Posts tagged usability
5 Website Development Stages For Usability Testing
May 18th
Usability testing has been the flavour of the week, and if you’re as fanatical about this ultra-useful web marketing activity as we are, you’ll consider doing your testing at every one of the following five stages of website development…
- Planning stage
Before you even have a rough idea of what your site will include, do usability tests on your competitors’ sites. If you haven’t already used these sites, you can even use your own team as the test subjects! - Sketch stage
When you have some rough (but not too rough) sketches on paper, take them to a user sample to see if they make sense, and if the titles are clear enough. - Site design stage
Once you have the proper design formalised, print out some sample pages and do the same as you did above. Ask your users to explain the navigation. - Prototype stage
When you have your HTML prototype up, check that your users can get around (as much as is possible) and they understand how to do key tasks - Dress rehearsal stage
When you have a complete usable version of the site, spend a fair bit of time testing before you finish everything off.
Top Excuses for Ignoring Usability Testing … and Why They’ll Cost You!
May 13th
We’ve been talking about usability testing this week – one of the internet marketing activities that most people don’t bother making the effort with. Here are the top 5 excuses we hear for not doing usability testing … and why (just like not having your homework done!) making an excuse only hurts you in the end.
Is that a REAL excuse?
- We don’t have time
If you don’t have time for testing, you’ll have to find time to redo parts of your site down the track - It costs too much money
Ditto above … besides, if you videotape your usability tests subjects, i=this internet marketing activity is actually very cheap. - We don’t understand what we’re testing
There are literally hundreds of usability and web marketing gurus to outsource this to nowadays! - I don’t know how to do usability testing
I’ll explain in a single sentence
. Grab a few people from your target market, ask them to perform the basic operations you’re expecting users to engage in on your site and give you a running mental commentary, videotape them doing so and watch where they had trouble later on. - We don’t have the equipment
What equipment? All you need is a computer, a desk and two chairs, at a minimum.
You see … there really are no excuses for ignoring the most important beginning internet marketing activity.
Focus Groups vs Usability Tests
May 11th
In SEO, analytics is the be-all and end-all. If something shows up in the numbers, it’s good … if it doesn’t, then it isn’t 
. However, you wouldn’t be the first person to realise that it’s smarter to try and test some aspects of your site before you implement them – the way you do that is with focus groups and usability testing. These two activities aren’t the same thing – here we check out the major differences in their web marketing purposes.
Focus groups
These are usually used in the design stage of a website’s development, or during a re-design. A group of users will all sit around a table and give their reactions to a page, or aspect of the site. They are better to have in the initial stages of website creation – they help sort out overall, abstract-type problems that could affect your internet marketing later down the track.
Usability tests
These are much more specific tests, aimed at getting a typical user to try to perform a task on your website. You’ll have to incorporate some usability theory into your website design long before you actually do usability testing. Here are some guidelines for good usability testing:
- Grab a couple of users to test VERY early in the picture
- You can’t test on yourself. It just doesn’t work.
- Remember that tests won’t ‘prove’ anything – they’ll guide you in a better direction. No company in the world has the budget, or the will, to actually ‘prove’ something in the usability arena.
Ideally, you’ll use both of these internet marketing pre-development tactics to ensure your site’s success!
Slippery Websites – Do You Have One?
Mar 16th
I love the metaphor of ‘slippery’ for a website – I can just imagine the site trying to hold onto visitors that are like egg white … they fall apart in your hands and slip down your wrists. Or the site itself can be like a slide – people arrive at the top, and quickly make their way off at the bottom. If your SEO can get people to your website without a problem, but have trouble making the money you should, we look at some steps to take to slow the journey.
Is this how slippery your website is?
1. Find out who you are selling to
So, so many companies say “We sell to whoever needs our products”. This may be true – but every company finds that a large portion of their customers are derived from a certain demographic segment. They might be mostly women, they might be mostly of childbearing age, and they might be mostly located within your physical area. Demographic analysis of your current customers is the first step to getting rid of that slip.
2. Understand your market
Understand their preferences for colour, their design sensibilities, the way they search for information, etc. Then pander to those sensibilities in your website, whether or not they also appeal to you. Everybody is different … and the only people you need to please are the ones that are keeping you in business.
3. Do usability studies
Jakob Nielsen is the grandfather of usability (often the grumpy old man of usability, actually J), and his blog at www.useit.com has lots of good usability info, hints and tips for where you might currently be going wrong. Of course, there is no substitute for an expert eye in this arena … many web marketing specialists work on usability and web design as well as SEO.
4. Build trust on your website
If you don’t have SSL security certificates, a https: connection for your credit card entry page, security certificates for programs like Verified by Visa, etc, there are few customers now that would entrust you with their money.
5. If you have an ecommerce site, link to other products from many places
If consumers can’t quickly find what they want, or don’t see any indications that you might have what they want, they will often click straight off. Use Top Seller widgets, ‘Also Recommended’ sections, and include ‘Customers who purchased this item also bought’ sections, a la Amazon.
Conversion optimisation is a big topic and you can spend years refining it – but without it, every SEO dollar you spend could be wasted.
3 Facts of Life in Website Usability and What They Mean for SEO
Jan 18th
SEO is often talked about as the be-all and end-all of website success. While it is a huge and important part of the equation in determining which sites ‘make it’ in the long term, a number one Google ranking certainly isn’t a ticket to paradise! A common scenario is that a company invests all of their cash in getting to the top of Google, and ignores the quality of their website in the process. So when people click through to the site, they find something that looks pretty shonky, not like what they were expecting, or looks difficult to use … and they leave! Assuming you have a good website designer, one of the more common areas that sites fall down is in the usability. Today we are looking at 3 ultimate truths in the context of website usability, and what each of them means to your SEO efforts.
Truth #1: People scan, they don’t read
Unfortunately, most visitors to your site will read about 10% of the copy that is displayed to them carefully. They know that not everything will be important to them, so they don’t bother. Therefore, make it easy to scan for, and find, the same phrases on the page that people likely searched for to get to your site. Make your keywords prominent, in other words.
Truth #2: People don’t check all the options, they take the first good one
All this means is that if you have one important action that you want people to take on a page (‘Submit’, ‘Buy’, etc), make it the most obvious! Make anything that might help them achieve YOUR website goal in another way obvious also … things like navigation, related products, etc. This way your website can start paying you back, and investing in future internet marketing activities.
Truth #3: We LOVE trial and error
People never figure things out, and they rarely consult the help manual. They most often simply try things until something works. In order to ensure they can do what you want them to with a minimum of errors, get some expert help with website design and usability. And then forge ahead with your SEO campaigns with confidence that your visitors will be worthwhile!
The Things that Make us Think in Website Design
Jan 15th
One of the best known laws of marketing (including web marketing), is that people aren’t interested in you (despite the fact they clicked on your website) … they’re interested in what you can do for THEM.
Another of the most important rules of owning a website is that if you make people think, they will avoid coming back to you. “Argh, my prefrontal cortex!”, they’ll subconsciously scream . And in a jiffy, there goes all of the link building, content optimizing SEO effort you’ve put in to get your site to number one in Google in order to get clicks.
Riddip - I didn't want to think!
So, today we are looking at the common website design mistakes that make people think too much, and how you can get around … thereby staying focused on the REAL goal of your internet marketing, which is not to get visitors, but to use visitors to make money.
Thought-Inducer 1: Obscure Titles
When you design your website, use words that aim at the lowest common denominator. Try to let go of the urge to ‘corporatise’ your language. So:
- If you have a page full of jobs, put the word ‘Jobs’ on the button, not ‘Employment Opportunities’
- If you are selling movies on a page, use the word ‘Movies’ on the linking button or navigation, not ‘Digital Video Discs’
You get the idea! There is an example for every industry. Don’t be afraid of sounding ‘dumb’ – remember, people don’t care about you and your vocabulary, they care about themselves!
Thought Inducer 2: Link appearance
You need to make it obvious where you want a person to click on your page. The easiest way to call attention to a link is by using a coloured, beveled, shadowed button. Using a simple coloured square makes it look like a graphic, and using text devalues the importance of the link. Worst of all is not changing the color of your links from the ordinary text color … waaaay too much work!
Thought Inducer 3: Marketing jargon in links
Some common examples of this understandable (but deadly!) usability mistake include:
- ‘Quick Search’ instead of ‘Search’
- ‘Product Types’ instead of ‘Categories’
- ‘Assistance’ instead of ‘Help’
Use the same words everybody else does for standard pages – trying to set yourself apart here often drives your visitors away, and wastes all of those web marketing dollars!.