Is Your Site User Friendly?
How do you know if you need a usability makeover? Benson says that some clients come to him with a sense that their site could be generating more revenues, or with evidence that their conversion rates are low for their industry. For example, a hotel may think that it is getting fewer online reservations than a competitor. You should also pay attention to complaints from users, particularly when the same feature receives consistent criticism.
Technology can provide feedback in the form of usage statistics, which can tell you how many people visited only your homepage and then left, whether someone started filling out a form and aborted the effort, and which parts of your site are generating no traffic.
Conducting focus groups with typical users can tell you what’s wrong with the current site and what’s needed to make the redesign more usable. “When we’re starting a redesign, instead of focusing on colors and design, we begin with interviewing—doing surveys face to face or on the phone, getting to know the customers and what they’re looking for,” Larson says. “From there, we come up with a laundry list of different ideas of how to organize the site.”
Many Web developers start with a document called a “wireframe,” a paper prototype of the site that shows the navigation functionality. Without even using a computer, you can put this prototype in front of a potential user and test whether the navigation system you’ve developed is intuitive.
Usability testing doesn’t stop when the Web site is launched.
Keep
testing usability by experimenting with different layouts and remaining
alert to customer complaints and user statistics. “My most
savvy
clients have a
running list, constantly in development,
of
usability
improvements to be made,”
says Benson.
“This is a
marathon, not a
sprint. You keep working at it. The
great
thing is that on the
Internet, if something
doesn’t work, it’s easy to
fix.”
Advice from the Pros Simple changes to make your site more user friendly. • Use underlining only for hyperlinks; use bold and italics judiciously to avoid making the page look jumbled. • Use a different color to indicate links that a visitor has already visited. • Program your internal search engine to handle common misspellings. • Give users more than one way to contact you in case of a problem: an e-mail link and a phone number, for instance. • On forms, allow for different ways of formatting phone numbers and credit card numbers, or specify how they should be formatted (with or without spaces or dashes). • If a customer fills out a Web form incorrectly, the resulting error message should appear prominently and in a different color or font from the rest of the type on the page. • When requesting information from customers, make it clear why. Don’t ask for gratuitous information. Be aware that if you annoy customers by asking for detailed demographics, they may make up their answers. • Use dates on press releases so that media and others can learn quickly what’s new. • Remove outdated information completely from the site rather than just removing the link. Anything that is on the server can be found by a search engine. • The Web sites www.usability.gov and www.useit.com are valuable sources of research and advice on usability. |
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