Website Auditing

What is Usability?

Usability is a measure of the ease-of-use of a product, application or service.

For example, a website can be called usable if first-time visitors find it simple and intuitive. A website that suffers from poor usability, on the other hand, makes people scratch their heads, feel stupid and get frustrated.

What is a Usability Audit?

A Usability Audit is a heuristic review of your website or software application.

Put simply, we examine your website, identify all the usability problems we can find, then write a document detailing our findings. We then deliver this document to you, and discuss it with you.

For more details on our auditing process, see our general Website and Software Auditing section.

Why Would I Need a Usability Audit?

If you are creating a computer-based product, service or website - anything that involves interaction between a person and an interface - then you should consider having an outside agency review its usability.

Usability is ultimately about human feelings. If your design makes people feel annoyed, angry or unhappy, then it is ultimately likely to fail.

A Usability Audit is one way to improve the user-friendliness of your design. There are other ways, such as Usability Testing (user acceptance testing), but an audit is probably the most cost-effective way to capture issues before they happen.

Where Does the Usability Audit Fit in Our Website or Application’s Life-cycle?

The earlier you can work a Usability Audit into your design process, the better — you are to nip potential user difficulties in the bud.

While many clients ask us to audit live websites or applications, we have also carried out Usability Audits of

• Pre-launch websites or applications
• Early-stage website mock-ups or application demos
• Bare-bones prototypes (also known as “Wireframes”)
• Paper prototypes
• Storyboards

Auditing early also saves money: it is more expensive, resource-intensive and emotionally painful for developers to try and remove problems from an application that they have spent hundreds or thousands of man-hours building.

Can We Get an Early-Stage Usability Audit and Another at a Later Stage?

Yes. In fact, we recommend that you conduct two Usability Audits - one early in the design process, and another later in the process, with enough time to implement changes before going live.

We offer discounted pricing for follow-up audits.

Our Web Designers Know a Lot about Usability. Why Do We Need an Audit?

People who are involved in the design of a service, product or application, or involved in the business associated with it, are usually not in a good position to test its usability.

This includes the people who designed the website.

Designers are too familiar with the interface, or the processes and services associated with it, to see it with the eyes of first-time users or customers.

How Do I Find Out More?

For more information, or to request an audit, please contact us.