How is your site's structure, navigation and overall usability? Even if you feel your site is doing a great job, how much better could it be? The power of the user lies behind the answer to these questions. As with everything in business, it's invaluable to fully understand the user experience in order to strengthen your consumer offering.

User testing time includes test planning, defining test tasks, recruiting test users, conducting a test with users, analyzing the results, and writing a report. Limitied budget and lack of time are not valid excuses for inflicting difficult sites on your users.

Our test results are distributed between three categories; Usability Catastrophes, Serious Usability Problems and Cosmetic Problems.

A "catastrophe" is defined as a usability problem that prevents the user from completing a task. A "serious" problem is one that slows down users significantly but does allow them to complete their task. A "cosmetic" problem delays users slightly or annoys the users as indicated by their verbal comments.

Web usability problems fall into two categories:

• Site-level usability: home page; information architecture, navigation, and search; linking strategy; internally vs. externally focused design; overall writing style; page templates, layout, and site-wide design standards; graphical language and commonly used icons
• Page-level usability: specific issues related to the individual pages: understandability of headlines, links, and explanations; intuitiveness of forms and error messages; inclusion or exclusion of specific information; individual graphics and icons

If you are already in site development and require assistance with user-testing to iron out any kinks contact us for information on how we can ensure that your site has gone through a quality assurance process.