Awareness Gap
Awareness - Usefulness Gap
The difference between users’ awareness of a piece of information or functionality and their perceived usefulness of that same piece of information or functionality.
If users are unaware of some specific functionality, but would find it useful, promote or highlight it in some way.
To analyze awareness-usefulness gaps, you must have both an awareness and usefulness metric.
Ask users about awareness as a yes/no question, for example, “Were you aware of this functionality prior to this study (yes or no)?”
Then ask, “On a l to 5 scale, how useful is this functionality to you (1 = Not at all useful; 5 = Very useful)?”
Measure Awareness - Usefulness Gap
Convert the rating-scale data into a top-2-box score for a proper comparison.
Plot the percentage of users who are aware of the functionality next to the percentage of users who found the functionality useful (percent top-2 box). The difference between the two bars is called the awareness-usefulness gap.
Items with the greatest difference between awareness and usefulness ratings, such as tasks 2 and 5 in the adjacent bar graph, are the features to consider making more obvious in the interface.