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Google encourages webmasters

Google encourages webmasters to dissect the user experience they offer

The start of a new year is a great time to take stock of how well your website is performing, and to see what you can do to further enhance it. Fortunately, those kind folks at Google have given webmasters some handy tips that they may wish to use to optimise the usability and design of their websites, “on the cheap.”

Know your users

The post on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog recommends webmasters ask themselves: “…if you really know whether your site is useful for your target audience.” To help them find out, the post then suggests a number of methods for testing and designing websites that may be useful to those with only modest budgets.

Google also say that webmasters should ask themselves a number of questions aimed at getting inside the minds and habits of web users, including, “How might users access your site – home, office, on-the-go?” and, “How familiar are users with the subject matter of your website?”

Questions like these are important for understanding how a website will be used, and then taking steps to make the site as easy to access, navigate and consume for that purpose. User testing is a vital means of finding the answers which will inform this process.

User testing for better website performance

According to Google, user testing should be easily achievable even on a shoe-string budget, and, “just five people can be a large enough number of users to find common problems in your layouts and navigation.” They also suggest choosing users with varying levels of “technical ability” to test your website, and focusing on “functionality rather than graphic design elements,” when testing.

You can read the full post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/website-user-research-and-testing-on.html.

In addition to testing the usability of your site, it’s also prudent to analyse the ‘readability’ of your textual content. It’s important to keep in mind that when reading text on a backlit computer screen ‘less is more’, and your users will thank you for breaking content into smaller manageable chunks with subheaders where necessary.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .