The ultimate guide to testing your website

Few people will give up their time for free, so you'll also need to consider incentives. Anything below £20 per hour is a bit miserly. You'll need a lot more to attract people from a particularly rare niche (GPs, mustachioed Canadian cat owners); it's probably worth using a specialist recruiter for these guys. It's up to you whether you offer cash, vouchers or any other incentive. If you're in a larger organisation, ask your finance team what's easiest.

Once you get started, you'll be too busy watching to takes notes by hand, so it's useful to record the screen. A video camera might suffice, but the quality won't be great and you won't be able to see the user's face. A better approach is to use screen recording software: see 'Usability testing software' (right). If you can't work out a way to record the session, try to find someone to take notes for you.

Also think about what kind of venue you want the testing to take place in. The most obvious choice is a spare room in your office, but they can be unfamiliar and intimidating places for the public. The guerrilla alternative is to get your laptop out and scoot round to a more amenable venue.

The ideal environment is as close to the user's natural habitat as possible, so you get the chance to see other things about their set-up. Do they have passwords scribbled on Post-it notes? Do they have to ask their son to help install software? These can have important implications for your designs.

Of course, it can be very hard to arrange tests on the user's home turf, so a quiet coffee shop can be a good neutral venue – but scout around first. It'll be hard to focus if baristas are shouting espresso orders within earshot.

The day of the test

Set up early and check you've brought the right cables (including a charger) and have all your paperwork ready. Once the user arrives, greet them, offer them a drink and generally make them feel at home. People might be nervous, so it's part of your job to make sure they relax.

A good way to start is to explain that you're not testing them, just the website, so they can't do anything wrong. It's often best to pay their incentive in advance too, so they don't feel like they have to do well to earn their cash.

While you're doing this, you'll probably want to go through some housekeeping. If you have a non-disclosure agreement, ask them to sign it. You should also ask permission if you're recording, and explain that they can opt out of the test at any point, and omit anything with which they feel uncomfortable.

Finally, explain what's known as 'thinkaloud'. This simply means that you ask your participant to talk you through what they're thinking during the test. This is a really useful way of learning how they believe the site works and behaves – what's known as a 'mental model' of the site. Then turn on your recording software, open the site in a browser (of the user's choice, ideally), give them their scenario and go!

As people familiarise themselves with the site, they'll often go quiet. That's fine, but you might wish to prompt them occasionally to explain what they're thinking. Good questions are "So what's going through your head right now?", "What do you think this page does?" or "What are your reactions?".

Try to avoid subjective or leading questions such as "Do you like this?" or "Does this button need to be bigger?". It's almost always better to ask open, probing questions starting with 'why', what' or 'how'. These are harder to answer in subjective terms and give users the chance to express how they've understood the system.