How to single-handedly test a website according to the usability checklist in order to understand how adapted it is to being used by ordinary users? Find out all about it in the feature.

Usability checklist: three important steps

Currently, most business owners prefer to focus their activity on the Internet domain. They create a dedicated website for the display and distribution of their services or products and then start looking for experienced marketers for promoting it. However, even the highly-qualified expert marketers won’t provide you a guarantee to increase conversion rates if your UX isn’t on a decent level initially. The full usability checklist contains numerous points, accordance with which must be approved by a qualified person. But the initial UX testing you can conduct yourself. How exactly? Read on!

Assess the homepage design

The design and appearance of the main page directly affect users’ decision to either stay on your website or leave. Some unpleasant things that could repulse visitors right off the bat are: loud music (any sound sources on the site should be muted by default); long loads (when you barrage a page with too much media content); myriad of pop-up windows (especially, ads and/or those that can’t be closed without clicking on the redirecting link); and non-adaptiveness/responsiveness (when a part of the site’s functionality is cut by the smaller browser window when launched on a mobile device).

Don’t let any of these issues be present at your resource. Check how fast all the crucial website items respond – menu, search (which should be enriched with an auto-fill feature), contacts, cart (if your site is of commercial nature), etc. These also must be visible and accessible from any page of the site.

Analyze effectiveness of website navigation

Check how many subsequent actions an average user must make to do something on the website (be it register, purchase, subscribe to the newsfeed, and other). If the number of steps exceeds five, then you should seriously reconsider the site navigation. Additionally, make sure you are able to tell at all times where you are situated on the website at the moment.

Such user experience is best provided by mega menus and dropdown menus that won’t occupy much space on a page but look like a tree with many branches (acyclic oriented graph). Also, any secondary page must describe a detailed route to it with clickable links (e.g. ‘products ->hair cosmetics ->shampoos’). And, of course, a user must always be able to return to the homepage in one (!) click. Usually, a clickable company logo is created for that, which is situated in the site’s heading and is accessible from any page.

Test all site pages

Make sure that all the pages related to the similar topic are of strictly approved identical format. I.e. if it is products, then you must come up with your web designer and SEO expert with an optimal location and contents of related sections (image, title, characteristics, item description, customer reviews, ‘add to cart’ option, etc.).

Also, make sure that all clickable elements on pages (including links in text) are distinct and don’t confuse users with their appearance in any way. For that purpose, web designers usually use popping up tips appearing when the cursor is pointed at a certain element long enough.

Last but not least, test out the input fields. According to the features of a modern decent UX, input accuracy should be checked in real time, without refreshing a page.

Conclusion

The testing of usability of an ecommerce website is a pretty important procedure. Only a competent expert in the field can realize it perfectly. In particular, we have such experts in our team. Contact us and we’ll give you tips on how to perfect your web-resource or give your website a green light to launch publicly.