January 14, 2000

Printer ready

Web-Site Usability:
Usability On The Web Isn't A Luxury
continued...page 3 of 3

Related links:

sidebar: Walk-Through: A Usability Experiment sidebar: Get The Right Answers From Testing

And from our sister publications:

EETimes Panel predicts a dot.com revolution for design InternetWeek Web Publishing

Send Us Your Feedback

Making these final steps as pleasant and easy as possible is just as important as any of the other steps. The customers are already at the site. They have already decided what items to purchase. If they leave at this point, it's the site's fault--from a business point of view, this is inexcusable.

The good news is that it's not difficult to have a superior user experience. Since most sites are so bad, it doesn't take much to stand out and be one of the easiest sites on the Internet. Get rid of the spinning logos and boastful marketing; focus the site on people's needs in plain language in a layout that's easy to scan and fast to download.

Providing a customer-centered organizational architecture is important, but it can be surprisingly difficult. It means that competing lines within a company might have to cooperate in the structure of the Web. Remember, customers don't care how the company is organized; they just want to know which product to buy and what its characteristics are. Then the customer wants to be able to buy it, right then and there. If a company doesn't wish to compete with its distributors, it should make it easy to go to consumer sites and get to the item in question immediately.

Although designing a Web site properly is easy in principle, it takes the right staff: Professionals in user experience understand people. They know how to do field research, design for interaction, develop rapid prototypes, and do rapid tests. They work closely with graphic designers, Web coders, and marketing. It's critical to have the assistance of designers who understand people, that the group has an appropriate budget, and that it has sufficient authority to execute their recommendations.

A deep understanding of needs requires field studies of customers. Developing the perfect Web site is a major undertaking, especially because it needs to overcome the Internet's primitive technical limitations. Luckily, the site doesn't have to be perfect--just sufficiently better than competing sites.

How to get a better site? Observe real customers as they actually use the site. A professional user-experience team will go to the customer's home, office, or place of employment, where they will access the site.

This isn't at all the same as a more familiar research tool, focus groups, which reveal what customers think, not what they do. Focus groups reveal what customers think they think, how customers think they behave, but not what they actually believe or what they actually do. Don't trust what customers say--trust what they do.

Usability isn't a luxury on the Internet; it's essential to survival. It's the key technique for superior customer relationships--more than any other technology we tend to associate with customer-relationship management on the Web.

Because switching costs are so low, attention to usability increases the percentage of those who complete a purchase after visiting the site. It's a lot cheaper to increase the human-centered design budget than to double the advertising budget. The Internet follows a kind of Sheer Design Darwinism: survival of the easiest.

Jakob Nielsen is a principal of Nielsen Norman Group (www.nngroup.com), a user-experience company. Donald A. Norman is a principal of Nielsen Norman Group and president of UNext Learning Systems.

return to page 1, 2

Back to Labs
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page

---