If you’re a designer and you wanted to convert your Client website well, you need to check the usability and feedback from other users, we may be looking at things differently that they do. Especially this is a Client website, and they are the one that will use it, to make sure that it will “work” for them. Today, we will discuss How to Get Website Usability Testing from your Designs and how important it is.
The issue here is finding other people to check your design or website, maybe you can ask a friend or someone you know. It would be really awesome if you can ask 100 people and gather their feedback and do the revisions based from that feedback. There are ways to do it, and here’s some of the website that allows you to gather web usability testing.
Before we look for software and other media to check out website usability testing, we try to see what and why we need to use it.
1. User Analysis – It is important that the user can accomplish the goals and task that is present on the site, they should able to do it effectively. For example a blog site, the user will read the blog post, leaving comments and move on to related blog post. The same task should be applied to your website.
2. Readability – Content is king, as we always say, even in web apps, has content in them. Usually a blog site that doesn’t have an understanding regarding user interface will harder to to the user to perform his/her task efficiently.
3. Site Navigation – Most sites use this so user will be able to move from one page to another, but there are others ways for the user to do that such as navigation menus, search boxes, links inside the content, sidebar links and other widgets.
4. Accessibility – Your website should be accessible to anyone anywhere, that’s why responsive is a huge leap for designers and developers. Your website should also serve those users that are blind or has mobility problems.
5. Website Speed – Since Google announce that they will include Page Speed to ranking sites, website speed became a problem for everyone. Most users won’t wait for your website to load, you need to serve it to them fast. I mean really fast!
6. User Experience (UX) – You need to study and evaluate how easy to use your website, this is a large factor because it deals with user perception, behavior and reflects differently from one user to another.
Now that we have a little knowledge regarding website usability, let’s dive in how to get and gather those data. Here’s some of them that I recently discovered.
Web Usability Testing Websites
Usabilityhub
They aren’t free, but you can earn free tests by helping test other sites. Their tools include Five Second Test (for design), Click Test (for testing clicks on landing pages) and Nav Flow (for tracking conversion funnels).
Activestandards
A new tool, that uses a traffic light system to identify errors on high-, medium- and low-use pages. It divides mobile and desktop users at a glance too. Click on any section and you can get a report on what the errors are and how to fix them. It makes it easy to focus your attention on the pages people are visiting most to troubleshoot errors in real time.
Labsmedia
Want to know what areas of your web page are getting most attention? You’ll need to be technically inclined as you have to download and install it to the server yourself.
Optimalworkshop
Offers three tools for different aspects of usability and all of them have a free-for-life plan. While the freebies have some limitations, using them could help you decide whether it’s worth springing for a paid test. The tools are Chalkmark for first click testing for your web design, Optimal Sort for card sorting, and Treejack, to see how people interact with your site structure.
Optimizely
Isn’t free, but you can use its 30-day free trial to load a page and change content. It’s included here because it is amazingly easy to use—just a few button clicks give you a whole new version of your page.
Conclusion
Using these tools and gathering data, you will have a great improvement to your website usability testing and you can make sure that your visitor will have a positive feedback and great experience. If you need more tools and tutorials regarding website usability, check out Smashing Magazine’s round up. If you have questions or other suggestions, feel free to comment below!
