Web site Usability
Usability factors include:
Ease of Learning
This is a measure of how fast a user who has never seen your web site before can learn how to carry out basic tasks like navigating to important site information or completing a transaction. Is the web site design causing usability problems?
Efficiency of Use
How fast can a visitor accomplish important tasks? Is the design of the web site confusing the user?
Usable and Memorable
If a user has used your web site before, can they remember enough to use it effectively the next time or do they have to start learning everything again?
Error Frequency and Severity
How often do users make errors while using your web site, how serious are these errors, and how do users recover from these errors?
Subjective Satisfaction
How much does the user like using your web site?
Is the web site design distracting the user?
Site usability is vital. Research from many respected bodies shows that users cannot find the information they are looking for on a web site around 60% of the time.
What this means is, the design and layout of many web site's do not measure up to a user's expectations and they end up wasting time, become increasingly frustrated, and are far less likely to make return visits and spend money.
Forrester Research, a very highly respected source, estimate several costs of bad web site design usability. The two most striking are:
- Losing 50% of the potential sales from a site as people can't find what they need.
- Losing repeat visits from 40% of users when their first visit was a negative one.
There's no such thing as a training class or a manual for a web site. People don't want to wait. Web users have a low tolerance for a difficult web site design or slow web site's. They don't want to learn how to use a home page. People have to be able to grasp how the web site works immediately after scanning the home page — for a few seconds at most. If the design of the web site is confusing, you will lose them!
Although web site usability testing has large benefits at any time (and should be a continual process), ideally, it should be carried out as part of the original web site design. Usability techniques can use very low technology methods to test web site design, navigation, terminology, transactions, graphic designs etc. before they are built. By locating potential user problems and fixing web site design issues before expensive development takes place, large savings can be made.
