Web Usability Blog

We are delighted to announce that we are now on the Government Digital Service G-Cloud framework as well as being established on the Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) framework.

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced a forthcoming update to its search algorithm. Although not coming into effect until 2021, there are some important aspects that digital teams should be considering now.

Recently we have been working with a start-up business developing a new website. They were working on tight timescales and budgets so it was essential that the research delivered added-value: it went well beyond ‘usability testing’ and significantly informed the strategic USP and brand proposition.

I was talking to one of our clients the other day who said that he was seeing a 94% task completion success on his site – needless to say, he was delighted! This was better than I recalled from testing, so I thought I’d dig back into the reports to see what was happening.

We always recruit our own testers. By doing it ourselves we get more appropriate testers and we can weed out the ones who try to make a career out of being a respondent.

You may have noticed we have been a bit schizophrenic about what we call ourselves. We started life more than 13 years ago as ‘Web Usability Partnership’, became ‘WUP’ about 9 years ago and reverted to ‘Web Usability’ last year. The change back to Web Usability was driven by various factors, including that nobody ever knew how to say ‘WUP’: versions we have heard included ‘woop’, ‘wuup’ and the letters W-U-P. It didn’t help that we weren’t clear about it either…

“Can I watch the testing remotely?” is a question we keep getting asked. In the past, while possible, this was complicated, unreliable and expensive.

Web Usability has recently invested in a state of the art mobile testing rig and eye tracker. This allows us to observe exactly what users are looking at when using a smartphone or tablet.

Really interesting set of stats about the growth in web access from mobile devices in the USA from comScore, a market intelligence company. Key facts were: