A complete user testing lab in a single link

I think this is of real value to anyone who is interested in finding out what users do, whether you are a usability expert, marketer, webmaster or a one-man startup. It is about how to turn Google Analytics into a user testing lab, and in doing so save money and get better data from remote and lab-based testing. This is a suitable, and in a lot of ways a better alternative to the paid for remote testing services.  So in summary:

• This will save you money, as it is free
• It can be set up in less than a minute
• You can test on any platform, desktop, tablet, mobile
• It will have no impact on how the site your testing performs, i.e. it will not slow down or interrupt page loads or break the site
• No programming is required
• It will provide you with a far superior tool for collecting and analysing data than anything else on the market, as it is Google Analytics, industry-leading, powerful, all-conquering etc.
• It is suitable for all levels of expertise as useful results can be achieved with relatively little knowledge or effort and if you know GA and you are willing to spend some time you can do some quite sophisticated work.
• And as it uses GA, the chances are that most sites,  apps will have it installed and if they don’t, it is unlikely that they will object to doing so.

Everything you need, Google will provide

You do not need to spend money on remote testing software. As Google Analytics provides, pretty much all that you need with a small tweak, or hack if you prefer. And while not everything Google touch is brilliant, their analytics are good, really good.

This is how is it done

You do it by tweaking the “UTM parameters” (“Urchin Tracking Module”).  These parameters are just a set of labels to which you can assign a value e.g. utm_source=’Webnarrative’. These labels and values are stuck on to the end of URLs. It looks something like this:

• Here is my URL: http://www.mysite.com
• Here is my label and value: utm_source=webnarrative
• Here is another  label and value: utm_content=funfares
• And here is my lab in a link courtesy of “?” and “&”:
• www.mysite.com?utm_source=webnarrative&utm_content=funfares

What the UTM’s  were originally intended doesn’t matter (tracking where your traffic comes from),  as we can set it up any way we want. You can run it in the lab or via a link in an email or pop up, just like taking part in a survey. If you know a little javascript you can even set demographic data, gender, age, role, so that we can see how one group performs against another.

The lab in a link  Proof of concept

Here is the task I set:

“See if you can find any cheap fares for a trip you are interested in. Keep going until you hit the top of the funnel”

I stuck this together an sent it as a link in an email to my colleagues begging them to take part. Below is the data I gathered off the proof of concept;

User flow for the Funfare task

Accessing the data within GA

If you have done no more than providing a link similar to the one above then you can find out how the user has done in the following way. Create a new segment. Select Conditions from the left hand menu. Choose ‘Add content’ from the drop down and ‘Contains’, then type in the value.  Here it’s “Funfares”. Click the “And” button on the right and For the next criteria choose “Source” Contains plus the value that you provided, ‘webnarrative’.  This allows you to browse all the reports and see how users trying to complete this task performed. You can see how many found the target page in the content report, what path they took to it and so on.

Taking it a bit further

If you have a few more rights or can persuade someone who does, this will make your life easier. Set up your view within GA. This view will filter traffic to only capture data from your test. My view was filtered on utm_source=webnarrative . This method makes the data cleaner, so you don’t have to spend time on digging out the interesting stuff. Create goals in GA for each task you want to measure; this will provide a convenient way of tracking success and failure. Finally, set up some custom reports, which allow you to organise things by the variables you are interested in, e.g. device ( mobile, desktop, tablet), demographic ( age, gender) and see different performance metrics, how long the task took, where they successful, average number of pages visited….

heres a link to the  template for the report I set up:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=m0_lJjhgRr2p_MZPjQem6g

What next?

There are a couple of things I’d like to do; the first is build a web app to manage a study. Part of this I’ve built already, the delivery of tasks and capturing comments, the next step is to make one publicly accessible, so anyone can, with a few minutes to spare, create a project, add tasks and get going. The final piece will be to do the reporting interface, so there is no need to log into GA.

heres a link if you want to have a play:

http://www.paperst.co.uk/gaLAB/tasks.htm

The other thing I’d like to try out is enhanced analytics: This would be a single question study which gets a visitor to record at the beginning of a visit what they are here to do. Knowing the intention helps us to assess how they performed and what needs attending to on our site.