Usability and Your Website, Final Part

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 .

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