Usability introduction
Usability can be the reason that people choose or not choose to use your website, it can save you a lot of money by getting it right, or it can be expensive if you get it wrong.
What is usability
Usability is the ease to use, how easy is it to use something, there are many similar definitions but essentially making it more usable is what usability is all about.
Recently usability has been orientated around computer interfaces such as software or web pages, usually there is a goal, and making it as easy as possible to achieve this goal, sometimes to inform or educate, sometimes to make the correct sale.
Importance
In websites there is often only one path to the goal and if anything stops the user either by confusing or by not giving the necessary information, then, with a choice of competitors a click away you may have lost a sale.
If your website is about providing information, then they may pick up the phone instead. A six minute phone call might appear cheap, but ten of these is about an hour of lost time for an employee.
Techniques (evalution)
When you design something you design knowing how it works, knowing the business model, the structure of the product and terminology around it so other than very early testing the designer or someone close to the product is often not the best person to try out usability.
Unfortunately, comprehensive testing is often expensive and so is usually only done once, often when its too costly to change a lot of the original implementation, the best ongoing method is to use friends or colleagues who would be similar in expertise to the final user and ask them to test. A common method is called the “Mom” test, literally as people often get their mother to help – probably because mothers are more happy being critical and want to help.
Of course at the final stage – pre-release, you need to do more thorough testing, for this you may feel its worth employing an outside firm who specialise in this usually they gather a group of participants and
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