Online research and usability testing

Flow works with a collection of online research tools from selected software partners. These tools deliver information that goes beyond web analytics. They give you detailed data about users' click streams, measure task success levels, and gather some insight into users' intentions and motivations.

Online and face-to-face approaches complement each other very effectively. Online methods provide quantitative data to support the detailed insights you can get from lab and field based techniques.

You can use online research techniques to:

• Observe real customers visiting your site, understand who they are and what they're after.
• Gather quantitative usability metrics and monitor how they improve over time.
• Conduct cost-effective international research across several countries at once
• Benchmark your site's usability against your competitors.

How it works

• We recruit representative participants online, or intercept them as they arrive on your website.
• Participants access the target site from their usual environment (often at home).
• Software captures user click streams, but also asks the users about their needs and motivations, and their satisfaction with the experience.
• The data is held on database and we can query it to get stats and look for patterns.

Flow uses a range of online tools including UserZoom, WebIQ and Speedtrap, depending on the needs of the project.

Results

Outputs include clickmaps, clickpaths and charts of success rates and user responses.

By analysing user data we can home in on user experience issues and rate their severity. We use our interaction design expertise to provide recommended solutions and quick fixes.

Typically we deliver results as reports or PowerPoint presentations.The raw data from the research is also available for you to analyse further.