Why Usability Test Your Website? Sales…and Survival

So, you’ve got a website redesign underway. But is it a good, user-friendly website? Or do you just think so?

One gauge of whether a website is worth more than its good looks is its usability, and by that, we mean usability to your target audience. If it’s structured for your own internal convenience, you’re doing your customers and prospective customers no favors.

Even the big guys are guilty of non-user friendly websites. A great book that breaks down websites as they are and as they could be is called, appropriately enough, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, by Jakob Nielsen. While the book reviews sites that have changed since the book’s printing, the lessons are still pertinent. Sites studied include Disney, Barnes & Noble, Drugstore.com, eBay, Ford, Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines.

But web usability isn’t something of concern for just the big guys. Testing and measuring your web site’s usability is critical for any organization seeking to gain from their web presence.

But conducting usability testing on your website doesn’t have to be a) obscenely expensive or b) all encompassing. In fact, research by Nielsen and others have shown that the best results of web usability tests come from testing no more than five users and running as many small tests as you can afford. While testing with at least 15 users would be ideal, he’s of the mind-set –as am I – that it’s better to do more intensive testing with fewer users than one huge elaborate study. Statistics show that a first study with five users will find 85 percent of usability problems with your website, which you can then address through redesign. Upon redesigning, you’ll want to go back to those same users and test again. While you may think the redesign fixes the problems, you should follow the old adage to assume nothing. A second test will determine if the new design fixes the usability issues and ensures you haven’t introduced any new problems!

The process for usability testing is very straightforward. General guidelines are to pick five people, devote a few hours and follow through.

• Pick five random customers who have not been involved with your website redesign in any fashion.
• Develop a series of five to nine “scenarios” or likely activities that customers would perform on your website.
• Set aside about 30 minutes per customer to test the website remotely with them. You can use tools like GoToMeeting to conduct the tests from the comfort of your office.
• Gather the feedback from your customers and share it with the development team for inclusion in your website redesign.

The most important part of the process, besides the testing itself, is to create reasonable tasks or scenarios that represent what most website visitors will try to accomplish at the site. You’ll be looking at a combination of several factors:

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design.
• Efficiency: Once users learn the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they re-establish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: Were the users able to complete the task that they came to the website for with relative ease?

Website usability testing can yield some extraordinary payback for most any organization. An extreme – but amazingly powerful – case in point for doing website usability involved a simple registration form that a company had on their website that appeared during a purchase just before the customer was about the check out. The company found that a staggering number of people “abandoned” their carts before completing the purchase, leading to many lost sales. Upon conducting usability tests, it became clear that the shoppers resented having to register when they encountered the page. The company made a simple change to the checkout process and =took away the “Register” button. Instead, they put a “Continue” button that said” “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click ‘Continue’ to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The result? The number of customers purchasing went up 45 percent. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month for just few hours of usability testing investment and a slight – albeit significant – adjustments to the web site.

To learn more about website usability testing and download a website usability checklist, visit www.marketingsavant.com/usabilty.

Dana VanDen Heuvel is president of MarketingSavant, a social media and Internet marketing consulting and training firm. Reach him by telephone at 888.989.7771 or at www.marketingsavant.com.