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Tools for improving website usability

A website Content Management System (CMS)

There is no way you can put any concerted effort into improving the usability of your website without the ability to update the site yourself. A website CMS will allow you to edit all aspects of your site and the more advanced CMS may even allow you to split test website pages to see which is most usable for your visitors.

A CMS will allow you to insert new Calls To Action (CTAs), change body text and the size and position of different aspects of the page. All of these can be used to improve the usability of your website.

A Web Designer

It’s all very well being able to edit your website using the CMS, but the chances are you will want some graphics designed to act as CTAs or images resized and tailored to fit different areas of your page. Be sure to always have a Web Designer to hand to deal with such things. Poor design means that your visitors might not even give your site the chance to demonstrate its outstanding usability!

Analytics tools

A strong analytics package will give you details of your visitors’ usage of your website. From your analytics tool, you should be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your website. Look for areas along the ‘route’ that you wish your website visitors to take where there is a high drop-out rate. Are you making the task too difficult to achieve at this point?

An analytics package will give you lots of points from which to analyse your website usability. At Intergage we recommend using Google Analytics on your website. It’s difficult to argue with an analytics package provided by the world’s leading search engine!

Guinea pigs

If you identify a problem and produce a solution, be sure to test it. Ideally, make testing part of the creative process when you are producing a solution. Testing different solutions will allow you to produce an optimum outcome and may even produce ideas you hadn’t thought of before.

For testing, be sure to have a whole herd of computer-literate (metaphorical) guinea pigs.

Competitors

Always look at what those around you are doing in terms of usability. Is there an example of best practice you can learn from your competitors? Better still, is there an example of worst practice that you can avoid? Look at your competitors and look to improve constantly on their usability offerings. Perhaps even unleash your guinea pigs to test the strengths and weaknesses of the competition’s sites.

The latest reading

Usability is an ever moving target. New ideas, new thinking and new perspectives are always being published as forward thinking agencies like us try and gain a new advantage in usable websites. Try to keep as up-to-date as possible (or employ an agency to do it on your behalf) by using a Google Alert set-up for ‘website usability’.