Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is benchmarking?
Usability testing can form a part of what is termed ‘benchmarking’. This is the process of setting a standard of performance based on either external sources, such as a competitor’s website, or by assessing a current website, for instance, using task times as a measure.
Prerequisites
Before any benchmarking takes place, there are two key prerequisites.
- Clarity around purpose: There must be clarity around the purpose of the website, that is to say, the business objectives of the site.
- Clarity around experience: There must be a clear understanding of what experience factors or measures contribute towards those objectives.
Without knowing what a website should be doing, it becomes very difficult to assess its effectiveness.
Hypothesis-driven design
On that second point, finding exactly what makes a website deliver on the objective set for it can be tested using a series of hypotheses. This technique is derived from Ling Methodology, and can be termed hypothesis driven design.
Using this approach, we clearly state what we believe will happen as a result of a change to a design or feature. This should be structured where cause and effect are unambiguously stated. For example, “We believe this feature will achieve this outcome based on this metric.” So a design change or a new feature leads to an outcome signified by a particular metric. This also bears a resemblance to what is known as the Scientific Method, demonstrating cause and effect.
Back to TopRick Monro
Rick Monro is UX Director at Fathom. He has extensive experience in user research, interaction design, user-centered design, and design strategy with private and public sector organisations throughout the UK and Ireland.
By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
- Appraise practices for planning UX research
- Critically evaluate the roles of innovation and users in User Experience (UX) research
- Evaluate cognitive biases that can affect research data
