A website designer aims for an awesome design that can captivate its audience and hold them long enough for goal accomplishment. The usability aspect of a website is equally important. It focuses on the ease with which a user can comprehend and use a website. Usability has established the importance of user centered design - where the user is the focal point around which various design elements are structured.
Usability of a website involves a user's experience when they interact with the website. Several aspects of user experience all point towards the overall satisfaction derived in visiting the website.
According to Usability.gov, usability involves a group of factors that include learnability (ease of learning), the speed with which a user can accomplish their goal, intuitive nature of design, memorability of design for future reference, error frequency, severity associated with the design, and individual satisfaction level.(1)
Usability also involves a website's availability, responsiveness, accessibility, clarity, consistency, and credibility. Usability is not attained overnight. Usability tests need to be conducted for making a website usable from the user's perspective. Apart from tests, various methodologies can be used for evaluation of web usability.
Questionnaires
There can be use of indirect testing methodology for assessment of user interface. For example, questionnaires can be a great tool, but must fulfil certain criteria for maximizing the feedback results.
Questionnaires should be well structured, lucid, relevant, and important from usability perspective. A well formulated questionnaire can provide useful insights into issues of usability with feasible and accurate evaluation results. The results are based on the aptly designed Likert scale. Open ended questions prove more noteworthy, although quantitative analysis is difficult for them.
The Human Factors Research Group of the University College at Cork, Ireland designed the WAMMI (Web Analysis and MeasureMent Inventory) which is based on specific questionnaires for website evaluation.
Certain considerations should be taken into account as pointed out by Sullivan (1997):
- Novice users should be included in the evaluation process as websites are accessed by all categories of users.
- The group of users should be designed as per real future audience for whom the website is targeted to ensure a realistic assessment.
- Since users are personally flawed based on their culture, experience, and background, the testing group should understand that they are testers and not tested entities.
- Users should be allowed to test for a sufficient amount of time without guidance or interference.
- Observational cues such as comments, tasks, and interaction, should be noted for evaluating the website's effectiveness and satisfaction level.
Observational Methods of Usability Evaluation
In this methodology, the psychological conditions of the users are evaluated to test usability. Behavior observation tools include test monitoring, direct recording, and think-aloud can be used in combination. Test monitoring observes and records the test user's behavior and their comments during the test through a database which guides the recording. There is a prescribed form that provides the timing and checklist of actions that have to be completed by users along with their comments and explanations.
Literal recording is facilitated through direct recording to eliminate any observational bias through audio/video taping, screen recording software, or a two way mirror. Think aloud methodology records the test user's comments, as they verbalize their remarks while conducting the usability evaluation, with respect to their feelings and various issues they face.
Behavioral evaluation requires an expensive setting with careful collation of data as the users navigate. The users might get struck with the website's content and ignore the general navigational issues that form the core of usability evaluation. However, noting the actual behavior of users can be aligned with data collected through other techniques for deeper analysis.
Evaluation through Automatic Tools
Tools can be offline or online and evaluates the user's failures with respect to simulated user behavior related to task accomplishment. These failures are ranked on the basis of severity and assist the developer in analysis and fixing errors. Automatic website usability can be conducted on actual implementation of a website or on web server logs.
Software automation tools evaluate usability on different aspects and at different levels. While simple tools just record usage data, complex tools can identify potential usability issues which do not conform to prescribed guidelines. More complex tolls can go a step further to propose solutions to usability problems.
Booby is a service developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology, a non-profit American organization, which is a free of cost tool for identifying and eliminating issues (for differently-abled people), browser compatibility, and load speed of website. US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed tools to find out the applicability of quick, remote, and automated website usability testing.
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