Usability

What do your visitors really think of you?

It's a sad fact that many of the visitors that we spend so much time cultivating, inviting and generally enticing onto our websites, then leave frustrated due to the difficulties we put in their way. The ease of use of your website will have an impact on not only what your visitors do, but on the impression of your brand that they take with them from their visit. Often analysis of visitor analytical data reveals a sorry tale of lost opportunities, high bounce rates and poor conversion, the good news is that it doesn't have to be this way.

With experience of conducting usability analysis for a range of clients including national and international brands, we can help you to transform your website visitors experience. Contact us now to find out more.

Walk a mile in your visitors shoes

It's a shame so many visitors to websites leave frustrated, as they are not actually asking for much, just the ability to complete the task they came to your website to find a solution for. Whether it be to find an answer to a question, find the price of a particular pair of shoes, get your postal address, or upload their holiday photos for printing, make sure that you have put nothing in their way that will stop them doing it.

Try looking at your website from their perspective, or even more excitingly ask someone else to look at your website then look at them doing it!

Do they understand from your Home page what your website is about?
Can they easily understand your navigation and how you have grouped your content?
Does your search facility allow them to find what they are looking for?
Does your content answer their questions or just reiterate your sales pitch?
Do they feel confident in you and have trust in your brand once they have completed the task?

Get the low hanging fruit first

One of the most re-assuring things about visitor usability, is that once the problems have been identified it is often the simplest issues to fix that provide the greatest benefit. Because many of your visitors will be looking for similar things and may well have similar experience or outlook, these simple fixes can impact on large numbers of your potential customers, improving that most reassuring of metrics, the Conversion Rate.

Don't let these often simple problems stand in the way of providing customer satisfaction, if you feel this may be an issue that affects your site, we can help you identify an implement the changes required to get the most from your current site. Starting with a simple overview analysis, through to an ongoing testing and improvement regime, we can help your website reach it's potential. Contact us now for a free discussion to find out how we can help you.

Usability testing can fit within any budget

Usability testing is not only for big budget projects.

In Jakob Nielsens classic article "Why you only need to test with 5 users", he explains that because of the diminishing returns gained from testing additional users, 80% of the insight into a web sites usability issues can be gained from only 5 test subjects. In other words the first user will find a lot of the problems, user #2 will find lots of the same problems plus a few more, #3 will again mostly repeat the same issues but will find a little few new ones, and so on. Thus by user #5 most of the issues have been discovered, so at that point stop investigating, fix those then re-test.

Usability lets you punch above your weight.

Good usability will help you to retain your customers and avoid abandoned shopping baskets. This is one area where smaller e commerce providers can win some trade back from larger on-line retailers, many of who's sites are hard to access and use.

The Billboard Website

Judgements are made in Seconds not Minutes

We all love our Home pages, we spend hours wondering if the logo is positioned right, if the font is too small, if the images we have chosen convey the right message and if the text explains clearly enough what we are trying to convey, yet the sad truth is that our visitors cannot wait to get off them. In this article we will explain why some pages, such as your Home page are different to other pages, and give you a simple task to carry out to see if your Home page passes "The 2 Second Test".

The pages in your website can be broken down into 2 types: Navigation pages and Destination pages

Navigation pages, the junctions and interchanges of your website

Navigation pages are the pages that help a browsing visitor make the decisions that will bring them to their goal. They can also help a visitor understand how you have arranged the content of your website and so by extension what it is your website is about.This last point is an important one and often over looked during the planning stages of a website build, when a visitor scans over your menu, they are doing 2 things simultaneously, they are trying to find how to reach their goal, but additionally they are gaining an over view of the scope of your website. This is why your main Navigation menu is so important, it is to your website Mission Statement to a visitor, it is saying "these are the topics we cover and we have arranged them in order of our view of their importance".

Typical Navigation pages on a website include:

The Home page
Category pages
Search results pages

In his book "Don't make me think" usability expert Steve Krug explains that your Home page should work less like a glossy colour brochure and more like an advertising billboard driven past at 60mph.What Steve is referring to here is the dual purpose of Navigational pages: that they should be easy to use and allow a visitor to quickly move on yet also informative about the nature of the website or area of the website that the visitor is currently entering. In other words they are the transport hubs of your website.

Destination pages, a moment to pause and interact

A Destination page has in many ways a simpler job than a Navigational page, it's role is simply to allow the visitor to carry out the action they cam to your website to perform. These actions will vary across a wide range of websites and can include:

Read an article
Find out your opening times
Purchase a product
Read a review
Manage their account

Essentially the number of possible actions will be as numerous as the websites they exist upon, but what is common about them is that they are the pay off for the visitors efforts. These are the actions the visitor came to do, so the role of the website at this point is to get out of the way and let the visitor carry out whatever they came here for. Don't suddenly try to sell them something, ask their opinion, require them to sign in / create an account or pop up an advert in their faces, they worked to get here, now they want their reward.

Remember, your Home page is a Navigational page, but your home page is not always your Home page!

Your Home page is the Navigational page for your whole website. This means that a visitor on your Home page must 'get' your web site almost immediately. They must instantly understand the fundamentals of what you are trying to say or sell. It also means that within a short period of arriving on your Home page your visitor must be able to work out how to use your site, where your navigation is and how to proceed to achieve their goals. That's a lot of responsibility for one little page, however remember that your visitors will often enter your website via different routes depending upon what they searched for on Search Engines, or which links they followed from other sites. So often you will find that your Category and other Navigational pages will act as your Home page and must also carry this responsibility, though they should also respond to the Visitor Context, (the ideas and goals the visitor brought with them) as well.

One short test can tell you so much.

So, does your home page pass the Two Second test? First open your web site in your browser at the homepage, then minimise the browser so it is still open but not being displayed full screen. Now find someone who is totally unconnected with your web site (a passing van driver, the man who reads the meter?). Sit them in front of your PC, and explain you will briefly show them a web page, then you will ask them some questions. Once they are happy, click the mouse on the minimised browser so it pops open full screen, count to two and close it again.

Now ask your volunteer (victim?) these three questions;

What was the name of the site?
What was it about?
Name something you could do on that site.

The answers may surprise you. If they're not what you hoped for, it may be time to consider some usability design. If they are, congratulations, now you are ready to reap the benefit of investment in search engine optimisation. Either way, you rarely look at your own or other peoples home pages the same way again.

If your worried that your website is under performing when it comes to usability or other issues, why not contact Appropriate Solutions to arrange an informal discussion, and see what we can do to make your website pass The 2 Second Test.