“Staying on this page, can you look for section X?”
This seemingly straightforward question revealed interesting user behaviour during some recent usability testing. It wasn’t so much how difficult participants found the task to complete, but the response they made on completing the task itself. While a number of participants clearly found it difficult to finish finding section X to our satisfaction, some of those same participants suggested that they found it relatively easy. This seemed somewhat contradictory.
I observed one user scrolling up and down the page endlessly searching for the illusive section X. 20 seconds passed. 30 seconds passed. 40 seconds in total had passed, an absolute eternity on the web. I’m certain if anyone had to spend this amount of time looking for anything on an e-commerce website, they’d simply give up and move on to a competitor. One could suggest they spent this amount of time looking because they were explicitly told to during a test.
At the end of the searching for section X task, participants would be asked “How would you rate this task out of 5? 1 being difficult, 5 being easy.” To my surprise, a number of users who looked to struggle with the task consistently rated 4 out of 5, suggesting that they didn’t have much difficulty at…
