UI and UX design
Apr 15, 2021
Sara Gómez
UX Specialist
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Tools to optimize your web usability

Home > UI and UX design > Tools to optimize your web usability
Do you want to please your users? Optimize your page with the following web usability tools and check the results out for yourself.

Design and web page usability have an increasingly bigger importance in the success of a project. The digital transformation that many companies are undergoing has translated into a change in consumer habits, and COVID-19 has accelerated that even further. 

Our experience with brands is online and over time, we have created a series of conventions that make up a shared language. For example, we know that a symbol with three lines means there is a collapsible menu, and if we are looking for the project’s social media links, we head to the bottom of the page to find them. These standards are part of the User Experience (UX) and we have to know how to use them so that the user experience is optimal. 

Figuring out how to measure the usability of a website is necessary if we want to optimize our business. And it’s something that affects all areas, from sales to marketing. We can summarize the UX criteria of a website in the following key elements: usability, accessibility, user control over the web, page performance (speed), and of course, aesthetics and minimalism. 

How to measure the usability of a website 

88% of users consider not returning to a webpage if the first experience is bad. And 39% close the window if the images are taking too long to load or don’t load at all. Therefore, it’s necessary to get to it and examine your webpage; here, we recommend a series of web optimization tools that will get you started: 

 

Tools for web usability that make a difference 

Usability

  • Clarity: Clarity is a free tool from Microsoft. Although it’s pretty new and has things that could be improved, it helps us to visualize the user experience, study the use statistics, and record sessions and heat maps, among other things. In addition, it can receive information from Google Analytics, which allows us to focus mainly on just one tool. 

  • Hotjar: One of the best usability tools that we can look at. Hotjar allows us to widely understand how users are living the experience of entering our site. It boasts many features, from heat maps to behavior recordings, with a lot of information to use for drawing conclusions. You can try a free trial, but there are different rates (from 39€ to 990€ monthly, depending on the size and needs of the company) to enjoy Hotjar completely. 

  • Crazyeeg: Crazyegg, similarly to Hotjar, offers the possibility of inserting a line of Javascript in the code of your site with which you can analyze everything that users do on your page (Scrolldeep, heat maps, clickflow, mouseflow, etc). You have 30 days of a free trial and annual rates to continue with after, from 24€ to 249€ per month.

  • UXPressia: It’s a system of personalized templates, where the main use of EXPressia is the creation of Customer Journey Maps in which it outlines, step by step, the user experience. It’s a collaborative platform with which we can also generate the User Persona, and if it’s just for one project, it’s free. If you want unlimited projects, there are different rates. 

 

Accessibility 

  • Wave: With just your URL, Wave evaluates the accessibility problems that the page can have and gives you advice on how to improve the accessibility of your information for users, especially for those with disabilities. It’s totally free and recommended.

  • Blisk: Use Blisk to carry out website usability tests and check how your pages appear on main search engines. Simulate slow website loading situations, test how it works on both desktop and mobile versions, track page errors, and much more. There’s a free standard version and a premium version for 8-9 dollars a month. 

  • W3C Markup Validation Service: It is used to examine the state of your website and detect HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML coding errors and more. It’s free to use for your site because, combined with Wave, it can replace many functions of other paid platforms.

  • Check my colours: When given the URL of your website, this page measures the reading level of the page through the contrast of colors between the text and background. It’s free to use. 

 

Navigability

  • Miro: this is a collaborative tool to complete work as a team: maps, strategies, diagrams, brainstorms, meetings with a “blank canvas” with which we can work easily. This way, we will be able to work on the navigation flow and even incorporate wireframes or designs for a better visualization/understanding. Miro has a free version and 3 paid options that expand upon the application. 

  • Figma: the design has a large weight within the user experience, and Figma helps to create, prototype, and share web designs from beginning to end (from a weak wireframe to a pixel perfect final design). The speed is one of its best qualities; you can opt for the free version, the professional version, or the version aimed at companies. 

  • Sketch App: Sketch is aimed at designers, like Figma. It’s a platform with an intuitive interface, multitude of responsive and scalable components, and plugins to combine your designs with data in real time. Sketch only has a paid option: 9 dollars a month per user. 

 

Attention Points

  • Attention Insight: It’s an IA that detects attention points for users. Knowing what element of our design attracts the attention of the visitor is important to designing a strategy and increasing conversion rates. Attention Insight allows this to occur without waiting for the results of real users. You can try the demo and then jump to their individual, team, or company rates. 

Page Performance

  • Page Speed Insight: This free tool developed by Google evaluates your website in function of what they consider the best performance practices. It is aimed at all developers and owners of websites. In addition, it allows you to extract a pretty comprehensive report.

  • Pingdom Tool: When you insert the URL of your site in the search engine, this application will carry out a test in which you will obtain all the loading times of the distinct pages that make up your site. It’s very useful to optimize the loading times and very easy to use, for just 8€ a month. 

 

A/B Testing

  • Google Optimize: with Google Optimize, we can carry out A/B Testing (among others) to identify what attracts and excites our clients about the web, and where it is lacking in those areas. It’s based on the analysis of Google, it’s free to use, and it gives us sophisticated segmenting tools; all of this is completely free and of course, is integrated with Google Analytics. 

  • Optimizely: it’s a tool to unleash the digital potential of your projects. It’s a more expensive option than Google Optimize, with various rates, and it also helps us to launch tests and make decisions based on the information and check how these tests are working. 

The goal of all these apps and tools is to be able to understand and better communicate with the people who visit your page so that tomorrow they become your clients. One of the keys of conversion rate optimization is improving the user experience. Get to work and make your business grow, speaking the same language as your audience. 

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