Overview of ErgoLight Exploratory Reports on Site Usability

The User Experience

 ErgoLight  reports are about the experience of your site visitors:
  • Did the site visitors find the page or command that they were looking for?
  • Once they found the page or the command, did they accept the download time?
  • Once the page was downloaded, were they satisfied with what they saw on screen?

Usability Information

 Common sources of usability information are user reports and reports obtained by professionals. User reports are most adequate to get feedback about the user's expectations and satisfaction. However, users are not aware of the many details required for usability diagnosis. Typically, the information that users provide in their reports is trivial (for example, complains about download time) or of minor significance (for example, improper colors or fonts). Most important diagnostic information, such as links and text that users do not comprehend, are not included in user reports. 

ErgoLight  reports provide diagnostic information extracted directly from the user behavior, considering details of which users are typically not aware at all.

Usability Barriers

ErgoLight  reports target three categories of usability barriers:

  • Barriers about links (internal references) between pages
  • Barriers attributed to the system performance (response time)
  • Barriers about the information on screen (quality and compatibility to the user expectations).

Usability Diagnostics

 ErgoLight  reports provide the most important information that you need in order to learn about the actual navigation experience:
  • Analysis of the navigation data recorded in server log files
  • Statistics about different measures of the user experience during navigation
  • Rating the web pages by usability attributes
  • Analysis of user difficulties in accessing, downloading and reading each page
  • Recommendations for design changes.

Aspects of the User Experience

ErgoLight  reports are about the positive and negative aspects of the user experience. Two types of information are available:

  • Page Rating reports provide information about pages that rank high according to various usability measures
  • Problem reports provide page specific information about design and implementation deficiencies, as well as of proof reading, which might affect the user experience. 

Automatic reasoning

 ErgoLight  reports are based on automatic reasoning, obtained by applying special methods for interpreting the meaning of a variety of statistics:
  • Statistics about attributes that affect the user experience: average access time, download time and staying on page.
  • Statistics about attributes affected by the user experience: site exit and backward navigation
  • Special sophisticated statistics about the correlation between measures of the first two kinds.