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Whether maintaining an existing site or building a new one, our goal is to transform the way you do business on the Web and guide your organization through a change that will revolutionize your Web site management. Usability is the key to success.
Put our award-winning project management skills to work and soon your Web site can tell the story of your organization. Internal communications will finally mirror your external communications, because your design will work for you.
Our usability services is at the core of our Web governance consulting, because if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Services include conducting expert reviews to provide you with performance scorecards, helping you with the planning phase of your Web design project to give you a blue print, or measuring how users perform on top tasks critical to your site's success.
Overview: Usability Testing Options (Slidecast)
Expert Review: Web Scorecards
Web Blueprint Package
Task Analysis
Overview: Usability Testing Options
(Slidecast)This presentation below, with audio, provides a high-level overview of usability testing options you might consider. It provides the rationale for you to make a commitment to integrating usablity into your Web operations. The length with audie is 23-minutes. You will find detailed descriptions of the usability testing options, including the advantages and disadvantages of each.
To find shorter written descriptions of our three core usablity service offerings, follow the ON THIS PAGE links from the top of this page or simply scroll below the slidecast.
Expert Review: Web Scorecards
An expert review provides your Web site with a scorecard to benchmarks performance against best practices.
We use evidence-based design theory in usabilty as the foundation, and can also examine compliance with Section 508 performance, content types and transparent policy.
With our value-based scorecard we look at your site's usability performance by classifying or building your user's awareness, satisfaction, confidence and trust.
The review baselines your performance and identifies improvement opportunities. This scorecard system offers an easy way to prioritize the results into your work plan since these factors are a hierarchy of values. For example, you need to have awareness as a necessary pre-condition to satisfaction. Satisfaction preceeds confidence, and confidence preceeds trust.
A full briefing on the scorecard results for you or your full team is included.
We think Web Scorecards rock. If you have identified a need for standards as a critical success factor for your Web team, our scorecard can be a valuable tool. Adopt the scorecard checklist as a core standards document. Or, if you elect for a written report, it can be the foundation of a more formal editorial guidelines document to help your team maintain a top-rated site.
Web Blueprint Package
A Web Blueprint package lays the groundwork for a strong site that embraces user-centered design.
Whether your Web site is in the range of 1000 to 10,000 pages or is a complex enterprise Web site that is 100 times that size a blueprint is an essential part of your management arsenal. Schedule at the start of a site redesign or use this technique to examine and document an existing site.
Seven Steps = One Blueprint
We believe every site goes through three stages: draw the blueprint, build the structure and manage the lifecycle. Here we focus on stage one.
There are seven steps in the blueprint phase:
Endorsement.
Get it in writing from the organization's top brass: the visionary executive
Set goals.
Baseline current activities and define the "problem" your Web site wants to tackle.
Analyze audiences.
Talk to internal and external audiences and define your market.
Benchmark.
Examine the competition and surface best practices, new ideas.
Document requirements.
Develop list of high-level needs; validate with stakeholder team.
Select navigation.
Lead stakeholder team to decide on primary and secondary navigation with meaningful labels.
Brand it.
Pick a tag line and theme to match your value proposition and fit your market and objectives.
Our blueprint package provides a range of audience analysis, including a card-sorting exercise, a focus group with stakeholders and benchmarking capabilities against your top competitors. We also set you on your way for a metrics program with a baseline analysis of your last quarter's Web activity and a future Web Analytics plan that best fit your environment. This baseline lets you measure the difference between the old and the new site so you can show the return on investment.
Usability: Task Analysis
The name of the game for most Web sites today is understanding the top tasks users try to do when they visit your site. You are focused on optimizing the graphic user interface and navigation to make sure that this is a pleasant experience.
Rule number one: don't annoy your users.
Here are some questions to consider:
:: Can you name your top user tasks?
:: Do you know their success ratio?
:: Do you know the average number of clicks to complete the task?
:: How much time takes the average user to complete these tasks?
The answers may surprise you.
Using our knowlege of task analysis and the latest testing tools, we'll test your site with representative users and provide answers to these important questions. You'll get a report that includes recommendations for improving performance.
