Your users are starting to notice that your site, well, it just doesn’t feel right. They can’t exactly put their finger on it:
Is it the search?
Maybe they misspell what they’re looking for and your site doesn’t offer alternatives. Maybe it doesn’t even offer results.
Is it the checkout?
Maybe there are no related products to view or other customer voices to be heard. Maybe your store has strange and unrecognizable products names.
Is it the lack of community? The lack of continuity? The lack of professionalism?
Say you’re a high street store
Your users may start to notice a major difference between your store and your website. They wonder when the offline gloss disappeared. They wonder why they are funneled through your site with qualifier pages and barriers.
Say you’re a bank
Yesterday one of your users watched a clock ticking away their lunchtime in one of your branches and wondered why they couldn’t do this from their desk.
Say you’re a mobile website
Your users are starting to curse you when they try to input search criteria with their big finger into a tiny and misplaced form field. All they want to do is find an address while they are on the move.
Your users are starting to notice and they’re voting with their feet (and hands).
The consequences
Search engines can teleport users anywhere online. They can turn your customers into someone else’s customers quicker than you can say “brand loyalty.” Successful companies have done their homework: they’ve employed analytics methodologies and separated their keywords from their buzzwords. So when your customer decides to go elsewhere, the successful company’s site is only a click away.
These days the bar has been significantly raised. Anyone operating beneath it won’t get much more mileage out of their internet presence.
However tolerant your current users still are there is a whole generation of intolerance on the way. If my son is anything to go by, there is an army of 8 year olds soon to be brandishing credit cards at your front door. If you’re not up to scratch they will take their limited attention span and potential spending power elsewhere. These users are banner blind, brand disloyal and would trade their Nintendos for the next shiniest thing available. And why? In my sons words: “Because it’s class and it does better stuff.”
Playing the blame game
You can blame your back-end and your infrastructure and your development team and more. You can fire and hire product managers, build and demolish sales teams, spend money to fight fires, light fires to raise money. But really, it’s all very simple. All your company has to do is listen to your customers.
I have worked with many organisations that trumpeted usability to customers during sales pitches and skimmed them over during team meetings. I’ve heard developers argue that usability is an entirely subjective field. But those are the companies that aren’t up to speed.
Make your website better, make more money
Support your users goals:
- Create meaningful and rewarding experiences
- Make your interfaces intuitive
- Entice your users with compelling functionality
- Empower your users with relevant features (not creeping featurism)
Educate them with content, make their lives easier through usability. Anything that you don’t do, someone else (your competitor) is doing.
It takes a lot of work: user, stakeholder, and customer service interviews; analytics; personas; user journey maps; accessibility; content development; information architecture; iterations; tests; etc. But it will pay.
The return on investment in our current climate is staying in business and building lasting relationships with your customers. That relationship starts with listening.
June 29, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Speaking of convenience: it’s always a balancing act between what you want your customers to get out of an online experience and what you as a website owner would like them to be doing.
For example, I presume you dislike subjecting people to new windows opening (target=_blank, etc), but you would also like them to stay on your blog and read more articles. Maybe even generate a little business and be known as the premier authority on all things website-y.
Linking me to ‘creeping featurism’ on wikipedia above seemed like a good idea I’m sure, but you can’t compare to wikipedia on content most of the time.
I am the typical internet user who has the attention span of an ADHD child and the patience of someone in anger management.
Send me to wikipedia and it’s like sending that same child to a fireworks, candy and puppy dog store while trying to teach them math.
You might be talking sense but you’ve created too much distraction for me.
People like to think things are simple and straightforward, but often website setup is a considered compromise that brings no clear win for either proponent of each side of an argument.
Hopefully it gets your user to do what you want though, be it buy something or learn something or simply have your company name and brand stuck in their head for future indirect use.
June 29, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Good points; however I have two bones to pick:
1. Links are good practice — in a blog especially. It’s like reference notes sans the MLA term paper format. i.e. it’s a good way to back up what you say.
2. Opening links in a new window isn’t best practice. This is because overwhelmingly, most users rely on the back button. When you open up a link in a new window, the back button is greyed out and a person may become lost.
Yes links can be distracting, and we may lose a person in the middle of a blog post, but I think that’s a small price to pay for a) linking to something that either backs up or expands upon or even disagrees with what we’re writing about and b) staying within the confines of what users expect. That’s best blog practice.
June 29, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Microsoft Word ’97 called. It wants its stickman back
June 29, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Many people now have IE7 onwards at the very least and in that browser new links can be set to open in another tab, which will eventually do away with the horrors of a blank back button for the regular reader.
Aside from best practice, there’s your audience to consider: people who would be reading this blog would be using a browser set up to open tabs for reading of links at their leisure.
That’s why tabbed browsing was developed – so you could read the linked-to page at your own convenience but not have to go back and forth and risk losing your place and train of thought.
You would read a footnote in a book immediately as you came across it, but if you had to flick to page 42 in another book many people would not bother. A link to a one-line explanation of a phrase on wikipedia in this case was far from usable or best practice.
And good practice guidelines are broken when the link you are clicking on doesn’t warn you it’s going to be external to the site you’re on.
It might be a bit nitpicky on my own behalf to even argue the point, but I think it’s fine to have a blog with standard practice, but it is also standard practice to customise that blog for the intended audience and their ease of use.
That’s just my 2c however.