Usability: The basics, some tips & tools
/ August 16, 2011
In general, usability refers to how well users can learn and use a product (in this case a website) to achieve their goals and how satisfied they are with this. So usability is an important fact while building and maintaining a website. Despite this common knowledge among web-designers and web-masters, not all websites are living up to the standards of today.
Is this done on purpose? Just maybe when there is a tight budget and/or a deadline. But most of the time web-master make the most common mistake that the visitors know the website as well as he/she does. When you develop or maintain a website you know the website from top to bottom and inside out, and by this you can overlook things. What may be clear and easy to you could be a hard task for a first time visitor.
So is your website user-friendly? To find out you need to get started with testing! Luckily for us, usability testing is becoming much easier. The last few years some really good and practical online-tools came on the market.
User-activity
We already use (Google)analytics to measure the amount of visitors, page views etc. But the most asked question in usability-land is: Who clicks where? This can be answered by the following tools. These tools register the location of the mouse cursor and the clicks a visitor makes. Witch will give you a visual graphic of the visitors activity on the website, also known as a heat-map.
The homepage
A quick and cheap way to test your landings-page is using a “flash-test”. Trough a web-application a screenshot of a page get shown for a few seconds to a group of test subjects. After this the test subject answers questions about what he has seen.
Cross browser
Not every website looks the same in every browser. And because its a bit of a hassle to have all different browsers running on your system the next tools can come in handy:
Now these topics are just the basics, there are far more possibilities than these for testing. You can think of Speed-tests, Card Sorting, A/B Testing etc. I won’t go any deeper on these topics because i just wanted to discuss some basics, and it gives me a good reason to write a follow up to this post.
So how are you usability skills, and what tools do you use?
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