What is Your Web Site’s Usability?

What is Your Web Site’s Usability?

How is your web site?

by Robert Baron

Web sites are like babies: in the eyes of their parents they all are the prettiest things around. Unless web sites are built for showing off your family vacation pictures, they are not intended for interested friends and relatives, but rather for complete strangers. If your web site is created for your business, you aren’t interested in how your friends and family like your web site, but rather how much business you derive from it. In that sense how USABLE your web site is, is far more important than how much people like it. The bottom line is business results rather than popularity. People could tell you how pretty your site is, but you’d rather see business results or sales dollars.

So what is usability and how can you tell if your site has a high usability rating? If usability is so important, how come you hear so little about it? How do you measure usability and what can you do to improve it? These are the issues we will deal with in this series of articles.

What is usability?

Usability is the factor related to how easily a visitor to your web site can accomplish their intended objectives.

A visitor’s intended objective may be one or more of the following:

• a. Place an order
• b. Inquire about the status of an order
• c. Request a merchandise return authorization
• d. Request a catalog
• e. Request a price quote
• f. Register for an Email list
• g. Etc.

How easily a visitor can accomplish their objective is related to:

• a. How many pages they had to visit while performing their task
• b. How many pages they had to scroll through while performing their task
• c. How much “thinking” they had to do to understand the pages they were looking at
• d. In general, how intuitive were the pages they had to “traverse” while on the site
• e. If you had a chance to observe your visitors (without being noticed by them) would they be glancing at your pages and immediately taking action, or would they be pondering each page, while doing quite a bit of head scratching?
• f. These and similar issues determine how usable your website is

How come you hear so little about usability?

Usability is a topic not generally taught during courses on web site design. Since most web design courses teach how to use the specialized software packages available for creating web pages, few spend time on the techniques of creating easy-to-use and effective web sites. Since many web site creators are “techies” who then teach other “techies” like themselves, many are more interested in how to use the latest and most sophisticated tools than in the practicality of the products they end up creating. These results are pretty obvious on the web, since most sites, while they appear attractive and full of the latest-and-greatest design features, they demonstrate low usability and frustrate most visitors. Industry statistics show that over half (some show as high as 90%) of all web site visits end-up in users abandoning the site in frustration, never or seldom to return again.

One analogy regarding usability is to imagine a skyscraper being built by carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers and electricians without an architect first drawing a set of blueprints and even creating a scale model. Just as no such skyscraper would either be usable, nor survive such construction techniques, a web site needs a “blueprint” and a model, which is the foundation for usability.

Usability is a discipline practiced by a relatively small number of people trained in human factors, human-to-computer interface design, and industrial design. Most of these people have been previously involved in designing industrial and consumer products and were called human factors specialists or industrial designers. Over the last few decades these same people coined the term of user-friendly software, a concept that never went very far. With the recent widespread interest in the Internet, its huge business potential and the difference a highly usable website can make over an average website, brought the topic of usability to the forefront. Usability is not mysterious nor difficult and can be readily integrated into most web sites. The key is to consider it early in the design phase and keep it constantly in mind as the site is being modified.

How does one incorporate usability into a web site and measure it?

Usability is incorporated into a web site design by use of a technique referred-to as “scenario analysis”. Scenario analysis refers to the technique of analyzing each step a web site visitor will attempt to perform while visiting your web site and optimizing it for:

NAVIGATION:

1. Appearance of most of the page contents on the common resolution being used currently (800 by 600)
2. The need to visit only the minimal number of pages
3. Minimize the need for scrolling down and to the right
4. Minimizing the need to scroll on pull-down lists
5. Placing the option-icons used near the top of the page In general ensuring that the visitor sees the options they need immediately on each page as it appears on their screen and can take action with minimal scrolling.

WORDING:

1. Compose the text in brief sentences
2. Use an easily readable font
3. Use underlines for links only
4. Do not use more than 2 modes of emphasis (i.e. bolding, italics, other fonts) In general,ensure that the text is easily and quickly readable and the main points of discussion are the first few words of each block of text/paragraph.

GRAPHICS:

1. Use graphics that are meaningful to your visitors
2. Use graphics only to enable quicker response
3. Use only a few graphics per page In general use graphics much like road-signs, to convey something quickly and easily to your visitors. Much like road-signs, the visitor should not have to stop and wonder as to the meaning of the visual.

SOUND/VIDEO/FLASH:

1. Use sound/video and flash to enhance the message or action item available
2. Use sounds and images that are meaningful
3. Do not use such multimedia features simply to impress the visitor with your ability to use such, unless you sell/provide such product and services on your site.

In general, everything should:

1. Enhance your message
2. Accelerate the visitor’s ability to take action
3. Never make your visitor have to think about what they see on your site; their experience should be intuitive and focused on WHAT they want to do, NOT what is available on your site.

If you make the visitor’s task easy and quick you can expect their full attention to be on the products and services available on your site and maximize your chances of making most visitors become customers. Good luck and best usability for your site.

DotComERGO, an East Dennis based firm, operates a fully equipped, high-tech. Usability test lab and assists both web site designers and clients on usability issues. We test for web site usability and consult on improving it. We get involved during site design in cooperation with the programmers of the site to ensure usability is built-into the site, during its construction to test for usability in order to maximize user satisfaction, as well as with existing sites where the user experience is less than satisfactory for the site owner. We refer all site creation work we get involved with, to local partnering companies. We have a full range of usability services available, we are local and are here-to-stay. We offer a free usability review of any site.

For more information contact:
Robert Baron, President DotComERGO, Inc.
508.353.8722
EMail: Email us.
Web: www.DotComERGO.com