This post will not be explaining the importance of user friendly websites. One should realize by now that easy-to-navigate and well structured content presentation will result in better sales, wanted responses from visitors, etc. However, we would like to emphasize the importance of timely usability check during the first stages of site or blog establishing.

Website usability test should be conducted at the point of initial site design, when site’s statistics show anomaly or optimization may result in better sales. The test requires participation of random people, who have no previous experience with a given site, in other words - strangers. The advantage of testing one’s site for usability during the early stages of its establishment is obvious. If design is not user friendly you will save a lot of money by redesigning it before you get massive traffic to its pages. Additionally, extensive changes of indexed pages may trigger unwanted reaction from search engines, including temporary exclusions from their indexes.

Conducting a usability test used to be quite a hassle for webmasters, marketers, business managers or whoever else was in charge of it. Finding people willing and able to participate, time and planning issues, as well as, low budget where some of the constraints that kept many of us from doing all this or doing this the right way. We have good news for you: “That should not be a problem anymore!” These days we have great tools that one can use to do quality website usability tests without many of these overheads.

Besides statistical software that allows one to track traffic funneling and link click-through stats, some allow you to see as if you were standing right behind the backs of your visitors, by recording every move they make. It is really cool! One of such service (FREE service) we would like to mention is a new online tool called UserFly (for more information see http://userfly.com).

UserFly records every action of your visitors’ mice and keyboards, including page scrolling or simply sliding of the pointer over the page elements, as well as typed data entered via keyboards. By using UserFly you will have a chance to investigate every visit session at your site by playing back actions at every page visited by your users.

This way the unaware visitors become anonymous testers of your the sites’ usability. All you have to do now is to process the information and make any changes that will help you to get an easy to navigate and use site.