Do you need a usability web review?

Does your business website need a usability review? Use this questionnaire to find out.

How important is this to you?

• You’re not getting enough traffic
• Your site gets a lot of traffic, but not as high a result as you’d like
• Performance on the site is critical (eg lives are at stake, people must make important decisions)

Your site is your company’s main way of making money.

• You need your site to make more money in these troubled times.
• A new site has opened up and it’s taking traffic away from you.

If you have one or more of these, the site is important enough to your business to consider a review.

How good are your existing usability web practices?

• Your design and development team didn’t include a usability expert
• Less than 5% of your budget was spent on specific usability activities
• You had usability experts on the team, but their recommendations weren’t fully implemented.
• Your website designers didn’t show the designs to customers.
• Your website designers did show designs to customers, but only at the end when it was too expensive to make any significant changes.

If you have one or more of these, your design process probably didn’t include enough usability, and you need a review.

Do you have signs of usability problems?

• People visit the home page and then leave
• Customers get to certain pages, then bail before you make any money from them
• You have lower return visits than you’d like. People buy from you once, then don’t come back
• You have a lower conversion rate than you’d like – a lot of people look around on the site but don’t buy.
• People are putting things into the shopping cart, but not buying them.
• There are a lot of calls to your help line or online chat system asking basic questions
• There are a lot of hits on your help section, site map and search (more than 3% of page visits)

People need to be trained to use this site.

• A lot of people are watching your “how to use this site” video
• Customers have trouble finding things
• The navigation or sequence of steps doesn’t help customers do what they come to your site to do properly
• There’s confusing wording, pages are long and hard to scan. Text includes jargon or complex sentences
• There is a feeling that the site is confusing
• You’re getting a lot of customer requests for changes
• You’re getting a steady stream of complaints, or feedback saying the site is hard to use.

If you have one or more of these, the site is very likely to have usability issues. You need a review.

Are there signs you need to assess your navigation and layout?

• The home page has more than two major navigational schemes
• The structure of the site reflects your organization’s structure or viewpoint – not the customer’s
• The customer must go to more than three pages before they can see what they need
• Menu categories are inconsistent
• Page design is inconsistent
• It’s hard to work out where to start.

If you have one or more of these, the site is very likely to have usability issues. You need a review.

To improve web usability consult the experts at www.usabilityweb.net

You can get a ’3 quick wins’ report or a more detailed usability report – the choice is yours.

Article by Alinta Thornton