Website Usability

WHAT IS THIS?

Website usability refers to the overall user experience on how your visitor digests the information on your site, navigates around, gets expectations fulfilled properly, and completes their intent with satisfaction.

Website usability relates to how your content is written, the site architecture of your categories and pieces of information, the ability of a visitor to complete a desired interaction or transaction, and how efficiently, intuitively, and easily all of this happens for your website's visitors on their respective browsing devices.

It's also broken out by user types.  You may have one usability study for mobile shoppers; and a totally different one for desktop browsers.  Or younger vs older users.  Or educated vs uneducated users.  It's important to know the targeted audience before studying your site's usability... a teenager will have a totally different experience using a website than his grandmother would.

WHAT IS THE RETURN?

Site usability is tied to brand, conversion, retention, and even SEO.  Better usability can help all of these areas:

• A very usable, intuitive website benefits your overall brand as being helpful and easy to use.  Apple launched products all built around usability.
  
  
• A highly usable website enhances the site's conversion rate.  Conversion rate optimization does some analysis in site usability.
  
  
• Customers return to websites that are helpful and easy.  Unless you have no competitors, your website can't afford to be tough to use.  If your customer has a frustrating experience using your site; it's less likely you'll have a repeat buyer.
  
  
• SEO is Search Engine Optimization.  A highly usable and helpful website means people who land on your page from search results are less likely to "bounce" (immediately leave).  An effort to make sure you have no bad links on the website, as well as making sure nothing is broken, also helps ensure a Google spider is less likely to find problems on your site.  All of this helps your overall search rankings for your content pages.

WHAT DO WE DO?

A website usability study can vary in scope size.  It may affect only one particular audience or one particular part of the website.  

Reviewing customer phone calls, emails, and CHAT sessions may be a first place to learn about some of the potential areas to test with users; where they contacted you after frustration or confusion regarding the website.

In some cases, we'll have strong recommendations not needing testing; due to known best practice in ecommerce.

Today, putting together user goals and conducting small groups of user testing can be very cost-effective to organize and run via web-based technologies and at-home users who represent your target audience.

Based on the conclusions made from the user testing, we'll make recommendations on solutions to resolve the problem areas.

Build your website correctly for your customer's user experience, and you'll piece together a plan for a positive return!

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