Posted in Website Usability Testing	January 11, 2008

Identifying and prioritizing your usability lab results is the most interesting and valuable part

Once you conduct your usability lab, it will become very obvious to you very quickly, which areas need improvement. More often than not, there will be more than one user who will experience frustration with certain tasks on your website.

We've asked test users to identify which order they tend to look for information on a webpage, and this is what they told us:

1. Underlined blue links in the body copy. Because these links are embedded in the copy, they have more credibility with the user.
   
2. Contextual navigation, left side first, right side next if it's clear that the navigation belongs to content and is not advertising related.
   
3. Persistent navigation, if the labels are not too broad or vague.
   
4. Search fields, when there are no clear indications that the information they are looking for can be found on the page they are on.

User satisfaction with a website tends to track along this list. Steps 1 and 2 lead to higher levels of satisfaction. When you get to step 4 users are ready to jump to a new site, particularly if the search results page is badly organized or uninformative.

Register for the Mequoda Summit Napa Valley 2008 where you can learn more about conducting usability labs, and how to optimize your website architecture. Register now.

Analyzing the Data

• How many people had the issue?
• How global is the problem?
• How important is the task?
• What possible solutions could address the problem?
• Prioritize

Incorporating Feedback & Recommendations

• Write up report of recommendations
• Communicate with stakeholders
• Implement recommendations
• Retest if time and resources allow

We wanted to show you some clips of usability tests that we've been hired to perform, but believe it or not, we didn't specify YouTube in our contract. Instead, we've decided to show you some videos of others who have tested their own sites:

Paper Prototype Usability Test

United.com usability issues - UsabilityMagazine.com

Related Articles:

How to Conduct a Usability Lab

Different Types of Usability Tests