Part of the Web Development process that is very much neglected in the industry today is website usability. You may wonder why that is. After all, it seems that a usable website should be the core principle for any website development project.

At Quirk website usability is very much a part of our Web Development and maintenance process. It will be my task from now on to introduce you to website usability and cover the various aspects of it in the next couple of months.

Note: Usability is a very broad topic which we will never be able to cover in-depth in a reader friendly blog post. If you want to really get stuck into the topic refer to the resources listed at the bottom of this post. 

Website usability ensures visitors easily achieve desired goals (Image Credit: Roebot).

What is website usability?

The International Organisation for Standards define usability as follows:

"Usability refers to the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of user." - ISO 9241-11

In a nutshell website usability can be summed up as the level of ease and satisfaction a visitor experiences when using a website for a specific goal.

How do we measure usability?

When it comes to measuring the usability of a website you will find two main forms of testing: user testing and statistical analysis. With user testing you take a group of people, identify critical user tasks that are important for your website's success and set goals for each task. You then measure the usability of your site based on the percentage of tasks completed, the success/failure ratio, time taken to complete the task and overall satisfaction of the experience.

When looking at statistical analysis, one would look at the following areas: web analytics, conversion rates and split testing (A/B).
This is where tools like Google Analytics, CrazyEgg and ClickTale etc. come in to play.

Resources to get you going

Interested in website usability? Here are a couple of resources to help you on your way to understanding and implementing website usability testing:

• Usability.gov
• Alertbox
• Usereffect
• SA UX group on Google Groups

We hope to cover as much as possible on this topic in the coming months and will go into more detail with each sub section we discuss.

Look out for the next post in our usability series named: ”Website Usability: Show me the Usability” where we will talk in detail about the various visual elements of a website that impact its usability.

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