In our latest article we selected what we considered to be the best website usability testing tools. We would now like to bring you more usability tools, as selected by web design specialists:

• 24 Usability Testing Tools
• 10 Tools to Improve Your Site’s Usability on a Low Budget
• (More) Useful Web Usability Testing Tools
• Usability Testing Toolkit: Resources, Articles, and Techniques
• Website Usability

Usability is about making a website’s interface easier to use and understand so that the user’s experience becomes as memorable as possible. Testing your website’s usability before launching it is one of the most recommended initiatives one can do for their website. It allows you to discover the many possible ways in which your visitors would use your website and how it can be enhanced.

Lately, there has been a flood of new cheap or even free website usability testing tools. Take a look at our today’s post to see some useful tools for managing a usability test for your website.

• Chalkmark by Optimal Workshop: It is an ideal way to discover people’s first reactions to your website’s screenshots. It will help you to get quick feedback on design before you implement it. Click testing is a great way to ensure that your users get started on the right track when they hit your website and Chalkmark is one of the most effective ways to do it.  Clicks are also recorded by Chalkmark, and a real-time display of a heatmap will show you their location.
• Userfly allows you to place a JavaScript on your website for tracking your visitors’ actions, their mouse movements, and clicks. You can see exactly where the user’s mouse moves and what he/she typed in the search box.
• Feedback Army is one of the fastest ways to get feedback about your website. Powered by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk engine, this service is a human-powered tool that helps solve quick tasks. Feedback Army asks users questions about your website and gathers feedback so that you can improve the user experience almost immediately.
• ClickTale is a paid service that tracks user visits, mouse clicks and moves and the time it takes for users to switch between website’s pages.  Data will be available to you in the form of heatmaps or as reports.  Heatmaps display identifies zones where visitors spend long periods of time and those where they spend the least amount of time. An interesting and useful feature is the Form Analytics tool which displays form fields data. This data includes time of field completion and which form fields have the highest rate of abandon, or take the longest to complete.

At CodeMyIMAGE we know how usefull the users’ feeback can be and that usability testing is critical for discovering user needs. By implementing usability tests you are optimizing your business’ website and able to focus on what your users want.

In our last article we tried to provide some perspectives on common web design mistakes.  We would like to bring you more insights from web design field specialists:

• How To Match Fonts With Personality?
• Best Font Size for Web Design
• The Most Common Mistakes In Web Design And How To Avoid Them
• Top 5 Web Design Mistakes Small Businesses Make

If you think achieving all the best practices principles in designing websites is sometimes challenging, at least you should try to avoid some of the most common mistakes. The Internet provides dozens of lists which help us to identify possible web design mistakes, but still, for those of us who, shall we say are less savvy, it is difficult to follow and respect all of these aspects that should be followed to optimize the design.

We thought it might be valuable to offer a short list identifying basic web design mistakes which you might find helpful in your design efforts. Previously, we offered some tips in this area, and decided it would be helpful to come back with a more comprehensive list. Keep in mind that these are common sense attributes which do not require the need for specific web development knowledge:

• Using fancy or tiny fonts. Not using readable fonts will annoy your website’s visitors and will make them give up reading your content. Make sure you use a common font that is easy to read and delivers the message straight to your visitors.
• Using blinking text or words. Users simply find this annoying and will make the content virtually impossible to read.
• Using fixed font sizes. The fixed font size reduces readability for most people over the age of 40. You should respect your visitors’ needs and provide them the option to resize the text as needed.
• Not changing the color of already visited links. Your visitors should know where they have been. Using different colors for visited/unvisited links is a useful feature that enables your visitor to avoid navigation confusion.
• Overusing Flash and using ‘intros’ will increase your website’s loading time and will cause your visitors lose their patience. You can’t force anyone to watch something before accessing the content and, ultimately, even your customers will avoid your website knowing that they will waste valuable time waiting for it to load.
• Using a lot of links before accessing the website’s content. The fewer the steps to the content, the better for users.
• Not providing search options. Your visitor should be in control when he/she is on your website and you should provide him/her an easy way to find what they are actually looking for.
• Using ‘drop down’ menus. You should provide your visitors with a clear perspective of the website’s navigation. A ‘drop down’ menu, for example, could hide the information your visitor is looking for.
• Using images for navigation. Yes, we know, it is one of the most artistic ways to make a website more appealing, but the use of images in navigation could also be a challenge for those who “turned off” images for browsing the Internet.

At CodeMyIMAGE we can help to assure that your website design will be free of the most common mistakes in web design and our specialized development team will anticipate and address the mistakes with you in order to deliver the optimal design and web experience for your users.

In our last article we tried to provide all of you with a comprehensive web design best practices checklist. However, we know that more resources on web design principles are anytime welcome:

• Website Design Guide: Best Practices And Examples Of Website Interface And Navigation Design Solutions
• Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices
• Best Practices In Modern Web Design: The Ultimate Round-Up
• Breadcrumb Navigation Examined: Best Practices & Examples