How To DIY Site Design And Usability

One of the trendiest topics online at the moment seems to be usability and how websites are built and navigated around by common folk like me and you. It used to be that you would build a website with some simple tabs, a header and footer and apart from people putting their different personal slant on it that was how things worked. With design moving on and the tools available to developers and designers becoming more advanced we have all started to look at the web a little differently and now expect to have our expectations challenged with what we see online.

Most readers of this blog will use a content management system or have their blogs or websites running on something like wordpress so we thought we would share a great little tool called 5 second test that will help you get a little feedback on what your users are looking at and possibly improve your design yourself. This will be particularly useful if you have a call to action like “contact us” or an email newsletter or RSS that you want people visiting your site to sign up to. Try the test out by sending it our to a few people in Twitter or Facebook. It may not be an exact science but if you get enough people to take the test you will see a pattern emerging and be able to make some small changes and become your own usability expert!

Here is the test that we got 50 people to take for this site. People were asked to highlight the first 3 places their attention was drawn to using a red dot. It builds a good picture up of what people look at on our site and allows us to make changes accordingly.