Website Usability
If you had a retail store with the best prices, greatest customer service and widest selection, you’d expect to be successful. But, what if people couldn’t find your products, or were confused by your pricing, or could never find a store clerk? In a brick and mortar store, it’s easy to see when customers can’t find what they’re looking for, can’t find a price, or can’t find a sales clerk …not so for visitors on a website. How do you see if your visitors are having problems when they’re on your site? One approach is to have your website evaluated for usability.
What is Website Usability?
The usability of a website refers to how easy it is for visitors to achieve their goals and how satisfied they are with that process. Usability is a pocketbook issue for websites, because website conversion rates are tied directly to website usability.
Most visitors come to a website with a specific purpose in mind, a specific task they want to accomplish. Just like a customer walking through the doors of a brick and mortar company, a website is having a conversation with the visitor from the time they land on the website until they decide to leave. The success or failure of that conversation is determined by how the website interacts with that visitor, how easily the visitor accomplishes their task, and how enjoyable the whole experience is.
This would all be easier to design and implement if we were all robots and approached every problem in the exact same way every time, but people are unique. How an individual visitor wants to accomplish a task will vary according to their personality and technical expertise or skill level. So, websites need to be designed to accommodate a variety of personality types and skill levels.
I would like to discuss how usability can improve my website’s sales and performance.
How Is A Website Evaluated for Usability?
Websites can be evaluated for usability in a variety of ways.
- Expert Review
- Usability Testing
- Online Surveys
- Logging calls from customer service
- Monitoring e-mail comments, call center calls and live chat
- Evaluating web logs, web analytics and search logs
The Expert Review
An expert review of a site is performed by one or more usability experts. They review the goals of a website and determine how the typical visitor will approach and use the website. The website is evaluated based on a number of best practices, and recommendations are made for improving usability. Because they are seeing your site for the first time, usability experts can bring “fresh eyes” and objectivity to the process. The expert review is a way to get a quick, inexpensive evaluation of your website’s usability.
Usability Testing
There are two basic types of usability testing:
- Quantitative usability testing
- Qualitative usability testing
Quantitative testing involves measuring usability in a scientific manner (how long does it take a typical user to complete a task). Typical users of a website are formally measure interacting with the site. Quantitative testing is very expensive because you need a large number of testers to provide enough data to come up with usable metrics.
As Jacob Neilson said,” Luckily, you don’t have to measure usability to improve it.” Qualitative testing looks to uncover the problems encountered by everyday people trying to do several tasks on a website. By observing 3-5 people using your website you can gain a great deal of insight about your website.
- Are the people making errors that you didn’t expect?
- Are they hesitating because they’re unsure of the next step, or getting stuck, when they’re on your website?
- Are they toggling back and forth between two pages because they’re confused?
- How serious are these events? Does the person seem to recover from the problem and move forward, or do they give up?
At Diamond Hazelton, we perform Qualitative usability testing on websites. Testers are videotaped while they perform several basic tasks. For example on a healthcare site, one task might be:
My newborn is crying all the time and can’t seem to settle down. The tester must find out what these symptoms might mean and what to do next.
If it’s convenient, you can watch the usability test of your site while it’s underway or if it’s not, you can watch a video replay of the test. What the usability tests provide is a way for you to observe people using your site and discover the problems they encounter. From this information you can decide which problems should be fixed and how to go about fixing them.
Online Surveys
Surveys are a way to interview a website’s visitors. Visitors are asked if they would like to participate in the survey and are then asked a few simple questions, such as:
- Were you able to find the information you were looking for?
- How satisfied were you with the results?
- Do you have any suggestions for improvement to the website?
Surveys gauge what visitors are thinking about a website and identify ways to improve the user experience.
Logging Customer Service Calls
Customer service will never be entirely eliminated by a website. But too many websites create more problems than they solve, for this very important group of people. By logging customer service calls, website usability issues will be uncovered and can be addressed. The best customer service is eliminating the reason for a customer service call.
Monitoring E-Mail, Calls and Live Chat
Logging visitor questions when they seek help whether by e-mail, live chat or phone, is a free source of information about a website that can be acted on to improve website usability and overall customer satisfaction.
Website Analytics
Web logs, web analytics and search logs all provide information on onsite visitor behavior, including the following:
- Time spent on the website
- Most popular pages
- What items were searched for?
- Which searched items weren’t found? Should we add them or redirect visitors to a website that does have them?
Prioritize Changes
Using website analytics data in conjunction with surveys, usability testing and information obtained directly from visitors provides a way to categorize and prioritize the changes necessary to improve website usability. Categorizing changes based on their impact on conversion and their return on investment is one way to prioritize the changes. Another way to prioritize changes is based on their impact on your brand.
Net Result: More Sales and Leads with the Same Number of Visitors
Convert more visitors to customers with a website optimized for usability. A better visitor experience and increased visitor satisfaction leads to a higher website conversion rate. The visitor wins and the company wins. What can be better than that?
I am interested in learning more about accessing and improving my website usability.
