Why Usability Matters a review of current information

Abstract - this will identify the reasons to do a usability study during a redesign by looking at the impact of other studies and discussing the potential for cost savings and the competitive advantages it offers.

What are the benefits of doing a Usability study for a site in redesign?

A Usability Study will:

1.     Accurately describes what is both right and wrong about the current site. It will enable you to keep the good elements, improve on what is weak, explore new areas users identify and architect new areas of development.

2.     Describe what users expect to find on a site and allow proper prioritizing and strategic implementation to reduce time to market by outlining the most important elements.

3.     Identify the elements that may be missing from the site and determine the important elements that users will expect to find.

4.     Help define the optimal navigational paths by testing customer expectations.

5.     Explore future possible page layouts and designs early enough in the design stage to avoid costly changes later.

6.     Measure the impact of current messaging; determine what is missing and what needs improvement.

7.     Increased usability decreases customer support needs and documentation requirements.

All of these benefits are in alignment with fulfilling Tauck.com's strategic business goals.

Why Usability Matters

"The magnitude of usability improvements is usually large. This is not a matter of increasing use by a few percent. It is common for usability efforts to result in a hundred percent or more increase in traffic or sales." (Nielsen, July 1999)

Profits are driven more by usability than price.

• "In a 1999 study of Web users, respondents were asked to list the five most important reasons to shop on the Web. Even though low facilities definitely do attract customers, pricing was only the third-most important issue for respondents. Most of the answers were related to making it easy, pleasant, and efficient to buy. The top reason was "Easy to place an order" by 83% of the respondents." (Nielson, February 1999)
• The repeat customers are most valuable: new users at one e-commerce site studied spent an average of $127 per purchase, while repeat users spent almost twice as much, with an average of $251." (Nielsen, August 1, 1997).
• "another usability goal is speeding up market introduction and acceptance by using usability data to improve marketing literature and reach market influencers " (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)
• "[Usability engineering techniques] are quite effective at detecting usability problems early in the development cycle, when they are easiest and least costly to fix. By correcting usability problems in the design phase, American Airlines reduced the cost of those fixes by 60-90%." (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)
• "IBM's Web presence has traditionally been made up of a difficult-to-navigate labyrinth of disparate sub-sites, but a redesign made it more cohesive and user-friendly. According to IBM, the massive redesign effort quickly paid dividends. The company said in the month after the February 1999 re-launch that traffic to the Shop IBM online store increased 120 percent, and sales went up 400 percent." (Battey, 1999)
• "In a 1992 Gartner Group study, usability methods raised user satisfaction ratings for a system by 40%." (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)
• "Usability is one of our secret weapons." The secret weapon appears to be working. Schwab who knows they cannot afford to coast; as more and more newcomers get online, and the competition for their dollars increases, more e-commerce sites are making ease of use a differentiator. "A year ago, it was a rush to put up applications and functionality," Thompson says. "It's now a rush to be useful." (Kalin, 1999)

Costs of Ignoring Usability

• Unusable products most often prevent a customer from accomplishing a productivity task or retrieving information necessary to make an e-commerce purchase. Online shoppers spend most of their time and money at Websites with the best usability (Nielsen, 1998).
• "More than 83 percent of Internet users are likely to leave a Web site if they feel they have to make too many clicks to find what they're looking for, according to Andersen's latest Internet survey." (Arthur Andersen, 2001)

·         An annual survey of the websites of FTSE 100 companies, published 2003, Seventy-two company websites "vary from needing some substantial attention, to needing a lot of urgent attention, to being irredeemably bad and in a state where they should be thrown away,' according to the report."
(6 January 2003)

• According to the Gartner Group, more than 50% of Web sales are lost because visitors can't find the content they're looking for?
• "A study from Zona Research found that 62% of Web shoppers have given up looking for the item they wanted to buy online (and 20% had given up more than three times during a two-month period)." (Nielsen, October 1998)
• "In Jared Spool's study of 15 large commercial sites, users could only find information 42% of the time even though they were taken to the correct home page before they were given the test tasks." (Nielsen, October 1998)
• "A study of software engineering cost estimates showed that 63% of large software projects significantly overran their estimates (Nielsen, 1993). When asked to explain their inaccurate cost estimates, software managers cited 24 different reasons and, interestingly, the four reasons rated as having the highest responsibility were related to usability engineering." (Nielsen, 1993)

Summary: Usability engineering is most effective at the beginning of the product development cycle and data demonstrates that usability offers a better return on investment than almost any other business action. Usability saves you money, improves your competitive position, and improves customer loyalty.

Procedure:

A significant amount of time is spent in preparing questions, identifying candidates, determining messaging targets and if appropriate, preparing information on future design projects and pages.

We know that testing 5 candidates will reveal over 92% of a sites functionality problems. The testing typically takes one day.

With the test candidates chosen we set up the video and equipment lab which we supply.

Our equipment includes specialized software which documents in a timeline, the entire clickstream analysis, and keyboard activity. This will reveal, time on task, intensity of activity, and site functionality challenges. It simultaneously records facial reactions and audio which is synched to the clickstream in a "picture in a picture" model. This powerful tool along with psychographic profiling research on each candidate provides great insights into understanding what the user experience on Tauck.com is all about. We will finally develop a "highlights" video outlining the challenges to both functionality and messaging. This video presents a great baseline for future analysis. It makes it possible for anyone within the organization to review at a future date the challenges faced when accomplishing a specific online task AND what client's expectations were when given that task.

Although testing is compromised by more then one person observing, we can remote feed the testing to anyone on the network given time to install the proper software and assuming minimum system requirements.

The majority of project time is spent in reviewing the 6-8 hours of video, all the data, editing for the highlights (though a DVD of the full session will be delivered as well) and the final written analysis and recommendations. The analysis takes from 10 days to 2 weeks depending upon the results.

It is common for usability efforts to result in a hundred percent or more increase in traffic or sales." - Nielsen, July 1999

Overview - The biggest factor in online profitability and repeat visits is the quality of the user website experience. Usability testing reveals over 92% of site functionality problems. Along with functionality we also measure: messaging, content effectiveness and brand impact. Usability research identifies the elements necessary to deliver the desired experience and offers a better return than almost any other web business investment.

Methodology - We directly test a range of users with specialized software that documents the entire clickstream and keyboard activity. It simultaneously records facial reactions and audio synched to the clickstream in a "picture in picture" format. This output includes: time on task, intensity of activity, and all application and browser changes. Our proprietary methodology combines this data with our psychographic profiling on each candidate to yield detailed insights into user behavior and motives.

Credentials

Why use Web Marketing Resources? Our experience over 8 years has included work on a number of sites in varying stages of size and complexity. We are members of the Usability Professionals Association and follow their Code of Conduct as well as being published for the innovative work in the field.

Todd Follansbee's first usability work in 1997 resulted in a savings to Amazon of several millions of dollars and prompted Microsoft to do an urgent site redesign, this work is further described in the online usability publication WebWord. Since then he has done work for SNET, TheDay.com (shortly afterwards they won New England newspaper web site of the Year), Mystic Seaport's eCommerce launch, and Franklins.net who won Developer's Choice Training Company of the year based in large part on their web presence. He has done Usability work for large and small companies and claims to have never done a study which didn't yield significant results.

WMR's associate, Ph.D. holds a Ph.D. in social psychology and is well-versed in the theoretical underpinnings of attitudes, persuasion, motivation, and behavior change. She has a special focus on advertising effectiveness work, psychographic segmentation, usability testing and concept/message testing-to help clients optimize their marketing strategies.

She has conducted research for Women.com Networks, as well as a broad range of clients, including: Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Citibank, GlaxoSmithKline, Pharmacia, Procter & Gamble and Pfizer.

"She has been a long-term partner of Amazon.com marketing and has provided the advertising team with critical insights about the brand's consumer awareness, relevance, and perceptions that have helped shape the company's overall marketing and advertising plans.  - Diana Stroble, Sr. Advertising Manager, Amazon.com

Credentials aside, usability studies typically comes from the "engineering" discipline. We capture the important data however our background is in Marketing and sales so our focus on messaging and sales is somewhat unique. We understand branding and promotional messaging and deliver insights one would not derive from the pure engineering prospective. We deliver the data on clickstream analysis, time on task, and keyboard activity however we also bring many years of web design and ecommerce experience into our review and recommendations of this data.

The Usability Study will:

•  Accurately describe the strengths and weaknesses of the site and determine the elements necessary for success.

•  Measure the effectiveness of site content.

•  Reduce time to market for site changes by prioritizing the development elements based on understanding user needs.

•  Define the optimal site navigational paths to best meet customer expectations.

•  Explore new page layouts and designs early enough in the design stage to avoid costly changes later.

•  Decrease customer support needs.

Deliverables to include:

•  Raw collected test data

•  Complete audio and video tape of user reactions along with full clickstream analysis

•  Survey Script

•  Profiles on users.

•  A video of test highlights outlining the challenges to both functionality and messaging. This video can become a tool to understand user behaviors when designing future web site solutions.

•  Formal onsite presentation with Q & A.

•  Written Web site review with recommendations for change.  

Project Proposal:

Comprehensive review of and recommendations for improving site functionality

•  Discovery process to clarify site objectives

•  User profile to be developed by client and WMR personnel.

•  Site tasks and messaging objectives will be developed based entirely upon clients goals for site combined with WMR experience

•  Client to review questions prior to testing.

•  Including at least 5 users who meet the demographic/psychographic profile of typical buyer.

•  Onsite presentation of findings with "highlights video of test subjects to support conclusions described in review.

•  All functionality issues - corrective recommendations

•  Review of site corrections with testing as needed for a period of 3 months.

Study includes all costs of testing, equipment, and travel for the presentation.

We ascribe to the guidelines and are members in good standing of the Usability Professionals Association
Web Marketing Resources is a member of and follows the Code of Conduct of the Usability Professionals Association.

Sorry, since we have quoted external sources here, this particular article is not available for reprint in any form. If you need more information or wish to discuss any aspect of this policy or the article please feel free to email me. - Thanks, Todd

 

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