Prioritizing Usability

At Interpix Design, we know that every company has a budget, forcing project managers and execs to determine the prioritization of usability. Is usability an absolutely integral aspect of your website? Should you spend hundreds or thousands to ensure the optimal user experience? What is the relationship between usability testing and other forms of user information gathering, such as analytics?

Usability versus Analytics? Analytics versus Usability?

Some marketers might argue that developments such as today's increasingly robust (and increasingly affordable) analytics software and advances in design would seem to make usability testing redundant, in terms of tracking conversions or other measurements of success.

However, every data-gathering method has its own drawbacks and advantages and analytics is no different. For instance, there are many questions raised by common analytics software that are best answered by actual users in a test. That being said, usability tests also have drawbacks: the very fact a user is being tested skews the results that he or she may come up with. But usability tests come in the design process where analytics can only acquire sufficient data after the site is actually being used - and that's often too late.

We absolutely recommend that you prioritize usability when you are testing any product where conversion is paramount. You need to learn from your users how they best complete tasks. If you leave this up to analytics, for example, you will never be able to determine problems users are having getting past page three of your checkout (for example). We say that from many years of being called in to fix products that were never properly (i.e. user-centered) designed in the first place.

Ideally, you will have money in your budget for both usability and analytics and you will use each tool at key points in your development process to provide your project with a one-two punch that gives your site an optimal user experience.

Contact Interpix Design to launch products with optimal usability.