How to Test Your Website’s Usability

Whether you already have a website for your business or are contemplating building one, you need to consider your site’s usability. This term refers to how efficient, effective, and overall user-friendly a website is. The key questions to ask when considering usability include:

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that everyone is going to be able to find information on your website as easily as you can. And if people can’t find what they’re looking, they’ll leave as quickly as they arrived. That’s why the focus of usability studies is always on the user’s experience.

An expert once compared usability to dating. He reasoned that, when going out on a date, it’s all about what restaurant SHE wants to go to and what movie SHE wants to see. If you take a woman you know is a vegetarian to a steakhouse on the first date, you might not get a second one.

The same holds true for a website. If you’re not offering the information the visitors to your website want to see, you won’t get a return visit from them.

A first step in determining whether or not you have a usability issue might be to try this: Make a photocopy of your home page. Show it to a few randomly chosen people and ask them what they think they can do on your website. If they don’t understand the basic function of your site and what they can accomplish there, then your site has usability issues that need to be addressed.

Most small business owners don’t have the budget to hire outside experts to conduct a formal usability test with live subjects. And, most don’t need to. There’s a lot that can be learned by simply gathering 5 to 10 friends, family members, or customers and asking them some questions.

One way to do this is to come up with a set number of tasks that the average user to your site would do. Once your test subject is sitting at the computer, verbally give her or him the tasks to complete, such as the following:

• “Find our business hours.”
• “Find our specials coupons.”
• “Order one of our T-shirts using a credit card.”
• “Become a registered user and post a message.”

To be most effective, you’ll want to closely monitor each subject. If you’re not testing them one at a time, be sure that you have observer assigned to all test subjects to note their actions and record their questions. It’s important to encourage the test subjects to “think out loud” as they try to complete their tasks. That will give you a clear sense of what they understand and what is confusing to them.

It's also important not to step in and help too quickly. If a subject asks a question like, “I’m on the page where I buy the T-shirt, but I’m not sure where to put in my credit card information,” don’t immediately give them the answer. Instead, encourage the test subject to solve the problem on his own. Ask, “Well, where does it seem the most logical to have the credit card payment page?” Watch where he clicks. This might give you not only insight into a problem but the key to a solution.

One more thing: Be sure to give these usability guinea pigs something for their time, such as money, restaurant gift certificates, or coupons for your business or service. If they're willing subjects, you'll probably want to invite them back to test your re-design!

1. The Recipe for Web Success
2. Oddcast White Paper
3. Incorporation Guide
4. Getting Started with eCommerce
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