http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/website-usability-tools/

It focuses on the key usability areas of:

1. User Task Analysis
2. Readability
3. Site Navigability
4. Accessibility
5. Website Speed
6. User Experience

It gives a great overview of classic tools such as pingdom but also some new ones.

Definitely worth checking out.

You should focus on more than the list of desired functions. You need to investigate the stated and implicit factors that the organisation or website owner considers to be most significant in the product’s success.

Collect and organize user needs and expectations.

Either using existing research or by performing an comprehensive user research and persona creation process, you identify what the products’ users want from it and how they expect to use it. You put this information together into a mental model of the user, an understanding of the user’s wants, needs and expectations.

Perform a content audit.

The depth of the audit depends on the final outcome-high-level navigation redesign requires only auditing a sample of content, whereas a CMS migration necessitates a rigorous page-by-page inventory. The audit is the analyzed to define primary content types, which are then laid out in a Content Map.

Create a new information architecture

By coupling the content audit analysis with your understanding of users’ mental models and the product’s business goals. This architecture will define the overarching user experience of the site and will be documented in a diagram specifying every step of the user experience within the section under review.

Prepare the documents that define the foundation of the new information Architecture

Provide detailed navigation specifications indicating the navigation elements required for every page, in order to guide the implementation of the new architecture.

These specifications will be supplemented by wireframe schematics indicating the placement of all navigation elements. You can also provide a style guide that will outline naming conventions for key content areas, URL conventions, and conventions for site-wide way-finding cues.

More resources

http://adaptivepath.com/events/training/complete/files.php

http://www.iainstitute.org/tools/

Web usability is extremely important and has the following benefits:

• Increase in (return) site visitors
• Increase in sales
• Faster download time
• Greater user satisfaction

There are many simple things that you can do to increase the usability of a website such as

• conducting usability tests
• ensure navigation labels are appropriate for the target audience

as well as many other strategies we will discuss over time