Prototype testing offers a variety of analysis options and metrics to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of your design. By using these analysis options and metrics, you can get comprehensive insights into your prototype's performance, identify areas for improvement, and make informed design decisions.

The task results provide an overview of the task performance by participants, including the success score, directness score, time taken, misclicks, and the breakdown of the task's success and failure. Together these metrics provide great insight into the usability of your design to achieve a task.

Success vs failure

If you have set the correct destination or pathway, your participants' responses will be sorted into success, failure, or skip. If you have left your tasks without a correct answer, participants who did not skip the task will be marked as ‘completed.’ If multiple destinations or pathways were set, you will see the statistics showing how responses were split between them.

Directness

The directness score is the total completed results minus the ‘indirect’ results. 
An ‘indirect’ result occurs when a participant backtracks, viewing the same page multiple times, or if a participant reaches the correct destination but takes the wrong pathway, the path is considered an indirect success. If your directness score is low, it could be an indicator that your participants were getting lost in your prototype, having to return to the same page multiple times, or that they took wandering paths rather than ‘direct’ ones. You can drill down into the most common paths taken through your prototype in the paths tab.

Time spent

The time spent is the average time that participants took to complete that task. There could be a number of reasons that contribute to the long time spent, load speeds, the length of the path needed to reach the destination, etc being some of them. The other reason could be that your participants were confused, a long time plus a low directness score could signal that your prototype confused your participants. and suggest you dig deeper into the paths tab and clickmaps to identify where the sticky points are in your prototype.

Misclicks

A misclick is a click that lands outside of a click area, a high percentage of misclicks might indicate that your participants are often clicking outside of where you expected them to. If you notice the percentage of misclicks is high, you can sort the clickmaps by ‘most misclicks’ to identify the pages that contributed to the high percentage and discover where these participants were clicking instead of where you expected them to.

Task success and failure table

The success and failure table tracks the number of direct/indirect successful results, direct/indirect failures, and direct/indirect skips. If a correct destination is set, then your indirect successes and failures are participants that backtracked at some point. If you set a correct path, indirect success also includes participants who reached the right destination via the wrong path.

A direct skip is when a participant skips the task straight away, and an indirect skip is when they navigate the prototype and then skip the task. Indirect skips might indicate participants gave up, got frustrated, or decided the task was taking too long. You can examine the paths these participants took in the paths tab to look for patterns or commonalities in these participant's paths.

The percentages in the bar chart represent how many of the total participants (those included in the study or, if you have applied a segment, in the segment you are viewing) had that result for the task you are viewing. The bar chart can give you a quick indicator of the spread of results for the chosen task. Hovering over each colored section of the bar chart will give you a short definition of what that section represents.

The clickmaps tab allows you to view your clicks in multiple ways to get visibility of where participants were actively clicking around your prototype. There are two ways to view the clickmaps, as a heatmap or a selection.

Heatmap view

The heatmap provides a view of where participants clicked when navigating to or from that page of your prototype. The clicks your participants made are either a ‘hit’ or a ‘miss’.

A hit is a click that landed on a clickable area and led the participant to a different page.

A miss is a click on a non-clickable area, a high amount of missed clicks would suggest that your participants aren’t navigating the prototype in a way that you expected or prepared for.

You can also see the time spent on each page, if a page has a high average time, then participants may be finding it confusing and are unsure where they should click from there. Bear in mind that time spent on the page could also be affected by the page loading times. Similarly, if the page set as the destination has a high time spent on a page, then it might be that your participants are having trouble identifying the page as the destination they are looking for.

What does the spread of clicks mean?

A large spread of clicks might mean that your participants were confused about where to click to successfully complete the task. Areas with a high concentration of clicks might indicate a level of consensus among your participants that clicking in that area would lead them on the correct path.

To change the page you are viewing on the heatmap, scroll down and click on the page you would like to view. If you set a correct pathway, the pages on that pathway are marked. You can sort these pages by most page visits, most misclicks, or most time spent.

Selection view

In your clickmaps tab in the heatmap dropdown, you also have the option of ‘selection’ view mode. If you want to get even more granular with your clickmap analysis, the selection mode will show you each individual click made on that page. While in selection mode, use your cursor to draw areas over the clicks on the page to view the percentage of total clicks that are in that area and the exact count.

First, second, and third-page visits

You can also filter the clicks on your heatmap by using the ‘All page visits’ drop down box by the first, second, and third-page visits. Some participants may end up clicking on a page multiple times if they go the ‘wrong’ way and have to backtrack.