S8080 Blog

Via Inspire me now

Pick up any usability book and it will say (rightly so) that considered usability, information architecture and user experience work will save money and get your site performing better whether it’s a Charity Site, NGO information site, E-commerce store or FTSE 100 site. Here’s a couple of usability tweaks, not redesigns, which have had big impacts:

Jared Spool (www.uie.com), usability guru suggested a tweak on Amazon; this added an estimated $2.7 billion to Amazon’s revenue. Jared and the team found that products with more than 20 reviews had a much higher sales conversion rate, so by adding a question ‘was this review helpful to you’ and then tweaking the site to place the most relevant reviews at the top, meaning more conversions – a real big winner for Amazon.

See the full article here: http://www.uie.com/articles/magicbehindamazon

I’m sure you’re frustrated when you have to register to actually buy something on an online store which you probably won’t return to? Here’ another example by Jared Spool (www.uie.com) on a different e-commerce store where a minor tweak increased to site’s annual revenue of $300 million per year!

In a nutshell users would have to login and register after they had filled their shopping cart but before they could actually enter delivery and credit card information to pay for their goods – sound familiar?

Jared and his team found that first time shoppers didn’t want to register – they just wanted to pay for the goods quickly and leave, in fact the users tested really resisted registering. Jared and the team also found that repeat customers didn’t find the process helpful either – with 45% of all customers having multiple registrations. The solution was simple, and one that many sites are now taking, remove the register button before the actual check out but add a message:

“You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

And what about the money?

“The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.”

See the full article here: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/

Giving exact ROI figures is always going to be more difficult for non transactional sites, but with Google Analytics we can quickly benchmark and show improvements (using metrics such as reduced bounce rate, increased average time on site, increased page views, increased page visits and higher Google Adwords conversions if you are using them).

I’m always great to that sometimes a minor tweak to the user interface, labelling or say the process of filling in a form can make huge differences to the usability and performance of web sites.

We’ve just got back from some detailed user testing and the importance of getting the home page to answer VERY LOUDLY the user’s immediate question’s “What is this site? What is the purpose of the site? Who is it for? What can I do here” is clearly still so important…

If the purpose of the site is not clear to the user within the first few seconds of landing on the home page then the user often makes up a site purpose in their mind. This distorts their whole experience of the site making it much harder for them to interpret the site, ultimately meaning they will misinterpret something, get frustrated and leave.

When users do “get it”, understand the purpose of the site, they are much much more likely to understand the rest of the site, follow the carefully crafted user journeys and information scents – achieve their goals and have a good experience…

Getting the purpose of the site across

Every element on the home page builds a users understanding of the purpose of the site and what they can do on the site.

That being said when testing with eye tracking we really saw users scan two areas of the page where they expect to find a concise and easy to understand statement of the purpose of the site, these were the ‘tag line / strap line’ – right next to the logo and the ‘welcome blurb’.

By tweaking the text in the tag line and welcome blurb we were able to ensure participants “got it”

• The tag line – right next to the Logo / Site ID is one of the most valuable bits of ‘real estate’, when users saw some text visually connected to the Logo / Site ID they knew it was meant to be a description summarising the whole site
• The welcome blurb – this short description of the site, above the fold in an obvious position should be a terse description of the site, try and keep it to less than 30 words, we found this really reinforced the tag line if it echoed the tag line and expanded on it slightly.

see: www.wales.com (this wasn’t the site we were testing but is a good example of the principle)

Why have both a tag line and welcome blurb?

Not everyone will use both these elements; if someone is deep linked into the site then there will be no welcome message so the tag line but the tag line next to the logo should give the user a good summary of the purpose of the site. So have both on the home page and use the tag line throughout the site.

In a nutshell – getting the message across

• Don’t be subtle… don’t take the approach “we don’t need to, it’s obvious”
• Use a tag line right next to the site’s Logo – and make sure it is easy to understand
• Use welcome blurb to reinforce the tag line
• Good tag lines are clear and informative
• Vague tag lines are bad

If you can test the site on someone who hasn’t been involved in the site’s design asking the question “What do you think the purpose of the site is”, if the participant can give you a credible answer you’ve cracked it – nice work…

….and it helps with search engine optimisation (SEO)

Twitter and Facebook do it

see: www.twitter.com

Of course some sites don’t need to follow these principles – because they are huge global brands: Apple, BBC etc.

See also:

For a really great no nonsense summary of usability read this book: Steve Krug: Don’t Make Me Think – a common sense approach to web usability.

Microsoft’s Live Search no.1 search term is “Google”.

No.2 is “Yahoo”. Ha!

More here.

Big, big bucks

Google is also now the most valuable brand in the known universe, worth exactly $100,039,000,000.

How was this astronomical valuation ascertained?

"The dollar value of each brand in the ranking is the sum of all future earnings that brand is forecast to generate, discounted to a present day value."