Test That Website!

Many a company has spent thousands of dollars developing the perfect website and setting up an elaborate launch party and press only to have the site crash, either literally or with users. The resulting big web FAIL and the financial losses could have been avoided had they invested in the appropriate web testing.

In addition to testing the site’s infrastructure to ensure that servers will stay live and the site won’t crash, it is vital to conduct Usability Testing . This testing can be handled in different ways, from focus groups and in house lab testing to remote testers all over the country providing greater demographic data.

A good usability testing program is going to survey users both before and after they interact the site. It will also monitor the tester as they interact with the site. This will help measure how difficult the site is to navigate, how intuitive various forms and features are to use, and whether there is missing information or functions that would improve the user experience. All this data is then correlated and analyzed by the testing company to provide a list of recommendations for both fixing broken or missing elements and for enhancing the site to be even more successful.