The Importance of Site Usability

Site usability is a very important facet of web development, perhaps one of the most important. No matter how well your website ranks in the search engines, if using your website is confusing, your visitors will not use your website. There are a number of things to consider when discussing site usability, such as browser compatibility, layout, and design. But how do you know if your website is unusable or not? There are various tests that have been developed over the last few years to help us understand how a visitor interacts with your website. From this data you can create modifications on your site to increase conversions, decrease bounce rate and much more!

What software exists?

There are various software packages that you can utilize to improve your visitors online experience. There are some that specialize in a specific type of test, and others that offer a wide range of utilities. We at Upright Communications utilize Visual Website Optimizer. VWO offers a wide range of tools including A/B testing, multivariate testing, and heat map software.

Other software includes Optimizely, Crazy Egg, and ClickTale. Which software you choose depends on your use case. Many are similar in their offers and features; a major factor might be the price-point of the services or quality of customer service.

I have my software, now what?

Before we can start improving the usability of your site we first need to understand what might be bad. Outside of following standard development rules for layout and using a good set of typography styles, we can use VWO’s heat map software to get a better idea of what your visitors are clicking on when they visit a particular page on your site.

Once you have an idea of what your visitors are doing with your site, you can then identify ways to attract traffic to certain areas or features. In a VWO case study,“ 158% increase in trial sign-ups”, a surprising discovery was made using A/B Testing. By simply adding a single call-to-action button they increased trial memberships by 158% without decreasing the number of paid membership signups.

Are you interested in learning more about site usability testing for your website? The team at Upright can help – give us a call.