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Testimonials - 2

Incorporating usability into the development of your website design is vitally important because it is the measure of the quality of a user's experience surfing your web pages, whether the site is for information only or for transactional e-commerce. Usability is a combination of website design qualities that affect the user's experience including:

Ease Of Learning.
This is a measure of how quickly a user who has never seen your website before can learn how to carry out basic activities like navigating to important site information or completing a transaction. Is the website design causing usability problems?

Efficiency Of Use.
How quickly can a visitor accomplish important tasks or chosen activities? Is the design of the website confusing the user?

Usability And Memorability.
If a visitor has used your website before, can they remember enough to use it effectively the next time they visit or do they have to start learning everything again?

Error Frequency And Severity.
How often do visitors make mistakes while using your website, how serious are these errors, and how do they recover from them?

Subjective Satisfaction.
How much does the visitor enjoy the experience of using your website? Is the design distracting the user?

Site usability is vital. Research from many respected bodies shows that users cannot find the information they are looking for on websites around 60% of the time. What this means is that many designs do not measure up to visitor expectation and users end up wasting time, become increasingly frustrated, and are far less likely to make return visits or spend money.

Forrester Research, a very highly respected source, estimated several costs of bad website design usability. The two most striking are:

Losing approximately 50% of the potential sales from a site as people can't find what they need.

Losing repeat visits from 40% of the users who do not return to a website when their first visit resulted in a negative experience.

There's no such thing as a training class or a manual for a website. Most people don't want to wait. Web users have a low tolerance for a design that is difficult to navigate or pages that are slow to load, and they don't want to have to learn how to use a home page. Visitors need to be able to grasp how the website works immediately after scanning the home page for a few seconds at most, so if the design of your site is confusing, you will lose them!

Although usability testing has large benefits at any time (and should be a continual process), ideally, it should be carried out as part of the original design process. Usability techniques can use very low technology methods to test website design, navigation, terminology, transactions, graphic designs etc. before they are built. By locating potential user problems and fixing design issues before expensive development takes place, large savings can be made.

How do you test usability? Understand what you really want from your website then understand who your visitors are likey to be and what user tasks are involved in order for them to achieve their goals. There are well tried, tested and effective techniques from website design usability evaluations to comprehensive user tests that will provide objective answers to all the key areas.

We carry out website design usability evaluations and are experienced in the surfing habits and interface expectations of web users. We can determine where websites give users problems in completing important tasks and provide a cost effective method of finding areas for website design and usability improvement. User tests utilise real visitors who are observed carrying out specific core tasks on the website and their success (or failure) carefully recorded. User tests are more complex but provide far more insight into the potential problems that any design may demonstrate. All levels of usability testing will result in our recommendations for website design improvement therefore any testing applies to existing sites only and not those that we have developed.