If you have ever ran an un-moderated usability study you know that most solutions don’t provide advanced features for research panels or the functionality for custom analysis. We personally use Loop 11 for un-moderated usability studies. Although we love the tool and the great insights we get we always sigh when it’s time to crunch the numbers. But not anymore!! Loop 11 just released new features that will make setting up and analyzing un-moderated usability studies a breeze. Within this post we will review the changes and why they are important.

1). Tracking participants using unique IDs
When using a research panel for a usability test tracking individual participants is important not only for segmentation but also to know exactly what participant completed the study and should be paid their incentive, terminated, or was over-quota. Previously, I had to ask the participant to fill in their Ids and as you can imagine some participants didn’t answer correctly. I would also download all of the IP address Loop11 gave me and try to match it back just to double check, which took hours!

Why this rocks: Now all you have to do is customize the end of the URL with a unique ID for each participant. You can now easily pay your participants and segment your users without having to invest a lot of time.

2).Re-Categorise multiple URLs at a time
Instead of re-categorising one URL at a time you can now re-categorise multiple URLs at the same time.

Why this rocks: Some websites have dynamic URLs, and you can’t set-up a goal for every possible combination within Loop 11. Now instead of re-categorising one URL at a time you can select what pages you want to re-categorise. This saves time during the set-up process of the study and analysis because once you re-categorised the URLs the data re-configures!

3). Pop-up invitation controls
If you are recruiting your participants by intercepting them via your website; you now have a feature allowing you to control the percentage of visitors that you ‘invite’.

Why this rocks: Selecting what percentage of your visitors is super valuable because too high a sample rate might mean you are surveying more visitors than you really need to in order to get valid results. Remember, too small a sample could produce results that lack statistical validity.

4). Individual participant path analysis in exports
Full path analysis of individual participants can now be exported into reports. This allows you to segment the conversion funnel by your top segments, whether you segment participants by female only or participants that clicked abandoned when they actually succeed the task.

Why this rocks: In the past, the way we collected this data was by using the interface within Loop 11 and simply copying and pasting each link for each participant for each task. Needless to say that it took awhile and there was lots of room for human error. Now all you have to do is download the report. Once you have this data you can segment your funnel analysis to view how different users completed or failed the task based either on their demographics and/or geographic.

5). Individual responses for Rating Scale Matrix questions
The results for rating scale matrix questions, while always available at an aggregated level were never available so you could see the individual participant responses.

Why this rocks: Let’s say you asked a gender question because you wanted to know how many females or males participated in your study. Loop would just tell you the percentage but not who was female or male. Now you can download the report and know who was who. This type of information is important if you had follow-up question after the task, you can find what type of user rated the task easy or difficult. Or if you didn’t use a research panel you can start your test with some demographic questions so your analysis can get a little juicer with segmentation.

What is your experience with Loop 11, are you excited about these changes? As Toby Biddle would say “Happy Testing”!