User Testing and Research Meets Client’s Goals

January 21, 2008Kayden Kelly

Client

Roseville Health and Wellness Center (http://www.rosevillehwc.com/) is a nationally recognized, upscale fitness and medical treatment center. It’s all about personalized total body wellness in a comfortable and supportive environment. Roseville HWC was voted #1 Health Club by Health and Fitness Magazine & #1 Wellness Center in the United States by the Medical Fitness Association of America (2007).

Client’s Goals

• Communicate that…You belong…and it is possible!
• Make everyday people (NON-musclehead) people feel like they belong and that they can help them achieve their goals with a tailored and personal wellness program.
• RHWC understands personal needs
• Make members feel safe, welcome, accepted, that staff is approachable, no pressure or intimidation
• Impression of warmth, upscale, personal, committed to helping them improve their member’s health and fitness.
• Want to be unique and at all costs avoid looking like typical gym.
• Primary Action Goal is for users to learn about who the gym is for, what the benefits are, and to take action by requesting a tour

User Centered Discovery Process

We interviewed the client to flesh out their needs and goals, discussed needs/wants with users, and gathered all marketing collateral and other assets. Developed a creative brief to set clear expectations and collect all creative input and direction, performed an audience segmentation to better understand their users (see below), defined and documented their website redesign goals and objectives, performed a benchmarking site analysis to better understand where their current site stood based on our experience and user feedback so we could properly plan our strategy to improve the site, and strategized and revised the site’s organization to make it easier to browse and more likely that users would see more of the content.

Specifically, to increase page views on valuable, buried content we consolidated some of the multi-page content into single pages and utilized more scrolling to greatly reduce the amount of clicks necessary to browse the site. More importantly, this tactic made compelling content more likely to be seen and thereby become valuable in engaging the users’ interest.

Our first in-person tour of the wellness center gave us a good idea of how we
wanted the website to represent the environment that RHWC has to offer. The color choices for the website were chosen to reflect the walls, desks and tiles of the
wellness center. RHWC is truly focused on offering a comfortable and supportive
environment that inspires, motivates and energizes their members.

We wanted to represent this feeling through aged paper and texture throughout the site. In addition, small bursts of waves are found on corners of members’ images to indicate movement and change as they strive towards their goals.

User Demographics

Because the targeted user demographics are so key to this case study we have included brief excerpts:

Primary User Demographic
Fitness clients, (People looking to maintain or improve their health), 60% female, 35-55 years old who are well educated and affluent looking for personal, caring attention in an upscale, comfortable, supportive alternative to the cold impersonal fitness chains or “muscle-head” gyms.

Secondary User Demographic
Rehabilitation and other special medical needs physician referrals who are between the age 45-55 and are well educated and affluent.

User Testing Results

The site was tested on a variety of users who matched Roseville HWC’s demographic and even those who didn’t match to be sure that both groups had the expected, desired reaction to the site. We found that people normally drawn to a standard body building gym didn’t identify with the site, didn’t have as positive of a reaction and were highly focused on price which is contrary to their unique and upscale positioning. People who were in the target demographic did have the exact desired reaction and responded with input that perfectly aligned and validated our website redesign project goals.

For example, a Female user in her 50’s who self-proclaimed she was not in ‘super shape’ had the overall response, “this is for people Just Like Me!” Her other comments were perfectly in line with our primary and secondary objectives.

After she took part in the first usability test that only gave her 5 seconds to
review the home page she responded with the following comments:

• Available to all ages…could take care of most anyone
• The site felt friendly
• Very nice looking site…colorful but not outrageous
• Great positive effect from the 3 images & messages
• The tagline made her look deeper into the site and she felt the site catered to
  her & other average people
• Offers child care
• Has a spa
• More focused on rehabilitation than your normal gym
• More of a health and wellness center for anyone
• Really liked real people images since they weren’t of twiggy athletes

Made Changes Based on User Feedback

As with all user testing you perform it to identify where you went wrong and fix those issues. Our user testing of Roseville HWC did identify a couple major and several minor issues which were all addressed to better meet the user’s needs and make sure the site was easy to use, especially for their demographic.

Bottomline: Met Client’s Goals

By performing a reasonable amount of user research and user testing throughout the website redesign project we were able to validate at the end of the project that users in their targeted demographic were having the desired reaction and overall impression that met Roseville Health and Wellness Center’s goals.

What better response from your target user could you ask for then, “this is for people just like me.”

Now we will continue to analyze the site’s performance based on leads generated and key metrics compared to the benchmarked performance of the previous web site.

About the Author

Kayden Kelly

Kayden is the Founder and CEO of Blast Analytics & Marketing. He leads overall strategy and execution in positioning Blast as a leading analytics and digital marketing consulting company. An industry trailblazer who stays ahead of trends and opportunities, Kayden has spent nearly two decades building his expertise in all areas, with a deep focus on analytics, search engine optimization, and user experience. He is an evangelist for “the customer,” helping clients create sustainable competitive advantage by developing, optimizing, distributing, and connecting valuable content to customer needs. Connect with Kayden on LinkedIn. Kayden Kelly has written 48 posts on the Blast Digital Customer Experience and Analytics Blog.