Five Usability Tips |
These are my five top usability tips that are guaranteed to improve most web sites. The tips have slowly built up over years of writing Expert Review documents for both ecommerce and regular web sites.
Whilst looking at your site, pretending that you are a busy person and a potential customer and ask yourself three simple questions...
- Am I in the right place? You have less than 3 seconds to grab a visitors attention, if you sell sofas don't sell lounging solutions. It's very easy to fall into the jargon trap, so take a step back and say everything as simply as you can.
- Am I convinced by these jokers? It's rare that someone will land on your site and purchase immediately so what are you doing to convince a customer that you are really real? Pictures of factories, real people help. Blogs can help because by their nature take time to build up. And of course there's all the usual stuff such as having a UK telephone number and a credible address, having a support email address etc all contribute to convincing potential customers that you are worth the effort
- What should I do now? It seems obvious but many sites and stores fail to ask, or even better tell the visitor what to do or what you'd like them to do at least. For example, many companies' really want you to call them and start a conversation and yet they hide their telephone number or give you a tiresome feedback form with too many options to fill out. Make your Call-Outs as clear as you can.
How did your site perform on this simple One-Two-Three? You'd be amazed how, because sites are constantly re-organised and improved how the One-Two-Three, the core purpose of your site gets lost.
Read more Design One Two Three">here.
Most sites and pages have something important that needs to be done, submitting a comment, buying a product etc. I call these Primary Actions. Make sure that these important actions are separated visually from actions of secondary (and even tertiary) importance.
The screen from the Zazzle site is a great example of clearly showing what the Primary Action is, even at this reduced size you can see the main button is "Add to cart".
Go visit your web site and make your eyes go all blurry. Can you still see the one thing that the designers want you to do or click is?
More on Primary Actions">Primary Actions here.
Working on the Information Architecture of lots of sites, I am often dismayed that a huge amount of effort goes into designing the site map compared to designing how items should be linked together. Whilst it's true that we want to help funnel people with our Primary Actions, until the visitor is convinced they are in the right place, keep offering related material.
Go visit your site or store, add things to your basket, generally use your site. Did you ever reach a dead-end? Did you have to use your back button? Are products or pages sensibly related to each other?
More on Always Have Somewhere To Go Next">Always Have Somewhere To Go Next here.
As I said earlier, the jargon trap is so easy to fall in to, this exercise tries to prevent the confusing issues that arise when you invent terminology and use categories. For example, when creating a site many people naturally group similar items together and label those items. The site may have "Accessories", "Peripherals" or "Heavy Duty" items.
Every time we use categories we risk confusing our customers. If I was to offer you a chocolate saying "Would you like a soft of hard centre?", you'd probably want more information. You'd probably want a peek at the actual chocolate names themselves.
A way of avoiding the mystery-chocolate situation is, rather than merely showing category names, like "Hard Centre" or "Soft Centre", include some example contents...
- Hard Centres ( toffee, nougat, plain chocolate ...)
- Soft Centres (orange creme, coffee creme, turkish delight, caramel ...)
Another advantage of showing some of what's inside is that a trigger word, or something that I am really interested in may be included in the contents. I may have arrived at your site uninterested in chocolates hard or soft but be a total sucker for coffee related products. would recommend that the contents contain some of your more popular products.
Go and look at your sites' main navigation. If it uses categories to group things together, can you find a way of adding the actual things into the design.
More on Describe By Contents">Describe By Contents (and chocolates) here.
"We we" sites are those that talk about "we" all time. Does your site have lots of "we-we" language? Working on your Frequently Asked Questions will help you find ways to better express what you are trying to say from a customers perspective. If your FAQs aren't growing daily then you probably haven't found a way to let your customers speak to you as freely as they'd like.
Go work on your FAQs, it's worth it for your Search Engine Optimisation alone.