Usability and Your Website, Final Part
May 13, 2009
Basic Implementation of Usability Testing
You have done all the hard parts, planning, analyzing, and designing. Now comes the implementation of usability testing. Throughout the previous analyses, there were most likely several negative findings. So many that it may be difficult to implement the changes to fix them all. In fact, you may not want to regardless of budget or time issues.
Develop Priorities
The next step is to create a list of priorities on what needs fixing first. Look for simple easy fixes, or try finding the ones that can affect most of your users. Fixing a poor Terms of Agreement page hardly compares to poorly done new user form or confusing navigation bar. A common side effect of fixing the larger issues first is that lesser issues become resolved on there own.
Another reason you might want to hold off on making all the fixes at once is that it may be difficult to determine what new changes made, make the greater impact. It’s easy to see improvements if all you did was move a menu to the left instead of the right versus moving the menu, redoing the menu’s organization, and changing the header all at the same time. Take little bites. It could be that moving to the left did work better for your users, but now using another feature has become more complex. Maybe the fix needed to be not moving the menu, but reorganizing it.
Test Again
Now comes the fun and ongoing part. Test and test again. A site is never really ever done. Even the big guns like eBay, Microsoft, or Google are constantly testing. I have been lucky enough to participate as a test subject for Google’s Adwords and AdSense. It’s the advantages to living nearby that I got to participate at Google I guess. Don’t forget, testing is one of the most important steps to building a website, and if you don’t do it don’t expect much. I’m guessing not everyone will like it.
This article was written for Temi by Rob Campbell of Best Web Image. Rob is a usability and web design consultant. You can contact Rob via the contact page on Best Web Image. You can discuss this article and other web design related issues at UK Webmaster Forum .
The Planet now hosting in UK
May 7, 2009
One of the most popular server hosting companies in US, The Planet now has a UK operation. The Planet calls the London facility its European operation. It will be offering what it calls “its fastest growing product in our portfolio”; virtual rack at its new London facility.
The Planet’s London data centre boast of up to 20kW of power per rack, backed by N+1 redundancy on generators, transformers and UPS systems. Customers gain access to a 10GB private fiber interconnect to The Planet’s core network through its Ashburn, Va., data center, as well as local connectivity to Tier-1 providers and the major European peering exchanges.
London-headquartered TelecityGroup, which operates 20 network-independent data centers across seven European countries, provides the facilities for The Planet’s new data center. Procedures in the new facility comply with ISO 9001:2000, which benchmarks quality processes for data center operations and management.
The London set up is manage for the Planet by data centre experts; TelecityGroup. Though The Planet has been sending out emails about its now London operation, and order page or a simple way to buy their London services has not been put online.
