Improve Your Website on a Budget: Usability

by Scott Chapin June 27, 2008

There are countless tools available to make incremental improvements to your website ranging from free to thousands of dollars per year.  I'm taking a look at five categories of tools and presenting some low-cost starter options as well as how to take it to the next level.  We've looked at external research,  content optimization, SEO and web analytics tools.  Today, we wrap up this series with usability.

Part 5: Usability

User-interface design and usability are frequently overlooked in web design projects because they seem overwhelming and expensive.  While it is true that you could spend $10,000+ on a usability lab, participants and analysis, for most, that is not required or even the best approach.

As with almost all of the topics I've discussed in this series, I recommend starting small.  Certainly you personally are doing some usability testing when you review a design or prototype.  Unfortunately, if you've been working on or with the project for more than a few days, you area already too deep into the forest to be objective.  To solve this, grab a co-worker or better yet, your spouse or children.  Have them take a look and get some feedback. 

From there, you can get a little more refined and have actual system users (customers, clients, etc.) use the site and provide their feedback in a comparable format.  Give them a task and ask about their experience (easy, hard, etc) and also ask if they had any challenges along the way.

Finally, if you don't think their feedback is detailed enough, watch them perform your tasks and YOU record their actions.  The ideal setting is one where they are comfortable (not a stark conference room), but use what you have.  Take all this feedback into consideration as you update the design and user interface for the website.

There are a few websites that offer user interaction logging where every mouse movement is tracked for playback.  ClickTale and CrazyEgg are two of these sites and they both will allow you to use the service for free up to a certain threshold.

Thank you for joining me over the past month to look at ways to improve your website on a budget.  Tools will change, but these five areas will continue to be key focus areas for website improvement.

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