Ipswich website design company SimpleClick Solutions are experts in the field of website usability and want to share their experience.

Usability testing is important for a number of reasons:

• Usability testing validates what you already thought was wrong with your site

• Usability testing tells you what you should be doing next

• Usability testing allows you to make informed decisions, not just make guesses

• Usability testing shows the world that you are serious about providing a good experience to your customers. Press release it!

Who should you choose?

Don’t get too hung up on selecting people from your target demographic. This should never be the most important factor. Think about it – a 40 year old man with no kids would encounter usability problems on a website aimed at new mothers, for example, in the same way as a new mother would! Just because he wouldn’t necessarily use that site doesn’t matter – this isn’t a marketing exercise, it’s a usability test.

So, go out and grab family, friends, workmates and get them to take part. It doesn’t even matter if some of them already use the site on a regular basis – they might have some great suggestions. The only caveat to this piece of advice is that you should never use a member of the team who works on the website to test the website!

How many should you choose?

Steve Krug, author of ‘Don’t make me Think’, says you can get viable usability test results from as few as three people. Jakob Nielson says that five should be the minimum. Personally, we feel that you can get a well-rounded set of results from anywhere between six and ten.

The benefits of keeping a test relatively small are clear. If you ever conduct usability testing on your own website, you will notice that in the first few tests, the same issues are coming up. Each new person might find a couple of new issues, but generally, after the sixth test, you have pretty much captured everything you need, especially all of the high priority problems.

It also makes the process of reporting much simpler. You are able to analyse, collate and write up the results far more easily – six sets of results are a lot easier to analyse than sixty!