The ultimate guide to testing your website

Similarly, you can guarantee that no matter how wonderful your site, someone will comment that they don't like the colours or they wish a particular corner was rounded. Don't worry too much about this subjective stuff unless it becomes a clear, repeated pattern.

Second run-through

If you have time, it can be really valuable to watch the session a second time, looking for anything you missed on the first run-through.

This is also a good opportunity to refocus your attention and take a look at your own technique. Did you ask any leading questions? Should you have allocated longer for a particular task? Chalk it up to experience and make a mental note for next time.

Once you have a list of all the issues, it's time to perform some triage on them. You'll probably have a couple of big issues and dozens of little ones. One good way to sift through these is to score the issues by how important they are and how easy they are to fix.

Your tests should give you enough information to answer the first question; just look at how much they affected the overall usability of the site. You'll probably need to liaise with your developers (or put on your developer pants, if it's just you) to answer the second question.

Some issues will simply be too big to fix, while some are worth throwing away weeks of work to make sure you get them right. Choosing which are important and which are acceptable casualties of time and budget is a fine art. Again, this is something you'll get better at with experience.

You'll probably be asked to produce a report for your boss or client. Although there are a number of different ways to do this, it's usually worth presenting your findings in person. Avoid bullet- itis, and consider playing some video highlights too: they can be extremely persuasive.

If you need to leave a summary of your findings behind, create a separate one-page document. Hefty usability reports have a tendency to sit, unread, on managers' desks.

Making changes

The best usability testing is repeated and iterative. Although one round is better than none, two rounds is better still: the more people you can test the site with, the better it'll be. For instance, you might want to do some formative testing early on, make changes and refine your designs, then follow up nearer the end with a round of summative testing.

Practically, budget and time constraints will limit the amount of testing you can do, but by using the guerrilla approach you maximise your chances of squeezing bits in where needed.

In the end, the user-centred approach is as much about mindset as process: putting users right at the heart of everything you do is a big change for many businesses.

Reshaping the culture of a business (even your own) takes a long time, but guerrilla usability testing is a great first step to introducing user-centred thinking. Sure, it takes a bit more effort than just making websites you think will work, but the results speak for themselves.

Your clients will be happy, your users will be happy and ultimately you'll be helping to make the web a better place for everyone.

First published in .Net magazine, Issue 182

Now read 20 websites that changed the world