Media Coverage | 2001 Archive

New Media Age: Usability Forum

All the eye-catching design in the world is irrelevant if your site isn't accessible and simple to use. But what are the best ways to achieve this usability? And are customers taking notice? Industry experts share their thoughts with Elen Lewis.

ELEN LEWIS: Is the lack of usability on Web sites going to be holding e-commerce and Web activity back?

CRAIG SULLIVAN: Well, certainly we've seen a major increase in the shopping basket size of our site since our work on the usability and the efficacy of the search. We've also seen increased numbers of registrations on the site.

When you actually sit down and see nine or ten people in tests that you run unable to complete a registration form, or add an item to their basket, then you know you've got a fundamental problem. People persist in putting obstacles in front of customers on Web sites that they wouldn't do in a physical store. People still design really lousy Web sites that don't let customers complete their tasks.

JUSTIN COOKE: We totally agree. We're working with a client at the moment and these are things which are really important in the course of the work that we're doing. It's trading successfully online at the moment, with £500,000 a year sales, but if you look at their Web site you'd wonder how they're actually managing to do that.

We did some stuff with some users and the feedback that we got from it showed that people there were absolutely lost. If you get someone to your Web site and you're an e-commerce store retailer, the sale can still be lost. That's the philosophy you've got to have, and if you start from that assumption, you're going to succeed. That's the way we're approaching this project.

Back to top

PETER COLLET: What struck me in my encounter with usability is the degree to which there's a disparity between what people have to say about the site and what actually happens when you get them onto the site. If you do a kind of psychological analysis of a site in an attempt to understand how people perceive it, what's fascinating is how less natural their real encounters with the site are. When you actually look in and use it, you see how they stumble through the site and use it in a way which has absolutely no bearing on the way in which its been designed to be used. Only then you can see how messy things are.

CATRIONA CAMPBELL: We take clients along to a lab where they're actually testing on real live users. We have a client behind a TV mirror and we actually get them to watch their real user. Unfortunately, Forrester Research says that less than 2% of conversion actually happens as the average conversion rate on site. Now that's probably down to ease of use, difficulty, navigational difficulty.

CO: We've seen things like this before where people used to accept that what they see in front of them is a realistic and accurate representation of what will happen with customers. But once you get to the fourth or fifth person and they find people from different social and economic backgrounds, they start to say "well maybe there's something to this."

PC: I think we all echo those points that you've made, particularly the way in which the client is inclined to transfer, blame us, project the blame out as though it's not their fault. And these people who don't seem to be able to navigate through the site are idiots whereas the fact is the it's probably fair to say it's the designers who are the idiots.

JC: I think that's very true. I think the developers and development community have traditionally been very design-led, and that they design in terms of winning awards rather than looking at it from the user perspective. But maybe that's a trait of a design agency rather than one of an interactive agency.

Back to top

CC: We find that designers and web agencies are certainly waking up to this. We've been working with a number of agencies who have gone back to the client and said, hands up, we may have designed something for you that doesn't work, but we're willing to help you address this and then we'll redesign it for you, because nobody knew what they were doing and there were no standards for the Web.

RUSSELL GOLD: We use our system every single day, so we know how it works, we know how easy it is. And like you said, if people can't get out, there must be something wrong with them and it's not until you start reading some of the comments from customers. And when you start collating those and start reading them more, you suddenly start noticing there are key areas that you need to have another look at. You used an example before, one of the things that we have always focused on is the actual front-end of our sites and how the customer interacts with that and gets to the product that they want to purchase. And no-one from day one had ever looked at the actual application process.

Originally, what we've done is taken a standard application form and put it online. Now the standard application wasn't customer friendly - it wasn't focused around how the customer will answer questions as opposed to how they would interpret what a customer had said. We spent quite a bit of time on looking at that whole application process and reformatting it. And it's taken the application process for doing everything down to say 20-25 minutes from 45 minutes to an hour, where you had to fill in 14 different addresses. Doing this, a number of complaints have disappeared.

CD: You've identified problems and you've come up with solutions, and you may be going through testing, but what difference does it actually make? So we're actually comparing functions before and after the change to see whether we've improved it in some way. I think it's critical to get the statistics back from management and use the metrics that we understand for basket size. Once you start getting these kind of figures out, then people can actually begin to see that there are real tangible benefits to their business.

Back to top

RG: One of the hard things is that we treat all customers exactly the same way, whether they're a personal buyer and know nothing about mortgages, or whether they've been through the process 10 times before. As part of that design, one of the things that we're going to be looking at, and one of things that we're getting smart about, is acknowledging where the customer is, at what stage they're at, and providing them with information as and when they need it rather than giving everybody exactly the same.

PC: That's very important. What strikes me about sites as a species, is that they don't accommodate what we get in face-to-face interactions. The more we can simulate those kinds of processes the more we will succeed. I mean that the business of dialogue and being able to second guess what the other person is saying, is integral to our conversations.

CC: We carried out a test for a large online book company, and books are the sort of things that people don't mind buying online. This company just couldn't work out why all of these users were going onto the Web, buying two or three books and then not filling in the VISA card details at the very end, they were dropping out right at the very end. And they said, do whatever you can. After two or three users, we discovered what they were doing. They were taking their visa card details, where the numbers are usually in blocks of four and then putting spaces between each of the four numbers. The system just came back and reported an incorrect number, because it didn't have the technology to block out the space. That's a really nice example of a tiny little thing that's often been overlooked, and it cost that company thousands of pounds.

RG: The credit card example you used is a very good one. At one point we were experiencing huge volumes, the market was fantastic and we were getting a lot of business through. And to try and manage the business and ensure that it was people who were very serious about proceeding, we made our credit cards fill-in compulsory. Straight away we saw that people were spending 45 minutes going through the application form and then getting there and saying no way. And they'd be interested but then drop off.

Back to top

PC: Did you find out why?

RG: We didn't find out why, but what we did is we changed it to say if you don't want to put your credit details in then press this button, and that would automatically produce a note to our call centre to ring the customer to get the credit card details over the phone.

PC That's a big hurdle isn't it? I mean, putting in credit card details is a barrier.

RC: And the people were putting in bank details, all their expenses, all their assets, but not their credit card online.

EL: What should a good site set out to do? Are there kev rules to be followed?

RG: I think, whatever the site is, whether it's groceries or mortgages, you need to set it up in such a way that the customer can get from point A to point Z directly or go on any path they want through the process. So, for example, if they don't need information on B, C and D, they can click straight into E and F and then to the next stage. But don't put everything in front of them, because people can't take it all in. They don't want to spend hours looking at information that's not useful.

CC: Just going back to the point about test, test, test. I think the common perception is that usability comes at the end of a project, just before you put it live, whether that be digital TV products or whether they're just a wireless or some kind of Internet plan. The nice thing about usability testing is that it has the foundation in psychology and HCI through to the transaction. Which means that if people are trained to help your demographic your users, they can work out what labels they want, the actual steps they want on consumer screens.

There was a large bank in the UK and we used to have a button for the home page which of course we called retail banking services. Now retail banking for a number of users meant retail as in shops, it meant clothing and really in the main they didn't know what the hell it was. Just by changing that one word to personal banking, means that they've increased their customers.

Back to top

CD: Usability is a reality check, it brings you back to the ground. You can be sitting there saying, wow, we've got the best Web site and we're going to go out there and we're going to kick our competition, we're going to win. And you need that sense of self-doubt to be really successful because you've got to constantly question, are we doing the right thing here. That new feature we put in there, are people using it, does it work, you know, what do they think of it? You make the mistake of thinking that everything's hunky-dory and you're in trouble.

JC: You know, traditionally this has been an emerging technology, and emerging technology is used by early adopters. Early adopters pick up techniques quickly. But I think a good analogy is the fact that traditionally on the Web, the chief exec has said to his son, what do you think of this Web site. And the son said, it's great dad, I love it, or they use their kids to advise them on how great the site is. And then the executive thinks, well my son likes it, my son is technology aware, he can programme a video, therefore, board, we're going to go with this design, rather than thinking about their customers. But there's a huge gulf between customer A and customer Z and you have to cater to both of their needs. Then you can start looking at their level of technology for knowledge and understanding and discover what sites they use on a regular basis.

RG: It's also very important to manage the customer's expectations through the process. If the customer comes online sometimes they expect everything to happen online, and it's not always going to. Everything isn't always going to be instant. In our industry you don't make instant decisions all the time and sometimes customers expect that.

CD: A big example of that is if you don't tell people up front that there's going to be a delivery charge. They get to the end of the process, where typically the designer will say okay, we'll put that at the end but then people feel cheated because they weren't told before.

CC: Yes, I represent the Usability Profession Association and one of the core things we discovered is that there's a lack of professionalism in the industry, and indeed no awards whatsoever to raise the profile of the industry. We're trying to objectively develop a professional accreditation scheme for usability professionals. And we're also working on an award scheme.

Back to top

JC: But usability is accessibility as well, I think accessibility is very important as well because there are too many divisions in this world as it is and at the end of the day the network is a great leveller. I think that accessibility is greatly overlooked by designers and developers as well.

CC: We've published a white paper which is for anybody on the Internet. It just highlights the fact that the US Federal Government decided to make accessibility absolutely essential. All of their US government Web sites are completely accessible to everyone. We teamed up with the RNIB and the WA (discrimination act people). The report highlights the problems, the possible solutions and some examples of getting those right, and one of those companies is Tesco, which is largely proactive and has just launched tescoaccess.com. Over 1m people in the UK are disabled in one form or another. That disability could be a visual one such as colour blindness, people with hearing difficulties, people with epilepsy, (because use of Flash can be quite damaging), people with motor infirmity and any neurological problems. So what we've done is to help companies analyse what they can do to improve their Web sites and their interactive TV screens.

EL: So do you think it's likely that the government might issue legislation about this?

SIMON BRODIE: I think it's an area with some recognition already. To be honest if it was to be implemented, a lot of sites would fall short. Quite frankly, if you improve this issue, then you'll probably improve the economics of the whole organisation.

CD: At the very least, people should be adding toolkits to the Web sites. If you do that, then you're widening your audience and any additional audience is to be welcomed.

RG: If you did it now, it's a competitive advantage to make the changes early on.

CD: A lot of people don't realise that actually having usability testing integrated into your whole product development lifecycle reduces the time to market, makes people work better together and it makes it more successful when it goes live. Yet the difficulty sometimes comes about when you suggest it's usability. It can be difficult to get them started.

PC: What do you think the resistance is, the fact that you're consulting people that they don't regard as experts?

CD: It's the not here syndrome. We do that, it's our job anyway, we don't have any money for that, we don't have enough time for usability.

RG: It's really difficult if people don't take it into account, because we've all seen competitors and we've seen some big companies not survive out there because they haven't done this kind of work. But the confidence in that environment will weaken. So you've got to do something more to build it back up.

SB: If there is a bad store, then it doesn't necessarily mean that you never went shopping in a shop.

JC: As the months go along I think it will become like the Premiership. I think to get into the top level there will be key criteria that you'll have to meet and usability will be up there. It has to be.

CD: People talk about converting traffic into business and usability is the fundamental thing that's underneath it all. The companies that adopt an approach to understanding usability within their sites are the ones that are going to be successful. I think we've got miles to go still, miles and miles.

Back to top

CATRIONA CAMPBELL
CEO and co-founder
Usability Company

DR PETER COLLET
psychologist
Oxford University

CRAIG SULLIVAN
e-commerce architect
Waitrose

JUSTIN COOKE
CEO
Fortune Cookie

RUSSELL GOLD
Director of product development
Charcol Online

SIMON BRODIE
E-business development director
Boots plc

Also present was Elen Lewis of NMA

 
© The Usability Company 2007