Services / Website Usability
“People are on the Web not to enjoy your Web design, but to get something done.”
Jakob Nielsen, world-renowned usability guru.
Don’t Make Them Think!
At Jigsaw, website usability is a priority. A good looking website will always fail if it is not designed with usability at the heart.
It’s Common Sense!
Many companies try and turn usability into so much more than it really is, presumably to justify their enormous fees. Usability is really common sense, it just means making sure that a website works well for its intended purpose. Like a lot of common sense though, it’s not necessarily obvious until after someone’s pointed it out to you.
That’s why our skill of creating good user experiences together with our specialised testing procedures ensures that usability becomes part of a websites development process and not an expensive extra.
Usability Checklist
Every website we produce is checked against a simple common sense usability checklist. It’s amazing how usability can get pushed aside by other project requirements, using this checklist ensures that usability remains at the heart of the design.
Usability Testing
Usability testing is often not necessary. For small sites, sites with a very simple interface or sites with little user interaction just following our usability checklist is enough.
Test, When Necessary
Testing can be an excellent and effective way of identifying potential problems in larger more complex sites. However many companies get it very wrong, again to justify charging massive fees.
Here at Jigsaw, like almost everything we do, we keep it simple but effective. There is no point in testing hundreds or even thousands of users, Jakob Neilsen (the world-renowned usability guru mentioned above) has proved testing just five people will discover over 85% of problems. Setting up usability labs is the next big mistake other companies make. Such an artificial environment will never lead to accurate results. We believe if you are going to test people using your web site, the best place to do it is in the place they would normally use the web.
Just Ask!
If you think your project is big enough to warrant usability testing or you are just interested in how it works, contact us and we will be happy to discuss it with you.