Website usability analysis is an important element that must be factored into your business monitoring. You can use Google Analytics and other visitor tracking software to get statistical data that can draw up a clearer picture of how your users are finding your site, interacting with your site and leaving your site.

You should have some form of tracking in place but to really test usability it is better to watch someone navigate your website. One way of testing your website for ease of navigation is to conduct sessions with a variety of users; always use people who computer savvy and those that hardly ever use a computer. This will ensure you get a broader picture of how easy your site is to use.

You’ll want to watch people use your site with no object in mind but, more importantly, you’ll want to give people specific tasks to see how easy they are to complete. For example, you could give the following instructions:

Find an item, add it to the shopping cart and proceed to the checkout page.

Find the contact page and submit a question.

Find product x add to basket, continue shopping and add item z, now empty basket.

Along with your observations it is wise to ask each person to complete a questionnaire where you ask for their feedback regarding ease of use. You can always use friends and family to do this but be aware that they may lean on giving you feedback that is more positive due to your relationship (you’ll be best to judge this).

An additional tool that can really help with your website usability analysis is to record visitor sessions on your website. Clixpy is free to register with and they give you a number of credits to get you started. You will be able to play-back visitor sessions and see exactly what your prospects and customers are doing on your site.

You’ll be able to see exactly what people do. Let’s say the sessions you record show that people are consistantly adding items to your shopping cart software and then not completing the checkout process. You may be able to deduce that the checkout button is not visible on certain pages, or is not clear enough, or the page you thought was live is actually returning a 404 page not found message.

Clixpy is a great service and purchasing additional credits is very cost-effective. You can get 100 captures for as little as $5 and they accept PayPal payments. Register for you free account with Clixpy by clicking on the link below:

www.clixpy.com

To your success,

Karl Foxley