Keen to understand how the site I have been working on would test to someone who has never seen it before, I invited my mother to be my UX testing guinea pig.
“The goal of user experience design in industry is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.”
With a brand new website about to be launched, it is essential to have user feedback. My mother perfectly fitted into one of the demographics of users. Therefore, she was an ideal candidate for user experience testing.
I warmed her up with some very simple tasks, which she passed with flying colours.
Stepping away from the project and looking at it with fresh eyes, or instead through my mother’s eyes, was enlightening in many ways.
Some elements were easy to navigate around, and some were surprisingly hard. For example, when she was on a sub-page, I asked her to navigate back to the home page. Instead of clicking on the logo, as would be standard practice for me, she used the back button until she returned to the homepage. It is not a significant issue as the site is only 3 levels deep, but it made me think about the famous amazon rollover logo, which then included the text home.
When I asked her to find specific information within the site, she navigated to the completely wrong section of the website, and after a while, gave up looking. It was highly informative for me and gave me a good list of issues to be looked at and fixed.
I think UX testing with mothers or those around you that aren’t digitally confident IS the future. Care to lend me yours?