Usability is essential when it comes to designing a website or web application. The majority of users won’t come back to a site if it isn’t user friendly, even if the content is great. Web designers need to do everything in their power to ensure that every website design“>website design is as user-friendly as possible.

The only way to achieve this is to test a site for usability. This requires getting real users to try out the website and give useful feedback using automated methods or telling the designer.

There are plenty of resources for testing all aspects of usability including websites dedicated to usability testing, downloadable applications and screencasting software. In this article I have listed some of the better resources for usability testing to help you design a user friendly website.

Silverback

Silverback allows users to capture and record the screen activity, record voices or participants and even export videos to Quicktime. Users can even control recordings while they conduct the usability tests. The only disadvantage is that it’s only available for Macs, but there is a 30-day demo to try for free.
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10 Second Website Usability Testing

10 second website usability testing is a simple method to check the user friendliness of your website. Basically it involves users to view their site with all the styling turned off and to follow the instructions on the usability site.
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Five Second Test

Fivesecondtest helps provide valuable feedback on parts of a website design, which stand out to visitors. Visitors are given five seconds to click on parts of a design, which are most prominent and then describe what they clicked on. The site doesn’t require registration and the basic service is free.
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Usabilla

Usabilla is a simple application, which can be set up in a few minutes. Users create a test, select the test pages, select some questions, invite users to test the site and then analyze the feedback. There is the option to test images or live pages and results can be viewed as a heat map.
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Usability.gov

Usability.gov is a U.S government run website, which covers many topics related to usability. The site is divided into sections including, methods, basics, templates and guidelines with free PDF downloads.
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Userfocus

Userfocus has a list of 247 usability guidelines, which are broken down into categories. This is a very valuable resource for help on testing the usability of a site and is also available as an Excel download.
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Feedback Army

Feedback army is an inexpensive usability testing service, which is very simple to use. Users set up a simple usability test and then once they pay the fee they will get 10 responses from independent users.
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Screencast-o-matic

Screencast-o-matic is a free screencasting application, which works in a browser and allows users to create screencasts online. This is very useful for testing the usability of websites where users might not always be in one place.
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What tools do you use for running usability tests on your website? Please share your experiences with any of the tools I have mentioned or any others that you have used.

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Posted By: Oli

I’ve been interested in web design for a while and I went to university to study a degree in media and graphics. While at university I developed my design skills using Adobe Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver and Adobe After Effects.

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Tags: Usability, Web Design

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 9:59 am and is filed under Resources, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.