| Website usability isn’t exactly a fresh topic. The pundits (Nielsen and Rhodes come to mind almost immediately) have helped us mend our ways from the mid 1990s, and we have gone on to create websites that are ‘sticky’, and actually generate revenue. |
| However, according to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox last year: |
| “The expected improvement from usability is smaller than it used to be for two reasons: |
- 1) We have now harvested most of the low-hanging fruit from the truly horrible websites that dominated the lost decade of Web usability (approximately 1993–2003).
- 2) Usability budgets have not increased substantially, even as the Web has gotten better. Yes, many more companies do usability now than ever before. However, individual projects don't see much more funding, even though they're now challenged with identifying a higher level of design improvements.
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| At the height of the first dot-com bubble, a common conversion rate was 1%. Today, 2% is a common conversion rate. So, across the Web, this — the #1 usability metric — has indeed doubled in a decade.” |
| This article brings a marketer’s perspective into the mix – a perspective developed over years of serving the online marketing needs of everyone from Fortune 500 majors to small start-ups. |
Marketer’s Goals and Usability
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| As marketers, our goals can be split up into three parts, to keep things simple: |
| 1. Traffic |
| There are over a billion wired people out there, with more plugging in every second. And we want them to visit us, spend more time on our sites, visit more pages, come back again and again, register, and more. |
| So, what helps achieve this goal? |
- Fresh, engaging, relevant content and features – encouraging visitors to spend more time, look at more pages, and come back for more.
- Address a unique need – if and when this is possible; and if the service is usable and keeps visitors happy, repeat business is much more likely. Addressing a unique need in a smart and customer-focused way also leads to real ‘buzz’ – happy customers are likely to discuss their experiences with others on various offline and online social media. End result – more traffic.
- Paid traffic and search-engine-optimization (SEO) – More ‘mechanical’ ways to increase traffic, SEO and paid traffic nevertheless increase ‘findability’ and bring new people in. Once found or visited, bullets one and two in this list will kick in and ensure visitors hang around, explore, and hopefully, turn into customers.
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| 2. Conversions |
| Conversions begin with people signing up, and end with them filling up their shopping carts and giving you their hard-earned money. If you find that halfway through the payment process many of them drop off, there’s something clearly wrong with the site’s usability. |
| What helps achieve this goal? |
- Higher traffic, driven by the right promotions, a USP, and clear communication usually results in more people wanting to sign up. A fast way to drive them away would be a complicated, involved registration process! Make it simple and offer incentives to sign up, and more visitors are likely to comply.
- The filling-up of the shopping cart is a little more sophisticated: assuming there are products/services that people really want to buy, the messaging should provide enough information and validation for visitors to feel safe to move forward with the purchase.
- A painstakingly organized cart with clear next steps and no surprises is a basic requirement. A mini-cart (often part of the sidebar) is also a good idea, helping customers keep track of their intended purchase while shopping.
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| 3. ROI |
| With more people using the online service to purchase and transact, costs typically associated with brick-and-mortar drop, resulting in higher returns. As a corollary, if less people have questions about the service, your customer service costs also fall – which again means higher returns. |
| What helps achieve this goal? |
- More customers shopping online mean more incentives for those customers to do so. Rewards/loyalty programs, free shipping, discounts – there are clearly many ways to encourage this behavior.
- An easy-to-understand and use service that answers most customer queries before they have a chance to become impediments to purchase is fundamental to ROI. This becomes hard to do with complex offerings, ergo it makes sense to simplify, simplify, simplify.
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| Each of the marketing goals above can be achieved with improvements in usability. It might be worth the while here to go into something that Lance Loveday, CEO of Closed Loop Marketing, a search marketing agency specializing in conversion optimization, calls ‘The Dark Side of Usability’. The point is this: in the pursuit of these marketing goals, it can become fairly easy to put them well above user goals. In a recent article on Search Engine Land, Loveday says: |
| “It doesn’t take much to plant seeds of doubt in a visitor’s mind. Small broken promises and misunderstandings can suffice, such as: |
- We click on an ad, then don’t find the promised item on the landing page
- We carefully click on a product link, only to find something different highlighted on the next page.
- We start a registration process, only to encounter many more steps than the site indicated.
- We try to complete a specific task quickly, only to find our progress slowed by questions, ads, and confusing page layouts.
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| What’s going on here? Don’t these companies know what their visitors want? In many cases, the answer is yes—perhaps too well. They know exactly what we want, they just choose to use that understanding in a way we don’t expect. In a way that serves their business goals, not necessarily those of their visitors.” |
| The next section therefore, is focused on the principles that make a website usable; principles that are essentially based on making life easier for users, not just for marketers. The idea is that one leads to the other, and leveraging customer trust to single-mindedly achieve business goals is usually a good idea in the long run. |
| 10 Principles that Make a Website Usable |
| 1. Where am I? Where should I go? |
| Users should always know exactly where they are, and have a good idea of where to go and what to do next. This is especially important in areas like the shopping cart: |
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| The ‘you are here’ dynamic changes – for example, on an information website like www.wired.com, ordering information in menus and sections is critical. |
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| And for an applications site, providing access to the start of all use-cases is a crucial requirement. |
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| A simple thing like active navigation, done on the server-side, can also boost usability, ensuring that visitors always know which section of the site they are on and what category they are navigating through. |
| 2. Make Information Easy to Understand |
| User reading behavior and link ‘heat maps’ are now part of common parlance, and sites that structure information by importance or similarity will have more success. For example, if a user is looking for information around a particular electronic component or spare part, it would help greatly if information about related components and the larger device they are part of show up alongside the primary results. |
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| In the screenshot above, the information under ‘Personal Finance’ is an example of well-organized data. |
| 3. Help the User at Every Step |
| No matter how well laid-out and how simply written your site, there might be sections where users would welcome some assistance, however small. Filling up a date field, for example – users will appreciate contextual help that tells them what format to enter the date in. This has to be pre-emptive to be successful. |
| Contextual help is a big area here. As soon as users perform a particular task – which may be as simple as moving a couple of emails to the trash folder – it makes sense to have contextual help immediately apparent. The ‘Learn More’ link when you do this on Gmail is a good example. Mouse-over a button on Wordpress and a tool-tip immediately pops up, telling you what that button does. A caveat here – avoid over-clarifying and explaining if you want your users to actually get anything done! Label things briefly, use pictures or pictograms to quickly orient users – in short be clear but concise. It’s harder than it looks. |
| Helping users also means being available. Being ‘available’ here, doesn’t mean testing your site to make sure it stays up even if half the population of China suddenly logs on – it means actually being accessible through 24/7 customer service numbers or a live chat, ready to address customer queries and issues as they occur. This is suspiciously similar to how people interact in the real world, and we all know how comforting it is to speak with a real human on the other end of a help line. |
| 4. Keep Things Consistent |
| Users always develop usage patterns, and if they’re used to the way a set of buttons, tabs and icons work, they’re almost certain to extrapolate this into newer contexts. If your design is consistent, users are more likely to get their work done quicker, and learn new features faster – all of which means they’ll probably come back to visit you again - and talk about their experience. |
| 5. Be Tolerant: Understand Different User Inputs, Allow Errors |
| Remember you are dealing with a global audience/market and attendant variations in user behavior. It makes sense – and it doesn’t take too much effort – to recognize and allow some diversity in user inputs. Take the date field again, for example – wouldn’t it be wonderful if users could enter 1/2/2009 or 1-2-2009 or 01/02/2009 or 01/02/09 without flashing an error message, or worse still, sending them back to the form page after they’ve hit the ‘submit’ button to revisit their ‘errors’? |
| Given the short time rations of the browsing populace, it is also crucial to allow users to easily recover from their mistakes. A simple search on Google, for example, will politely ask “Did you mean…” if you’ve made a spelling error. Easily done - and very effective. For users to successfully complete longer processes or tasks, breaking them up into smaller steps and allowing a ‘save’ between steps can also go a long way in making the experience less of a bother; and also make it simpler to recover from system failures. |
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| 6. Allow ‘Cancel’ and ‘Undo’ |
| A user who is in control of the situation is usually a happy user. Allow them to backtrack, allow them to undo, allow them to move things around to their satisfaction. After all, the best thing about computer Chess is being able to retrieve the poor Queen just after she’s been taken by a lowly Bishop or Rook... hurrah for that ‘undo’ button! |
| Another good example here is when users are downloading/uploading data. Make it clear what will happen if a link on the page is clicked, or the page refreshed; or even what would be the appropriate action in case of an interrupt or failure. |
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| As part of giving users more control, it’s easy and helpful to give users appropriate amounts of extra information that can influence their decisions – when they’re downloading a white paper or a video, for example, it can help them to know just how large the file is, how long it would take to download on a typical connection and so on. |
| 7. Remember User Actions |
| Goldfishes, they say, have 30-second memories. Tough to carry on any kind of conversation with one! |
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| Better user experiences come from remembering what users did last, and if appropriate, starting from there in terms of logins, passwords, recent searches/transactions, and more. Having a ‘recent history’, like in the screenshot above, can be a real time-saver. |
| 8. Speak a Language that Users Understand and Relate to |
| Overall messaging, including system messages (“The password should be alphanumeric. Please enter again.”) must be appropriate to the intended audience, and as a general rule, simple enough to identify with. In the example below, there is definitely an option to saying ‘alphanumeric’! |
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| 9. Make Things Look Familiar, and Like Their Function |
| It is always a good idea to make objects on your website look the way you want users to interact with them. Scroll bars should look like scroll bars, buttons like buttons, drag-and-drop handles – you get the drift. These paradigms have evolved over the last decade, and the best sites never mess around with them. |
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| There is also a lot to be said about familiarity – when designers talk about making interfaces ‘intuitive’, what they’re really saying is that they’re making the interface as familiar as possible. Users that encounter a familiar symbol, object or word, expect it to behave in a familiar way. For the most part, don’t disappoint them. |
| 10. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify |
| If an interaction has been made simple, see if you can make it simpler. |
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| In the example above, the value proposition is the headline; you get a quick demo of how it works, and there’s more info in a set of simple bullets below. Enough said. |
| Usability, Customer Experience and ROI |
| Focusing on usability is really not much different from focusing on customer experience, and as marketers, we’re already very focused on the latter. But customer experience in the context of Web applications has become a very specialized science, and marketers need to devote more time and energy to understand it. |
| The ROI question is always the hardest one, but it is now proven that system usability does indeed boost ROI. Examples include: |
- “Registration rate on our site increased from the current 3%, to 5% or above.” [Web2.0 Photo Application Site]
- “The average time it takes our customer service representative (CSR) to service a customer is about 8 minutes. We reduced this to 6.5 minutes.” [Banking Firm]
- “The average time a customer stands in the queue to transact is about 4 minutes. We reduced it to sub 3 minutes.” [Library]
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| To Conclude… |
| Getting started with usability is easy – there are volumes of easy-to-read resources available on the Web, a lot of which is genuinely well-researched and presented. It might even be simpler for you to ask us for an evaluation of your website! |
| The important thing is not to lose sight of the primary objective, which is facilitating the achievement of user goals in parallel with our own business goals - and finding the right balance. The attraction of Loveday’s ‘Dark Side’ is strong; so as marketing Skywalkers all, the ‘Force’ must be strong with us… |
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