A website usability audit can be a great marketing tool
Everyone wants to be billing their clients and I’m sure thinking up some good ways to justify this is a major occupation. Well we here at IntuitionHQ have a solution: consider a usability audit of a client’s website that includes a few simple suggestions on how to improve the usability of their website.
So where are the billable hours coming from? Not too many are going to come from the usability testing itself. IntuitionHQ makes usability testing incredibly easy. Within a few minutes you can create a number of tests on the usability of a website and send it to a group of respondents. Results are compiled instantly and you can gain immediate insights from the usability test. Usability testing will highlight your web development skills and is a great marketing opportunity for you to leverage implementing the improvements to your clients website.
Here is our guide to a usability audit that is easy to put together, easy to interpret, will give you billable hours and some great reasons to pick up even more work from your client. Don’t forget that your client and their website visitors are the ultimate beneficiaries, as Amazon’s much fabled $300 million dollar button proves.
Step 1: Spend a few minutes analysing the website
Websites have differing functions. An ecommerce site should make it easy to register, navigate, and purchase goods and services. A traditional store may need to build a community while it provides simple advice of location and purpose. Most companies want to give customers information to avoid costly call centre calls.
Whatever the purpose, look for a few obvious things on the website that look a little dated. Usability thinking has come on hugely in the last few years and a website more than 3 years old will need few tweaks. For some really useful insight on how to get started check out these 7 great tips for writing usability questions
Step 2: Develop some easy website usability tests
Did you know that people are much more likely to click on a contact button with a picture of a person on it? This has been widely tested in usability studies and you can prove it to your client with an easy usability test run using IntuitionHQ:
Does the website have a main picture in the website? You can run a quick A/B preference test on whether the current picture is preferred or an alternative:
A simple example we ran was on whether the cat or dog was cuter:
If a website requires a specific task of visitors, then testing how long it takes visitors to accomplish this task compared to an improved design can show how website usability can be improved.
In the example below, the respondents are shown either the website on the left or the right. They are asked where to click to find the blog and IntuitionHQ automatically times how long it takes for respondents to click on the blog button. You can see that the respondents shown the website on the right found the blog button almost twice as fast as those shown the website on the left.
Conclusion
Taking the initiative and proactively using a usability audit on a customer website will provide a great marketing opportunity for you. You’ll be able to engage them on a range of ways you can improve their website with the benefits sure to follow for their website users.
