Site usability and testing

[gaydemon]

I'm a keen fan on usability for web sites, but does anyone else ever test or keep in mind how user friendly your site is?

Would you ever consider employing anyone to check your site out, test it etc. Would you prepared to pay for that kind of service?

Is it even a part of what you keep in mind when creating and launching a new site?

My problem has always been to find a proper testing group - panel of test subjects which would test a site.. even better but impossible so far a group which you would monitor and see exactly how they use a site.

[dzinerbear]

I would love it if my webmasters friends and board buddies would be honest when I ask them questions about my site. I hate it when I hear them say after I change something, "Yeah, I didn't know why you ever did that." I think honesty from your peers can go a long way to improve usability.

I'm constantly trying to get comments from my surfers. For some reason, they just don't want to communicate with a porn site – or me, I don't know which. It's frustrating because I'm only looking to improve the site, and hence, their experience. I'm in the process of making some changes in my site, and I'll have some polls up, so hopefully that'll help.

I would pay someone to do a usability study on my site, but the problem is that most usability experts probably won't take on porn clients.

I think what would probably be more useful is just to go to my local coffee shop, find a gay man, hand him my laptop and tell him to surf Gay Porn Pig. Then watch him, see where he stumbles, let him ask questions. That would be pretty telling, I think.

Cheers
Michael

[Gaystoryman]

I watch the wife when he surfs, because while I try and check my own work, I built it, and I know where the links are, where to look for how easy it is, so for me I just sit back, watch and find out just how damn complicated I made it, then tear it down and start over... who said being married was easy? :bang:

[tombarr]

Interesting, just had this conversation yesterday with a friend. Here is a company that does testing of other's websites usability by putting users in a room with a 1 way mirror and writing down everything they do while surfing a site.
http://english.sja.is/

[Adam Mason]

Personally I have always felt that by keeping things simple you won't confuse surfers. Indeed, just about every review written about BLAKEMASON has commented on just how easy it is to find your way around and get what you want.

The original site took 6 months to build... with just me as an incompetant surfer. I didn't and still don't know any code, but I know what's easy from a user perspective.

That said, moving from v1 to v2 of the site was nerve-racking. A bold change in colour scheme and picture formats was always going to be a challenge, but luckily I have a member's forum! They were part of the testing group for v2, Bjorn was also very helpfull and hey presto, we moved forward in the end very successfully.

[gaydemon_jr]

Maybe add a forum here where people can post their new sites. Then everyone can check it out, do a bit of error reporting and slip a few comments and opinions in. I think I would particularly find that useful in the future....

[roupen]

Figuring out what is user friendly has always been a difficult process.. mostly because what makes sense to one person doesn't make sense to another. I usually try to show new sites and designs to several people and see if I can get a general consensus about anything clearly wrong with it.

I know there's ways though that you can get better control over how your traffic flows and figure out how to direct your surfers better. Applications like google analytics will let you track the success of funneling traffic through your site, but I'm sure it takes much planning and data analysis to get good at this process...

[RottenRay]

Folks,

Something I do a few times a year is to WATCH someone I'm friends with surf sites.

The sites don't have to be mine - and I don't interrupt.

I simply watch quietly, usually from across the room, and take notes.

I realize this isn't a "pure" test, but I have found that if you are patient and let someone go at it, you'll be able to spot trends in how surfing is done.

(The folks I've watched were in their own homes, using the computers they normally use for websurfing, and aren't given a list of sites to visit.)


Some notes...

1) Large flashing banners typically get scrolled past, especially if they have mind-numbing flourescent colors.

2) Text links usually cause a slight pause in scrolling down a page, but don't necessarily get a click - the magic seems to be 4 words or less in a contrasting but pleasant color with regards to the rest of the page. Caps vs. no caps doesn't seem to matter.

3) Animated banners which rotate ~ 1/2 second intervals seem to get more attention that those which rotate much slower or much faster.

4) Going against all 'hot zone' studies, porn surfers seem to look at the bottom 1/3 of a page more than the top, top left, top right or absolute bottom.

5) Links that say "click here" don't seem to get as much attention as links that read "here is" or "find YADDA here."

6) Large amounts of white text against dark backgrounds generally aren't fully read.

7) Having a buffer at the bottom of a page seems to help get people back up into the area where the content is (watch someone surf using WebTV and you'll understand this much better) and a "dead zone" at page bottom almost assures that a surfer will scroll back up to the lower or middle third of a page.

8) Lots of folks use FireFox, and lots of FireFox users constantly use the "find" command to locate text.

9) More than half of the folks I have observed automatically try to right-click and open links in new windows or tabs.

10) Roughly 1/2 of the folks I have observed will select the last page of a site and work back from there, instead of following any available "page 1, page 2" order offered.

11) Roughly 8 in 10 look for links saying "extra" or "bonus" and most avoid links reading "continued."


Hope this helps...


...

[gaydemon]

I'm constantly trying to get comments from my surfers. For some reason, they just don't want to communicate with a porn site – or me, I don't know which. It's frustrating because I'm only looking to improve the site, and hence, their experience. I'm in the process of making some changes in my site, and I'll have some polls up, so hopefully that'll help.

This is exactly what I have found. People do not like to comment, they might leave a comment about a nice big cock on a picture.. but they wont really tell you if they like something with the site even if you ask them. Interaction always seems to be very hard to get on a porn site - atleast our type of sites.

[gaydemon]

Thats exactly what I am talking about. Thats how I would love to do it with gaydemon, but no such compaines from what I know work with porn related sites.

It would be VERY interesting for both my type of site and paysites specially to see how people use a site.

Just think of the information you might find, how they use join pages, what attracts them to click, or what makes them join etc..


Interesting, just had this conversation yesterday with a friend. Here is a company that does testing of other's websites usability by putting users in a room with a 1 way mirror and writing down everything they do while surfing a site.
http://english.sja.is/

[gaydemon]

Wow, thats really good information. Thanks for that!



Some notes...

1) Large flashing banners typically get scrolled past, especially if they have mind-numbing flourescent colors...

[abostonboy]

4) Going against all 'hot zone' studies, porn surfers seem to look at the bottom 1/3 of a page more than the top, top left, top right or absolute bottom.

5) Links that say "click here" don't seem to get as much attention as links that read "here is" or "find YADDA here."



Concerning 4: I STILL find my top banner spots get more clicks. So I wouldn't under estimate the importance of that real estate space.

Concerning 5: I always say "Click here for the full 20 min video." Click here is a call to action. If I said "watch the 20 min video here" and underneath that I had more screenshots, they may scroll down and think they can watch it there. I have even tried "watch the full video at blakemason.com" with a rollover that they know is a link and still doesn't pull clicks.