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Increasing website usability

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Kerry Bodine is a principal analyst at Forrester Research whose research coverage includes usability and design best practices for the web and self-service kiosks, user-centred design processes, corporate cultures that support design thinking and design strategy.

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Kerry Bodine offers some simple suggestions to boost your website’s usability.

Whenever we ask web executives how important it is to improve their online customer experience, they reply emphatically, “It's critical.” But firms often flounder when working on site improvements. So, what can they do to get the most out of their websites? Forrester recommends the following 10 tactics for improving your website user experience.

Evaluate your site and determine users' needs

1. Flex your web analytics package

A successful web analytics program can dramatically improve online user experience by separating fact from fiction. Focus your analysis on two key tasks:

  • Examine the actual behaviour of customers on your site. Web analytics software is the best tool for understanding where visitors go on your site, and what they do when they get there.
  • An ‘A or B’ test will let you know what your visitors prefer. By simply routing traffic to either a control version of the site or to a test version of the same pages, web administrators can observe which version performs best against critical metrics like conversion rates or lead generation.

2. Conduct an expert review of your site

Expert reviews are quick and inexpensive ways to determine what's ‘broken’ on your site. To conduct an expert review, first locate potential reviewers who can empathise with your users' needs and then have them:

  • try to accomplish relevant user goals, and
  • look for well-known user experience flaws – for this, you'll need a set of evaluation criteria, like those in Forrester's Website Review methodology.

3. ‘Reach out’ to real users

  • Direct observation and interviews are both effective research methods to assist in determining users’ needs. There are also more creative ways, such as giving users diaries and paging them as a reminder to make entries, or leaving motion-activated cameras in a user’s home for a week to observe at-home behaviour.
  • Conduct focus groups to gather feedback on new concepts. This can be done in a discussion-based setting – i.e. while focus groups have the benefit of free interaction in ‘structured discussions’, moderators can help direct the dialogue toward specific topics and refocus discussion following any diversion in the conversation.
  • Survey the site users to find out who's visiting your site and why. It can also be an effective way to prioritise customer segments.
  • Test designs with users to uncover specific usability problems. Usability testing is an effective way to identify user experience problems that are unique to a particular group of site users.

Redesign your site

4. Focus on fixing usability problems with known solutions

The above methods help companies uncover distinct types of design issues. To make substantial improvements to your site in a short amount of time, first focus on well-understood design flaws with known solutions. For example:

  • make your privacy and security policies easy to find
  • improve text readability, and
  • help users recover from errors.

3 Comments

LukeF
  • Wrote on 13 May, at 09:53AM
All great suggestions.

For smaller businesses many of these maybe out of reach though, so for this group you may want to try:

  1. Use models that help you understand (at a more basic level) how to get started on the right path first time – our four pillars model is a good example.

  2. Think like a single persona – imagine your ideal customer browsing your site, what imagery do they like, what are they looking for, how do they prefer to engage with you beyond your website

  3. Use models (during the build) and analytics / testing (to refine once the site is in place)


Websites look easy to produce because the end results are (or should be) intuitive. This fools many of us into believing that their production is easy, which can be far from the truth. Fortunately there is more free information out there on the web (including articles like this one) to help.
advanet
  • Wrote on 13 May, at 10:56AM
Poor design or bad navigation or both are still quite prevalent on the Web. And businesses need to improve those areas otherwise their websites may become irellevent.
Bridget
  • Wrote on 13 May, at 02:39PM
A simple exercise for smaller businesses:
- get a group of potential customers (or failing that, friends who are willing to think like customers and help you out for a few beers).
- do rough outline drafts of the main areas you want your website to cover. One page per topic, however big or small.
- give each person a copy of all the pages and ask them to 1) write a (preferably short) title on the top of each page summarising what it is about and 2) compile the pieces of paper into groups which make sense to them, and write a summary title for that group of topics. Everyone should do this on their own - when complete, you compare.
- Assuming you have some kind of agreement across the different individuals, you now have a menu structure (title for each group of topics is a main menu item, title for each piece of paper is a sub-menu item)
- You also have user-friendly wording to put on the menus or on links in other text.

...you could also get this group, or your employees, to do a session where you trawl all your competitors sites and look at what they are offering. What is good? Bad? Annoying?

Some simple and immediate tips:
- avoid heavy graphics and videos which take ages to load unless that is a key selling point to your target audience. All it does is make things slow and keep peole waiting.
- put menus where people expect them (ie left hand side or top)
- never use a link which says click here. Instead, put meaningful text in the link: download the full article here check our rates here etc
- ALWAYS include a contact us option at top menu level. Include a postal address, a phone number and an email. Contact forms are a pain in the butt designed to make YOUR life easier, not you customer or visitors life. Wrong viewpoint.
- keep it short and simple. People dont read long epics onscreen.

Theres a great but ancient (ie over 5 years old) book by Jakob Nielsen called something like Website Useability. Funnily enough, design principles dont change that fast, even if the examples are out of date.

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