Slice of Lime recently launched an incredibly rich and fun website called Big Green Rabbit. The target demographic is children aged 2-8. To ensure that the website was usable, engaging, and fun for this age group, we ran a series of user tests using the application, Silverback.

The Silverback application allowed us to bring laptops on location (into the child’s home) and to use the built in iSight camera to measure the reaction of the child’s face, where they were looking, what they were saying, and where they were clicking. A moderator took notes, but avoided interfering or helping the child if they were stuck.

This process was immensely helpful pre-launch as it brought some usability issues to light that we hadn’t though about. We wound up making major changes to the nav one week before launching to improve the experience right out of the gate. Here’s a small clip of Max bringing Charlie, the Big Green Rabbit, to life. His reaction is priceless:

This user testing was very valuable to us. However, there’s another sort of “user testing” that we’ve seen lately - “Socially-Driven User Testing.” We’ve found that some of our target demographic will take it upon themselves to blog and even post videos about their experience with the websites we build. This sort of data is almost more valuable since it comes in naturally (vs. us going out to actively acquire it in a controlled environment).

Here’s a YouTube video that we found of a girl dancing along to the “Learn a Dance” portion of the Big Green Rabbit site:

We’ve seen this sort of Socially-Driven User Testing before with the Jibbitz site that we built, where V and Cat talked about how “fly” the site was:

While controlled user testing will always be a valuable way for us to collect data, we’ll be sure to look more and more towards social media channels to collect invaluable information as we move forward.

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