Establishing Guidelines for Usability Testing when Using Web Analytical Tools

Abstract: Usability and User Experience has become increasingly important. Users should be able to achieve their set out goals with ease, whether that is to purchase a book on an e-commerce site or to find articles about current events in Europe on a news site. Achieving good usability is a task most developers and designers face today and to address that task they employ the use of usability evaluation methods. Lately, web analytical tools have shown some potential in usability evaluation. This thesis aims to explore if usability can be evaluated with Web Analytical Tools by comparing their benefits and limitations with classical usability evaluation methods. The result of this thesis is a set of guidelines meant to help smaller companies with their design phase. It was found that Web Analytical Tools can be used in some cases to realize usability problems, but to understand and fix the problems it is essential to conduct usability tests with users, so called user testing.