How Usable is Your Website?

admin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 06:51:41 +0000

I had the pleasure of meeting with a user experience expert yesterday, Carl Heaton from Web Courses Bangkok. Carl showed me a great tool for website owners called UserFly (affiliate link).

Userfly allows you to test the usability of your website as each visitor goes to your site. You start by adding a small JavaScript to the web pages you want to track. It’s that easy.

You can then view your account activity and watch a video of the users experience on your website; what they looked at, what they clicked on, when they left your site. This is a fantastic tool for helping us website owners to understand website usability. It can also point to potential problems that we didn’t realize existed.

For instance, Carl showed me a video of their old site. (They have just launched a fresh new look this week.) On the old site, visitors wandered around aimlessly not sure where to click or what to look at. This resulted in a redesign of the layout which assists users in finding what they are looking for much quicker and in a much more productive manner.

I am trying out the tool on my site now and I am amazed at what I have been neglecting in providing my users with helpful guidance on where to go and what to look for. It looks like I may be examining the layout of my site in more detail in the months to come.

About Web Courses Bangkok

“It is the 1 year anniversary of Web Courses Bangkok. I started the company exactly 1 year ago and we have already helped 12 people become professional web designers AND taught over 200 people.” – Carl Heaton
You can find out more here: http://www.webcoursesbangkok.com

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Adding a Search Engine to Your Website

The Coach — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:49:16 +0000

As you develop your website and the amount of content grows, finding specific bits and pieces rapidly become more of an issue. This can be a problem not only for your users, but also for your content managers. But, why do you need an on site search engine when you gone to all of the trouble of categorizing everything into a nice neat menu system?

Why does my website need search capability?

Very simply, Search is the user’s lifeline when the navigation system fails to direct them to what they need quickly.

In our development projects, one of the biggest issues we have is getting to that one piece of content that requires attention. The project is for a Medical Tourism website, with a database that contains medical procedures and services, partners, hospitals and hotels. These are assigned into categories for the menu system to make it easy for a user to narrow down a list of services before selecting their exact Medical Service. But some visitors want to get directly to the information about the procedure that brought them here in the first place.

The CMS allows us to build a package for our visitors that includes hotel, flights, transfers, information on the Medical facility, additional services and of course, information on the procedure itself. But when we find an issue with the content, and need to get to that one piece of data that requires attention, the process of looking for that bit of information becomes a chore. And with out a proper on site search engine, this could also end up being a chore for our server as it eats up large amounts or processing power and memory.

These are just two of the many examples that demonstrated to us the need for an on site search engine.

What to look for in a Search Engine

Again, simplicity is the key, but there should also be careful consideration to usability. A literal search engine is nice to have, but can reduce the usability of your site in that they are usually unable to handle typos, plurals, hypens, etc. So look for a search engine that is forgiving of the search terms in relationship to these variants. Many search engines can be configured either way by default.

Also steer away from engines that prioritize results based on the number of times the search term is found in a page, rather than on the importance of the document.

Other features that should be considered are:

Easy installation & setup on your site
Template functionality – retains the look and feel of your website
Auto & Manual re-indexing of your content
Reporting on your visitors queries
Simple & Advanced search options including Boolean expressions
High Performance – doesn’t slow down your site during a search request