What are some methods of analyzing a website for user experience, usability, and accessibility?

Question

I'm a recent graduate who is looking to get a job doing user experience. Next week, I have a technical interview in which I will be given a website and will have to talk about its usability issues as well as come up with ways of improving the user experience. I feel I have the natural skills to do this and have been doing a fair amount of reading into the subject, but I would like some further advice on how to effectively critique different kinds of websites.

Does anybody have any suggestions of common faults I should look out for, or advice on ways of structuring my evaluation in order that it is relatively air-tight and I do not miss anything obvious?

As I've said before, I'm already doing a lot of reading and I realize that practice makes perfect. However, I'm hopeful that those that have long-term experience with this can help me by imparting their wisdom on gotchas, common issues, and what to look out for in a good/bad website.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

My thinking process :

See what's different. I mean ask yourself, "is this button here also done that way on youtube/google/basecamp/whatever has been proven good enought".

If it's not the case, I ask myself "does it make sense to do it differently?". If it doesn't make sense, then it shouldn't be that way to avoid confusing the user.

If it makes sense, I ask myself "If it's not obvious, what's the learning curve for the user?", always keeping in mind that "the user" is not IT.

Then I'd see if I can improve it. If I can't, maybe you can't improve it, so even if the control is not perfect it's good enough.

Finally ask yourself "what does the website wants the user to do?". Is it buying something? Subscribing? It's all about figuring out what's the objective. Then see if the website is oriented toward something aiming to complete this objective.

Answer 2

• How easy navigation is

• Whether a user can easily find what he needs without resorting to "search" function. Edge case: whether a user can find the search input field without using the browser's search function (Ctrl+F)?

• Whether a site is browsable with images turned off

• How many clicks it takes to accomplish an operation. Is that many really necessary?

• Are the most important / frequently used features right there in front of the user?

• Whether you communicate with the user in geek language

• Whether you overwhelm the user with long literary texts where one or two words will suffice

• Whether you use standard ideas in your UI. Do buttons, links and menus look like buttons, links and menus? Do they also work that way?

• If UI is made up of a limited set of controls with consistent look and behavior? Or each page is unique and has to be learned from scratch?

• Whether UI is accomplished with mostly 2-3 colors or uses different colors everywhere to look cool

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Answer 3

As the other answers have talked a bit about usability I'll mention some things about accessibility (although good accessibility and usability go hand-in-hand).

First of all you need to get the usability correct - a site with poor usability will straight away mean that it will almost certainly also have poor accessibility. Make sure it makes sense, is easy to navigate and is structured meaningfully - for good accessibility that needs to be reflected in the markup as well as visually (so use headings correctly, use things like (strong) instead of (b)old, etc). Automated tools can provide some limited help with this.

Secondly make sure you use the various pieces of markup that are available which will enhance usability (e.g. alt tags on images). Automated tools are excellent for this.

Next if you're going to use technologies like javascript try to use progressive enhancement so that users without those technologies available still have a workable experience. Automated tools won't help much with this.

Finally don't get lured into thinking that an accessible website is a dull boring featureless one - for every user with visual difficulties there will be many more who have cognitive difficulties such as dyslexia. The aim is to make it engaging for everyone, not cripple it for a minority of users (who will likely also be penalised if you start slashing content - for example youtube is one of the most popular sites for blind users).

Answer 4

As well as practical ideas about usability problems, you might want to think what kind of process you'd use to do this work (and how it would fit into the company's development process). Would you start out with research? How would you present your analysis and feedback?