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.

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...
 

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:
 

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