There is a great way to win more customers’ hearts — just make sure it is easy for their eyes, hands, and mind to work with your website. The art of making websites convenient is called usability. When it comes to website and business success, usability often plays a more important role in a website success than the coolest high-tech features.
Website usability testing is a special area in quality assurance where skilled QA engineers check your website’s user-friendliness in every detail — and you can be sure our digital agency has awesome ones! More details about usability testing are below.
What is website usability testing?
Website usability testing is a comprehensive examination of your website’s work from the user perspective. It checks how easily and quickly users can achieve their particular goals, how clear and obvious the steps are, and how convenient it is to make them — in every aspect. Here are at least some of these aspects:
- the expected and logical behavior of all website elements
- the right positioning and quick access to call-to-action buttons, menu items, and important website areas
- the fonts, colors, contrasts, and sizes of all design elements
- clear and logical steps for all procedures
- convenient content categorization
- the right handling of form submission errors
- the simplicity of forms
- quick access features (for example, the ability to login from social media accounts)
- hints and helps where needed.
and much more.
Special attention should be paid to mobile usability testing to check if users can achieve their goals with minimum scrolling and zooming, with their fingers easily tapping on the buttons and links, and so on. After all, the share of web pages served to mobile phones reached 52.2% in 2018.
Website usability testing overlaps with other testing types, especially web accessibility and performance testing.
- Web accessibility testing deals with how accessible your website is for people with disabilities. Some of its aspects, like fonts and contrasts or error handling, are pretty universal for all audiences.
- Performance testing checks website loading speed, because without this you cannot even begin talking about usability.
Digging deeper, usability in the end is connected to all testing types, so it is necessary to have the well-organized work of a quality assurance team.
What will website usability give you?
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Usability boosts conversions
The easier it is to find everything on your website and make a conversion, the more users will do it. This means more goals achieved for you — sales, subscriptions, form submissions, and so on. The power of usability here is overwhelming. A vivid example would be a shopping cart or checkout abandonment because of complicated forms or incorrect error handling.
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Usability increases customer loyalty
When customer are happy with your website’s work and feel like home on your website, they will come back again and again. They might also share their impressions with other potential customers.
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Usability improves SEO rankings
SEO and usability have never been so close together as they are today. Google uses smart approaches to discover which websites are useful and which are not, and considers this in the search rankings. One of the obvious examples is the bounce rate — site abandonment after the first page visit, which often occurs due to lack of usability.
Entrust usability testing to experts
So that usability testing is performed in accordance with the best guidelines and with the use of the optimal testing methods, entrust it to a professional QA team.
Our QA engineers get the best feedback from customers. A world-famous international online store and a huge crowdfunding platform are just a few examples of customers who trust our experts as dedicated QA. The level of usability on website like this should really be sky-high! And our guys are always on the level.
So do users struggle through your website or are they guided smoothly and confidently to conversions? Let’s check it with usability testing, and improve it — just contact our web development company!
