The number of tools available to conduct user experience research has grown tremendously over the last 5 years. There are 5 second tests, 1st click tests, usability software of many varieties, tree tests, card sorts, session replay, heatmaps, and the list continues to grow. What most of these tools have in common is that they are self-service, it’s easy to create research projects and to manage them but unless you have your own list of users they are recruiting from either home grown panels/communities or the big panel companies. So the big questions are; Are you getting the right users for your research and are you taking advantage of your most important user resource to fuel your UX research.Most of these tools are affordable, easy to use and they offer a lot of value for specific UX needs if those two simple questions can be answered in the affirmative.
So where are the right users? Well unless you are targeting a new market segment they come to your website every day and their behavior on your site can easily segment the target users if only you had a way to intercept them at the point of performing that behavior. With OnCue our new online research management tool you get all of that with just a few simple clicks.
Example Video about how easy it is to use OnCue to turn your site into a UX research platform.
For example the director of marketing is upset that accessories on your ecommerce site are not selling very well and has put forth the hypothesis that it’s the taxonomy of the accessories section of the site that is at fault. How are you going to prove/disprove this before he hauls off and spends $50k for a new redesign of the section?
Having done a little taxonomy work in the past you know that there are companies like OptimalSort offering the ability to do card sorts and tree testing that could quickly give you the answer you needed provided you could get a good sample of people who are looking to purchase accessories from your site. Now with OnCue at your disposal, you can easily target users of your site that visit any of the sub sections of the Accessories section of the site, ask them to opt-in to the Tree Test study you created, turn it on and watch your data roll in. When you have a statistically significant sample size you simply log into OnCue and disable the test. No need to call up your IT team, no need to spend thousands on panelists to get the answers you need to make sound business decisions.
Want to give it a go? Signup to be a beta user for Oncue. To learn more about OnCue, see the announcement from Usability Sciences.