When visitors arrive at your website, do they know what to do? Do they know how to use the site? Patience levels with websites with poor usability are low, and you will lose any impact you hoped to have if your visitors bail because they just don't feel comfortable with using your site.

At Sandbox Software Solutions, we craft usable websites through adopting best principles and practices of design, many which have been validated by formal research. We act on our beliefs that consistency of experience within a website and providing visitors with cues and clues are crucial parts of our work in designing websites that are appealing. There is also little doubt that visual aesthetics can have a profound impact on perceptions of website usability. In fact, visual aesthetics can be a deciding factor in whether a customer trusts a website enough to make a purchase. One study found that people make "far reaching inferences about the qualities of online banking websites on the basis of simple screen shots, or very short interaction sequences."

Websites created by Sandbox Software Solutions combine appealing visual design to ensure the initial attraction of a website visitor with sensible and best practice usability frameworks to ensure that visitors will keep coming back.

Sandbox Software Solutions can also implement usability studies with your audience and/or targeted potential audience. These studies may include feedback surveys and individual or focus group interviews.

Interviews can help you and your website developer to discover the needs and goals of your visitors or target audience, how visitors complete tasks on your site (or would do if functionality was available), and what visitors believe your website has or will offer them. Interviews focus on visitor/target audience needs, and can help guide both efficiency (savings of cost and time) and effectiveness in the creation of a new website.

Surveys, deployed either by mail, fax, email or kiosk, can help you gain opinions of a broader audience. They tend to focus on quantity of responses rather than depth and quality of responses. In short, surveys help you know about your website visitors or target audience, while interviews help you understand them.

Finally, Sandbox Software Solutions can make it easy for you to conduct Split or A/B Testing. Split or A/B testing is a way of finding out which presentations of website concepts (visual design, usability, messaging) best drive desired actions in your target audience. Split testing provides a controlled method for measuring the effectiveness (or not) of changes to your website, and may be used to assess impacts of small tweaks or more dramatic differences. Generally, split testing runs 2 different versions side by side or in random sequence and assesses visual aesthetics, usability and messaging to see which is more effective.