We must never forget that the web is primarily a means of providing information to the public. Any website that does not fulfil this task properly is a failure. So that amazingly cool Flash navigation bar that spins and twists around is actually not that cool if users can never work out how to find the page with your contact details on, give up and go to your competitors.

We can provide “usability labs” where we set members of the public common tasks to perform on your websites or interactive applications. Their responses and times are invisibly measured and we can then create benchmark reports with advice on improvements.

In addition there are now a huge possible range of output platforms and browser types and versions which your website could now be viewed on. What looks great in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP may not look the same on Internet Explorer 5.5 which still accounts for 4% of the global audience. We maintain a test suite of a dizzyingly diverse range of systems that we can run independent tests on your system, produce reports and advise on fixes.

The worse type of usability is lack of accessibility. For example most websites designed today are virtually impossible to use by the visually impaired and will fail to scale well to devices such as mobile phones. In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 does not refer explicitly to website accessibility but makes it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities. As a result in the future websites designed without this in mind lay their owners open to litigation. We design all our sites with accessibility in mind and can produce independent reports on other sites to for compliance to standards such as W3C WAI and Section 508.