Counting on our Website

by Cally Whiteside, web design and usability specialist, Ecology communications

We know we count on our website to share information about the work we’re doing. But we'd like to know more about what our web visitors are counting on. So we're conducting a usability study this week. One part of the testing is happening on the website itself, and you we hope you participated!

Online usability testing

If you visited our website recently, you probably noticed a pop-up message that asked for your help. We used a web tool called “Loop11” that asks volunteers to complete a set of 7 tasks using our website. The information we gathered will give us a better picture of how well our navigation, content and site design work for our visitors.

The quiz was on the site for approximately one week. We also conducted in-person testing so we could observe how our visitors use our site and see where we can improve it.

Our website comes of age!

Our website will turn 21 this year! It was first launched in August of 1994. At that time our entire web fit on a single floppy disk. (Remember floppy disks?) It’s grown considerably since then. We now have over 11,000 files. It’s closer to 40,000 if you count PDF files. That's a lot of information!

In 2014 our website was visited nearly 7 million times. We averaged about 19,000 visits per day. That’s a lot of visitors! And we'd like them to be busy, successful visitors; definitely not frustrated visitors. If you count yourself as a user of our website, we'd appreciate your participation in our online testing. Help us improve our web.