Let’s pretend that we move into a new pre-furnished home. Now, let’s say that certain things don’t make much sense: our bathroom is on the roof, the car is parked in the living room, and the oven is at the foot of our bed. We may learn to adapt to these anomalies, but they go against the grain of our logic. Eventually we will tire of the annoyance and find a new home.
This is true for visiting a website for the first time. It is these lapses in logical layout and flow that usability seeks to remedy. The above example of the confusing home is accurate, and coincides with our Q1 & Q2 Usability Reports, which sought to dispel issues concerning proper layout and navigation, respectively. Users, much like homeowners, want elements of a website to appear according to their own sense of placement, not a designer’s.
At this year’s Enterprise Network Conference our very own Kassy Ritchie gave a talk on usability, elaborating on the psychology of the end user. She also discussed The Active Usability Lab, which allows us to conduct usability studies in-house, giving us instantaneous feedback and the ability to implement changes to websites according to our findings. Over the course of her talk she covered several tools and methodologies.
Our biggest, and coolest, usability tool is the Tobii eye-tracking machine. It is a phenomenal piece of hardware which lets us know exactly where a user looks when on a website, broken down according to each user’s demographic, sex, age, and level of expertise. Tobii helps greatly with both layout and navigation aiding in the determination of the logic of the average user.
Of course logic is a sliding scale. For example, think of any real estate website. Some users may want pages like “Mortage” to fall under a heading of “Services,” while others think it should fall under “Buyers.” The trick is finding which heading is the most popular – which then may become a top-side navigation header. In our Q2 study, one way of determining this was by a card-sorting method. Test subjects were given a stack of cards and asked to sort them according to master categories (which were both pre-defined and user-defined). Analyzing their organization of these cards is what led to the determination of proper navigation and the “ideal sitemap”. For more information, read our blog post, The Active Usability Lab: The Ideal Sitemap.
Consider for a moment the direct correlation between sales and the usability of a website. From first contact we work towards the signing of the contract – always be closing, right? But, what if a potential customer’s first contact with our company is visiting a website that only serves to annoy them? The Active Usability Lab helps generate a positive user experience which makes us more likely to earn their business.
Related Posts:
The Active Usability Lab: The Ideal Sitemap
Active Community: Introduction to The Active Usability Lab
Active Community: Usability Lab, Part 2
By Jeff Payne
