Usability
Why consider usability?
Organisations provide sites for business reasons.
People visit sites for specific purposes.
Usable sites support their visitors by enabling them to perform their goals easily and efficiently, and in so doing deliver the businesses goals.
A usable site drives trust and loyalty in the site and the organisation in general.
A site with bad usability is quickly discarded in favour of the more usable competition.
In short: Usability is absolutely critical to a web site's success.
What is Usability?
There are many different definitions of usability, but basically any product that has good usability exhibits these 6 characteristics:
- Quick and easy to learn,
- Efficient to use,
- Allows rapid recovery from errors,
- Easy to remember,
- Enjoyable to use,
- Aesthetically pleasing.
On the net, this means designing an intuitive user interface and populating the site with interesting and relevant content that is easy to find and simple to navigate around.
This sounds obvious and straightforward but unfortunately there is no 'cook-book' approach to ensuring usability. This is because each site has a different business objective and a different target audience.
Therefore each site must be purposefully designed at each stage with the wants, needs and expectations of the users as a priority whilst ensuring that it is delivering the business objectives.
To successfully achieve this continual evaluation is carried out at every stage during the design process.
However, it's not too late even for live, established, sites to set about improving usability.
What is User Testing?
User testing is one aspect of usability testing. Usability testing is the process by which we ensure that a software product or website performs its functions efficiently and effectively and provides a satisfying experience for the user. In particular user testing uses real people performing real tasks in an environment that allows for detailed analysis of any problems they encounter.
Our Resources & Facilities
With our partners we have a fully featured usability laboratory that is capable of performing a wide range of user audits and testing on software and web sites.
The usability laboratory is equipped with up to date equipment capable of providing the following services:
Video and Audio recording of the test user experience.
Eye tracking of test users' focus of interest.
Software supported video analysis of usability problems.
Multi-media presentations of findings of test user sessions.
These facilities allow for a rapid and thorough investigation of the potential usability problems of new software or website designs to fit in with a rapid iteration development process.
