Website Usability: Testing Your Visitor’s User Experience

Web Usability Testing

This article will be the first in a multi-part series dealing with website usability and how to maintain a solid user experience and still give the search engines what they need. There can be a happy medium between optimization and usability, if you take the time to properly plan and more importantly TEST your site. Depending upon the size of your company or your client’s company, you will need to put together a testing group. The usability testing group should be broken down into sub groups based upon user experience on the web.

One of the most important initial determinations is how to ascertain what level a particular user is at. The criteria for user experience is:

• How many years has the user been online.
• Excluding e-mail, how many hours online do they spend per week.
• Do they use advanced skills such as Instant Messaging, organizing and renaming bookmarks, do they have upgraded browsers, if they or on Windows do they also use FireFox, do they have a blog or myspace site.
• Can they download, install and configure software without support.
• Are they current on the latest Internet technologies, do they subscribe to online newsletters, etc.
• Do they have a customized home page through Yahoo or Google for example.

In my experience with setting up testing groups, most advanced users need to have at least 3 years experience on the Web and use it for over 10 hours per week.

Once the user groups are handled, the next step is to break down a number of tasks for the testing subjects to perform. These tasks should be specific to your business. The actual testing tasks also need to be broken down into both site-wide and web-wide tasks. The fact is if you give users a group of tasks and start them on your home page they will have a higher success rate then starting them at Google or Yahoo search. Another reason for breaking up tasks from site and Web is to also get some competitor comparison as well.

A quick example of some testing parameters:

Client: Online Florist, Nationwide Service.

I took this client’s website over a couple years ago. They had no search engine placement and were spending 60,000 a year on pay per click. I took the job in October preparing for a full on campaign for Valentines Day. That gave me 3 months for redevelopment. I had to stress the importance of testing to the client, who was highly concerned that testing would slow down the process. The fact is that the usability testing made the project go much smoother and by getting other people involved that normally would have no say in website design, the final product was far superior.

After separating 10 users into 2 groups based upon their skill levels, I had them:

1. Use the site to send 1 dozen roses to various family members or friends.
2. Create custom messages to the recipient.
3. Place an order, then change the recipient address.
4. Cancel an order.
5. Change the order from roses to lillys.

Taking these tasks and performing them from the customer’s home page, and then doing them again from the Web gave us very valuable data about the website and how it functioned. The first version of the site which I had only optimized for search engines and hadn’t optimized for user experience, had a failure rate of 70% for experienced users and 85% for the less experienced users!

After taking the data and optimizing for visitor experience, our testing results was more reasonable with a failure rate of 12% for the experienced group and 25% for the lesser group.

I am happy to report that they surpassed their expected targets on Valentines day by 150%. By the time Mothers Day arrived the load balancing, and server replication changes allowed for even more sales!

Web Usability and Social Network Marketing Platforms

My company specializes in social network marketing and e-commerce sites. Most of our clients are trying to sell something whether it is a product or a service. SEO at one time was the only basket I ever promoted. Our goal was to get our clients out of pay per click and in using organic traffic. The focus was not just on obtaining traffic, but on what that traffic did once it hit the site! Through much trial and error I became a usability expert.

Now that I have added social network platforms to my arsenal, usability has become even more important. Since WordPress is my platform of choice we have had to deal with tweaking the deep linking structure of blog permalinking. When combining e-commerce and social network platforms, the fact is 40% of a sites visitors are more likely to enter the site on pages other than the home page.

I normally use a bread-crumb technique for visitors to always know where they are in relationship to their path through the site. This technique can also be used to give a visitor a clear understanding of where they are on a site at all times, but especially when they first arrive to a site.

Stay tuned for more on website usability.