Usability Testing As Part Of A Marketing Campaign

Very few webmasters or website owners regard usability as part of their marketing strategy. However, site architecture, ease of interaction and the ability complete tasks all affect the user experience, which in turn affects their image of your company and the bottom line.

Drive pre-qualified visitors to your website

If your visitors find it difficult to find the information they are seeking or complete tasks, especially shopping or checkout related activities, they will abandon your site in favour of a competitor who has better considered their needs and goals.

Part of every online marketing strategy is to drive pre-qualified visitors to your website, once there you want to keep them and encourage further interaction with your catalogue or services. To do this effectively you need to create an intuitive environment where the visitor can concentrate on the task at hand rather than how to navigate a quirky interface or illogical information structure. Usability testing can uncover sticking points and bottlenecks that may be causing friction between your visitors and their goals.

The benefits of usability testing

The benefits of usability testing are not just visitor centric, usability testing also furthers the commercial goals of the site owner or shareholders by ensuring that information structures, financial processes and forms are elegant and forgiving thus simplifying visitor interaction.

Design Insite's blue-print for usability majors on six highly focused design principles: visibility, feedback, structure, reuse, tolerance, and parsimony.

Visibility

Visibility is about removing gratuitous features that may cause confusion and entice users to stray from the preferred path while ensuring that essential features and functions are clearly visible and explicit in nature.

Feedback

Feedback is about providing users with relevant information in terms of the actions they have taken, or are just about to take in order to complete a task. For example, failing to notify users that you require dates in US date format can create problems for UK users who use a different date format. It is equally a sin, and just as annoying, to request endless confirmations after each and every step.

Structure

Structure is about organizing information and navigation in a way that feels natural and familiar while maintaining the intrinsic order of the information. Related information should be grouped together; unrelated information should be moved to a more logical location within the site structure.

Reuse

Reuse is about maintaining interaction patterns and visual components so that the user interface is consistent, contains few distinct options and is simple to master.

Tolerance

Tolerance is about creating a flexible and forgiving environment for site visitors. Visitors should be helped to make fewer errors when interacting with forms etc. and aided in correcting or overcoming the errors they do make.

Parsimony

The principle of parsimony states that the simplest explanation, the one that requires the fewest hypotheses, is the one most likely to be correct.

As far as usability is concerned parsimony is about simplicity and elegant solutions to complex problems, if your visitors pay more attention to design elements or have to guess at the meaning of cryptic navigation items then you have failed. Good web design should be invisible, good navigation should be intuitive and make immediate sense to the visitor, and good content should be objective and hype free.

However, parsimony is rather more than a simple minimalist approach to design and requires a working knowledge of concepts such as progressive disclosure where only the most relevant information and navigational options are given to a visitor at any given time.

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