Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is an annual event celebrated on the third Thursday of May, dedicated to raising awareness about digital accessibility. It’s a day to reflect on the importance of creating inclusive digital experiences that cater to individuals of all abilities. As we mark GAAD, let’s delve into one of the fundamental aspects of accessibility: color contrast.

Understanding Color Contrast

Color contrast refers to the difference in luminance or color between two elements in a design. It plays a crucial role in ensuring readability and usability for everyone, especially for individuals with visual impairments, color vision deficiencies, or other disabilities. For these individuals, insufficient color contrast can make content difficult or even impossible to perceive.

Impact of Color Contrast

According to the 2024 WebAIM Million report, lack of sufficient color contrast is one of the leading causes of accessibility barriers in digital content. Consider this: for someone with low vision, reading text with poor color contrast can be akin to trying to decipher blurred or indistinguishable characters. Similarly, individuals with color vision deficiencies (color blindeness) may struggle to differentiate between certain colors, further complicating their interaction with digital content.

Tips for Ensuring Adequate Color Contrast

Fortunately, there are simple yet effective measures we can take to address color contrast issues and enhance digital accessibility:

• Use Contrast Checking Tools: There are numerous online tools available that can help assess the color contrast of text and background combinations. Tools like WebAIM’s Contrast Checker or the Color Contrast Analyzer by The Paciello Group can quickly determine if your design meets accessibility standards.
• Follow WCAG Guidelines: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide specific criteria for color contrast ratios that ensure content is perceivable by all users. Aim for a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text to meet WCAG standards. Use color contrast tools such as those mentioned in this article to ensure text meets the requirement.
• Choose Colors Wisely: Opt for color combinations that provide sufficient contrast. If you struggle in this area, tools like Accessible Color Palette Generator will generate an accessible color palette based on a starting color.

Need More Help?

At SymSoft Solutions, we understand the importance of accessibility and are dedicated to helping businesses and organizations create more accessible digital experiences. Whether you’re seeking guidance on color contrast optimization or comprehensive accessibility audits, full accessibility solutions, or looking to establish an accessibility program in your organization, Symsoft is here to support you every step of the way.

Together, let’s strive to build a digital landscape where everyone can access and engage with content without barriers. Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

In over 15 years of redesigning websites and implementing Web content management systems for our enterprise and government clients, we have identified five essential activities that are often missed in the project planning. In such cases, the whole project might be at risk because time and internal resources are not allocated. Of course, when this happens, there are still ways to deliver a project, but it might require readjustment that could have been easily avoided altogether.

Before you plan for your next Web design or Web CMS implementation project, we suggest you consider the following five activities of a successful redesign:

1. Content Production, Editing, and Migration
2. Web Content Accessibility Support
3. Application and System Integration
4. Organizational Change Management (OCM)
5. Maintenance and Support

1. Content Production, Editing, and Migration

Whether you are redesigning a site or launching a completely new website, content migration and new content production are critical activities that require careful planning and consideration. 

Content updates and organization typically require engagement of the content owners and subject matter experts, such as program managers or communication teams. Failure to plan for their involvement results in low engagement and unanticipated workloads that nobody allocated for. It is common for organizations at that point to step back and re-identify project stakeholders, which in many cases results in inconvenience and delays.

To avoid surprises down the road, ask the following questions:

1. How much content is currently there on the existing website?
2. Will all the current content be migrated to the new website?
3. Can content be archived?
4. Does some content belong to the Intranet or Extranet rather than the public-facing website?
5. What is the legally required content that needs to be migrated over to the new website?
6. Do you need to create any new content, or update any existing content for the new website?
7. Will you introduce new content formats, such as photography, illustrations, or video?
8. Who will produce or edit content?
9. Who will migrate the content?
10. Who will review and approve content editing and migration? 

Answering these questions prior to starting the project will help you define a more realistic scope, and identify additional resources needed to ensure the delivery of a comprehensive website solution.

2. Web Content Accessibility Support

Accessible websites combine accessibility compliant platforms (e.g. content management systems or document filing systems) and accessibility compliant content.

While most public sector website redesign or implementation projects require an accessibility compliant platform, software, and design system, content accessibility compliance workflows and procedures are often overlooked. This can create challenges after the project is completed and the website content continues to evolve, so it is essential to establish and adopt processes to monitor and ensure accessibility compliance moving forward.

When planning your next accessibility compliant project, ask the following questions:

1. How will you test and validate website accessibility after the project is completed? How will you keep the website accessible? This is especially important in public sector websites that need to self-certify for accessibility compliance (AB 434 in California).
2. Are there any files and documents that need to be remediated for accessibility compliance before publishing on the website? (In many cases the answer is yes.) How many of such documents are already remediated? Do you have a strategy set in place to conduct remediation of the non-compliant files and documents? In our experience, the volume of documents that require at least some accessibility remediation comes as a surprise to many organizations.
3. Do you have the technical resources and expertise to maintain an accessibility compliant website? If not, how do you plan to address the gap?

3. Application and System Integration

Many organizations, especially in the public sector, provide website visitors access to business applications through their websites. These applications help with self-service tasks and therefore significantly optimize business processes, digital transactions, and time required to serve thousands and millions of users. Such applications are often the main reason users visit the website, so consider business application integration while planning for a website redesign or implementation project.

To help identify tasks and resources that should be part of your project, review all applications currently available to the users through the website. Consider engaging the business application owners and technical support groups in the planning.  

In our experience, there are a few common scenarios:

1. Business applications are kept as-is. They retain their look-and-feel and are hosted in the existing environment. Applications are not integrated with the main website but are merely hyperlinked. In this case, the user experience and accessibility could end up being suboptimal, but the project timelines are more predictable.
2. Existing application rebranding and visual design alignment. This is a common option for organizations that are able to dedicate technical staff who can apply the main project’s design system to the business application.
3. API development and integration. This is the most future-proof solution, depending on the CMS and how much development effort is required by the complexity of the business application. Benefits of API integrations include a unified brand and user experience because the user stays within the same website, which opens up possibilities for additional features such as content personalization or user profile functionalities.

Sometimes, the rebranded applications are embedded through iframes. However, we strongly suggest avoiding this approach as it may create accessibility challenges that are expensive to address. Typically, video embeds are somewhat easier to maintain, but custom data dashboards might create more problems than benefits when embedded through an iframe.

As always, there are multiple solutions to a problem, but we recommend at least high-level planning, well in advance, to avoid surprises later in the process.

4. Organizational Change Management (OCM)

Implementing new systems and tools may require changes to the organization’s internal processes, procedures, and day-to-day operations. Planning and managing the change is sometimes omitted from the project planning process, resulting in low stakeholder engagement and slow adoption.  

When planning the project, changes and challenges that need to be identified include:

1. Changes in roles and responsibilities.  
2. Implementation of new processes, policies, and procedures.
3. New resources, skills, or abilities required within the organization.
4. Legal requirements for implementing the changes.
5. Impact of the changes on the organization’s workload.  

We have partnered with many of our clients to help lead organizational change management throughout our projects, which has been vital for successful implementations and enduring solutions.

5. Maintenance and Support

Although most website redesign or implementation projects include a knowledge transfer deliverable, some miss the option of engaging the implementing partner to provide ongoing maintenance and support after the project is complete.

Having maintenance and support in place allows organizations to gain additional knowledge of the solutions by monitoring issue resolution procedures, collaborating with the vendor to resolve real-life situations, and learning by doing. Having maintenance and support in place frees up internal resources to focus on more strategic tasks than day-to-day monitoring.

When planning the project, thinking about the organizational capabilities will provide you with a general idea of the maintenance and support requirements that should be included in the project’s scope. Consider:

1. Your organization’s familiarity with the platforms and technologies used in the project.
2. What resources will be available to support the solution after the new website is launched.  

Conclusion

We hope this list of considerations will give you a better idea on how to scope website redesign or Web CMS implementation projects in your organization.

For further questions, and help in scoping projects, please contact us.

By approaching the digital transformation project with the business mindset, the award-winning GOV.UK website saved £61.5 million in 2015. They focused on streamlining digital transactions in order to help users accomplish as many digital transactions as possible online, instead of visiting offices and filling out paper forms. In the Government Transformation Strategy (PDF), the government of the United Kingdom stated:

Services must work for the whole of society – not just the 77% of people who have basic digital skills, but for the 12.6 million adults who don’t. This is particularly important as financial exclusion and digital exclusion often go hand in hand.

Improving accessibility and page speed performance in turn improves audience reach and digital service adoption.

A few examples of digital services that benefit from page speed improvement include:

1. Online account registration and switching to paperless correspondence.
2. Vehicle registration and driver’s license renewal.
3. Benefit or retirement account self-management.
4. Consumer complaint filing and resolution.
5. Business registration, and business license applications and renewals.

So, let’s talk about how to improve performance of your carefully crafted digital services.

In January 2021, we evaluated over 300 California, U.S., and international government websites for page speed performance using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which measures website performance on a scale of 0–100. As you probably assumed, 100 is the best score, and one that is beyond reach even for the most popular websites out there. Go ahead and test a few websites that you visited this week to get a better idea about how they perform, and to see how various scores correlate with actual usage.

In our test, we discovered that about 3% of tested government websites score 90–100 points for mobile performance, and 18% of government websites score 90–100 points for desktop performance (median mobile: 50, average mobile: 38, median desktop: 64, average desktop: 68). 

Given the median and average values above, and the fact that many popular non-government websites’ scores linger in the 30s for mobile and 50s for desktop performance, it’s worth looking at our top performers’ examples to see what they did right. 

Continue reading below to learn why performance matters, and how to immediately improve your website’s performance with a few practical tips. In this article, we will cover:

1. Why does website performance matter?
2. What is an excellent level of governmental website performance?
3. Five simple improvements for better website performance.

Please note that when we evaluate page speed performance, we do not cover the quality of accessibility, interface design, usability, content design, or information architecture. We plan to cover these other topics in separate articles. Subscribe to our newsletter and connect with us on LinkedIn to receive future updates.

Why does website performance matter?

Time is a universal commodity, so everyone values fast performance in every aspect of their lives. Whether streaming HD video, waiting in line in a grocery store, or trying to accomplish a task on the website, getting things done as quickly as possible is an implicit user expectation.

But what are some practical reasons? Years of observation of conversions in e-commerce combined with studies about how people perceive the speed of the websites and internet content availability in general, demonstrate that speed performance does benefit the users and the organizations. 

Human-computer interaction research shows that speed perception thresholds are really short, at about 50–300 ms (0.05 to 0.3 seconds). For example, Dr. Lindgaard showed that people can make a decision about design quality based on a 50 ms long exposure to a picture. With such fast perception, it is no wonder that people cannot wait more than a couple of seconds before they lose patience and abandon a website.

Here are a few examples:

• Professor Ramesh Sitaraman’s study shows that people begin abandoning videos if they don’t load within two seconds (PDF). This finding impacts not only retail websites, but also government websites that are providing video guides that walk the audience through a self-service process.
• Akamai reported that page load times significantly impact conversion rates (PDF). 53% of visits to mobile sites are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
• For Walmart, website speed correlates to business metrics. Walmart.com’s engineers found that conversion rates declined as load times increased. The average site load speed was significantly lower for the converted population (3.22 seconds) than the non-covered population (6.03 seconds).
• In 2018, Google published industry benchmarks for mobile page speed performance. Their analysis found that as page load time goes from 1 to 5 seconds, the bounce probability increases to 90%.
• Finally, Google Search uses website speed performance as a signal when ranking websites. It is not the most important Google Search signal, but, all else being equal, faster websites are ranked better.

Considering the above research, it is clear that government websites’ improved performance can broadcast critical information to constituents faster, help them more efficiently utilize government digital services, reduce the server and data bandwidth costs, and increase the likelihood of users completing the goals around which the sites are built. Also, for millions of Californians, faster websites mean more equitable access to digital services, especially in communities where blazing internet speeds are not accessible or affordable.

What is an excellent level of government website performance?

When evaluating website performance, we use two industry-standard tests, Google PageSpeed Insights, and the WebPageTest. Both come with actionable results accompanied by practical instructions on what to improve to achieve better performance. Another often used tool is Google’s Lighthouse audit, that evaluates specific metrics such as TTI (time-to-interactive), which is useful in optimizing web and mobile applications.

Specific to government website performance, any website that measures in the 80s and 90s for either metric in Google PageSpeed Insights can be considered a well-optimized website. When evaluating performance, we can stop there and follow the guidelines provided in the PageSpeed Insights results. However, the WebPageTest features a more elaborate scoring system that grades the implementation of individual best practices and provides the actual loading times. The most significant load time metric in WebPageTest is the Speed Index, the average time it takes for a website to display visible parts of the page. 

Our test’s top performers achieved a Speed Index of 3–4 seconds, and fully loaded in 8–10 seconds over a Regular 3G Mobile test configuration.

Top 10 performing government websites

The top-performing websites above combine server and infrastructure-based best practices, such as:

• Keep-alive enabled. This means that they enable persistent connection between the browser and the server, reducing CPU and memory load on the server, allowing for faster delivery of content to website visitors.
• Compressed data transfer. Enables data size reduction by compressing data before transferring over the internet from the server to the browser. Compressed files have a smaller file size, which means less bandwidth is needed to move them from the server to the browser.
• Compressed images. Same benefits as compressed data transfer, except that the images can be stored in an already compressed state on the server. This can be achieved through automated compressing on the server, or by applying content authoring best practices (see below).
• Effective use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Typically, each web page is composed of a few files, such as the main HTML file, CSS, JavaScript, and images. To render the interface that the visitor sees, the browser needs to download all these files. To optimize this multi-threaded download process, we can serve website files through a CDN. This results in more servers sending files to the visitor at the same time, distributing the request.

While upgrading to a new platform and technology or switching to a cloud server infrastructure may improve performance, you can improve your website’s performance within your routine website management workflows.

Five simple improvements for better website performance

1. Optimize photography. Before uploading photographs and illustrations to the website, ensure that images are correctly sized and cropped. For example, hero images should be as wide as the website layout for full effect. News / blog feed thumbnails can be reduced to a smaller size, significantly improving visitors’ loading speeds. Simple tricks to compress images include converting PNG images into the JPG format and running images through image optimization tools, such as TinyJPG (available as a plugin in popular content management systems), Image Compressor, or if this is available to you, Adobe Photoshop’s “Save for Web” option.
2. Combine multiple CSS and JavaScript files into one of each type. You probably regularly update your website’s CSS and JavaScript libraries to the latest versions. Next time the libraries are due for an upgrade, combine them into single CSS and JavaScript files. Combining files will reduce the number of requests to the server and the number of files the visitor’s browser needs to download, thus reducing latency.
3. Minify and compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. After combining files into a single file of each file type, use that opportunity to minify code. Most of the popular code libraries, such as Bootstrap or jQuery, already come with prepackaged minified versions, so it might be just a matter of replacing the current version with the minified one. For extra performance, utilize Bootstrap CDN and jQuery CDN options, which allow you to serve these files from a CDN (content delivery network) server instead of hosting them on your website. For any visitors who have downloaded the CDN version on another website, they’ll already have these files downloaded when visiting your website.
4. Disable plug-ins and features you don’t use. Regular pruning of the add-on features and functionalities may also help. Removing commonly overseen elements, such as map APIs,  leftover YouTube code, legacy analytics code, or captcha code in pages that don’t include web forms can dramatically optimize web pages that don’t utilize these case-by-case functionalities.
5. Enable caching or install a caching plug-in. If your content management system or web server supports caching, ensure that caching is enabled and properly configured. While caching won’t help visitors on their first visit, it will improve page loading speeds for visitors who frequently revisit your website.

Conclusion

Website performance is easy to improve but also easy to miss. We hope that this simple list helps you understand how to improve your website’s performance, allowing  for faster access to information and the ability to better reach your audience.

For all questions or advice on website performance, please reach out to our team of experts.

As you’ve probably gathered, user research and design validation with users shouldn’t be taken lightly. Nevertheless, getting into the regular practice of including customers is not always an easy endeavor. It often requires budget and time approval for teams and individuals, which many organizations are still not too happy to give away. Even if approval is attained, keep in mind that involving users also sets certain expectations. This is why it’s important to maximize every opportunity to learn from users and improve the design concept.

To get the best outcome from a test, it’s always a good idea to eliminate any sloppiness that might ruin the effort. As such, by taking care of any low hanging fruit, we can then focus on gathering insights that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to identify ourselves. In other words, if we are already aware what needs to be fixed, we really don’t need to spend testers’ time to tell us the very same thing.

Let’s see what we have…

1. Ensure text is clear and readable. A good rule of thumb is to keep text size above 16px, while establishing harmonic headings and subheads sizing using tools such as modularscale.com.
2. Organize individual content elements using appropriate amounts of white-space, and group related element together. Doing so will make it easier for testers to scan each page. A good rule of thumb is 1 space unit between two paragraphs; 2 space units between the main content and supplementary content; 3 space units between major sections on the page (for example, between the header, content and footer).
3. Provide sufficient color contrast. This usually applies to text and background color combinations, but the contrast between two adjacent background colors that is too low can be difficult to perceive for some users as well. (Remember that time when you presented your design on an outdated projector and the colors didn’t look nearly as vivid as on your Apple screen back in the office?) To help you design WCAG 2.0 / Section 508 compliant websites, be sure to test color contrast ratio using the numerous tools available.
4. Design affordance for every interactive element. This doesn’t mean avoiding flat design, but being consistent in how interactive and non-interactive elements are designed. A simple trick to accomplish clarity between interactive and non-interactive elements is to use one typographic style for content elements (subheads, paragraphs and captions) and another style for interface elements (navigation, tabs, buttons).
5. Respect well-established conventions. A huge usability offender we still see nowadays is the use of a right pointing triangle icon (▶) or plus sign (+) in bulleted lists. Such icons are commonly used to signify expanding accordions or sublists (in which case they should turn into a downward pointing triangle or minus symbol to signify the collapse). Using them in other instances simply creates confusion. We’ve seen on multiple occasions, testers who attempted to expand a list item because an inappropriate icon was used instead of a more appropriate middot (•) or an en-dash (–).
6. Improve page loading and content rendering. Take care of webfonts, image and video placeholders and provide appropriate fallback options. In doing so, don’t let poor loading times and random rendering influence the user experience and the outcome of the usability test (unless, of course, you are running a usability test on a poorly performing interface to prove your point). Keep in mind, that when testing websites for usability, it’s always a good idea to clear caches between sessions.
7. Use good quality high resolution photos. Yes, this somewhat contradicts the previous tip. However, we know from experience that imagining better photos is not the same as seeing better photos. The good news is that a single and carefully selected high resolution photo performs much better than a few subpar photos. By being cautious of how we export images from a graphic editor and running them through file-size optimizers such as TinyPNG, we are able to provide great experience at a low performance cost.
8. Create a 404 page for all links to non-existing pages in the test prototype. In doing so, we remove the need for having to explain why some links work and some don’t. Test participants are generally able to easily recover from a 404 by clicking the back button. Otherwise, test participants can be left extremely confused if they are simply taken to the top of the page after following a link populated with an empty hash (#).

Maximize the test to learn the things you don’t know

Getting customers to test an interface is not an effortless process. It takes a lot of time to screen and recruit perfect participants. This is why we are careful not to waste an opportunity to learn something new, and not necessarily just watching users point out insufficiencies that we’re already aware of.

Whether you’re tasked with designing a task-oriented interface — that almost always benefit from a straight-forward and usable appeal — or a marketing-focused interface, a common project requirement is visual adherence to the brand guidelines as well as an appealing visual design. Even if branding guidelines don’t exist, there are almost always some basic visual style requirements. As such, the guidelines and/or requirements ultimately set the tone moving forward.

Nevertheless, when it comes to visual preference subjectivity can still pose quite a challenge for designers and stakeholders alike. Why? For a start, it’s sometimes difficult to apply aesthetics that will resonate the same with all end users and customers. Furthermore, for each given design problem there are usually many different viable solutions to that problem. Hence, which solution is truly the best fit for the problem at hand? Therefore, the first question we need to ask, is whether we can successfully measure aesthetics?

Scientists Papachristos and Avouris (2011) defined visual attributes such as symmetry, order and complexity, balance, and contrast as low level evaluative constructs. Perceived usability, credibility, trustworthiness, novelty, and visual appeal represent high level constructs. This is an important distinction, because high level constructs can not be measured mathematically, and usually require some qualitative feedback from real people to be evaluated.

But, but, but! Why would you test the aesthetics in the first place? Is it not the case that designers should be the final decision making authority? Well … not so fast. Indeed, experienced designers bring a lot of skills, ideas and expertise to a project. They skillfully identify and create different viable solutions. But even for the most experienced, it’s sometimes difficult to know which solution resonates the most with the target end users.

Benefits of including end-users

Apart from the primary reasons outlined above, there are other less obvious benefits to including end-users in the process:

1. Aligning the team’s vision and developing common understanding. After seeing real people using the design, the whole project team, including key decision makers and stakeholders, get to clearly understand which design assumptions were correct and which ones were less relevant. This helps with aligning the team’s vision, developing common understanding and pushing everyone’s efforts in the same direction.
2. It’s easy to estimate if the visual appeal is an important factor in the first place — and to what extent. In some projects, quick access to information heavily outweights the need for visual appeal. In others, overly sophisticated design can send the wrong message about the value of the product. However, even when core usability is top priority, many websites still benefit from distinctive visual appeal and brand recognition.
3. End customers provide us with nuanced feedback on how they perceive the design and the organization. As a result, the visual design is informed and can be improved based on the input provided by the external audience. Sometimes a visual style preferred by the project team doesn’t resonate with the end customer and vice-versa. After all, as a designer Zuzana Licko said, “we read best what we read most”, which is obviously a different experience for each and everyone of us. What the designers or the stakeholders are used to seeing is not neccessarily what the end customers are used to seeing.

Having hopefully established strong enough arguments in favor of testing, let’s review some viable options for testing aesthetics of interfaces.

Scientific methods for testing website aesthetics

There are multiple options available for validating aesthetics. However, visual design tests don’t have to be conducted as a separate activity. In fact, the examples below can be easily combined with other evaluation methods too. This is what our design team at SymSoft prefers resulting in better efficiency and project budget optimization. For instance, after the usability test phase of the session is done, we can also test a participant’s attitude towards the visual aspect of the interface design. How?

1. Ask participants to solve a cognitive task after using the design. This is useful when comparing which of two or more solutions are more appealing. Science says that people perform better in cognitive tests — such as the Candle problem — after they are being exposed to a more appealing design. For example, the participants who receive the good typography afterwards perform better on Isen’s cognitive tasks as well as on subjective duration assessment (PDF). This test is quite reliable, because the participants aren’t aware of the connection between the goal of the test (which is how they perform after being exposed to a design) and the cognitive problem task. A good way to establish a baseline is to first test the current design and then compare it with the results of the new design test.
2. Relative Subjective Duration assessment (PDF). Time flies when we’re having a good time. Studies have showed that users underestimate tasks they felt were pleasant to accomplish. By comparing the user’s estimated time and the real time it took them to accomplish a task, we can easily compare two versions of a visual design where all other factors, such as navigation labels and interaction remain unchanged.
3. Semantic Differential test. Semantic differential is a rating scale used to measure opinions, attitudes and values on a psychometrically controlled scale. By offering pairs of antonyms, subjects can select a value on a scale to evaluate the interface. Two examples of scales are modern vs traditional and appealing vs off-putting, but we can use many more scales in the same test depending on the given brand attributes.
4. Desirability test was originally developed by Microsoft (DOC). Each participant individually selects a number of cards (for example, three, five, or more) from a variety of cards with different adjectives written on each card (one adjective per card, 60 percent positive vs. 40 percent negative adjectives). After a few participants undertake the test, the generated word cloud from all of the participants provides a clear idea about the aesthetic perception of the interface.

The methods above can be combined into a more robust suite of tests to push the research even further. For example, by introducing different versions. However, it’s not always viable to create multiple versions of the interface. Rather, it makes more sense to apply iteratice approach to the design process.

A more simple, less biased method

When following an iterative design process, it’s useful to use design validation for course correction, especially if we have conducted exhaustive user research up front and it’s clear why people visit a website. An iterative design process also allows us to utilize a much simpler method to test aesthetics which can be easily combined either with user interviews or usability tests. This is how we combine multiple tests into one session.

First, we capture the interview or the usability test verbatim. After the session, we would extract all the adjectives participants used during the sessions.

Second, before the end of each session we literally ask each participant to describe the interface with five adjectives:

Please use five adjectives to describe the website you just tested:

1.___________________

2.___________________

3.___________________

4.___________________

5.___________________

This simple task is open ended, unlike the Semantic Differential or Desirability Test that spell out options to the user and hence introduce a bias. With an open list, participants can come up with answers that first spring into their minds.

Finally, we compare the adjectives they used during the usability test against the ones they selected after the test to gather insight into their perception of the interface. Needless to say, the ones used during the test tend to have more value. However, if the two lists of adjectives end up matching one another and they too match the list of brand attributes—then we can be really confident that the design resonates with its intended audience. Be aware, that if the adjectives used are too diverse, then it just means the visual communication is not clear and requires more work.

The key factor is to ensure you gather a sufficient volume of feedback. From experience, having fewer than 5 participants, more often than not, does not generate any overlaps. With five or more participants, their combined answers generally reveal numerous patterns. However, we rarely see any improvement in precision after ten participants.

Including end-users pays off

Testing and validating designs with end-customers improves the final result and builds the project team’s common understanding about the user’s expectations. By testing designs, we end up delivering better websites that meet user’s needs and as a result improve business objectives.

Meet user research.

User research is a collective name for design methodologies and tools used to understand people’s needs and validate the proposed design with the audience who will use it.

At SymSoft, we use different methods based on the project needs and viability, but often we also combine multiple tools. Allow us to share a couple of examples how we recently incorporated user research.

1. We utilized card sorting, user interviews, usability testing and visual preference test for a utility company website redesign.
2. We published an online survey for a government agency website redesign.
3. We conducted user interviews for a conservation organization website redesign.

Card sorting, user interviews, usability testing and visual preference test for a utility company

Sacramento Utility Municipal District (SMUD) is the US’ sixth largest community owned utility company. We included users to help us validate the proposed Information Architecture (the way pages are organized on the website, also known as IA) and to also help us improve the homepage and service page content, layout and interactivity.

1. To improve the IA, we collaborated with SMUD’s User Experience experts in utilizing a method called card sorting.
2. To validate page design and interaction, we conducted user interviews and usability testing as a part of the design sprint, an effective five-day process we use to move from a design problem to a viable solution.
3. To evaluate brand compliance, we collected and analyzed adjectives participants used to describe the design prototype after using it. Read more about different ways to estimate website aesthetics.

Including users not only helped us improve the website, but it also built up team excitement and enthusiasm. After watching real people using the website, everybody knew exactly what we needed to do to further improve the design.

Online surveys for a government agency

On multiple projects for the California state agencies, we used online surveys to get feedback about the current website. The audience on a state agency website is usually very diverse, ranging from state employees, to various public entities, to businesses, to general public.

Online surveys give us a quick snapshot of who they are, what they came for and how they perceive the current website. In addition, we establish a benchmark for the redesign using the Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire (SUPR-Q).

For example, on a recent project for a sizable state agency that spans over a dozen business lines, the survey results surfaced two distinctive audience types:

1. The state employees and professional specialists who use the website daily, some of them even for more than a decade. They learned how to get around the shortcomings to find the information they need.
2. General public who visit the website only occasionally to learn about specific services. This group has a hard time finding basic contact information, because they easily get lost in the specialist language and institutional jargon.

This insight helped us provide two distinct pathways to information — one for the experienced users who already know the organization’s inner workings and the other for newcomers who are unaware of other business lines beyond their immediate need.

Having both experts and novices using the same website is a very common scenario. However, it would be irresponsible to make assumptions about the two distinct behaviors without some kind of validation. Making design decisions based on speculation is rarely a good idea. In this case, the online survey confirmed the hypothesis about two distinct types of website users and helped us cater for both audiences.

User interviews for a conservation organization

User interviews help us understand motivations, aspirations, priorities and language used by the target audience.

We were lucky to interview the primary audience of the California Conservation Corps, an organization that recruits and employs young people on a variety of conservation projects. Sessions included interviewing recruits as well as the existing members. The CCC’s project team went far and beyond to secure a diverse group of interviewees at various stages in the recruitment process.

Apart from understanding their motivations and attitudes, we were also able to sneak in a photography preference test, which helped the website editorial staff to select appropriate photography for the website launch.

Including customers improves business

The above examples illustrate how including customers can improve the end result and build the project team’s common understanding about the user needs as well as the best way to address them. More importantly, customers who find the website useful and convenient, keep coming back for more. This as a result improves brand engagement and meets business objectives. In short, meeting customers’ needs is good for the business.