How Usable is Your Website?
Published: 12 Jun 2010 In: Web Tools
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
Related posts:
- Adding a Search Engine to Your Website
- 5 Tips for Writing your Website for the World
- Social Community for Small Business Website Owners
- 7 Reasons to Have a Personal Website
- Misunderstanding Bangkok
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Comment Form
About Us
Siam Communications has been helping people with websites since 1998. We have offices in Hong Kong and Bangkok, Thailand offering a variety of low cost web services.
Categories
- Applications (5)
- Blog Ranking (3)
- Business Opportunities (1)
- Domain Names (3)
- General (11)
- How to's (10)
- Marketing Guides (1)
- Premium Websites (1)
- Security (3)
- SEO (15)
- Social Networks (2)
- Uncategorized (2)
- Web Tools (8)
- Website Design (18)
- Online Magazine (6)
- WordPress (5)
- Writing (1)
Archives
- admin: Based on a specific comment made about iMobile, I thought this article might be of interest. Here i [...]
- Jay Hunt: website SEO is very very important if you want good rankings for your website. :'* [...]
- Milat: Thanks very nice article [...]
- admin: Hi Martin, Good comment. I guess Google has the advantage of being able to throw money at cutting [...]
- Martin: Dude, hi, I tried Wave, as you know, but never found a use for it. Each of its component parts [...]
- Managing CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer (IE)
- Low User Adoption Kills Google Wave
- Adding a Simple Contact Us Form to WordPress
- Immediate Ranking on Page One of Google Search Results
- Thailand’s NTC makes Fourth Attempt at 3G Bidding Rules
- New Version of WordPress Refreshing
- How Usable is Your Website?
- Twitter changing the way they handle Links
- Google’s Caffeine: Search Results 50% Faster
- Misunderstanding Bangkok
4 Responses to How Usable is Your Website?
Carl - Web Courses Bangkok
June 12th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Eric, thank you for the post it is very interesting. UX is my passion and it was so surprising to see what happened on my site when I used Userfly. I didn`t realize I went so far off the mark so we re-designed everything.
Thanks again for the post
admin
June 12th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Hi Carl,
I have just installed UserFly today and I am very keen to see the results of how our website stacks up. I really appreciate this new tool.
Thanks again for the heads up.
links for 2010-06-12 « Wander the Web
June 12th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
[...] How Usable is Your Website? | Siam Communications Web Services & Tools 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. 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. (tags: usability user experience) [...]
Lasse
June 17th, 2010 at 3:03 am
Hi,
thanks for the article. I would strongly recommend that you tried out the tool Mouseflow (http://mouseflow.com). It records videos of visitors just like Userfly, but it also offers a wide range of analysis tools such as heatmaps of clicks/movements, link analysis and live stream.
Lasse