Make Guests Feel As Comfortable On Your Home Page As They Do In Your Home

By Linda Kolker

When you invite friends to your house for dinner or an overnight stay, you try to provide everything you think they'll need to feel welcomed and at home. You want them to enjoy their visit and to come again. In the same way, visitors to your home page need to feel comfortable and welcomed. When they do, they'll want to come back again, and that's good for your business.

The key to creating an experience that makes Web site visitors return is usability. Good usability makes it easy for visitors to find what they're looking for quickly. And they'll come back for more. Poor usability annoys site visitors because their time is wasted as they try, unsuccessfully, to find what they're looking for.

Time is the medium of exchange, and newcomers to your site have limits on how much time they are willing to invest. If visitors don't find what they want quickly (estimates range from about 9 seconds to about 28 seconds), they leave.

Great usability builds confidence in your organization. It demonstrates that you respect your prospects and customers, and that you deliver what they want in the best possible way. It's the foundation for long-term, mutually rewarding relationships.

The ROI of Usability: Substantial Improvements in Site Metrics and Goal Achievement
Recent research has shown that investing in redesign of a Web site for usability can yield improvements of an average of 83% in key performance indicators, such as traffic numbers (page view statistics in your site's usage logs) and conversion rates. The term "conversion" refers to visitor behavior on a Web site, when they take an action that converts them from strangers to prospects or customers. For example, if visitors are asked to request a white paper, improved usability will increase the number of visitors who submit requests, increasing the "conversion rate."

Web Site Usability Best Practices Are Based on Web Conventions
Although there are no formal standards, Web usability is based partly on conventions–what the majority of Web sites do for navigation, content and design. Web users are accustomed to finding information and performing tasks in a certain way on most sites, and it's in your best interest to make it easy to do those things on your site too.

For example, on site pages that are below your home page, your logo should appear in the top left corner of the screen and users should be able to click on it to return to your home page. It's a small thing that has become a virtual standard on the Web, along with a link labeled "Home" that should appear in the same place on every page in your site.

Research has been conducted on many site usability conventions to determine their degree of importance. These are a solid foundation for prioritizing the usability guidelines to incorporate into your site. Here are some examples:

Your Marketing and Business Goals Should Drive the Structure and Content of Your Site

1. Know what you want your site to accomplish.
   Establish key performance indicators to measure your site's success. This might include reinforcing your brand, generating inquiries, making sales, or providing customer service.
2. Know your audience.
   Who are they and what do they like? What challenges do they face that lead them to your site? Chances are that you have multiple audiences. You can write scenarios that describe a particular user in each market segment, how they live and work, and what might lead them to use your site.
3. Know your competitors.
   Evaluate how effective their sites are, how you want yours to compare, and what you can offer that will differentiate your site from theirs.

Your Site Architecture Map Should Reflect Your Goals, Audiences and Content
The architecture map is the core of your site's usability, the plan that helps ensure visitor satisfaction. It's your blueprint for the smooth flow of your visitors' experience at your site. Careful attention to information architecture allows you to make changes before site development begins. Like home building or renovations, once work is underway, even small changes can be time-consuming. In addition, a solid architecture map provides for easy integration of additional features in the future.

Make Site Navigation 100% Consistent and Predictable
Navigation enables visitors to find their way around your site. Navigation links should be in the same position on every page. For example, if you have an "About Us" link as the left most "button" in the navigation at the top of your home page, that's where it should appear on every other page in your site. The names you assign to navigation links should enable users to accurately predict where a link is likely to take them. For example, they might reasonably expect to find press releases at a link labeled "Press Room."

"Chunk" the Content on Your Pages for Fast Scanning
Most people scan the content on Web sites. Make it easy for them to spot what interests them by formatting text into short paragraphs with subheads.

User Testing Should Be the Start and the End of Usability Redesign
This crucial step is the one that most organizations overlook. However, it's absolutely the best way to know how well your site works. Stakeholders often have strong opinions about what changes need to be made based on their own experiences. User testing establishes an objective basis for evaluating opinions and making decisions about what changes are necessary.

There are many ways to do user testing, including card sorting and paper prototyping before you begin to build your new site. But it can also be as simple as sitting down with three to five people who represent your typical users, and watching them navigate the site you now have. The results will show you what you need to change when you redesign your site. It's a powerful body of information to draw upon. Testing as site development proceeds is a great way to validate decisions about functionality, navigation, content and design. When the overhaul is complete, you can test again and compare results with earlier tests.

Linda Kolker does usability consulting for site creation and redesign projects. She has worked on large scale sites including the University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and Cable in the Classroom; and also on smaller sites. She has been a marketer for many years, working for a wide variety of clients. Learn more about her background. She also writes a blog on usability and social networking.

back to top

 Email to a friend and share the knowledge! – click here