How to evaluate a blog – Part 5: The user experience

“User experience” or “Usability” is a big word for webmasters and serious bloggers. It is all – as many things while evaluating a blog or a website- all about “putting yourself in the shoes of your visitors”.

In this part of our evaluation series, I will restrict our analysis to the key points of “How easy is it to use the blog, to find information”.

The key questions to answer are:

• When you land on the home page, or a blog page, is it easy to understand, or at least to find out, what this blog is all about?
• Does the navigation make sense to a novice user?
• Is it easy to find the key content, the content the blog wants to promote or that differentiate this blog from the next?
• Does the navigation help in finding key content? Remember, key content should never be more than two clicks away…
• Can you easily find key content through the search function? Try searching for a couple of keyword, which are supposed to be prominent or typical for this blog. Can you find the ‘ace posts’?
• When reading a blog post, is it easy to find content related to this post?
• Are the posts themselves easy to read? This might be related to the language used, the formatting, or the graphic presentation.
• Do the widgets make sense? Do they contribute to the quality of the blog, to the quality of the content?
• When there are different ways to navigate, do these overlap? Is multi-navigation contributing to the ease-of-use or are they confusing to the users?
• Looking at the different pages, as an ad hoc visitor, take note of what don’t you understand, or what does not give you what you expected. There is a good chance others won’t understand neither.
• Check Google Analytics figures to find out how much people use the navigation (either through navigation menus, category and tag lists, the search function)..
• Is it easy to subscribe to the blog? Any visitor who subscribes to your feed, is one more guaranteed returning visitor (link). How easy do they make it for anyone to subscribe to the feed?
• Are the feeds actually working, and consistent? Often one feed icon refers to the native RSS feed, while others refer to a Feedburner feed. – To be avoided!
• Are ‘ALT’ attributes used for icons (the text shown when hovering over an icon) giving additional explanation on the function of the icons? Is that explanation clear? Or confusing?

In the next part of our blog evaluation series, we will cover a more objective matter: The blog speed.

                                                                    by blogtips.org