User experience: Remember the Grandparent Test

Build your site for every user

Increasingly nowadays people have to go online to carry out everyday tasks, often trivial but important to their lives, to book, purchase or communicate something. But a poor website experience could be costing your company business.

By "people" I am referring to anybody and everybody, of every age and every level of capability: Jo Public. So how well will they manage and how well have websites been tested to ensure they can navigate them easily? I propose 'the grandparent test' to evaluate them.

Suppose you have a 90 year-old granny or grandpa, a non-native English speaker living overseas, who has just been given a PC. They want to buy something and send it to you, wherever you are in the world. How likely is it that they will manage to do it? This is the much-trumpeted global market, so you would epect commercial websites to cater for the implications; but in many cases they don't and they almost certainly lose business because of it.

Underlying this is a lack of user testing: grandparent testing. Sites are too often tested only by IT literates, who can second-guess their way through any difficulties.

I have been applying the grandparent test to a number of sites, and found most wanting. On one site I visited I picked a number of items I wanted to purchase only to find, when I came to enter the payment details, that one item could not be sent to my country. I was tired so rather than page back through all the items I simply cancelled the whole order.

On another site I wanted to purchase a PC but found I had to have a UK address to do so (I don't live in the UK). On enquiring why I was told that the company required payment on a UK bank account, which I had; that is perfectly legal, even though I reside outside the UK. On pointing this out to the company I was asked which product I wished to return and what was wrong with it - the robots had taken over.

As a result of these and other experiences I have formulated some rules for grandparent-friendly websites. They are listed, with explanations below.

Rules for user-friendly websites

From the examples we have given I have been trying to infer a set of rules that web masters - and CIOs! - who are concerned about the user friendliness of their sites should observe. Here's a first cut at the rules.

1. Home Page

Does the home page present a list of options that fits with what you want to do on the site? What this means essentially is: does the list of options cover all legitimate uses of the site? Maybe there should be a question on the home page asking what you want to do and listing the options; is it obvious or must it be implied?

Is there an "other" option (an ELSE clause, when I programmed)? This could be covered by a "Contact Us" option if that includes a means to send a query easily, by email or other means. Does the Contact Us cater for all the reasons why you would want to contact the organisation, and can you do it easily?

Some sites don't even have a Contact Us option, or make it so restricted or difficult that it amounts, essentially, to "Piss off". So much for the importance of customer-supplier relationships.

Is there a site-wide search facility included on the home page? This can be helpful if user has an esoteric query (one the site designers haven't thought of). Does the search facility cater for it?

2. Information requested

Where information that the user may not have readily to hand is to be solicited, any general requirements should be stated up front: the documents or purchasing means you will need. There is nothing more frustrating than having to spend time searching for documents and then finding that the site has timed out on you.

With repect to purchasing information, any general restrictions should be given up front: "We don't accept X, we only accept Y." Restrictions on individual items could be linked to the items by a signal (e.g. an asterisk) linked to a drop-down menu of options. I've never seen it, but live in hope.

3. Restrictions

As a corrolary to the above, many sites have restrictions and few signal them in advance. Restrictions are most often geographical or financial. That is, items may not be able to be ordered from/delivered to specific geographic regions or may not apply to residents outside particular countries, and some credit/debit cards may not be accepted. If any of this applies, or there are any other restrictions, these should be signalled in advance of any transaction being started.

One commonly misunderstood restriction is the use of the UK postcode/address generator. It is a very useful piece of software, used in many sites, but it applies to the UK only in a world of global markets. So, if used and anything on the website applies outside the UK, it needs to be used with an escape clause (an ELSE clause, in my terms). E.g. if non-UK then...

The people managing the site also need to know what applies in the UK and elsewhere. Do they? Duh…

4. Telephone contact

I've no idea how many or if any websites track telephone traffic to ascertain how much of it is related to their website, but all site owners should. Such analysis may well reveal more about the effectiveness of your website than you wish to hear.

Other rules for website owners

There are a number of other questions that website owners might usefully ask themselves, particularly if they have inherited the website they are managing and had no part in its initial creation.

They should ask themselves, "What user testing has been carried out, by whom, and is this repeated periodically?"

I've already given our paradigm for the ideal user tester, the IT-illiterate grandparent living overseas. Failing this, who has been used to test the site? How IT-illiterate was s/he?

It must be obvious that knowledge of use of the site increases enormously over time and all kinds of statistics are generally available. But how much of this, and on what basis, is used to assess the site's user friendiness? Are statistics gathered on transactions aborted mid-transaction, for instance, and are reasons postulated and probed? Are telephone transactions related to the site, or which could have been carried out on the site, recorded? And are user-friendliness tests repeated periodically, or only when a new version of the site is launched?

Some sites have adopted the practice of releasing a beta version of the new site to the public, presumably as a form of (cheap) user testing. I'm not generally in favour of getting the public to do your dirty work for you but accept that it could be a useful adjunct to other forms of user testing.

In any case, small changes are made to most websites all the time and should always be - but I suspect rarely are - user-tested.

Unstated assumptions

Does your site contain unstated assumptions? What do you assume around declaration of age, for instance, or sex (only male and female?) or nationality, and are they always justified in all cases?

This is not about "woke" issues but about the validity of the information you are collecting. I would suggest that this is another instance where an "other" (ELSE clause) is imperative.

Contact us

In an age when most commercial organisations are spending a great deal of money trying to forge links with potential customers, it amazes me how many sites seem to deliberately make it diffcult to contact them.

If the fear is of allowing a deluge of useless contacts, incurring limitless employee time, it would be easy to use AI to avoid this using filters, and the information gained could be invaluable. I have never seen this approach being used.

Examples, error messages and passwords

I find it surprising that so few websites use examples to aid correct entries in fields. They can be very useful, especially for grandparents. For example, error messages that are some variation on "Invalid Entry" could be a lot more helpful - what exactly did I do wrong?

Finally requirements on passwords, such as inclusion of a special character, must be noted when a password is being created; although you obviously want a secure password, you shouldn't have to make an error in order to find out what the requirements are.

I believe that that websites aimed at Jo Public suffer from lack of rigourous "dumb" user testing, like the grandparent test or something similar. The result is that both users and the website owners lose out.

There are obvious gains to be made if the problem is properly addressed and, specifically, if more attention is paid to the ELSE clause in programing and determining options.

The ecomonic imperative seemingly proposes reducing human intervention in processes. So, with fewer people involved, the ELSE clause - the "other" human element - gains in importance.

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" - Shakespeare, Hamlet.

Your granny knows that. Does your website?

Ian Hugo entered IT in 1965 with ICT, which became ICL. He subsequently became an independent consultant and a director of two IT companies. He now lives in France.