Card Sorting - What is it and how can it Improve Your Website Usability?

Card sorting is one of the most efficient ways to measure a website's usability. It mainly helps evaluate and design a site's information architecture. During this process, participants are asked to organize topics into different categories that make the best sense to them. Categories may be pre-determined or labeled by them to help you determine the most appropriate tags/markers to use for the actual web design. Traditionally, actual cards and pieces of paper are used to conduct a card sort, but professional usability researchers and UX experts now use card sorting software tools to make the job easier. Seeking the help of professional usability experts will help you formulate the best card sorting strategy to use that will yield the best results for your site's information architecture and design.

Card sorting, like other usability experience research techniques ultimately help you understand what users expect from your site and how they understand your layout and your topics. It is most useful when you have already done your homework to find out about your target users and the kind of content that is relevant to them. Know how typical users sort information can help you label categories for proper navigation, build the structure of the website, and decide what the most important things to put on the homepage are.

Depending on the needs of your website, you may choose to do an open or closed card sort. In an open card sort, participants organize topics from the content within your website into groups and name each of the groups that they have created in a way that accurately describes the items or the topics in each category. A closed card sort, on the other hand, uses pre-defined categories. Researchers also use a combination of these two techniques, using an open card sort to identify content categories, and then a closed card sort to see how well the labels work.

5 Quick Ways to Improve Your Website’s Usability

Website usability testing is one activity that is imperative for any given website, either on the prototype or once the website is launched. Below mentioned are 5 simple ways to improve the usability of your website.

1.    Readability

You can improve the readability of your website, by using an appropriate font size and type, ensuring proper paragraph formatting, using bullets when needed, and making the content look easy to browse.

2.    Background Colour and Contrast

The site usability testing team should give due attention to the fact that the background colour is in sync with the theme of the site and is soothing to the eyes of the visitor. The contrast should be such that users can easily differentiate between the font and the background.

3.    Images and Their Placement

The images used on the site should be high resolution. These should be relevant to the content of the site, and must be placed in a way that they do not hinder the reader’s view, rather augment the readability.

4.    Site-Navigation

The layout of the site should be simple, and users should navigate through the site conveniently, even through mobile devices. A sitemap can also be provided to assist users.

5.    Hassle-Free Use

The website design should be such that it enables the user to accomplish his task with a few clicks. Hyperlinks should be appropriately formatted so that they can be spotted easily.

So, why waste time? Get your website tested today, incorporate the above mentioned ways to improve the usability and see how it works wonders for you and your business.

Usability tests...They sure will help you..!!

Sometimes, a well designed and graphically appealing website may not be yielding the best of results. Well, if that’s the case, all you need is to get some usability testing run on it. This is the best way to find out what’s right and what’s not with a given website. You might get an inference, which states that the time taken to perform a given task on a website takes too long and tests the user’s patience; or, probably the site’s depth is too much. This leaves the user clueless concerning the navigation paths. Some, times the site may be too extensive, and it may become difficult for a visitor to locate the desired point. These and many more can be the reasons for the dissatisfaction of the users and may lead to the diversion of visitor’s to a competitor’s site, which is possibly more efficient. The test results will make it very clear as to what is causing problems to the user and the development team can take the requisite steps to eliminate such issues. Measures to rectify these problems may be employed. These may comprise of a site search tool, a site map, a simpler web page arrangement etc.

Once this is done, it becomes easier for the website to retain the attention of the user for a longer time period, and this can be good for business. Once a client, always a prospect is what holds true in such cases. A second-time visitor, as we all know, is most likely to become a regular customer. So, why waste time. Just go online and hire a good company that can provide you appropriate usability tests for your website and experience the wonderful effects thereafter.