Introduction to Usability Testing

Usability Testing begins with a simple question: what is the quality of a user’s experience?

A simple enough question, however, it does not always lend itself to a simple answer.

As people vary greatly in how they experience websites, the measure of usability can becomes subjective. A website that one user can easily navigate might be next to impossible for another. Personal preferences, educational background, technical knowledge, experience using computers, age, nationality, and income levels are among some of the many factors that influence how a user interacts with your website.

To make things more complicated, you might find yourself receiving feedback from people who adore your website’s flashy design, but still consistently have difficulty locating pertinent information or products. Conversely, some of your visitors could strongly dislike the look and feel of your site, but can easily discover the information they need.

We view usability as a comprehensive metric that meets both subjective and objective criteria. Usability Testing takes these important subjective factors into consideration, and helps you obtain a comprehensive picture of your website’s usability.

Why conduct Usability Testing?

Usability Testing is very important if you would like to improve the quality of your users’ website experience, increase efficiency, productivity, as well as minimize the number of errors encountered by people navigating your site.

The more effort taken to fine-tune a usability test for a particular website, the more likely it is that you will be able to pinpoint and fix key problems hindering the website. For this reason, we place a high premium on extensive consultations with our clients to develop customized testing plans that will address the specific usability issues and concerns for a given website.

The following sections contain summaries of our most popular Usability Testing services. We encourage you to contact us for a consultation or just to ask a question.

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