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Brick No105: A crash course in website usability
By Matt Weston, Friday 22 October 2004 Three ways to use the web The last thing I want to do is reopen the playground spat of two months ago but as I think the hot potato has had enough time to cool, today I want to talk again about web design. (Yep, in a past life I manufactured red rags to wave at bulls). As I see it you have three options: (a) You use the web to show off. Do this if you run a design agency that is held completely unaccountable by its clients. I like the Vincent Flanders translation of web branding: "We're going to spend a lot of your money putting your name out in front of the public, but we're going to do it in such a way that you can't prove we screwed up." (b) You use the web to cut costs. Do this if you run a company that can't figure out how to make money from a prospect calling you up. Bury your telephone number dozens of clicks down into your site. Make it as difficult as possible for your prospect to find what she/ he really wants. (See brick 104). (c) You use the web to make a sale. Do this. Ironically this means taking the exact opposite approach to (b). The way to make a sale is to make it as easy as possible for your prospect to find what he/ she wants. The powers that be call this usability, and it's something that every small business owner using the web to sell should understand, even if you need a webby to put it into practice. A crash course in website usability Please don't misinterpret me on this. I never said that you had to learn Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript yourself to come up with a website that works. But I did implore you to take responsibility for your website making money, and work with your (very talented) web design team to achieve that. Even if your idea of techy is setting the video, your job is to bone-up not on the HTML, but on the HTMMSS . . . How To Make My Site Sell. And that means taking a crash course in the basics of usability: (1) "Learn Good Design By Looking At Bad Design" (Vincent Flanders). websitesthatsuck.com tells you how not to do it . . . "there are no real rules except make the sale". Flanders motto is that if Amazon doesn't do it, it probably doesn't work - it has invested more money in testing usability than anyone else. (2) "Less Is More". Right now, I'd argue that Google is the most useable site on the planet. It has a single, clear objective (Search Me!) that results in a "sale" via its advertising revenue (3) "Don't Make Me Think". That's the title of Steve Krug's very readable book. The less your prospect has to think, the better. Clear navigation should make it easy to figure out where you are, and where you want to go. Spend an hour today reading the interviews on his site then buy the book (4) "Revenues on the web are determined almost completely by usability" (Jakob Nielson in The Economist, 2001). The heavyweight of usability, Nielson has lost his way recently. Sure, usability is a science, but that doesn't mean sites like this sell. That said I receive (and enjoy) his fortnightly "Alertbox" newsletter. (5) "Where's the banana?" Seth Godin's e-book, "The Big Red Fez" was the No1 bestseller on Amazon for months and months . . . but now oddly is only available in paperback. The premise is simple: think of every visitor as a monkey. Where's the banana? If it's not easy to see, the monkey is gone. Good intro to usability. (6) "What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes". Visit this site if you want to get reeeaally scientific research of how visitors actually read websites . . . all based on eyeball movement. Less scientific, but equally useful is webdesignpractices.com (7) "The most common mistake in web design is not testing" (Steve Krug, again) . . . "People launch sites all the time with major flaws that would have been fixed earlier if they'd only done a few user tests early on." The last third of "Don't Make Me Think" is given over to low-budget usability testing. How to get a web critique The last point is the most important. I receive several emails every week from readers asking me to critique new, impending or broken sites. By broken, I mean "doesn't sell". My problem is that as this list gets bigger and bigger (we're now at 8,500 readers) it becomes more and more difficult to find time to answer every single such request. As it happens, I've come up with a better solution. From today, if you have a new, impending or broken site on which you want feedback . . . then drop a line to this address (tell us what you're trying to achieve/ when the site will go live etc). Then, every so often in the Bric-A-Brac, I'll feature a selection of said sites (at my discretion), and ask our very generous community of small business owners to give you their feedback. There's no cost to this service although I am of course open to bribes. (See businessbricks.co.uk/donate.htm) Bric-A-Brac A very quick thank you to long-time reader (and donor) Andy Bell. Inadvertently, Andy provided the inspiration for today's brick by choosing the best slogan possible for his new web design firm, Mint Digital. The slogan? Simply this:"Websites that sell". Remember to sign up: back to top |
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