If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave. If the users get confused they leave. Okay, you probably get the idea by now that website usability is extremely important.
Current best practices for website usability call for setting aside 10-20% of your design budget on usability. This will significantly increase the website’s desired quality metrics. Think of it as doubling sales, doubling the number of registered users or customer leads, or doubling whatever other KPI (key performance indicator) motivated your web design project.
Methods for Improving Website Usability
There are many methods for studying usability, but the most basic and useful is user testing, which has three components:
- Get hold of some representative users, such as customers for an e-commerce site.
- Ask the users to perform representative tasks with the design.
- Observe what the users do, where they succeed, and where they have difficulties with the user interface. Keep quiet and let the users do the talking.
To identify a design’s most important usability problems, testing 5 users is typically enough. Rather than run a big, expensive study, it’s a better use of resources to run many small tests and revise the design between each one so you can fix the usability flaws as you identify them. Iterative design is the best way to increase the quality of user experience. The more versions and interface ideas you test with users, the better.
The resulting need for multiple studies is one reason I recommend making individual studies fast and cheap. Here are the main steps:
- Before starting the new design, test the old design to identify the good parts that you should keep or emphasize, and the bad parts that give users trouble.
- Test your competitors’ designs to get cheap data on a range of alternative interfaces that have similar features to your own.
- Make paper prototypes of one or more new design ideas and test them. The less time you invest in these design ideas the better, because you’ll need to change them all based on the test results.
- Refine the design ideas that test best through multiple iterations, gradually moving from low-fidelity prototyping to high-fidelity representations that run on the computer. Test each iteration.
- Inspect the design relative to established usability guidelines whether from your own earlier studies or published research.
- Once you decide on and implement the final design, test it again. Subtle usability problems always creep in during implementation.
The only way to a high-quality user experience is to start user testing early in the design process and to keep testing every step of the way.
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