Web Usability Blog

Over the last month or so Web Usability has been getting to grips with user testing apps. The number of these is growing exponentially and, while many are great, there are even more that aren't very useful or aren't very usable, so there is clearly a need to test these with users to ensure they work properly.

SEO and usability are specialist areas and often treated as separate web management activities - SEO focusing on improving search engine rankings, and usability focusing on the user experience within a site. But there's no point in having great SEO performance and being high in search rankings and then throwing users into a site they can't use; or in having a great site that can't easily be found. Rather than being separate silos, SEO and usability should really be viewed as a continuum to increase website effectiveness: "Search engine optimizers and usability professionals focus on different aspects of usability. By applying a holistic approach and merging the skills and widening the focus of [both] you can increase traffic, leads, sales and happy customers" (Thurow and Musica 2009)

If Gordon Brown wants to save some money in the public sector I have a suggestion for him. We have been working for public sector organisations for over 10 years and what is very obvious is they have very little organisational memory. I don't know how long the average web manager stays in their post, but I would be very surprised if it is more than 5 years. And when they leave, very little of what they have learnt from user research stays in the organisation. A particularly bad example of this was when a client, for whom we had done a lot of work, asked us to undertake a project and I had to point out we had done the exact same piece of work 3 years earlier and simply sent them the report again.

We want to undertake projects for clients that will save them money and maximise the success of the project. However, mostly we end up testing websites when they're live; usually there's been no user research or testing beforehand, and all the design and build costs have been incurred. That's not an issue if the site is coming up for redevelopment (when the research will inform the new site), but often these are sites that have only been recently launched (or re-launched), meaning there's no spare budget for revisions. If the site works perfectly and achieves its aims then fine, but regrettably that's rarely the case. Occasionally we get to test sites just before launch, which means that some revisions can be made to increase site efficiency and effectiveness. However, often, the testing surfaces fundamental issues about the site that would ideally require a significant rethink. Either way, there's often limited budget and time to launch a site that delivers a good user experience and good outcomes for the site owner.

Last night I was trying to book a hotel room from one of the UK's leading budget chains for my daughter going off to look at universities. I wanted to pay for the room in advance as she does not have a credit card. So I found the right hotel and then went through the check out process and got to the card payment stage and then thought 'but you pay on arrival not when you book with this hotel chain so can I pay in advance?' I finally found an FAQ link, (small, grey and not where I expected it, and it takes you out of the booking process - not a good idea!) which said I could pay in advance (but "only on some occasions", what does that mean?), but nowhere could I see how to do this. I, therefore, left the site and booked a room with a competitor where I could obviously pay for the room in advance.

To make a webpage accessible to all, it is necessary that users can 'tab' through the different elements of the page. We have recently added a couple of flash videos to our new website. As part of our aim, we wanted to make this flash video accessible. Once the flash element is active, you can use the keyboard to control everything - volume bar, seek bar, turn on/off subtitles, make it full screen etc. We had no problem accessing the video on IE browsers. But we got stuck when using other browsers like Firefox, Safari and Chrome and trying to access the flash video by tabbing on the page.

Most organisations now have web sites; however, judging by our experience, a lot of organisations don't have clarity about why they have the site and how they can tell if it's successful. For many, the focus is on what the organisation wants to communicate rather than on what the user wants to do on the site. This paper discusses why clarity about strategy and success will result in a more effective website.

We have recently been looking at testing websites on mobile devices. While most sites are still in Jakob Nielsen's 3 classes of mobile user experience i.e.  horrible, bad or impoverished, where site owners have taken the trouble to develop mobile sites they can be quite good (e.g. BBC, Facebook, Google Maps, etc.) However, to have an effective mobile website, usability is only half (albeit an important half) of the story.

This month's UX (user experience) magazine (published by the Usability Professionals' Association) contains some interesting articles on remote user testing and its advantages over lab based testing. One of the principal advantages is the ability to get large numbers of users to test a site, often several hundred, for similar costs to much smaller lab based research. What was particularly striking to me was that much of the feedback obtained using these approaches is based on users' attitudes e.g. Was this task: very difficult'[5 point scale]'very easy?

One of the things that continues to surprise me when watching users test websites is how often users blame themselves when they can't find things. Without doing any analysis, my guess from watching hundreds, if not thousands, of users is that less than 10% blame the website when it is difficult to use.