Another early-stage technique is to run so-called low-fidelity designs past test subjects. These designs are basically nonworking prototypes of a site - anything from paper drawings of a homepage to a digital mock-up. While such experiments aren't very useful for learning about specific details, they can flag potential problem areas and offer valuable insights into how people perceive basic concepts.
The most critical phase of usability evaluation, however, comes after a site is functional. This is when individuals are closely monitored as they perform a series of specific tasks. A financial site, for instance, might ask test participants to find various stock ticker symbols or set up an online portfolio.
Proponents tout the advantages of this type of hands-on exercise over question-based focus groups. "What [focus groups] say isn't necessarily what they do," explains Keith Pelczarski, another usability expert at Motley Fool. "They tell you what you want to hear." With task-oriented testing, on the other hand, there's less room for confusion - people either succeed at using the site or they don't.
For all its effectiveness, task-oriented testing is surprisingly affordable. Terra Lycos and Motley Fool both test their sites on only five people (all of whom can be recruited by a focus-group firm for less than $1,000). With 16 test participants, Lego Group, which recently launched a commerce version of its site, is at the high end. "If you do a comprehensive test lasting anywhere from 60 minutes to two hours, drilling down to a lot of areas on the site," explains Usability Group's Rubin, "they'll expose 90 percent of your usability issues." Rubin advises running these tests four to five times throughout a Web site's development cycle.
The biggest factor affecting the success of a usability test is not how many participants you choose, but who. Relying on the wrong subjects can skew the results or make them worthless, so a business must recruit members of its target audience. "You should not bring in your cousin Vinnie or your aunt Sally simply because they're available," warns Rubin. For many businesses, handing off the screening and recruiting of participants to an outside specialist is money well spent.
Improving usability doesn't end when the testing and subsequent design tweaks are over. The next step is studying how real customers interact with the site. This means poring over server logs (the files that record who clicked what on the site) or using an audience analysis service, like WebTrends (WEBT) or WebSideStory (dossier). The patterns within this data can illuminate flaws in a site's design.
That's exactly what happened at Skechers.com, the Web site of the athletic-shoe maker. "We saw a lot of people bailing out because we weren't putting enough specific info in front of them," explains Geric Johnson, the company's VP of marketing. So the Manhattan Beach, Calif., company moved product information to the top level of the site and retooled the navigation. Visitors can now click forward to any product instead of having to backtrack to a main menu. The design changes seem to be going over well, says Johnson, who cites a doubling in page views in the past year and a 400 percent increase in sales during this past holiday season.
Payoffs like this may convince other businesses of the importance of being user-friendly. The coming convergence of the Web, television and wireless devices is going to create even greater design challenges. For Motley Fool's Burnette, this means there will be a lot of questions to ask: "How will people use converged media at first? How will those usage patterns evolve over time?" The answers no doubt will require time, experimentation and a fair amount of testing. Burnette can't wait to watch.
