How to make your website more user friendly

Do you want to improve usability for your website? Do you want to do it on a low budget? Then read on because I think I have stumbled upon a relatively cheap solution that can help you solve most usability problems.

Yesterday I signed up for UserTesting.com via AppSumo — a $99 deal for 6 testing sessions of random users completing various tasks on Wedoist. After watching my testing videos the usability testing idea is great and a true eye opener. It shocked me what people were struggling with.

Why you only need to test with 5 users

There's a lot theory on usability testing. Jakob Nielsen is a great source and 10 years ago I read an article by him called Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users. In this article he argues why you only need 5 users to find most usability problems in your product:

Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not true. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

This is great news since since it means you can do usability testing on a low budget! You don't need to test it out with thousands of users to find most problems! Couple your usability testing with with A/B testing and lots of analytics ... and you are set to create a great product.

Why is it hard to create user friendly products?

I think one of the core issues I am struggling with is that I use my products and it's very hard for me to imagine what a new user struggles with. It's simply hard to imagine what's easy and what's hard and what needs to get improved.

This is where usability testing is very useful and a true eye opener since you can get an insight in how new users react to your product and you can make changes accordingly to their reaction. It's a great way to create intuitive products.

One of Wedoist's testing videos

Check out one of the Wedoist videos if you want to see how a random user interacts with Wedoist and what he struggles with during his session. Some of it is pretty hilarious.

Making changes and incorporating this into a work flow

I am definitely making changes based on the feedback I have received from my first round of usability testing and I think I will incorporate usability testing in my work flow. For example, before releasing a big feature I will do an usability test to make sure that it's intuitive — even for random users that don't know anything about the product.

Not affiliated

Please do note that I am not affiliated with UserTesting.com or AppSumo. I am simply sharing my experience :-)