Usability is the term commonly used to describe how ‘user friendly’ a website is, in other words how easy it is for a person to find what they are looking for or perform a task.
Your users should be able to work out how to do things easily, achieve their goals quickly and they should find this a pleasant experience that doesn’t raise a sweat in the brain power department. It’s all about aligning the technology with the human being!
There are some definite rules that make a website usable and some general guidelines that will help too. Good usability can be achieved by applying these rules and guidelines throughout the information architecture, design, functionality and content of your website.
Captovate knows all these rules, and we can help to make sure your website meets all the criteria, whether we're reviewing your existing site or helping you to plan a new one.
It may not surprise you to know that the best way to test the usability of a website is to try it out with...users!
Captovate is experienced in many different proven methods of user testing which allow us to both gain insight into user perceptions and opinions of a site, as well as to test users’ ability to complete certain predefined tasks. For example, we may ask users to access a certain document from the website, and then we track both how the users achieve this, and how easy or enjoyable they find it.
As well as the good old fashioned focus group (which is great for collecting opinions and enabling in-depth discussion), Captovate has also been working with some cool web-based usability testing software which allows us to reach many more people and clinically track their path through task completeion.