Etips is a publication of:
Your Guide to Professional Web
Site Design and Development
Hello,
Welcome to this week's edition of Etips.
Have you ever visited a website and wondered what on earth they were selling?
Although a professional looking site is an important part of your online
success, your website's usability is just as important. If your visitors
can't find what they're looking for, they certainly won't waste their time
looking for it.
In today's edition of Etips I will be featuring part one of Corey Rudl's
informative article, How Improving Your Site's Usability Can Increase
Your Buyers by 40% and Boost Each Order By 10%. This article will assist
you in testing your site's usability.
I hope you'll enjoy this week's edition of Etips.
To Your Success!
Visit the Web Design Mastery site
to
download your free chapters (77 pages)!
 How Improving Your Site's
"Usability" Can Increase Your Buyers by 40% and Boost Each Order By 10%!
Part One
By
Corey
Rudl
With all of the factors involved
in designing and building a web site, one of the most influential questions
is often overlooked: Is your site easy to use?
Usability isn't the same as design. Just because you've hired a talented
designer to craft your site and make it look great doesn't mean it's easy
to use. Looking good is a completely different matter from working well!
After all, plenty of beautiful sites have won design awards while losing
customers by the thousands.
How many times have you gotten lost on a good-looking site or abandoned a
purchase in frustration after you couldn't find the information you were
looking for? If you walk into a brick-and-mortar store and can't find your
favorite brand of gherkin pickles, you can simply ask an employee where they
are. But on the Web, it's much easier for a customer to go to a competitor's
site than to go through the trouble of sending an e-mail inquiry.
Whatever your business is about, your web site will have specific goals,
such as convincing people to...
Usability is simply a gauge of how
easy it is for your visitors to do these things.
For an e-commerce site, usability is especially crucial. If people can't
follow your navigation scheme, they won't be able to find your products.
And if they can't find them, how can they buy them?
Obviously, a key measure of the success of your site is its efficiency in
converting visitors to buyers. Yet did you know that, according to market
research from the Gartner Group, more than 50% of Web sales are lost because
visitors can't find the content they're looking for? And another study by
usability consultants Creative Good estimated that improving the customer
experience increases the number of buyers by 40% and increases the overall
order size by 10%!
With results like these, why doesn't everyone test their sites for usability?
Some people mistakenly assume that usability testing is too expensive, too
time-consuming, or too complicated to bother with, especially for smaller
companies.
Fortunately, usability doesn't need to be any of these things. While there
are high-priced consultants who can do it for you, a do-it-yourself test
can be very effective.
Setting Up a Basic Usability Test
While usability testing is most efficiently done as part of the process of
creating a web site, it can be done at any time to improve your site's
effectiveness. If you are planning a design update or adding new elements
to a site, it's crucial you begin the testing before you invest time and
money in making changes.
To do a basic usability test, you just need to find a "sample group" of potential
customers and ask them to perform simple tasks at your web site -- like
purchasing a product, subscribing to a newsletter, or locating specific
information like your guarantee -- while you watch them.
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1. When to test:
You can test usability any time. In fact, even if you don't have a site yet,
you can still test your initial design using rough sketches on paper that
show the layout of key information and navigation links. If you're testing
potential changes to an existing site, you can work from quick HTML mock-ups,
or use your designer's print-outs.
Obviously, the more detailed the testing prototype, the better the results,
but you'll be surprised by how much information you can gather with even
the roughest layouts.
If your site is up and running already, you can test your current design
to flag any potential problems and increase its efficiency. Usability testing
should be an ongoing process to fine-tune your site and make sure you aren't
losing customers -- and profits -- unnecessarily.
2. Set your goals:
Start by setting your testing priorities. Which of the actions your visitors
perform are most important to your business? Focus on a few key things you
want all visitors to be able to do, such as...
-
Subscribe to your newsletter
-
Become a member
-
Add a product to their shopping cart
-
Find answers to common questions
These basic tasks are the "script"
for the test. The more complicated the site, the more detailed the script.
An e-commerce site selling plumbing supplies might use a script that looks
something like this:
-
Click the link for the page on which
you think bathroom faucets are located.
-
Find the American Standard "Ceratop"
faucet.
-
Are there any less expensive faucets?
-
Add it to a list of items to buy.
-
How much will it cost to ship the
faucet to where you live?
-
How long is the warranty?
-
Complete the purchase.
As your testers work through each
task, you'll be able to see how they use your site. Do they browse categories
or look for a search function? Do they encounter any difficulties along the
way? This is an incredible opportunity to get inside your customers' heads
and watch what happens when they use your site.
You can also analyze your site's metrics to see what's not working. If an
analysis of your web logs reveals that tons of people are exiting your site
from one or two particular pages, for instance, usability testing can be
a good way to find out what's behind the high exit rate. This is especially
crucial if these pages are part of your check-out process.
Note: If you can, get a test credit card number from your merchant account
or gateway provider so your testers can complete test purchases. If this
isn't possible, have the testers take the check-out process as far as possible,
and then ask them what they'd expect to happen next.
3. Choose the right people:
The people you choose for the test are important, as they should mimic the
range of users you have (or want to have) using your site. Sit down and gather
any customer demographic information you have to create a series of user
profiles.
What is their level of computer experience? How old are they? What special
knowledge do they have (if your site serves a specific demographic or industry).
A site targeting real estate professionals will have very different user
profiles than a site selling skateboard wheels, so make sure your testers
mirror your actual users.
Strive for a mix of computer experience that matches the mix you'd expect
of your audience. Are most of your customers already comfortable with computers?
Are there some newbies in the mix? You can recruit existing customers if
you're testing changes to the site, but for an existing site, look for people
who haven't used your site before.
Finally, don't worry about getting a large pool of testers: You only need
five or six people to identify 80% of the main problems that may be affecting
your sales.
Note: It's common practice to pay testers for their time and effort. And
while using Uncle Henry or Bob from accounting may save you $40, they're
likely to skew the results if they don't reflect your target audience and
are already familiar with your site.
This article will be concluded in next week's edition of Etips.
About the Author:
| Internet marketing
expert Corey Rudl has gained popularity because what he teaches is not
theoretical approaches to online marketing but real examples of what works
when it comes to having a successful business on the Internet. He's also
the author of the bestselling how-to guide, Insider Secrets to Marketing
Your Business on the Internet. For free tips and resources, please visit
www.marketingtips.com |
|
| Tip of
the Week |
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The most popular image format
used on the Internet is the graphic interchange format, better known as GIF.
It uses a maximum of 256 colors and is best suited for images such as logos
and banners. Joint Photographic Expert Group, better known as JPG is also
popular. It is the best format for photographs, as images can contain millions
of colors.
Today's tip is an excerpt from the highly acclaimed
Web Design Mastery series.
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