Words

How Usable is Your Web Site?

by Cia Romano

Welcome to the post-boom Web -- a highly competitive landscape where once-bitten clients should be asking Web development companies for demonstrable assurances of success. Many early Web projects overburdened themselves with complex and useless features that later languished. Others suffered from a lack of attention and appropriate funding. Now that the Web hype has crested, how do we approach our online audience?

The Web is not a static product like a new car that gets "cooler" as you add features. The Web is a conversation with your audience. In order to be successful, Web sites must be usable -- respectful of and anticipating the user's needs. All online content and presentation (interface) must be created to serve the user or it is without business value to your publication.

What is usability? You may have heard of "user experience," or you may have conducted focus group studies. While both of these terms are related to usability, they are not quite the same thing. Usability for new media (the Web, CD ROM, PDA, etc.) is the application of known human factors principles to the design of any human/computer interaction.

As Human Factors International succinctly puts it, "If the user can't see it, it's not there." The bottom line for Web content planning is not what publishers or advertisers want users to see. It's a combination of two key concepts: Understanding what users themselves want to do, and making sure the site is designed so they understand how to do it .

This is a revolutionary and disturbing idea for traditional business, dependent as it is on the dominance of advertisers or marketing-speak. Face it -- most people hate being "sold." Don't you? Naomi Klein's incisive No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (St. Martin's Press, 1999) reports from the consumer front lines with unsettling observations on what 15 years of modern "brand-building" have produced: Consumers who resist advertising the way some organisms resist antibiotics.

Web users will ignore whatever you put in their path until they accomplish at least part of their goal, and they always have a goal. The primary misstep of many content publishers is underestimating the user's volition -- after all, the Web is the first truly interactive medium, where users expect to create their own paths without artificial obstacles. This point is succinctly made in the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus Books, 1999), a who-needs-whom examination of user impatience with business as usual.

New business consists of true interaction, which creates user loyalty. The best interactions are created with a deep understanding of usability. Successful online publishers employ usability principles to "get out of the user's way." Web users are performing a number of tasks (cognitive, motor) and those tasks need to be supported . Disappoint them on the first visit, and they are likely to never return.

The most obvious collision between user needs and old-media thinking occurs in the ill-conceived use of most advertising on the Web today. Applying conventional ad thinking to the Web -- saturation, happyspeak, "pushing" users through ads before they reach content -- produces the exact opposite of the desired effect.

How do we know that offline ad models don't work online? We found direct proof -- more than we had expected -- when we conducted a study of online magazine readers in Spring 2001 while conducting a study for an application server product that gave online magazines added functionality (remarkably, without intruding on the primary brand) at San Francisco's Nichols Research, a well-regarded usability testing laboratory. Five distinct user audiences were tested on five major American media sites. The results? All users expressed a dislike of the way advertising was presented on most Web sites, regardless of computer literacy, age, gender, education or income. Their attitudes ranged from resignation, to resistance, to resentment.

It's a short leap from there to the dismaying realization that your company's Web site may actually be driving your core audience away, rather than enticing them on to a deeper relationship with you. Content decisions should not be hampered by your corporate dealings. What does that mean?

The publishing industry again provides an excellent example. Many magazines with name recognition on the newsstand fail to understand that in a new medium, reassurance is key . Maybe you are now owned by AOL/Time Warner, but your readers are not thinking about that when they come to your site. They want to see People or Time without being confronted with the parent company's cross-sell. Why confuse the user surfing to (what she thought was) Newsweek.com by sending them to a confusing MSNBC/ Newsweek home page? I call this brand leakage -- an unwitting practice that occurs when publications over-focus on corporate linkages (or counterproductive "alternate identity") and under-focus on the basics of usability.

(In the second part of this article, we'll see what these basics are, and what you can do to improve usability on your web site)

Cia Romano is CEO and Founder of Interface Guru™ (www.interfaceguru.com), a professional services company specializing in usability, Web interface, and strategy. Cia is a technology evangelist with 20 years' experience in publications, design and marketing and seven years on the Web; she launched Arizona Highways Online in 1995. Cia speaks nationally on user-centric thinking at conferences such as The Folio: Shows and Internet World (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles). Write to her at cia@interfaceguru.com.