it as easy as possible for
a reader to find information on any given page (or recognize that
the information does not exist on a given page).
The technique that we've used to evaluate page level design is
a heuristic evaluation. It's an inspection technique. You're not
actually going to end users, but instead you're having usability
experts go through a site and analyze it. There are a number of
inspection methods. Jakob Nielsen has written a book called
"Usability Inspection Methods", where he catalogs quite
a few of them and discusses some of the advantages and drawbacks
to the different methods. We found that a heuristic evaluation
really does a very good job at identifying things like
inconsistencies between pages, inconsistencies between the words
you use as a link and the title of the page that you're jumping
to, differences in layout, jargon, incomprehensible acronyms and
things of this nature.
Testing Site Usage
Now it's all fine and well to have a style guide and to follow
it, and it would be nice if we could say "Well if you follow
the style guide then you will have a perfectly usable site",
but it often doesn't work quite as cleanly as that. There is
certainly no substitute for having actual end users run through
the tasks that they actually will do on the site and to pay
attention to them. That's what we call Scenario-Based Testing.
This is where you assemble a group of (hopefully) representative
end users, you give them a set of tasks that reflect what users
will be doing with the site once it goes up, and then analyze
their performance. Some of the things to look for are how quickly
users are able to accomplish the tasks, how many errors they
made, how many intermediate pages they went through. Did they
follow the path that you expected them to follow? Did they find a
more efficient path or conversely did they find a much less
efficient path?
There are various ways of capturing the interesting
information: talk aloud protocols, the Web logs, video taped
sessions. The idea is to observe and record what real users are
doing on your system.
Then there's the issue of subjective user satisfaction.
Regardless of how quickly a user gets through the task and how
accurate they are, the question is whether they liked the system,
whether they enjoyed the experience or whether they found it
terribly frustrating and annoying. One tool that we have used to
approach this is the Questionnaire
on User Interface Satisfaction (QUIS), which was developed by
the University of Maryland and can be licensed from the
University of Maryland. I recently heard about a similar
questionnaire called SUMI,
developed and used in Europe. I hope to learn more about that. In
fact I think one of the speakers later today knows a little more
about it than I do and maybe we can ask him.
Post-Implementation Testing
I believe that there's no reason why usability testing should
stop after a system has been deployed. One of the nice things
about the Web is that the Web daemon does capture a reasonably
comprehensive log of usage and there's an incredible wealth of
information as to how real users are using the system in a
production environment. Let's say BLS has a million hits a month.
There's a million plus entries in the log; there's a lot of
things that we can learn from that. Find out what users are
searching for, find out where they appear to give up in the
middle of a session, find out what the most popular pages really
are, things of this nature. Of course, there is also direct user
feedback to the Help Desk, telephone calls, e-mails, etc., all of
which we try to gather and feed back to the developers, feed back
to the design team for the next iteration of the system.
Special Characteristics of the Web
A lot of this is very similar to usability testing in the
other system. On some levels, a Web site is just another software
system and all the techniques that I've described were originally
developed for non-Web systems.
We believe, however, there are some real differences between a
Web site and a Windows or Text based application. There are some
characteristics I believe that make the Web unique and we have
been working within BLS to fine tune some of the testing
techniques specifically for Web sites and for some of the
specific characteristics of the Web.
The user population interacting with a Web site is typically
much more diverse in terms of goals, experience level, domain
expertise, and also system configurations (what hardware platform
they're using, what operating system, what browser). A Web site
seen through a windowed browser gives an illusion of power
insofar as the site looks like a windowed system, and so naïve
users are deluded into expecting the kind of interactivity that
they get from their Windows word processor, but they don't get it
because the Web doesn't actually support much in the way of real
interactivity. That's changing a little now with Java, ActiveX,
some of the other more powerful languages, but it will be a long
time, if ever, before the Web has the same immediate capabilities
that a desktop use of software does. Finally, naive users are not
always clear as to what is a feature (or shortcoming) of the site
and what is a feature (or shortcoming) of the browser being used.
The Organizational Context
To conclude, I wanted to talk a little bit about the
organizational context. Certainly our experience at BLS is that
there has been a gradual evolution or capabilities. We started,
as an organization, seriously thinking about HCI seven or eight
years ago. There was a long period of internal education where a
number of the analysts trained themselves and started going to
classes. We then started bringing instructors in-house, developed
a HCI curriculum, taught in-house for our analysts and started
expecting a certain level of understanding. We developed a set of
guidelines for interactive systems. Then usability testing kind
of followed out of all of that. There has been a progression, and
usability testing is the latest stage in our progression.
Given the realities of resource constraints, we had to look
for techniques that were safe to implement. For me personally,
there's been an interesting evolution from being a developer and
code jockey frustrated by management not letting me do the
usability analysis and testing that was clearly necessary, to
being a manager who has to deal with budgets and delivery dates
and things of this nature. And the fact of the matter is, there
is a real deep faith involved here. It doesn't matter how many
times someone tells me that if I do the up front work it'll cost
me less in the long run, at some point I have to take a deep
breath and say, "OK, I'll give it a shot, I am going to
invest X person-weeks and Y dollars in this effort and hope that
it will all work out for the best at the end". So to
minimize my risk what I'm looking for is "easy, fast and
cheap". I'm looking for techniques that do not require Ph.D.
level human factors expertise, because I don't have it and I'm
not going to be able to hire it; techniques that are reasonably
fast so if things go wrong I haven't delayed delivery too much;
and techniques that don't cost me much because I don't have much
to spend.
And in fact all the methods that I've talked about so far are
all three of them, they're easy, fast and cheap. In spite of that
they have made a real difference in our systems. Having done a
lot of these we are now slowly beginning to invest in what we're
calling a usability lab. We've got a little more equipment so
that we can do some slightly more sophisticated things. I expect
if our efforts continue to be successful, we will get marginal
increases in a non-existent budget, and be able to get some of
the nifty and more expensive tools, but the fact of the matter is
we've come a long way without spending much money and it's made
all the difference in terms of moving forward. I think that's
pretty much it. Are there any questions?
Questions and Answers:
Q. Do you have a formula for costing a
usability test on a Web site?
Levi. No we really don't. Our experience is
that the only dollar cost is really in staff time and depending
on the task it can take anywhere from one person-week to three or
four person-weeks, depending a lot on the expertise of the staff,
the kind of tests and how thorough we want to be.
Q. Have you found a good log analysis
package?
Levi. Not yet and in fact that's one of the
things that we are most interested in finding at some point. What
we have done is hacked together a collection of Perl scripts that
will go through the logs and pull out some of the things we're
interested in. I've heard recently about some log analysts tools
that are coming out of Europe. Apparently there is at least one
piece of software that has been developed specifically for this
purpose, but I don't know anything about it yet. I'm just hoping
that it's going to be something valuable.
In particular what we don't have a good handle on is measuring
deviation from an expected or ideal path. At least in the
designer's mind there is an ideal path from one point to the
next. That's the expected, fairly efficient way of getting from
point A to point B. Now what we find is that users frequently do
not follow that path. They wander around. What we'd like to be
able to do is to compare the user's actual path to the presumed
ideal path and make some deductions. Where do they diverge? What
is the average number of steps? What can we expect in terms of
use? I've found nothing so far that supports such investigation.
If anyone knows of anything, please let me know; I'd be most
grateful.
Q. In reference to what you said about
iterating and the first release needing to be pretty good: I've
seen examples where that's really not the case. Where the first
one is really atrocious but if you have strong management support
for this iterative process you can recover. Without management
support, you're right, you're dead.
Levi. I think management is actually likely
to recognize a dismal failure and say, "You've got to do it
again." The problem is the user base. If you have users who
must use the system, they're going to keep coming back anyway
because they don't have any choice. No matter how horrible it is.
There may be high costs for the agency but the users have to use
the system because it's their job. If, on the other hand, you
have discretionary users who get to decide, "Am I going to
use this system or not, am I going to use the Web site as opposed
to making a phone call?" or something like that, they may
not come back for a second try. In fact they probably won't,
until you persuade them that it is worth their while. It's that
initial credibility that makes all the difference, that
determines whether they will give you another chance.
Q. Are you set up to do usability testing on
other software products or do you just concentrate on the Web
site?
Levi. To date, we have done most of the
testing on Web sites just because that is where the interest of
people were. But we also have started applying various usability
tests on non-Web systems and find the testing extremely
successful.
Q. Some friends were over for dinner the
other night and mentioned being frustrated with one of the sites
you mentioned, the Census Bureau site. At work my friend has
Windows 3.1, and on the basic Census site she can get only 2/3 of
the way through the screens and then it would stop. I knew it was
supposed to work, so we came to my house and tried it on Windows
'95 and got all the way through. I didn't notice a good, simple
way to provide user feedback.
Levi. I think that one of the things that's
hard about testing Web sites is that ideally you'd run from all
standard user configurations. Unfortunately there are too many
possibilities. If you have ten standard scenarios and you break
your user population into three major groups, that's 30 major
tests right there. Now multiply by all the different browsers and
configurations — there's no way you can do it, it's impossible.
All you can do is try to pick the most important and hope for the
best.
Q. I was browsing through one site and they
said their site worked best with Netscape 2, and they downloaded
a copy of Netscape 2 for you to run.
Levi. A lot of sites do that, but a lot of
users don't like it, because they've already customized their
browser. If they were to accept a new download it might write
over what existed.
Q. I've seen situations where the site
provides a button that the user can click on and everything is
taken care of.
Levi. But you still have the same situation.
There is an arrogance here. The site designer knows best, even as
far as what resides on the users hard disk.
Q. I have a comment and a question. The
comment is sometimes if I'm stuck in the browser, particularly if
my PC has hung, I can't send a message to the webmaster or
anybody else, and it's very frustrating because I want to get
certain document, I really want to get this and I don't know how
to get it because I can't make it download and I can't send
E-mail to get help either.
My question is: What sort of people do you have designing your
Web sites? In my organization just about anybody feels competent
to do Web design.
Levi. That seems to be one of the special
characteristics of the Web. Most applications software at this
point is developed by professional software developers. Most Web
sites are not developed by professional Web developers. If you're
lucky you've got a central group that reviews pages as they come
in, but a lot of organizations don't even have that level of
control. It's pretty much anyone who wants to put anything out
can, and that makes for highly unusable systems.
Certainly it's unlikely that you will achieve consistency
under those circumstances. Everybody is likely to solve the same
problem in their own way. One way to address it is to at least
try to route everything through one group who checks for
adherence to standards. Be very clear up front what you're
looking for, what you and will not accept and why.
Q. That central group you talk about, did
they do editorial review?
Levi. At BLS there are two independent
groups. One does editorial, or content, review. The other does
Web standards review.
Q. What other functions might a centralized
group perform?
Levi. Build common functionality, common
graphics, establish the common graphic design.
Q. And you mentioned the central feedback, so
mail to the site comes to one place then gets spread out?
Levi. We have always given users two options.
The nice thing about the Webmaster is it's easy. The user can
remember it, or at least there's some chance that the user will
remember Webmaster @ bls.gov or HelpDesk @ bls.gov, so even if
they end up stuck somewhere and have to get out of their browser
then they would fire up their e-mail and probably reach somebody.
On the other hand the Web Master cannot answer real questions
about content. If someone wants to know why the CPI minus food
and energy is X% this month, when blah, blah, blah, the Web
master is not going to be able to answer that question and will
have to forward it to the right person. Best case, there is a
loss of time because it takes a while for the Web master to read
the mail, to forward it to the right person, and that person to
read it; there's an extra step. Worse case is that it will never
get sent to the right person.
So we've also tried to have feedback to the content expert who
can actually answer content questions. We try very hard to
explain the difference between a content question and a system
question, and my guess is about 60% of our users understand what
we're trying to tell them.
Last Modified Date: July 19, 2008