USEworthy Spring 2004
The monthly Newsletter from The Usability Company

Welcome to the spring edition of USEworthy. In this issue, we focus on e-commerce and public sector websites. The Argos website, said to be one of the three most visited sites in the UK, undergoes some usability scrutiny by Arlene Kline, Usability and Accessibility Specialist at The Usability Company. Arlene conducted a usability assessment of the Argos website for Internet World magazine Jan-Feb 2004 issue. The Usability Company will be conducting a website usability assessment each month for Internet World magazine. If you would like The Usability Company to assess how well your website shapes up, please drop the editor of Internet World a line at:

Lisa Halabi, Usability and Accessibility Specialist at The Usability Company provides an assessment of the five most common e-commerce web usability mistakes that she encounters through testing in our usability labs on a wide range of e-commerce sites across various sectors.

In the Rules of Attraction article, which first appeared in Internet World Jan-Feb 2004 edition, Paul Blunden, CEO of The Usability Company discusses the business case for usability, especially the issue of Return on Investment. The article explains how poor design equals poor sales suggesting that the quickest ways to double the amount of money you get from your website is to either increase the number of visitors by 100% - or double the amount they spend once they're there. The article suggests that the latter is easier and cheaper and will only cost around 10% of the investment the former would.

These comments are further supported by Joe Coughlin from Victor Chandler and Russell Gould from Charcol Online both long term clients of The Usability Company. According to Russel Gould, Head of eCommerce at Charcol Online, 'Customers were getting kicked back a lot by things we wouldn't have seen without (usability) testing. But a few quick changes resulted in happier customers, a drop in calls to the call centre, and almost immediate hikes in conversion rates…." This article is a must read for clients or those who are considering commissioning some usability work as it illustrates the benefits of usability from the clients' perspective.

In addition, the Guardian article "Is your website friend or foe?" Catriona Campbell, Chairman of The Usability Company comments on the usability issues facing public sector websites. The article discusses the general state of public sector websites and the usability challenges they are facing.

The Usability Company News

The Usability Company is pleased to announce that we recently celebrated our 3rd Birthday, which took place at Century Members bar Thursday March 11. Thank you to the staff, clients and suppliers who attended the party and made it such a great success!

There was much cause for celebration at The Usability Company this past quarter as we opened our new Edinburgh office! The Edinburgh office was opened in February this year in order to fully explore the opportunities Scotland's growing economy presents. Scotland is a particularly attractive location to The Usability Company due to its very strong IT and financial services industries and, of course, it is the homeland of our founder!

The Usability Company has tied up with the New Media Age (NMA) Effectiveness Awards, the biggest prize in new media! Usability will be one of the key tests for would-be NMA Effectiveness Awards winners this year, following an accord between The Usability Company and NMA. The Awards ceremony, which celebrates the best of interactive media for 2004, takes place in May. The Usability Company will assess all the shortlisted entries for the Awards in appropriate categories for usability and the findings will be included in the judging process. Furthermore, Catriona Campbell has been asked back to resume her place on the judging panel for the NMA Awards again this year!

The Usability Company welcomes Toby Turner to our sales team as Senior Account Manager. Toby comes to us from Hemscott Group Plc where he worked as an Online Investor Relations consultant for three years. Toby is now working in The Usability Company's corporate accounts department.

And Finally...

Catriona Campbell was invited to speak to some Brighton University PHD students alongside Guy Winter, Head of HCI at the BBC, January 12 2004. The event focused on iTV and Catriona gave a presentation on "Designing usable and engaging interactivity".

Marty Carroll, Head of Usability Practice, was asked to speak at the Comino conference in January. The conference, which is specifically for local government took place this January in Hinckley, Leicester where Marty spoke about and demonstrated the major usability issues concerning local government websites.

Marty was also one of the guest speakers at the eConsultancy/NetImperative Web Analytics seminar March 11, 2004. Other guest speakers included Jim Sterne and Matthew Tod. To learn more about the seminar and download the presentations please visit the e-Consultancy website.

This April, Catriona Campbell will be speaking at the International Classified Media Association, ICMA General Meeting at The Hague, Netherlands. ICMA represents market-leading publishing companies within the classified media from 38 countries worldwide. Catriona will be speaking and chairing the debate on who the target audience is for classified media and what they want from the online service offerings provided by publishing companies. For more information on this event, please go to the ICMA website.

Five common e-commerce web usability mistakes

Lisa Halabi, Usability Specialist, The Usability Company

It's amazing how often the same design mistakes appear on different websites. Testing in our usability laboratories enables us to critique and study a wide range of websites with end users running through a series of tasks that they might perform on the site in the real world. Alarmingly, we often see the same issues occur with regular frequency on a number of sites. The sectors might be different, from banking and insurance to gaming and entertainment, but the mistakes stay the same. These mistakes tend to frustrate and annoy your customers to the extent that they can't complete the tasks that they came on the site to accomplish and may go elsewhere. Below we've put together a list of some of the five common usability mistakes we see. Have a look and ask yourself, how does your site compare?

1) Not telling people in advance about information required to complete a process.

Many of you may have experienced the frustration of getting to the end of a lengthy online process only to find that you're missing a piece of vital information. The sheer irritation of having spent an hour completing your online mortgage application only to find you need your previous employers post code. "If only I was told I would need this in advance" you wail. A sure fire way to waste your customer's time and send them packing elsewhere. Best to tell them in advance about any necessary information they will need to have to hand. Failing that, allow them to save the session for later.

2) Forcing people to register with your site.

Registration is often seen as a barrier to users unless there is a clear reason for it. Why? Because it forces your users to work and who wants to do that unless you really have to? Imagine a friend has sent you a link to an interesting news article. You click on it only to discover you must register with the site first. There's a good chance you simply won't bother. So if it isn't strictly necessary to do so, consider whether you are prepared to loose a significant proportion of visitors before you force them to register with your site. In many instances removing this barrier is advantageous to both you and them.

3) Hiding prices.

When people visit your website, they will want to find out the necessary information to enable them to make a decision about a product or service. For many e-commerce sites, one of the most important aspects is naturally the cost. Yet, during usability testing sessions, we often observe people unable to find prices on sites because they have been hidden away. "All I want is the price! Where is it?" Holiday websites are often notoriously bad at this. Most people would rather see the prices displayed alongside the descriptions to which they relate rather than on a cryptic table hidden away somewhere. Being clear and upfront about prices is good for your customers because it means that they are not required to hunt them down. Furthermore, this transparency can often increase the customer's trust in your website

4) Not writing for the web.

Writing for the web is not the same as writing for any other medium. It is not okay to take printed matter and place it on your website mostly because it will be too lengthy. Users do not like to read information online and presenting them with wall-to-wall text shows a lack of understanding of how people read online. So how do they read online? In essence, they don't. Eye tracking studies have shown that people don't read screens of text; instead they scan, stopping only to look at things that look interesting or relevant to them. So the key is to make information as short and concise as possible and to enhance "scanability" by using lists and bullet points. Less is definitely more in this instance, but make sure your content is good.

5) Search engines that don't work.

The 'hunter gathers' of the web world know exactly what they're looking for and will often use the search facility to help them find it quicker than browsing. If people don't get good search results and if they can't find what they're looking for after a couple of attempts, there's a strong chance they will leave your site and try their luck on your competitors. It therefore makes good business sense to help your customers find what they're looking for. You need to ensure your Search is up to the task for natural queries and that results are helpful and informative. Google is a really good example, it anticipates that people make spelling mistakes and goes the extra mile by providing assistance when you do. Indeed, some people have even started to use Google as an alternative dictionary to find the correct spelling of words they don't know!

We look at how well the Argos website www.argos.co.uk shapes up in the usability stakes,

Arlene Kline, Usability Specialist, The Usability Company

First published in Internet World Magazine Jan-Feb 2004

GOOD POINTS

• The six methods available to find products

They accommodate those users who know exactly what they want ('Search'), those users who already know the product's Argos catalogue number ('Quick Order'), those who have a rough idea of what they would like (The category lists and 'A-Z Index') and those who require help in choosing a gift ('QuickFind-It Gift' and others). The 'Quick Order' feature has the added advantage of allowing users to enter up to ten catalogue numbers at once for a quick multi-purchase option.

• The search results

Only the top results from each relevant category are displayed initially, with the option of viewing the full set of results. This makes the return of the results page quicker and avoids overloading users with too much information at once.

• The variety of ways for customers to pay for and receive their goods

This integration of multiple shopping channels assists the usability of the online shopping experience by exploiting offline knowledge and experience that users would have gained through their dealings with Argos in the physical world.

LET DOWNS

• The high-level product information pages

The information provided in the list is scant. Ideally, users should be provided with sufficient information to make an informed decision. This information is not available until a product is selected from the list and the detailed product information page appears.

• The quality and clarity of product photographs

Users typically want to simulate having a 'closeinspection' of the product to satisfy themselves of the material's quality. More views of the products and close-ups of details would be useful.

• Stock availability

Users do not know whether a product is in stock or not until the product has been added to the trolley. It could be frustrating to find a product out of stock after going to the effort of locating it. Ideally, the availability of the stock would be displayed when the detailed product information page is viewed.

OVERALL

This site is a good example of how good information architecture can make it simple to present a vast product range. The pages are simply laid out, yet provide users with enough information and related links to investigate further. The categories are clear and the labelling is appropriate. Good use has been made of the alt tags to enhance the clarity of links and images. Overall, this is a tightly-knit site that sits very well with the Argos brand - not overly elaborate, but with plenty of options to satisfy most users' needs.

Would you like The Usability Company to assess how well your website shapes up? Then please drop the editor of Internet World a line at:

Is your Website Friend or Foe?

Websites are put to the test every time someone visits them, but the software used to record the popularity of a government site does not assess how easy it is to use.
Sally Whittle explains why.

This article appeared in The Guardian, Wednesday February 25, 2004 and The Guardian online e-Public section.

The chief executive wants to know how the website is doing. So you ask the IT department to pull up the server records. They show that hits are growing, page impressions are up, and the search engine has been getting lots of use. Great, right? Before you pass those numbers on, think again.

The search engine's popularity could be a sign that users can't find the information they're looking for. High page impressions may suggest they're lost, testing link after link. You don't know because your organisation, like many others in the public sector, never asked people whether your website is easy to use. "The website you have is probably a miserable failure," says Jakob Nielsen, principal of the usability consulting firm, Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen has spent the past decade crusading against complicated menus, badly designed pages and poorly worded home pages. He says that 80% of public sector websites fail the usability test, meaning that the average user can't find and use information quickly and easily.

Usability is a particular issue in the public sector, in which websites need to be accessed by the whole community: the elderly, people with low literacy levels and those with visual or other disabilities. Managers in the public sector have a responsibility to ensure that everyone in the community can access online services, says Mark Gardner, website manager at Birmingham city council. "The site is paid for by its users and we have to be able to justify their investment. That means usability has to take priority over design."

When Birmingham redesigned its website two years ago, improving usability was a top priority. The council worked with a specialist market researcher to conduct focus groups, asking the community what it thought of the new site. "We got a lot of feedback, particularly on the menu and the terminology we used," says Gardner. "We used that to create a new menu based on eight categories of content that people can easily understand."

The focus group is an essential component of user-centred design, which is the holy grail of website usability. "The idea is to build your website around what users want and how they think, rather than how your council is structured," explains Catriona Campbell, managing director of The Usability Company. "When I visit the council's website, I don't know which council department I want to contact. I just want to know when the rubbish is collected on my road."

The first step in improving website usability is to think about how information is put together on the site - something the experts call information architecture. "Does one page follow another in a logical order," asks Campbell. "When I click on a link, do I have an idea of where I'm going to end up?" One way organisations can improve information architecture is to write the headings of web pages (or groups of pages) onto pieces of paper, and ask users to organise them into areas they think are related. "This is a really simple and remarkably effective way to devise a menu structure," Campbell says. Where users don't agree on where a page goes, information can be duplicated or a link created between the two sections.

Once you have a basic structure in place, Campbell advises creating a paper prototype of a typical web page, and again testing the site's design with users. Once this is done, create a prototype website using basic hypertext mark-up language. It might seem like a lot of hassle, but Campbell points out that early user testing often works out cheaper in the long run.

"It's a lot cheaper to move a search button on a paper prototype than it is to move a button on a fully-functioning website," she says. Early and frequent testing can offer warnings on potential problems. When Medway council redesigned its website last year, the three months spent on user testing helped reduce overall development time by half, according to website manager Sean Hale. "It was absolutely worth it because it opened our eyes to issues that we would never have considered ourselves, because we know the site and the information inside out."

The council initially videotaped a series of users trying to accomplish specific tasks on the existing website, and used the results to create a priority list for the new site. The usability team then returned to the users at every stage of development, while a specific disability working group considered how well the site worked for people relying on text-to-speech web browsers and other assisted technology. However, user testing can present managers with problems. "You'll always get people who say everything is rubbish.

People contradict themselves all the time and nothing is ever going to please everyone," says Hale. The best advice is to take the general point of view, unless an individual points out an issue that you are obliged to take note of, such as access for people with specific disabilities. If your website is up and running, it's still possible to dramatically improve usability with a few inexpensive and simple changes. For example, traffic monitoring software can reveal what pages on a website are being visited, and where visitors leave a site. This can reveal services that aren't being used or particular stages in a process where users become confused or lost.

The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) is responsible for awarding grants to innovative community projects from National Lottery funds. However, traffic analysis showed that visitors were often leaving the site without viewing information on how to apply for grants. "We didn't know we'd hidden it, but it was apparent people couldn't find the information," says Maria Stark, Nesta's web manager. Simply moving this information further up a menu structure, or providing a link from the home page is often enough to improve usability. Traffic analysis tools are widely used, but it requires a degree of skill to interpret these results, says Nielsen. A page might be unused because it is hidden, but it's also possible that people don't need that service.

Alternatively, visitors may end up misinformed by content they have found that is poorly written. In the end, Nielsen says, user group testing is the only way to really be sure your website passes the usability test. "There's a tendency to prefer nice, clinical data to the messy process of sitting down with real users," he says. "But remember: they don't smell, and they won't bite. Who knows? They might even be nice about your website."

Rules of attraction

Gary Flood

First published in Internet World

So your new website is fast, slick, got loads of content, and you can buy all your company's goods online off it over a highly secure link. Time to sit back and count the millions as customers stream to your virtual shop front, right?

Alas, you may have to postpone the champagne cork popping just a little longer, because the most vital factor in whether a website is actually used may have been overlooked. How sure are you that your shiny new e-commerce zone is actually usable by the people you want to buy from it? Unless you can answer 'because we asked them,' you may be in trouble, according to a growing chorus of experts (and converts) who say that usability is still a major downfall of UK.com.

For example, in June, design consultancy Salmon delivered a system for Argos that can find any product from the firm's entire 12,000-item catalogue in three clicks.

The fact that Argos - which claims to be one of the three most popular websites in the UK - felt the need to do this should tell you something about the state of usability. The best websites are the ones that don't just put up the best-looking template their web design agency came up with. Instead, they either start from scratch with a so-called user-centred design approach, or only work with those designers who understand wonderful new things called information architecture. Or they take the time and trouble to actually field-test their web shops with real punters, who may find your stellar design doesn't actually help them to do what they clicked on your site to do - research or buy a product.

Don't believe you need to worry? Dutch e-commerce consultancy Fredhopper this year analysed 500,000 consumer website visits. It found less than 10% of visitors to retail websites make a purchase, a worryingly high 20% to 30% of potential customers explore no further than the home page, and 65% of visitors leave after viewing only one or two pages. So why are we bothering?

Similarly, UK start-up website performance evaluation specialist SciVisum claims its equivalent research found 81% of large UK companies rely on customer complaints to improve website services. (Think of how comfortable you'd be with that as your main research process for product improvement.) Put this and other such data together and you soon start to see a disturbing pattern: the missing link in far too many websites may be the customer you're trying to reach and retain.

'If you haven't done user testing, frankly I don't think you should be on the web selling things,' is the take-no-prisoners viewpoint of one of the undisputed pioneers of usability thinking, Jakob Nielsen, principal of the Nielsen Norman Group.

Nielsen - and many others - say they're not banging on about usability just for pure aesthetic reasons. Poor design equals poor sales. If design is bad, it will put users off too easily, or it won't allow them to navigate or cruise the site the way they want to, and that feels most natural to them; it will put too many obstacles in the way of the main purpose and make getting information or closing a purchase too klunky. All that could be robbing you of sales - and sales targets - that you never knew you ever had.

Let's put that in a more business-oriented way. Quickest way to double the amount of money you get from your website? You can either increase the number of visitors by 100% - or double the amount they spend once they're there.

Guess which is easier and cheaper? The latter will cost around 10% of the investment the former would, according to Nielsen and other usability doyens, such as Paul Blunden, chief executive of The Usability Company, a small consultancy based in Clerkenwell that's been talking to companies about how to improve website usability since 2001. A case in point is Danish online retailer Bon A'parte, which carried out a big usability research project at the end of 2002. 'This told us a lot of things we didn't know we were doing wrong,' says its e-commerce manager Brian Andersen. Immediate changes made were fixing the index page, allowing more browsing of the catalogue, and other navigation changes. The result? 'We got an immediate improvement in conversion rates that quickly paid for the work.'

Another example is financial services firm Charcol, which used Blunden's company to help find ways to improve conversion rates on its www.charcolonline.co.uk site. 'We found some of the results quite horrifying,' says its head of e-commerce Russell Gould. It turned out the system wasn't flexible enough to handle the many ways people (naturally) write money figures out, like £100,000, 100K, or 100,000.00, and date formats were also different in different parts of the site. 'Customers were getting kicked back a lot by things we wouldn't have seen without testing,' he adds. But a few quick changes resulted in happier customers, a drop in calls to the call centre, and almost immediate hikes in conversion rates. But surely this should be the role of the designers? Good website layout and functionality is what we pay them for, surely?

The reality is that until recently too many designers concentrated on the 'wow' factor, and may have lacked the in-house usability expertise they should have. As Nielsen puts it, 'That spinning 3D view of the product your web design agency says is cool should only be there after you have tested that real users can view it without being confused.' Blunden adds: 'You can't assume your web design agency does this - you should talk about it from the start and make sure they can demonstrate they have, or can access, the expertise.' If nothing else, many wheels may have been reinvented. 'I'm amazed at how many companies don't just steal the ideas that obviously work from sites like Google and Amazon,' muses SciVisum's chief executive Deri Jones. Leading internet marketing technology companies like Agency.com agree. 'In the UK, we think of usability as a bit fluffy,' says its head of information architecture, Clare Munday. 'That means clients don't want to pay for it; so if your design agency doesn't do it inherently, it may not get done at the right stage, from the start. US and Asia-Pacific clients are much more demanding on this as the best customer experience is a high value for them.'

Luckily, there are a number of ways sound design principles can be applied to either guide design of a revamped website, or lead from the start. But many companies won't have the luxury of a complete overhaul. The good news is that by applying a combination of analysis of existing usage and user testing of fixed components, websites can be fixed in-flight and with great return on investment (ROI). As Agency's Munday says: 'Assessment of the site from a usability viewpoint doesn't have to cost a lot - but can return great value in the form of better customer retention and loyalty, conversion, and scalability.'

We mentioned ROI. It's one of the peculiarities of usability that it's actually quite difficult to separate out specific ROI directly attributable to improved usability on its own. 'It can be hard to quantify,' confirms SciVisum's Jones. 'Talk about ROI on usability is difficult, because few companies isolate it out,' admits The Usability Company's Blunden. 'But users tend to report to us that as part of a general revamp of the website they may see massive increases in turnover for as little as £40,000 worth of work.'

If you think 'usability' and 'user testing' is a weird combination, you probably won't be that worried about 'wasted', 'investment', and 'your website'.

Case Study: Victor Chandler Bets On Usability

Major bookmaker Victor Chandler (www.victorchandler.co.uk) says it's reaped tangible benefits from its usability improvement work.

Joe Coughlin, Gibraltar-based project manager at the firm, used The Usability Company to consolidate three different websites and improve overall usability - a process that took nine months, but resulted in what he says is 'at least' a 30% increase in business since.

Coughlin says a key reason to bring in a usability third-party is that in-house expertise is very useful, but you may still have blind spots as to what real-life customers actually do. 'While we know an awful lot about betting products, we discovered many ways we could make account management and registration go an awful lot smoother,' he told Internet World. 'We also found that online punters didn't always want to do things the way we wanted them to.' As a result, Coughlin is a convert to prototyping and user testing for all e-commerce sites. 'You'll save yourself an awful lot of time,' he says - and advice from your bookie is normally worth following.

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