First Click Times on Websites Versus Images
MeasuringU
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It’s a lot faster to mock up an image of a webpage than to build a working webpage. Using images as prototypes allows for quick iterations and testing by having participants click on locations as if it were a real working webpage or app.
But does an image used in a click test elicit the same user behavior as a live website?
In an?earlier article,?we reviewed the literature on click testing and found nothing that compared clicks on images with clicks on live websites. We conducted two studies using the click-testing features of our?MUiQ ??platform to better understand the similarities.
In our first?study of five homepages, we found generally good corroboration between images and live websites. Across hotspot regions, the average absolute difference in first-click behavior was only about 6%. Of the 20 regions, six had statistically significant differences in the percentage of first clicks, but some differences were as large as 40%. The main driver of the differences was interactive elements on websites that weren’t present in static images.
In our?second study, we focused on internal product pages. Our 306 participants attempted to locate a laptop on one of three website product pages (Dell, Lenovo, HP). Participants were randomly assigned to one of the three websites and presented with either an image or a live website. Our analysis found that the?first clicks were generally similar between images and live websites. The average absolute difference in first-clicking behavior was only about 8%. Of the 21 regions, six had statistically significant differences in the percentage of first clicks (no significant differences for Dell). The largest difference in first-click percentages between regions was 31%.
Both studies suggest that click testing?likely provides a “good enough” option to gauge where people will click as if it were a functioning website to an approximate average precision of +/?10%.
So click testing on an image seems to provide a good proxy for?where?people will click (an essential effectiveness measure), but how comparable is the?time?it takes people to click (an essential efficiency measure) on an image versus a website?
To find out, we returned to these two studies and examined the time till the first click, which we collected with the?MUiQ platform.
Read the full article on MeasuringU's Blog
Summary and Discussion
Across two studies comparing first click times for tasks on live and image versions of eight websites, we found:
Participants take about 50% longer to make their first click on an image of a website than the live website. In seven of eight conditions, participants took longer to click on the image compared to the live website. Six of the eight differences were statistically significant. Our best estimate is that participants take on average about 50% longer to make their first click on the image of a website.
These estimates could change with a larger sample of tasks. To date, we only have image versus live site data from eight websites, one task per site. For one site (Disqus), the time to first click was nominally faster for the image than the live site, so it’s plausible that the true percentage of sites where image clicking is faster than live sites might be greater than 1/8 (12.5%). But because a 90% adjusted-Wald confidence interval around this proportion ranges from about 1% to 43%, it’s likely that first click times will generally be faster on live sites than images.
The “why” of the difference in image/live site times to first click is an open question. At this time, we can only speculate about why participants took more time to make their first click on the images of the websites. One clear difference between images and live sites is that images present a poorer set of visual clickability cues than live sites. Some clickability cues are the same on both (e.g., links indicated with underlines or colored text), but not all. For example, it’s common for selection cursors to change state when hovering over a clickable element. As shown in Figure 3, the cursor changes from the arrow to the pointing finger when hovering over “Stories” and the text also changes to bold. On the image representation, the cursor always shows the pointing finger because, on an image, everything is clickable (and the text does not change state when the pointer is near it). This might not account for all the additional time to first click on images but seems likely to substantially contribute to it.
Read the full article on MeasuringU's Blog
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Event Date :?September 10 - October 3, 2024
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Click Testing in MUiQ
MUiQ supports Click Testing as an integrated task type.
Click Test Setup: Upload images of your UI and define success/fail hotspots to determine task success. Set optional min/max required number of clicks and task timeouts.
Click Test Participant UI: Participant experience for the integrated?click?test includes a task description box at the top of the screen and optional?click?marks to confirm where they clicked.
Click Test Results Dashboards: Review the results as?click- and heatmaps along with data filters and detailed data exports.
Advanced Features: Set up your click test to end on the first click, set a min/max number of clicks, set a task timeout timer, and more.
Reach out today to learn more about how your team can use MUiQ !