By Christy McDougall for the National Network of Forest Practitioners
You are about to walk into a building, in a hurry, and the door won’t open. You push and push on the bar that is supposed to open the door, and it won’t work. After a frustrated moment, you realize you are pushing on the wrong side of the bar. With a humiliated feeling that you’ve just made an idiot out of yourself, you slink inside and hurry away from that door, knowing you’ll probably do exactly the same thing the next time.
Is there something wrong with you, that you can’t work a simple door? No. There is something wrong with the door. If it is difficult for you, the user, to use something as simple as a door, the door has been designed badly. And why has a bad design been implemented into a building? Because the designers did not test it on real human beings. If they had called in five random people off the street and asked them to open the door, they would have seen in about five minutes that they had some work to do to make their door usable.
Websites work the same way. What designers assume will be easy usually isn’t easy to the average person who happens upon the website. Website creators may be so familiar with their sites and with complicated computer tasks that they can lose sight of what is and what is not simple to other people. If it isn’t easy to use the site, the user will become frustrated, and no one wants the main feeling people have about their website to be frustration. That is why even the most basic website could benefit hugely from some simple usability testing.
Usability testing asks a few average people to sit down at a website and try to figure out what it’s for and how to use it without any prior knowledge of it. The average person should be able to tell in a split second, without any guessing, what your site is about, and the average computer user should be able to maneuver around the site without getting lost and to perform most tasks without trouble.
The easiest way to perform your own usability testing is to grab a couple friends or relatives who haven’t been on your site and ask them to take five minutes to play around on it. Give them a task to perform, like signing up for your newsletter or finding a certain page. Watch what they do, how much they hesitate over certain things. Ask them for feedback, especially what problems they had. Sometimes what you thought to be perfectly obvious won’t be obvious to them at all. Then go and fix the problems, and later ask a few others to try it and find out if you fixed them as well as you thought you did.
If you have a larger business or run an association with members, it is recommended that you get your new members to do usability testing. When you have a new form for members to fill out online, test it on a few of them and ask them to tell you how it worked for them. Many people will stay politely quiet when they find errors in forms, but when you ask, you will get plenty of very useful feedback. Listen to both the experts, who know how a good website should work, and to the beginners, who have yet to memorize all the computer rules many of us take for granted.
It is always a good idea to offer some compensation for your testers’ time, even (or especially) if they are friends or family members. Sustainable Woods Network conducts usability testing by offering free services if members will be willing to be testers. You might offer a gift certificate, money, or a product or service from your business.
Remember: your site is for other people. You want it to attract people by its beauty, its clarity of purpose, and its ease of use. Your site should give people who stumble upon it the best possible sense of your business. Even if you feel your site is absolutely wonderful, you should give your customers a chance to say how it makes them feel, because they are what is most important. Your customers and clients are your business’s lifeblood, and usability testing can help you create a site that attracts them rather than driving them away.
Usability testing resources: Web usability consulting – http://www.sensible.com/
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. A book by Steve Krug.