User Page Reviews in Usability Testing

Websites increasingly encourage users to provide comments on the quality of specific pages by clicking on a feedback button and filling out a feedback form. The authors investigate users’ (N=153) abilities to provide such feedback and the kind of feedback that is the result. They compare the results of these so called user page review methods with the concurrent think-aloud method, applied on the same Websites. Results show that it is important to keep feedback tools both simple and attractive so that users will be able and willing to provide feedback. The authors also find that the number of problem detections is higher in the review condition, but the two methods seem to be highly complementary. An analysis of the detections from a practice-oriented perspective reveals that the overlap between the two methods is rather high and that reviewing participants seem capable of signalling important problems that are also exposed in a think-aloud study.