designer

Testing for Usability 415
At this stage, this conversion should be relatively easy because you have already established
the IA, including the navigation structure and the UI design for the elements to
be used (their placement within master pages and layouts). You will, however, need to
decide whether the out-of-the-box master pages, page layouts, and CSS files meet your
requirements or whether you need to customize these elements or build your own.
See Also Information on how to customize or change a master page is described in Chapter
11, “Working with Master Pages,” and information on how to brand your SharePoint site is
described in Chapter 10, “Branding SharePoint Sites.”
Once your Web site is developed and launched, it needs to be tested for usability and
accessibility. Usability testing is a key step in ensuring that your users can successfully use
your SharePoint Web site. Accessibility testing should be taken seriously given that your
company could be sued for presenting an inaccessible Web site. More information and
methods for addressing these processes are covered in detail in the next sections.
Depending on the size of your project, you can carry out usability testing in a number of
ways:
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Study users who perform tasks based on usage scenarios or use cases developed
in stage 1 of the UCD life cycle, and then document any issues the users have using
the Web site.
Use in-house/expert testers who test sample parts of the system and document any
issues. Normally these parts are the most frequently used or are critical to the success
of a project. Distribute your budget for user testing across as many small tests
as you can afford, with no more than five users per test.
Test a representative page from each SharePoint template.
Usability testing will highlight any usability problems with your site, such as broken links;
poor navigation design; problems with rendering in different browsers, at different
screen resolutions, or with devices such as smart phones; and forced scrolling (the user
should never be forced to scroll right). Ideally, usability testing should be carried out during
the life cycle of your development.
In this exercise, you use the SharePoint Designer Hyperlinks task pane to help test the
usability of your Web site. In particular, you’ll test whether the information architecture
has any broken links.