Homestead Blog

Brian is a user interface designer on the product team who works very closely with people we invite to our user testing sessions. Here’s the first in a series of articles he’ll be bringing you on the importance of testing your site for customer friendliness – Rochelle

How “user-friendly” is your website? This is an important question for any website owner who wants people to use his or her site. Depending on the answer, you could have a website that people bookmark and browse every day, or you could have a site that people can’t stand looking at for more than a minute.

Think of your website as a supermarket. Even though you may have the products that your customers are looking for, if they have to wade through disorganized piles of junk just to figure out where to go, chances are they’re not going stick around for very long. Similarly, if visitors don’t have a good experience while browsing your website, they won’t want to come back, much less purchase what you have to offer!

A good way to measure the user-friendliness of your website is to actually test it on users. User testing involves watching people perform common tasks on your site, such as finding information or making a purchase, and observing how they go about doing it. By watching their interactions with your site, you can discover problems with its design—problems that may not have occurred to you simply because it’s your website, so you already know how it works.

The first step toward conducting a user test is to figure out what your goals are. What is it that you want any user to be able to do and/or accomplish on your site? For example, if you sell products on your website, your goals may include things like “purchase a product” or “find shipping information.” If your website is informative, then your goals might be “find a list of your services” or “access contact information.” You should try to identify at least five to ten goals that you’d like any visitor to be able to accomplish on your website.

Once you’ve decided what yours goals for customers are, how exactly do you test the usability of your website? In our next user testing post, we’ll go over the details of how to prepare for a user test and how to conduct it. In the meantime, don’t forget to identify those goals!