PaulGSmith.com: Web Analytics, Usability and More

Given that many designers and marketing professionals often get usability wrong, what should we do to help make us more likely to succeed? Steve Krug, in his classic book “Don’t Make Me Think” quickly identifies five important things you can do to make sure your visitors see and understand as much about your site as possible.

1. Create a clear visual heirarchy on each page.
2. Take advantage of conventions.
3. Break pages up into clearly defined areas.
4. Make it obvious what’s clickable.
5. Minimize noise.

Creating a clear visual heirarchy does not just apply to navigation. It means putting important text in larger fonts, setting important text off from the rest of the text, grouping related objects together, and properly nesting related content on our web pages. Ignoring these factors leads to confusion. Most of the time a visitor can figure it out, but often you are just making them work way too hard.

Conventions are those things we have all come to expect on a website. Most visitors have come to expect a logo or company identification in the upper left-hand corner of the page. Most visitors expect a search box in the upper right-hand corner of the web page. Most of us know how to work the shopping cart on amazon.com or bestbuy.com. But designers often want to show that their site is different and unique, or we think that there is just something so different about how we do business that we ignore these conventions. Far mor often than not this leads to a bad web experience.

Breaking pages up into clearly defined areas allows a visitor to quickly find the right area of the page to focus on. It is simply amazing how often it is not clear what is clickable on a web page.  We designers have to avoid buttons that are too subtle; they are too often just hard to understand. And lastly, keep the noise under control. Pages that are simple, easy to read, and have adequate whitespace are much easier to use.

Web usability is all about making sure that your website works for your visitors. Making sure your website provides it’s visitors with the information, functionality and user experience they want and expect sounds like good common sense but so often we web developers fail to do this.  One obvious reason for this is one that is becoming quite well known. Most visitors just don’t think about our products and services the way we do. It is easy to fall into the trap of designing for the internal audience rather than our target audience.

But there are other very important reasons. Many of those involved in designing and creating web sites, just don’t get how people actually work on the web. There is a strong tendency to approach the design of web pages and the creation of content as if it were print. In the print world people pay a lot of attention to the look and layout of the pages, documents, brochures they are reading. They spend quite a bit of time reading the details.

On the web this rarely happens. On the web visitors scan content. They just don’t have time to read every word on every page. Most of us have learned that we just don’t need to read everything. On the web visitors rarely make the best choices. Designers often think their visitors will look over all the information, links, buttons, and other content before making the decision where to go next. Far more typically a visitor will click the first link that looks reasonably close to what they are looking for.

Careful attention to web usability can have a great impact on this situation. Web usability practitioners pay close attention to how people think, what captures their attention, and what kind of mistakes our visitors are likely to make.