When considering the success of your industrial or commercial website, you should keep in mind that search engine optimization and ‘good looks’ are only part of the picture.  Making sure that your site is not just attractive to the eye and the search engines, but that it is actually usable to your visitors is key to having a well-rounded website that brings in the visitors and conversions you’re looking for.

Usability is serious business, yet there are some interesting tools out there that make checking the usability of your website fun!  

Feng-GUI

Feng-GUI allows web designers, advertisers and photographers to analyze ‘Attention’ and ‘Attraction’ in visual images. You can find out how people ’see’ your website and which areas are getting most of the attention.  This service is free and uses artificial intelligence that simulates human vision to produce a heat map on your website.  This can reveal how people are viewing your images, calls to action, navigation, etc.  (Note:  Feng-GUI is only revealing one facet of your website based on algorithms, and does not take the place of a thorough usability study by a trained professional!)

Five Second Test

Five Second Test is a simple online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.  You can submit a screenshot of your website, which other users of the service evaluate for the top five most memorable areas that they can remeber from viewing the image for five seconds.  You can also perform this test on other people’s websites, thus becoming part of a community that helps website owners and designers evealuate the strong visual points of their websites.  I evaluated a few sites and found this to be fun and addictive!

MIT Usability Guidelines

The Usability Guidelines offered by MIT’s Information Services and Technology Department are a little more serious, but who doesn’t love a checklist?  I know detail-oriented people like me do (just call me ‘Monica’)!  These guidelines include most factors to consider during a usability evaluation of a web site.  And…it’s MIT!  You can’t go wrong.

By ensuring that you’ve created a usable and well-organized website, you can help lower bounce rates and increase conversions on your site.  Have fun checking out these tools, and if you come across any others, please post them here!

Thank you Ann Smarty for the great ideas!

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 2:58 pm and is filed under General. 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.