LDS Tests the User Experience

On a desk draped in black felt sit seven "category cards"--large white index cards with a big gray number on the middle of each card. Text representing Web site navigation categories is printed over each number. Below the large cards sit an array of smaller index cards. Each is similarly printed with a large gray number and overprinted with text. Those are topic cards. The object of this particular game is for participants to work their way through the deck of small index cards, placing topics on the category cards until every topic is matched with the category that best fits the item. The exercise is a lesson for those who would build complex Web sites.

The category that won by far, during one recent session, was "other".

"It's very cool, very efficient and very low-tech," says Elizabeth Nappi, usability engineer at Logical Design Solutions (LDS). "It's called a card sorting test and it allows us to map the mental model of site users." LDS is a 130-person Web integration company whose founders have a background in human factors and performance engineering. This perspective affords the company a solid platform to base the critiques of Web sites it performs for clients and a strong launchpad for designing new sites with an end-user-centric approach.

LDS' headquarters, recently re-located to lower Manhattan near Wall Street, houses its usability lab. The lab consists of a series of small conference rooms and control rooms. (The lab itself was designed by a group of usability specialists) Users in each of the participant rooms are monitored and recorded by usability specialists who sit behind two-way mirrors in observer rooms. In the participant rooms, ceiling cameras record the participants and their activities-whether at a screen surfing Web sites or sitting in front of the black table, sorting cards. In fact, the large gray numbers on the cards in the card sort test are all the observers can read when they record participants. They translate the numbers to the corresponding textual items for clients when they view the tape.

Every move is recorded, even facial cues. In a picture-in-picture window, LDS usability specialists record the expressions of participants as they sort cards or surf sites. "It helps to look for feedback of all kinds," says Nappi.

"When we give tours of our usability labs it starts to show personality differences from, say, a company like Razorfish. A lot of this is really personality difference among competitors," says Mimi Brooks, president and CEO of LDS. "When we're comparing ourselves to the interactive agencies we think that we offer a more complex solution."

The lab testing seems to be paying off. Privately-held LDS lists Fortune 500 clients such as AT&T, Lucent, Chase Manhattan, John Hancock and others.

One such customer is NCR Corp., Dayton, Ohio.

"Our Human Resources site was designed two to three years ago and had an old look and feel. We wanted to update it," says Jane Casson, a benefits consultant at NCR. "When we interviewed employees and HR managers to see how they used our Web site we found that the Web site wasn't used because people had difficulties finding the plans and programs they needed."

NCR used LDS and its usability labs to help update and improve its internal HR site. This was no small undertaking. The site will be made available first in the United States to some 14,000 employees and later will be rolled out to the company's top 10 employee populated countries, eventually becoming available to all of NCR's 36,000 employees worldwide.

NCR brought in employees to conduct card sort tests using 50 to 100 cards to be sorted into six or seven different "bucket" categories. "After they did that we had a better idea how we should organize our site," says Casson. LDS demonstrated three different prototype sites to the users to test site content, navigation, colors and overall look and feel for the site.

"After the users went through the proposed sites, we brought up the current site and the users had problems finding information and became very frustrated," says Casson. "I didn't realize that our Web site had gotten so bad."

Two client rooms afford LDS' customers the ability to monitor events at a safe distance. "Sometimes we have 'emotional stakeholders,' clients who need to see what's wrong with their site and hear it from users," says Nappi. LDS makes sure that clients can see and hear what their test subject have to say without interrupting the tests. The rooms are a "home away from home" for clients. Each contains a phone so clients can call their headquarters to have changes made "live" to their Web sites if necessary during tests.

"Our performance engineers are really looking at this from a science of design perspective," says Brooks. "That's a really different way of looking at design."

Casson is optimistic about the results of LDS' new design for NCR's HR site. "I'm sure it's not going to be perfect, but I'm sure we're on the right track," says Casson.

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