The Maine SEO Blog

James Fenelon, Interactive Product Director, nFusion

What is it?

• Usability testing provides measurement and ease of use and user success
• Helps explain how test subject respond in: time, accuracy, recall, emotional response
• Benefits:
  - First-hand data from users
  - Discovery of errors and areas of improvement
  - Saves development time and money
  - Reduces guesswork and arguing

Why is it important?

• Site impression is made in 1/20th second

Start with the right strategy

• Usability is about helping site visitors accomplish THEIR goals
• Start be defining:
  - Business goals
  - Visitor goals

Some Usability Options

• Can range from basic to high-end
• Basic Techniques:
  - Heuristic reviews
  - Card sorting
  - Prototype Testing

Heuristic review

• Evaluation method that helps to identify usability problems with the user interface
• Provides:
  - Identification of user experience/website usability issues
  - Prioritization of what to fix

Information Architecture and Usability

• Is the menu-naming terminology consistent with the user’s perspective?
• Are navigational titles clear and mutually understood?

Card Sorting – Validating your IA

• Many techniques
• Write the name of each main item on index card
• Shuffle deck and give to user
• Ask them to sort into groups and explain

Prototype Testing

• Using wireframes to decide best usability for website
• Best way to start? On paper.

When to do it?

• Earlier, the better
• Any usability testing is better than none
• Usability for optimization is not a one-time activity

Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting, Apogee Search

• How can I improve my conversion rate? It depends.
• You have to understand your problems before you can fix them.

Step 1: Goals

• Improving conversion rate
• Have you identified your goals?
  - Yes: Continue
  - No: Start over.
• What is the purpose of your website? (sales, leads, email signups…)
• Optimize to ALL of your goals.

Step 2: What is your traffic doing today?

E-Commerce:

• Start with purchase process (Do people abandon your shopping cart?)
• Moving on the Entry pages (Where are you sending your traffic? Homepage? Products? Categories? Test them.)
• Where do people abandon?
• Focus on your biggest problems first
• Use tactics that fits the issue (usability testing, page testing, focus groups, etc.)

Lead Generation:

• Is quality an issue? Integrate with a CRM system
• Instead of focusing only on web forms you could track past the lead and analyze & optimize towards
  - Human scrubbed leads
  - Qualified opportunities
  - Sales
• In a few years, tracking only leads will sound as silly as tracking only clicks now.
• What do people do when they enter your site?
• How’s your lead bait?
• It never hurts to focus on your forms
• How’s your call-to-action?

Conversion Strategy Summary

• Dig deep to understand & optimize to your goals
• Use your analytics to find your unique goals
• Tailor the therapy to the type of problem
• Look at level of difficulty compared to level of impact

Kimberly Krause Berg, Usability and SEO Consultant, UsabilityEffect.com/Cre8pc.com

What are your site requirements?

• Project Management
• Organizing and planning your web site
• Napkins, sticky notes, whiteboard
• Write everything down!
• Team signs off
• Test cases

Business Requirements

1. Sell products online
2. Provide information on our company
3. Provide excellent customer service
4. Be accessible to everyone

For example…

• About Us page
  - Provide bios of staff
  - Presidents message
• Blog
  - Global reach
  - Host ads
• Catalog
  - PDF version
  - Subscription
• Social Network
• Shopping Cart
  - Custom cart
  - SEO friendly
• Marketing

Functional Requirements

• Derived from use cases, mental models, user personas
• Programmers’ domain
• Determine specs for browsers, OS accessibility, bandwidth, performance, platform, mobile use, programming

Scott Brinker, President & CTO, ion interactive, Inc.

Landing page options

• Option A: Technology & psychology to “optimize” pages.
• Option B: Give them what they really want. –> “Wow. Thank you, that’s really what I was looking for.”

Searchers expect pieces to fit together:

• Intent
• Keyword
• Ad copy
• Landing page (where things tend to fall apart)

Other thoughts

• Think big, test small.
• It’s not about the number of tests, but what you’re testing?
• Find what they’re looking for and give it to them.  That’s what landing page usefulness is all about.

Questions

• Information foraging – how people interact and deal with your site
• How do you balance content vs. ad excitement to increase Quality Score? You can have a relatively small amount of content and still have a high quality score.
• Should you remove navigation so you can increase conversions? Don’t ever leave people without a choice. You could remove navigation if it’s too distracting, but still leave them with options.
• Can you change design for landing pages? You can experiment with a lot of looks and feels…people are used to micro-sites. It’s about quick, cheap tests.
• Quick tips from panelists:
  - Ask yourself what it would take to double, triple, quadruple how many landing pages you have.
  - Is your elevator pitch on your homepage/landing page?
  - Any usability testing is better than none.
  - Conversions happen when calls to action are available when people are thinking about them.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Expert Advice, Training, Web Developing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.