Usability – Track, Test, And Improve Your Website

By Web Hosting Help Guy

As a web designer, you’re surely familiar with the basics of usability – that is, you know the usual rules about designing a website so anyone who navigates to it will have the easiest time getting around. Underlined links? Check. Text hierarchy? Got it. Site map for for ease of use and SEO purposes? You know it.

But did you ever wonder how those rules came into effect? Yes, some are well-worn, tried-and-true principles of graphic design. How, though, did web usability gurus like Jakob Nielsen come to modify and apply these principles to the Web? The answer is simple – they discovered effective and practical ways to gauge and record how a user interacts with a website and, most importantly, how to conform that data into a set of best practices. By following certain guidelines and by understanding that all the rules don’t necessarily work for every site, you can make your site easier for your users to navigate, which will hopefully lead to more traffic, sales, or whatever else you’re hoping your site will accomplish.

Here, then, are 4 tools and practices you can use to gauge and increase your website’s usability.

Google Website Optimizer

This is a free tool from the undisputed master of all things Internet that helps you with relatively simple site tests. Website Optimizer, used as either part of Google AdWords or as a stand-alone, will walk you through its testing process – basically, finding out whether you want to do basic A/B testing or more complicated multivariate testing. Keep in mind that you have to have your A and B sites designed already, because Google’s not going to do it for you or suggest elements or changes. Plus, while the tool is effective for designing something like an effective landing pages – with one or two “calls to action” – you’ll got lost in a sea of relatively worthless data if you give Website Optimizer too many things to track. Keep it simple.
http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

Google Analytics/Click Tracker

This handy tool is a snippet of Javascript that adds a lot of flexibility to Google Analytics – which you should already be using – to show specific elements on your site that users are clicking. Once the code snippet is embedded into the event handler, it can keep track of clicks on images, links, spans, divs, and form elements – basically, anything anyone could ever think to click on. You’re essentially tricking Google into giving you more information than it normally would. This is pretty helpful for determining what links are most popular to users, as well as letting you know if your site has some confusing elements on it, i.e. things that look like links that aren’t.

You’d use the following snippet to track clicks on an outbound link…

<a href="http://www.example.com" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/example.html');">Example.com</a>

And you’d use this snippet to track clicks on an image…

<img src="/your_images/image.png" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/clicks/buy_now_button.html');">

Heat Maps

A heat map, at its core, lets you know generally how people read your site. It’s another version of an overlay tool that registers where the action takes place on your site by showing you how long a user lingers on an element, how they scroll, and how they read the site. Properly used, a heat map can show you where people are looking, what they’re looking at the longest, and where they’re clicking, all in one neat package. There are many options out there, but with click tracking, eye tracking, and a great-looking overlay, ClickTale seems to the lead the pack. Similar options include UserFly, ClickHeat, and SimpleMouseTracking.

User Testing

Experts agree that one sure-fire way to increase your site’s usability is to put it in front of real users and see how they fare at doing what you want them to do. Unfortunately, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds – it requires money, time, and resources that not all designers or small businesses have at their disposal. Not everyone, for example, can afford to bring in users off the street, pay them for their time, provide lunch and snacks, and track the issues that might arise. Luckily, there are many platforms that either provide user-testing or make it more cost-feasible. Silverback, for example, is a popular testing tool that offers a free 30-day trial to use its Mac-based testing platform (it costs $49.95 after the trial). Another option is UserTesting which, for $29 per test, sets up testing and allows you to observe the user’s results and comments via QuickTime.

What tools have you used to gauge the effectiveness of your website?

Related posts:

1. A/B Testing: A Guide To Split Testing 2 Versions Of A Full Website
2. How To Add A Search Engine To Your Website
3. Accessibility: Is Your Website Accessible To The Visually Impaired?
4. Hit Counter – 5 Free Installations For Website Statistics
5. Unobtrusive JavaScript – Website Accessibility When JavaScript Is Disabled