Your Websites Usability Is Important
A lot of people overlook just how important it is for a website to have good usability. A website can look amazing but if your visitors can’t easily shop and purchase you are loosing thousands of dollars. If a customer can’t easily find what they want to purchase it they will most likely leave your website and go to one of your competitors. It’s a very simple concept, the easier you make it for your visitors, the easier they will make it on you.
In order to effectively test the usability of your website you need to get together a group of people who have little to no knowledge about what you sell. Give them a list of products or product types to find, and then watch them to see just how easy it is for them to navigate around your website and find the products or product types. This will give you an idea of what your customers are doing and things you might need to change to give your website a better usability. It’s a good idea to change one thing at a time if possible and then see what your conversion rate is. This way you will know if that change is helping or if it’s hurting your business.
There are certain things that you need to look out for when you’re watching your testers. If your testers hit the back button in their browser this means that they didn’t find what they were looking for. This means that particular link or description they just read was misleading and needs to be looked over.
Reading something over again is also a sign of a problem. This means that what they were looking at was confusing and should be looked over. The navigation of your site should be simple but just enough information to tell them where that link will take them.
When your testers hesitate this is also normally also a problem. If a website has good usability the user shouldn’t have to think too hard. There movement should be smooth and fairly quick unless they’re reading a product description.
There are many different ways to test the usability of your website. This is one way that we have found to be one of the most effective and it should do the same for your website. Remember if you don’t give your customer what they want your competitor will. So make sure your website has the best usability possible.