Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Most Web sites fail basic tests of usability. The result is poor visitor satisfaction and, for eCommerce sites, disappointing sales. And although the Fortune 1,000 average between $1.5 million and $2.1 million per year on site redesigns, their shot-in-the-dark efforts often make user experience worse.

These problems could be avoided if site operators adopted the practice of testing their designs in usability labs, formal settings where individual users are observed while performing common tasks with either the actual site or a prototype. Forrester identifies two reasons why firms typically don't follow this procedure:

• For many, user testing is a new discipline.
• Usability labs market themselves poorly.