Usability Tools: A Useful Start
By Andrew Chak
Your Web site's usability drives its success or failure. Usability ensures that visitors can understand how to interact with your site. If it's easier to buy something or find information at another site, why should users bother with yours?
The best way to improve your site's usability is to observe your users interacting with it and then incorporate their feedback into your design. However, if you're inexperienced with facilitating usability tests or lack the resources to conduct a test, consider employing some automated usability tools that provide a head start in designing a more usable site.
Today, there are only a handful of usability tools. WebSAT and the Lift services evaluate the HTML code of Web pages based on a set of usability guidelines. Max performs a statistical evaluation to generate a site rating. Finally, NetRaker remotely surveys users to gather usability feedback.
Keep in mind that these tools are only a starting point. Using them is like using Microsoft Word to check your grammar—they're good for highlighting potential problems, but you'll need to evaluate each identified issue for its appropriateness. The tools are good for checking routine site-design elements for consistency, and encouraging good design practices.
