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View Full Version : Making sure your website works.



alvo
30 Jun 2009, 11:04 PM
I run three different web design companies. One does web and general graphic design, another does simple, discount website design (used as fill in work for when the main business has downtime) and the third does usability testing and website consulting to fix "broken" sites. We just got a job in the consulting business that get me thinking about how people make websites and never take the time to consider if they do what they are supposed to do.

This time an account exec brought in a site that had been done by somebody else, chosen over us in the first place. It looked rather nice, the the owner had concerns. Seems that with advertising and all that it was receiving fairly good traffic for a new site, but nobody was buying anything. Could we help?

Usability testing was recommended, but before even discussing that, I discovered a major problem with the site that accounted for the lack of sales. It was impossible to buy anything for the site. No one had bothered to go through the shopping cart and attempt to purchase something. If they had they would have discovered that it was impossible to select a valid year for the expiration date of a credit card (for some reason the drop down menu only had years from 1969 through 1978 as choices). There were other issues that would have reduced purchases, such as requiring a buyer to have a password to place an order, but nothing mattered since the process couldn't be completed anyway.

I'm bring this up because usability testing is something that every web designer should do. If you can't afford to hire a firm to do it, at least do some basic testing on your own. It's not hard to do and even a small amount is likely to point out places that need improvement.

If you're interested in learning how to do some on your own, I'd recommend you read the book I often give to clients so that they understand what we, as designers, do and why a lot of what we do is done the way we do it. The book is Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. If you aren't familiar with it, it's a short, fun and easy-to-read book about building sites with common sense approach that, it seems, it's always so common.

If you've read my comments on various sites in the Website Review section here, you've probably noticed that I repeat myself a lot as many designers don't grasp the fundamentals of how real world users use the web. Reading Don't Make Me Think would be a good start for many of them.

Wickham
01 Jul 2009, 12:54 AM
Good post.

I would add that it's important to test the way a web page works after every edit too. It's very easy to test thoroughly when the page first goes online, then decide not to test after edits because you think "It's such a small edit, it can't possibly affect the page operation", but sometimes it does! A few days after doing some edits you wonder why it isn't working - and all the people who have been frustrated.

Not that I do shopping carts, but the same applies to dropdown menus, edited hyperlinks, videos, javascript items, PHP forms, etc.