PRINT ADVERTISING

Web Global Media a division of 1699407 ONTARIO INC.

What is Usability?
A website that is not user-friendly can decrease your revenue potential if users find a site irritating. To establish how users feel about a site, focus groups are created to provide a usability study to best understand the users experience with the sites navigation, visuals, functionality and features. Information about how users navigate through a site and what benefits they obtained will be key in understanding the sites strengths and weaknesses.

Usability engineering is an approach to product development that incorporates direct user feedback throughout the development cycle in order to reduce costs and create products and tools that meet user needs.

The benefits of adding usability to a product development process include:

  • Increased productivity
  • Increased sales and revenues
  • Decreased training and support costs
  • Reduced development time and costs
  • Reduced maintenance costs
  • Increased customer satisfaction

Some standard questions for the usability study to address are:

  • How easily and successfully do users find their way around the site? What buttons and links do they choose to locate desired information?

  • How easily and successfully do users identify kinds of information available and recognize how it is organized? How do they interpret the difference between left and right frame content?

  • How easily and successfully do users retrieve information (using bookmarks or other means) once they have found it?

  • How easily and successfully do users find specific kinds of content, especially for sales and marketing purposes?  How do they rate the usefulness of different kinds of content?

Usability Testing Methodology
There are varieties of different testing methods – all inexpensive – that allow the site to be tested at various stages of its design.

These following methodologies are standard practice to explore the usability of your website.

  1. Basic polling of members to determine if there’s an overall acceptance or need for a feature or features. Creating a fantastic feature that no one wants or understands makes it unusable right from the very beginning and it’s an uphill battle from there.

  2. Conduct “interviews” with members and non-members. This is not the same as a marketing focus group. Questions would be worded to allow members to express what they’d “expect” of a certain feature, not how it works.

  3. Based upon the answers given in interviews a basic task and functional analysis can be created which in turn can be tested.