How to View Usability Study Results in Indigo Studio

In this post, we’re going to walk you through the final step of hosting a usability study in Indigo Studio, Infragistics’ rapid prototyping solution: looking at the results of a usability study and quickly gaining insights. To get the full story on usability testing, be sure to check out the first two parts to this series: how to set up a usability test and how to take part in a usability study. 

Usability studies are unmoderated; this means that the study organizer does not have to present when people take part in the study, and any number of people can take part at the same time. You decide when a study is complete, and have the option to close the study to prevent additional participants. As people complete the study, the results automatically update.

What you see here in the video is the study overview report. It’s been designed to generate quick insights, without having to review the session for each and every participant. From here, you can see how many people completed the task and the average time required to complete the study.

In this example, the first task was completed by 9 of 11 participants. So naturally, this is the one we should inspect in more detail. Clicking on the task item will show a more detailed report for each participant.

The detailed report shows the metrics for each participant. These are: whether they completed the task, whether it took them longer than average, and the number of steps or clicks they took for each task.

We can see that the last two participants were marked as unsuccessful because they needed guidance to complete the task. If you see a “Play” option listed for the participant, you can watch a recording of their session to understand what exactly happened. Clicking “Play” will launch the video player in a new tab.

To make it easy to understand what happened during the session, the timeline is annotated with markers. The color and shape of the markers represent whether the participant used the prototype as expected. If there are no usability issues, you may only see the blue circles as markers. Which is not the case here. The red markers are shown when there are interactions we did not expect.

You can either play back the entire video or jump straight to the portion where you see the red markers. If the participant enabled voice and camera, you will be able to see their face and hear them as they use the prototype. You can switch between participants or tasks using the navigation on top or use the arrow keys–left and right to switch between participants and up or down arrow key to switch between tasks.

As you review the video, you can add notes to record your observations. This will also add a note marker to the timeline. This is handy if multiple people are going to analyze the video. If you created the usability study in a group workspace, other members will automatically have access.

If for some reason a video is not available, you can view a clickmap report for each participant to see exactly where they clicked in the prototype.

In addition to video recordings and clickmaps, you will also see a sub-report that reveals how participants used the prototype. This report is useful if you have designed multiple ways to complete the task and you are looking to find out which was more popular.

The task flow defined by the study organizer, when setting up the task, is shown as the recorded flow. If more than one user uses a different flow, it will be captured as an alternate flow. You can then see how many people used the recorded flow versus the alternate flow. If each participant completed the task their own way, each will be captured as a unique flow. It's called a unique flow because there are no overlapping sequences of steps amongst the participants.

In conclusion, the reports are designed to surface interesting incidents automatically and in a hierarchical format. Having videos is great, but it's also a very rich format and time-consuming to analyze. The report helps you identify videos that you need to watch first. If for some reason video recordings are not available, you can always view the clickmaps.

If you haven't tried Indigo Studio yet, get it for free, and start evaluating your prototypes on how customers actually use them, not just what they say. For more information on usability testing in Indigo Studio, visit Usability Testing at Scale on infragistics.com.