What’s Happening...

Now that daylight savings time is in full effect, and dusk happens at around 4:30PM every day, our super bright yellow walls are really paying off! No seasonal affective disorder here; at the Wired Solutions’ office, it’s always sunny!

We are now in the testing phase of the Songwriters Association of Canada’s new web presence. The new web-application will not only provide a full content managed web-site, but it will also sport custom software that we developed to allow songwriters to have their songs evaluated by veteran songwriters. It will also feature a Song Pitching framework to match executives who require music with Canadian songwriters via the new Song Pitching framework we developed.

Website Usability

Have you ever thought about how your website’s visitors are using your website? Do they find it easy to navigate, or is it difficult to read and understand? Website usability testing is used to evaluate how others are using your website, and determine if they are using it the way it was intended to work. Its main goals are:

Performance

How are basic tasks completed? How many steps and how much time is involved. What mistakes are people making? Where are they getting confused?

Recall

Are people remembering things about your site? What do they remember?

Emotional Response

Are your visitors experiencing a higher stress level when they are on your site? Is the users overall experience negative, or positive?

Here are a few tips from the experts at Wired Solutions when thinking about usability on your website.

1. Keep your content clear and simple. You’re not writing a thesis here. There is no reason to be wordy. Make your content easy to scan, because generally people don’t spend much time reading websites and put the important content at the top of the page.
2. Navigation text is not the place to be creative and different. It needs to be obvious, tell people where they are going, where they’ve been and where they are, all in a few words! This is why navigation indicators and mouse-overs are important. Don’t forget to always have a home page link.
3. If your website doesn’t match the rest of your branding, then you’re going to lose people the minute they hit your site. They will think they are at the wrong place. Keep pages within your site consistent, you don’t want people thinking they’ve left your site, when they haven’t.

So how do you do usability testing on your website? The easiest thing to do is to have people use your website who have never seen it before. Watch them, and get them to tell you anything they are thinking while going through it. Try to choose people that are within your target market as well.

Lesson Learned!

Creating a professional website is a process, and you’ve probably been involved somehow right from the beginning. This means your understanding of the website is different from a user that has never seen it. An important step in creating a website is to get people to test it and use it, learn from their experiences and make changes as needed.