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Website Usability Testing Guide
This guide is designed to assist you and your program to understand the basics of usability and website usability testing. It is broken down into the following sections with subsections to provide a thorough understanding of the field.
Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Why Test for Usability?
Usability testing will save staff time, money and administrative overhead by defining what users need, how they find information and what information they are searching for. By listening to users, understanding how they interact with your site or tool, and responding to the needs users actually articulate programs can avoid spending unnecessary time and resources and better serve their users.
What are Usability and Usability Testing?
A website should be easy and intuitive to navigate for the website user. Jackob Neilson defines usability as the “quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use.” Although user’s opinion of a site can be helpful, usability refers specifically to how well people engage with a website. Neilson develops five “quality components” that we will use throughout this guide as benchmarks for a usable site. These include:
This session features two new self-help websites. Hear from Ohio Legal Help and Indiana Legal Help as they share their experience developing their websites.
The Basics of Usability Testing
In this section, we will discuss the what, when and who of usability testing. what to test, when to conduct user testing, a variety of different types, and who to draw on as testers.
Exercise: Become the Tester
Usability testing is readily understood by navigating a website as if you were the tester. Perform the exercise below, and answer the questions to get a sense of a simple usability test.
Why Conduct Usability Testing
While website usability testing is conducted for many reasons, primarily, it ensures that people can use your site. If they can't, they will find solutions elsewhere.
Usability testing can also help determine:
What to Test - Site goals, user tasks, testing scripts and metrics
When conceptualizing a website we rarely articulate what users must do, instead, we focus on what our site does.
When to Test - Beginning, Middle and End
Usability testing is a priority when launching a new project, and it is vital to test your interface at each level of the design process.
You should conduct user testing when:
Creating or redesigning a site;
Changing the goals of your site (i.e.:, adding donation capacity to your site);
How to Test - Types of usability tests
Each type of usability test is best suited to answer a particular type of question. Articulating your testing question and knowing which test best responds to that question is key to your test’s success. Although some distinctions below are artificial it is helpful to familiarize yourself with the various tests before creating your own.
Who to Test - Participants
The idea of finding individual participants to test your site can be overwhelming and a stumbling block to routine user testing. However you do not need hundreds of testers to obtain good information.
The Nielson Norman group indicates that 5 users can uncover 85% of the major usability issues, and 15 users can find 100%.*
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