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Here are some suggestions on how you should go about designing your website. It has a couple of practical suggestions about how to present and review the work. But what i love the most about it are 3 suggestions it has for usabilty testing.

In most if not all website design projects I work on there is a small group of people that are reviewing the site or is a single person who is making suggestions or approving the design before it goes live. I have always had trouble understanding this. Basically because websites are for your prospects and customers to visit not “you”. Of course you should have some say being this will be a reflection of how your company is perceived, but for the most part people want a website to attract or maintain customers, so why not design your site with those people in mind. Make design decisions based on what they would like, and correct things that they find confusing.

Ok so lets say that I have convinced you, and you now want to test every design decision with your public, how do you go about doing this?

Google has a cool feature in their web analytics that shows you a click map to where your visitors go, which is cool but sometimes limiting.

And heres where the links from this article come in.

There is a web stat service that tracks users based on some javascript code, I have installed it on my machine and can’t wait to see what it finds…

http://userfly.com/

next is a paid service that will find people to do a focus group study on your website.

http://www.usertesting.com/

Not a bad service at a really cheap price

Then you have an actual application that runs on an apple computer, This would need to be done in person with the designer or presenter.

http://www.silverbackapp.com/

This could be a great approach to presenting the website to the client, instead of showing them the site and saying what do you think. you can actually make them your first case study subject.

Then while at the office have a few other people do the testing, even if you made design decisions based on these few people its better than making decisions on the whims and fancies of a single person especially the “owner” of the company.

Here’s is the roginal post, so please check it out I hope inspires you as it did me http://inspectelement.com/articles/the-unwritten-rules-of-web-design/

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 9:45 am and is filed under Design Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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