Testing Website Usability

Website usability can be tested by using a method called usability testing. This is necessary in order to evaluate a website. Usability in this case refers to the ease with which users can access information from your website and also how easily they can navigate through different web pages of your link.

In this world of information called internet, there are thousand of thousands websites. Among them, it is necessary that your website shows up to the users and also it has to be so simple that they find it easy to access your website. There are certain basic ideas that are to be followed to ensure simple user-friendly interface. To test how usable your website is, you can employ some of the approaches that have proved successful.

Here are some common approaches for testing website usability.

1. Contextual interviews: It is merely listening and understanding what the user has in mind when he/she is navigating in your website from one web page to the other. This can be experimented by placing some users sit in front of the computer with your website open. There is a person allocated to note their behaviour while they go about navigating each and every web page.
2. Heuristic evaluation: This evaluation concentrates on identifying major problems right at the beginning stage of building the website. Brief review is taken from more than one person and then as the design progresses, all the changes are incorporated. Thus, this approach involves no expenses as such.
3. Individual interviews: After designing the website, interviews of users are taken to understand how the website is performing and also to learn about some drawbacks that the user has faced until now. This gives the web designer or the web designing company a chance to understand and learn their mistakes and try not to repeat them in future projects.
4. Prototyping: You can initially prototype your website and learn from it the user’s responses and also how the prototype turns out to be. This is very important a way before you can launch your original website. If there are any feedbacks that need modifications, you can gladly do it in your original website and later end up launching it once you are satisfied with good reviews from the users.
5. Parallel design: In this particular approach, a lot of people are involved in designing the website with the same requirements. Once they all finish their work independently, the designing company can choose the best design that seems to work for them.

There can be several other approaches as well but generally using these techniques website usability can be tested fairly well.