The Net Impact Newsletter
October 2010 |
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Featured Service: User-Testing
A Small Change can Make a Big Difference
Let’s say you are getting ready to launch a new website. Your marketing team loves the web design and your IT team is thrilled with the security and efficiency. So is your website ready to take off? Maybe...maybe not. What about taking that quantum leap and testing your site with your intended audience, your customers?
Understanding how visitors navigate your site is critical in creating the most effective site possible. Having a site that that is user-friendly and leads visitors to conversions should be the goal of any website. User testing (UX) is a fundamental component of the web development process.
User testing allows you to see how real people navigate your site, while hearing their comments at the same time. This provides insight into how to improve your site by identifying positive and negative aspects of your site, including features on your site that may be confusing to visitors. This service will tell you what is working on your website and what is not from a visitor’s perspective. This can lead to additional functionality or features that may be beneficial to add to your website. It can also lead to simpler navigation that takes some features away. The bottom line is that your website becomes more relevant to your visitors.
An investment in user testing, if managed properly, will return value far beyond its cost. It may be in the form of hundreds of saved development and design hours, or improvements in conversion rates, and subsequent increases in revenue and profit. Remember website testing is an ongoing process, but when done effectively it will drive your efforts and help visitors realize a greater satisfaction with your website.
The Net Impact employs usability testing as part of our analytics methodology in order to construct complete online marketing strategies. Contact The Net Impact today to learn how we can help you find the most effective way to make your website visitors take action. |
Usability Testing Case Study: City of Wentzville
When it comes to a municipality website, the usability of the site by its citizens is a necessary condition for performance. After The Net Impact launched the The City of Wentzville’s new website, the city worked with our Internet Marketing team to conduct a series of usability tests to gauge how user-friendly the website’s navigation and overall experience was for visitors and to get a better idea of ideal traffic flow for visitor satisfaction. We created a series of scenarios and tasks for testers to complete on the City of Wentzville’s website.
Once the user tests were complete, our team of Internet marketing specialist analyzed videos and tester feedback to generate a recommendation report and next steps in order to improve the user experience. From the results we concluded that overall the testers were impressed by the amount of information provided, but there was still room for improvement.
The testers provided valuable insight about the website and its usability - both positive and negative. Based on navigation observations and tester comments, The Net Impact identified several key changes including navigation, layout, and website function updates to be implemented into the website in order to improve navigation and overall user experience.
In conclusion, based on the invaluable feedback from the user testing, our team continues to work with the City of Wentzville to revise aspects of their website to in order to continue to increase effectiveness and functionality.
Read more TNI User-Testing Case Studies!
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"By utilizing a focus group to conduct routine business functions we obtained valuable information about the positive aspects of the web page and also benefited from useful suggestions to make the site more user-friendly. The City’s web design team and members from The Net Impact team analyzed the results of the study and began implementing recommendations. We believe this focus group process was a valuable step in the creation of our new website."
- Dianna Wright, City Administrator, The City of Wentzville |
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