Excellent Usability – Your Key to a Positive UX Design

Web Usability encompasses a variety of aspects that focus on making your users’ experience the best one possible. Building your site has the potential to be a fun exercise in determining your company’s mission, and making it a positive experience for your users is a top priority.

User Research

This aspect concentrates on understanding how your viewers and audience behave, what they need and their motivations – once you have completed that process, your findings are processed through task analysis, various observation techniques and other feedback methods. Essentially, this is the practice of understanding the influence of your design on your audience.

At what point should you analyze your user data? Since there are many different research techniques, each one has an ideal time frame within the user analysis process. A great time to use focus groups, for instance, is toward the beginning of a new process or change within your company’s site or brand – allowing you to learn about their attitudes, ideas and desires will help you determine what changes (if any) you need to make moving forward.

Once that development is done, your business can indulge in prototyping, letting your design team expand their creativity and delve into new viewpoints by building a mock site (this can range from a basic paper strategy to actual interactive coding pages). Consider this step a “test drive.” By building this prototype and making room for criticism and comment in the early stages, the development process is assisted and guided in the optimal direction. Ultimately, the long road of testing is for the users’ positive end experience.

Usability Evaluation

How well can your audience learn and figure out your product, resolving how it can best achieve their goals? User evaluation tests and determines how satisfied your users are with that process.

Usability indicates the quality of a user’s experience when interacting with products or systems, including websites, software, devices, or applications. The foundation of usability is about effectiveness, efficiency and the user’s overall satisfaction.

Knowing how quickly your users can learn and accomplish basic tasks (as well as that site’s memorability and design) can allow you to adjust and increase your website’s efficiency and usability. This feedback will lead you to the creation of a neat and intuitive design and site architecture and decrease the likelihood of error frequency and severity (increasing the average time of recovery from those errors, as well).

These methods are made up of consistent testing – “test early and often.” Once the needed data has been gathered, you may use it to appraise your website, recommend various improvements and implement any recommendations that are created based on those analyses. Testing to ensure the effectiveness of any implemented changes wraps up the process, and you are left with a site that is a pleasure to view and use.