I could have quite a rant on this, but won’t.

Three things to do:
- Did you video the sessions? You can use Camtasia or Silverback to record the screen and the users’ faces and voices. These videos make pretty compelling viewing and suddenly the “opinion” starts to be compellingly real and immediate.

- There is some maths that can help you, a bit. “Research shows” that 8 users is actually quite a lot, when it comes to uncovering usability problems. There’s an important piece of research by Jakob Nielsen et al that demonstrates that often, 5 users can be quite sufficient. You can also have a go at using the modified wald method to squeeze every last drop of power from your sample. (That works better with 10-20 users, but you might still get a result with 8.)

- Consider the politics and the shape of the market you’re in. If there is no serious competition in the market, then there arguably is little business sense in investing in UX, since your users have no choice but to use you. It’s a short termist strategy, because it leaves the door wide open for a competitor. But it can make sense if margins are low. If there is competition, or alternative channels for customers, then you need to look at the business benefits and talk about them to senior management. There’s plenty of research to show that user-centred design boosts revenues and reduces costs. If margins are low, it’s possible that UX can improve them. Ultimately, most businesses aren’t keen on just “helping the user” for the hell of it. They do it because they understand it makes business sense.

And as someone wittier than me once said: If management really refuse to understand that customer experience matters, you’d better move to another company. Your customers will.

I’ve become increasingly frustrated with glaring design flaws and terrible user experience destroying our conversion rates.

I took your suggestion at the end of this article and collected user feedback, observed 8 people using our sites and products and noted their responses, many of which were similar.

The company’s response?
We can’t act on opinion, only figures. This is a fob-off as the underlying attitude is “our target market will use any piece of rubbish product you throw at them – we know because they did 10 years ago when we started up”.
The fact that our profits have been plummeting steadily for over a year was not enough!

I’m sure the frustration I feel is nothing in comparison to that of our users!

One comment on the Standard Bank login form – they have one feature which I think enhances usability greatly: A small icon that appears within the form input box that is selected, indicating that the caps lock is on. It’s especially useful for password fields where you cannot see the characters you are typing. I often find I get passwords rejected and subsequently find that I have caps lock on so it’s great to see a little feature like this – it should be ubiquitous.