Usability Testing

Usability is a bit of a buzz word in web design circles. Although it is a flavour of the month, it does focus your attention on this fundamental question: does your website work?

Every web user has experienced what we call the "Yahoogle" moment - when you actually find something that you're looking for. Many large corporations have necessarily complex sites, but arcane navigation and seemingly arbitrary links. There are a few sites out there where all the buttons are in just the right place, they seem to fall under your mouse, where the path to what you are looking for is clear and painless. If you can decrease your users frustration, they are more likely to come back.

We offer 2 usability related services:

Usability Optimisation

Use our experience of usability issues to create a report that suggests improvements (or we can carry those out for you). We will look at issues like:

Immediate impression - what does that page "say"
information hierarchy - is the site laid out logically
visual hierarchy - does the visual match the information hierarchy
navigation - are links obvious and logical
navigation - does the site function to its intended purpose
can the information be "compressed" - both visually and through cutting words - without affecting your search engine friendliness.
We can also design a mock-up of an "improved" page layout (usually based around the homepage).

Please contact us for a quote for this service.

Usability Testing

With the best will in the world we will miss aspects of the usability of your site. People scan web pages quickly so they often will not follow a logical path. They will hit the first link that approximates what they want and muddle through from there. Usability testing uses real people in a real world situation using your website. We video tape a number of people being set specific tasks and provide you with the tape, and with a full report on the areas where your site appeared not to be working (or was working well). We use a cross section of people with different levels of web experience to approximate your user-base.

This is a process and should be regarded as integral to the proper deployment of a complex site.

As such we would recommend two smaller sessions in preference to one large one. We tailor our sessions to suit the demands of your site, but here is guide:

5 subjects, each spending 30 minutes with the interviewer, tackling 2 specific aspects of your sites usability. We produce one DVD or VHS containing unedited footage, a full report relating to specific issues that arise from the testing, and referencing the footage. Report contains instances where the subject clearly had problems with the site or raised issues of concern, an overview of the subjects immediate impressions, plus all the aspects detailed in "usability optimisation". AUD $850