Websites/Mozilla.org/One Mozilla/Documentation/Checklist-UXR

Overview: All websites have problems (some are just prettier to look at while you're growling). User research helps fix usability problems when it comes to websites. We love fixing problems, and creating user happiness. Here are some of the tactics that the websites' team uses.

Analytics

At Mozilla we use Webtrends to track website analytics. The analytics that Webtrends gathers tells us what people are doing on our websites, but not necessarily why they're doing it.

Important Metrics:

• Bounce rate - useful for identifying pages that might not be useful or user flows that might be broken (presenting the
• Page views - useful for identifying high-performing content & user flow entry points
• Time spent - the amount of time a user spends on the website
• Referrals - where users are coming from
  1. of desktop downloads
  2. of mobile downloads
  3. of social connections
  4. of backlinks

(there are many more!)

3rd Party Services

• usertesting.com
  • the challenge with usertesting.com and other similar services is that the users are highly motivated to do the tasks "right." Users receive ratings on their performance and in general it's not unusual that a tester wants to "get an A."
  • we use usertesting.com to do fast testing on important changes we make to our conversion funnels, we also use it to learn more about how users interact on our competitor sites.
• Gazehawk - Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze (“where we are looking”) or the motion of an eye relative to the head. Gazehawk uses software to track eye positions and movement around areas of interest (AOIs) on webpages.
  • Seeing Differently: Working With Gaze Studies on mozilla.org/firefox

Surveys

• Pre-conversion survey - setting the baseline
• Post-conversion survey - measuring the effectiveness of the tactics

Laura Forrest is a whiz at this, read her post on the brand awareness survey she ran in 2010-2011 here

In-house User Testing

Use a very simple setup with Silverback

• Our friends @ Twitter do this too :-)

Users: Both Fans and Outliers are useful Fans

• It might seem contradictory to bring in fans, but people who aren't part of the target audience will have problems that regular users won't, which creates false positive data
• Similarly domain knowledge isn't always as useful as you think it might be. In the case of /firefox, we're working with 4 flavors of Desktop and Mobile downloads (nightly, aurora, beta, GA). Terms that you might think users would be familiar with like "download" turn out to be more loaded lately

Outliers

• People who fall outside of the target audience can be useful too. Often, they can point out things that real users can't. It's useful to have at least one articulate outlier in the mix.