How to Measure Website Usability for Your WordPress Website

Did you know that good website aesthetics helps to provide credibility to a website? What this means is that it is important to provide a great experience to your website users. The only way to achieve this is by looking for usability issues on websites.

Usability Testing—What Is It?

Usability testing refers to actions that are executed to assess how easy a site is to access and use from an end user’s perspective. Testing involves bringing together a group of representatives who will be tasked with providing feedback pertaining to the site’s quality.

The more difficulties found by a team of representatives, the more enhancements you will need to make. Keep in mind that different web users will visit your site for different reasons. If the site is unable to meet their needs, they will immediately move to that of your competitors.

Having a user testing guide helps you to focus on providing users with the best possible experience.

The Fundamentals of Website Usability Testing

1. Ease of Learning

An ordinary web user should be able to learn the ins and outs of your website within a few minutes. What this means is that they should easily determine what each section does and whether they have to sign up to access its crucial functions. Ensuring that the options are easy to locate helps to improve the usability of the website.

2. Intuitive Navigation

Navigation is always self-explanatory. Visitors should not have to use compasses and maps for them to successfully navigate the platform. They should easily find the information and data that they require.

The usability test will act as a WordPress audit of your website or blog to determine how fast users are able to access information. From it, you will also get to learn whether users are getting confused or lost while accessing your site.

Visitors that cannot easily find what they need will often get frustrated and move on to another website.

3. Efficiency of Use

This particular factor is tied up to the two already mentioned earlier. When a WordPress website is easily navigable, chances are that it will also be easy to use.

Knowing this, it means that the goals of usability tests here will involve establishing whether users are satisfied with the site’s efficiency. It could also check whether they are satisfied with all the processes that make up your business platform.

The information you glimpse from the efficiency test should be used to streamline various functions on the website. Try and get rid of the redundant functions to improve usability and efficiency.

4. Brand Perception

When looking at usability testing, the brand perception will have two relations to it: the type of feelings they associate with your brand, and whether the project has received proper branding.

Proper branding enables clients to connect your brand with your content quality. While the testing brand perception may not assist you to rejuvenate a brand that already has undesirable associations, it will come in handy in letting you know whether you are doing things the right way.

5. Attention Levels

Testing for attention levels involves looking at the parts of your site design that tends to attract the attention of a majority of your users. It will also require you to determine how long that section is able to hold the user’s attention.

The information you gather will help you establish whether the areas that attract users are critical to the functioning of your website.

6. Selecting Your Participants

The first five points discussed above have dwelled on the technical aspects that accentuate the usability testing process.

Participant selection often follows two main criteria: the first criteria pertains to demographic information, e.g., country of residence, gender, income, and age. Make sure to narrow down on these demographics to find those that fit your preferred selection criteria.

The second criteria will involve determining whether the representatives available have prior experience. Try and choose a group that is wholly representative to ensure that the results of your usability tests will not get skewed in any direction.

Popular Website Usability Tests

1. The Brand Perception Test

A brand perception test is probably the simplest WordPress audit you can ever conduct. As its name suggests, the test is aimed at providing you with information related to how test participants view the overall brand. It also looks at whether the website truly reflects the association it has with the design that has been applied.

You can conduct the test by providing the participants with site design mock-ups. Allow them enough time to go through them before seeking their input on which adjectives they would use to describe the designs.

2. The Closed Card Sorting Test

The purpose of this test is to determine whether your website has intuitive site navigation. Participants will need you to furnish them with a copy of the site’s navigational structure. You can show the structure using a basic brain map.

After the test, have the participants provide you with details on the sections they would visit to look for certain information, functions, or services.

For instance, if you asked the group where they would go to check for the contact information, many of them would point to the footer area.

Summary

Determining how to maximize the usability of the site’s design is something that you will likely figure out later on. But regardless of your expertise in this area, the only true way to determine its viability is to thoroughly test each hypothesis.