How improving your website usability can boost your bottom line

eBusiness, marketing and online customer experience managers should be well aware of the important role usability plays in the design of any website intended to have strong commercial and brand-building outcomes.

I am continually amazed at just how confusing the average website is for the average user. There are great lessons to be learned from watching a new user navigate a website in an attempt to achieve their goals.

If you’ve just spent three months or more working closely with your web design partner building your site from the ground up, you never get the opportunity to experience the finished website through the eyes of a customer visiting for the first time. As a result, website managers are often totally unaware of serious usability issues within sites they control.

All too often website users spend their energy trying to work out how a website actually works, rather than focussing on the content and functionality they came for.

This creates frustration, which manifests as frustration with your brand, rather than the positive brand-building experience that websites should be creating.

Looking at analytics related to user behaviour on your site may paint an interesting picture about just how deep people are travelling into your website (or not). They may be giving up before they reach their goal, which is not good for business.

Short of commissioning a full-fledged usability review of your website (which I do recommend) there are some simple principles that can help assess website usability.

The ultimate goal is for user navigation and comprehension to be intuitive, so that your audience can spend their time focussing on your content, key messages and functionality.

This means drawing upon what the user already knows. The less they have to “learn” in order to use your website the more usable it will be. Avoid designing a completely new navigation paradigm for the sake of creativity. You might be very proud of your innovative creation, but your customers may be less than impressed.

This doesn’t mean that your website should be a copy of Microsoft or Apple.com. There are many ways a navigation system can be designed so that it provides a unique, branded experience, while offering a familiar and therefore usable experience. Good usability is transparent. Users don’t notice that they know how to use the website because they don’t need to think about it at a conscious level.

Tapping into things that users know at a subconscious level is the key. While sometimes overdone, metaphors such as “tabs”, “folders” and “desktops” are devices that user interface designers have borrowed from the physical world in order to create usability through familiarity.

Truly unique computer interfaces can only develop as quickly as the population as a whole can expand their frame of reference and understanding.

It is important to quickly establish navigation rules, and these rules should be simple and used consistently throughout the site.

For example, how is a user to know which parts of a particular web page are clickable? What distinguishes navigation from content? You can’t assume that a user will “just know” the answers to these questions. Use design treatments to explain the rules.

Navigation items might all be red, all use an underline, all have a drop shadow etc. Once a user has clicked on one link, they should feel confident that they now know exactly how navigation on the website works. And never contradict the rules as this could undermine the user’s confidence in comprehending the system.

Establish clear and simple rules for each type of navigation. For example: first level, second level, related links, links to external sites and files. The system needs to be logical with the right visual cues, and the right amount of simplicity so that users can instantly “get” your navigation system.