Category Archives: User Experience

Bridge Experience, Design, Random, Usability, User Experience, Website Design

Does Your Homepage Leave a Lasting Impression

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Find out what kind of impression your homepage is leaving. Evaluate your homepage now.

First impressions count and online they count for a lot. The homepage is what is seen by many visitors when first arriving at a website. This initial impression will lead to either a lasting positive or negative impression that will affect their decision to continue using your site.

The most important aspect to be aware of is the goals of the site, and in this case the homepage. Having a grasp of what the visitor is trying to accomplish is key to getting the design right.

Designing a homepage is as much a science as it is an art form. It requires attention to detail, putting focus in the site’s purpose and goals, and taking into account the tasks the visitor wants to complete.

How does your current homepage rate?

You can get a better understanding of what is and what isn’t working on your current homepage in about 5 minutes. By taking the evaluation you should also gain insight into some best practice homepage design principles and ideas on how to improve your current homepage.

Get Started

Take the 5 minute homepage evaluation and see the kind of impression your homepage is leaving.

 

Usability, User Experience, Website Design

8 Common Sense Usability Ideas

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When it comes right down to it usability design is a lot of common sense stuff. Sure, someone with experience conducting usability tests, writing personas, or designing information architectures has a deeper understanding of underlying usability issues, but a lot can be said for common sense.

Here a 8 common sense ideas to help you improve the usability of your website.

  1. Don’t make visitors think
    Steve Krug’s original law of usability (Don’t Make Users Think). Upon arriving at your website the visitor should be able to understand the page and know what they are being asked to do without thinking. If a visitor has to spend time thinking about how to accomplish their task that is time they are not spending completing the task, which is why they came to your site to begin with.
  2. Don’t make visitors feel stupid
    Error messages are some of the worst offenders of making visitors feel stupid. Your site should be designed to help the visitor avoid as many mistakes and errors as possible. However, it is impossible to avoid all errors. When errors happen the messages that are displayed should be helpful and useful so the visitor can quickly resolve the issue and move on.
  3. Make it easy to get help during the final stages of the buying process
    Look for ways to answer your visitors’ questions at critical decision points. For example provide answers to common questions, such as ‘What is your return policy’, or ‘do you offer any guarantee’, or ‘what are the shipping costs’ when the user is checking out.
  4. Eliminate Text
    Studies have shown visitors don’t read website content instead they scan the page looking for ‘trigger words’ (words that trigger a click) that are relevant to them. Look for ways to eliminate filler text. Review your current site copy looking for ways to reduce any copy that doesn’t add value to your message. Be aggressive. Then with the remaining copy use headlines, bullets and call-outs to make your page easier to scan.
  5. Don’t use silly link names
    Visitors arrive at your site to complete a specific task. They don’t have time, and don’t want to learn your terminology. Call things what they are and don’t force users to guess at what link name might mean.
  6. Write links with clear direction
    When writing you links, keep your link text simple and clear. Links should be descriptive and lead the visitor to the next destination, properly setting their expectation.
  7. Avoid using pop-up windows
    Pop-up windows remove user control, are disruptive and eliminate the ability to use the browser’s navigation (i.e. back and forward buttons). In addition, the content within the pop-up is not easily printed and often times pop-ups are blocked by modern browers’ pop-up blockers.
  8. Make it easy for visitors to contact you
    If visitors do want to get in touch with you, but can’t find your contact information, you lose their interest and trust. Your contact information including phone number(s) should be visible and not hidden. This becomes especially important if you aren’t selling online but instead using your site to provide information to your visitors that in turn will cause them to call or email for more information.

Small usability changes have been shown to have a large impact on key performance indicators. Addressing these eight common sense issue will help your website and give you an advantage over your competitors.

If you would like help understanding if your website project has fallen victim to any of these usability myths gives us a call or drop us a line.

Design, Usability, User Experience

7 Usability Myths

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Recently I gave a high level presentation to a group of product managers in which I spoke on the business benefits of usability. Part of the presentation focused on 7 usability myths that I’ve heard and experienced while on project teams. I thought it would be valuable to share those here as well.

I realize that this is an incomplete list but these 7 myths were highly relevant to the group I was presenting to.

Usability Myths

  1. Usability is Expensive
    Best practices call for spending 10% of a project budget for usability, which in itself doesn’t account for a lot. However, if your budget doesn’t even have 10%, user feedback can get even cheaper.

    Gorilla usability is cheap.

    Conducting a test can be easy as grabbing a someone sitting in the next cube and ask them to run through something with you. Or, head down to a local coffee shop ask a couple people to help you out and then give them a $25 gift card. The information you receive is well worth the $25 bucks.

  2. Slows Down Projects
    Done right, usability design will actually save time. However, it does need to be factored in from the start of the project.

    One of the major benefits of usability design is that you don’t waste time on features that your visitors don’t want or need. Early usability design techniques show you where to focus resources so that you can deliver a better product in the same amount of time.

    Usability can also save time by helping you quickly settle arguments in the development team. Most projects waste countless staff hours as highly paid business folks sit in meetings and argue over what users might want or what they might do under various circumstances. Usability design allows you to focus on the visitor and takes the guesswork out of requirements.

  3. More than 3 Clicks = Bail
    No study has shown this to be true.

    Users are trying to complete task and meet a goal. As long as they feel that each click moves them closer to their goals they will continue. (See Getting Confidence from Lincoln, UIE)

  4. Users Want to Read
    Your website visitors are pressed for time and are probably multitasking, they don’t have time to read in detail.

    The writing of your site must be simple, short and to the point. To achieve this goal, look to reduce the quantity of text by 50% in the first review and reduce it again by 50% in the second review. The content that remains must be clear and concise.

    Make use of headlines, sub-heads, lists, link text, etc.

  5. Website Issues Can Be Fixed With Instructions
    As stated above users don’t want to read. Instead users muddle through a site.

    Think about yourself, how often do you read before clicking or filling out a form? I would guess most of you start interacting then if you have an issue you’ll try again probably, still not reading.

    Instead of writing to solve problems design your website to be easy to learn and understand.

  6. Usability = UI Design
    Usability is much more than deciding where to place a button goes. Design plays an important role in the usability of a site but the site needs to function first.

    Design can help an ugly, but working, user flow. Design can’t help a broken user flow

  7. Usability Testing = Focus Groups
    Nope. These are two completely different things.

    Usability testing: focuses on the completion of tasks and ease of use. It is a 1 on 1 interaction between the facilitator and the participant. The primary question usability testing answers is: what will make the website easier to use?

    Focus groups: focuses more on feelings & opinions, the likes and dislikes. It is a group to 1 interaction between a group of participants and the facilitator. The primary question focus groups work to answer: what will motivation to a person to buy?

As I mentioned this is by no means is this an exhaustive list. It is instead a starting point when looking to debunk common business misconceptions about usability design.

If you would like help understanding if your website project has fallen victim to any of these usability myths gives us a call or drop us a line.

Design, Usability, User Experience, Website Design

Best Practices for Creating a Successful & Profitable Website

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This post focuses on a few high level heuristics and best practice approaches for creating a successful and profitable website.

Understand Visitors Are Pressed For Time

A key point to be aware of is visitors to your site are extremely busy and pressed for time. As such they don’t want to be forced to read information that isn’t relative to them.

Providing too much information too quickly can do as much damage as not providing enough at all. Visitors do not want to be forced to read a book to understand what benefit you are going to provide them.

Visitors to a website on average will only read about 20% of the text on the average page

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, May 6, 2008:

Within moments visitors quickly scan the overall page, continue scanning some of the text, and then clicking on the trigger resembles the thing they’re looking for. Most of the page goes completely unnoticed.

When the visitor finds something promising they click. If the new page doesn’t meet visitors’ expectations, the Back button is clicked and the process is continued. Worse, the visitor leaves your site completely, costing you valuable sales.

3 Stages of Information Gathering

It’s important to note visitors go through different stages while searching for information.

Information Stages

  • Scanning Information
  • Gathering Information
  • Requesting Information

They first are scanning the page for triggers giving them the confidence that they are 1) in the right place and 2) that you have the product or service to help them solve their current problem.

If those two considerations have been met the user is then engaged. Being engaged they are more willing to give you more of their valuable time. This is the appropriate time to provide them access to click in to more detailed information.

Finally, after they have engaged with your content they are more likely to request information. This is where users will be willing to fill out contact forms to download white papers, submit an online request and/or pick up the phone and call.

These three stages may happen all during the same session or during multiple sessions.

Focus Your Content

The content should be focused on your site visitors. It is important to understand what question visitors have when they come to your site, what problems they currently face and how your business is going to be able to help them.

Understand why someone is coming to your site and the goal they have in mind and then write your content to match the goals you identified. Ideas for content that may better answer visitor questions could be case studies, white papers or before and after results.

When writing for the web the style must be adjusted to cater to the how the visitor browses. Marketing fluff won’t be read. Long paragraphs without images or phrases set out in bold or italics will be skipped. Exaggerated language will be ignored. Avoid cute, marketing names, company jargon, and unfamiliar buzzwords. Be clear and stay focused.

Effective Online Content Should:

  • Be concise and to the point
  • Be scannable – logically organize the content, use multiple heading levels, use bulleted lists and include images to give visitors eyes a resting place
  • Use clear and jargon free language

Your website plays a major role in whether a visitor decides to do business with your company. It is important to make sure your site is designed for success.

Does Your Website Get Results? If not, we can help. SFD’s experience and knowledge will help you get a better return on you website investment. Contact us today.

Small Business, User Experience, Website Design

Organizing Your Website’s Navigation

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Outlining your web site’s structure early in the design process will help facilitate a good navigational structure allowing the visitors to your web site an easy easy to find they are looking for. A consistent complaint coming from website visitors is how difficult it is to find the information they want. By thinking through your navigation and structure upfront you will gain a benefit when trying to update your site in the future.

Understanding your content

Look at the content you have available to use on your website. This may sound obvious but it is surprisingly overlooked. If you have a site currently, start there. Also take a look through your marketing materials, brochures, articles, product descriptions, etc. Once you have an understanding of the information you have available start creating logical buckets, or groupings of the information.

You may find it necessary to create buckets within buckets (sub-directories) in order to organize your content appropriately. For example a photography site may have a bucket that contains examples of all the types of photography the company does. A grouping like this would work but it would quickly become very large and overwhelming. But what if the photography bucket was broken down into smaller groupings such as portrait, black and white, wedding, baby, pets, etc.? By creating smaller groupings the user can quickly and easily narrow down the scope of photography and identify the type that pertains most to what they were looking for.

Once the content has been identified and grouped appropriately you should now be able to label each of the buckets (including any sub-bucket that was created).This will serve as your primary and possible secondary navigation.

Placement of Primary Navigation

Now that the content has been identified, grouped and labeled in a way that logically makes sense to the end user it is important to think about how and where the site navigation will be placed.

By-and-large there are two primary locations for website navigation; across the top or down the left side of the page. Large sites, such as e-commerce sites, use a combination of the two. As the size of your website grows so should your navigation system.

Some sites (this one included) run navigation down the right. This by no means is wrong it just isn’t as common as across the top or down the left. Interesting to note however, is with the proliferation of blogging navigation appearing on the right is becoming more popular.

As with everything there are going to be trade-offs with each type of navigation structure. Listed below are some of the basics of each.

  • Tabs Across the Top
    Located near the top of the page visitors are quickly able to view the most important buckets (primary navigation) of your site. The biggest downside of using tabs is limited amount of space available. The size of the labels combined with the size of the tabs themselves will limit the number of tabs that you will be able to fit without causing horizontal scrolling, a usability faux paux.

    Focus on the main buckets as doorways into your site.

  • Left Rail
    This navigation runs down the left side of your site. Left navigation allows you to show more options than what top navigation does. Showing the main buckets as well as sub-buckets will help users orient themselves with your site and the breadth of offerings.

    E-commerce sites are good examples of sites that use left navigation well. Since there is typically a lot of different types of products available using the left navigation to better organize them helps users quickly to locate what they are after.

Other navigational systems should be considered when your site begins growing larger than a handful of pages (usually 15 pages or more).

  • On-Site Search
    Providing an on-site search is a good way to supplement your primary navigation system. With a few exceptions on-site searches should never be used as a primary navigational system. Again, e-commerce sites tend to do on-site search well.
  • Footer Links
    Footer links, as indicated by the name, run in the footer of your site and provide an additional means for users to navigate your site. As with an on-site search footer links should never be used as a primary navigational system.

    An added benefit of providing footer links is from SEO standpoint. Most likely footer links are text based (not always the case with tabs) allowing search engine spiders to easily read and follow these links.

  • Site Maps
    Site maps provide the overall website structure. Think of the site map as an outline for the information contained within your site.

    Site maps again provide an SEO benefit by bubbling up links to all the pages of your website.

Conclusion

When designing or re-designing your website it is extremely important to lay the foundation upon which your site can be built. This foundation will help guide you in determining your navigational system and your primary and secondary buckets.

Finally, by having a well organized and well structured site you will ease your users’ frustrations and create a user friendly site that helps them find what they are looking for.

Small Business, User Experience, Website Design

27 Simple Ways to Build Trust in Your Website

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Building trust online isn’t achieved by any one single action. Trust is achieved by doing many little things correctly throughout your website. When combined, these will give your visitors a sense of trust, honesty, and stability. The good news is it is easy to create and build trust in your online visitors.

Few business owners focus on building trust in the minds of their visitors. When done well, the trust you build becomes a sustainable competitive advantage.

  1. Make a good first impression with the design of your site. Having a site that looks professional says a whole lot about your company.
  2. Create simple and intuitive navigation. If visitors are not able to find what they are looking for easily, doubt will begin to form about your ability to provide what they want.
  3. Give your website a voice that is consistent with your company’s brand. Make sure to use language that is audience appropriate.
  4. Make it easy for your visitors to contact you. Provide an email form, telephone number, and address of the company.
  5. Answer any incoming emails promptly. Try and answer all emails within 24 hours no more than 48 hours after receiving.
  6. Continue to add content and update your site regularly. This shows that your website is active and a focal point for your business.
  7. Make a routine to check all your website links. Broken links will cause doubts to quickly form in your visitors’ minds.
  8. Spelling and the correct use grammar matter. Typos create the impression of sloppiness and carelessness.
  9. Do not make outrageous claims. Your visitors are too smart and will associate your website with those of the get-rich schemes.
  10. Do not fake your testimonials. Publish real testimonials and always use real names and link to websites where possible.
  11. Write your ‘About Us’ page to be personal and comprehensive. It is important to make visitors feel comfortable and show the real people behind the site.
  12. Add your picture and the pictures of any key people involved with your company. This reinforces the fact that there are real people behind the site.
  13. Carefully consider any advertising you display on your site. If your website is anything but a blog, I strongly discourage any use of advertising.
  14. If you are conducting any transactions over your website make sure you publish a security policy. Clearly indicate what measures you take to ensure that all transactions are secure.
  15. If you offer a guarantee make sure it highly visible. If you don’t offer a guarantee I’d suggest you offering one, making it a 100% money-back guarantee if possible.
  16. If you display pricing keep your prices up to date, and honor those prices. If unexpected costs do arise, a customer will be much more likely to accept them if a foundation of trust is built.
  17. Do not hide charges from your visitors. Make sure they know what to expect in terms of shipping and handling charges.
  18. Make your refund and returns policy visible. Do not bury it, use it as a competitive advantage.
  19. Use the trust of big brand names and companies to piggyback off of. For example if you use PayPal, put the PayPal logo on your site.
  20. Become a member of well-known industry associations for your subject, join up and put their logos on your site. Join your local area Chamber of Commerce and put their logo on your website.
  21. Allow visitors to add comments to your articles. Openness and the exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement.
  22. If you accept credit cards put images of the credit cards you accept on every page of the order process.
  23. Clearly indicate ‘secure website’ whenever you try to get any information from visitors, including newsletter sign-ups, forum input and payment.
  24. Offer a low-cost, entry-level option when selling a service such as a subscription. This could be a one-day, one week or a month trial offer.
  25. If you do offer a trial make it extremely easy to cancel the offer. Do not try and trap your visitors.
  26. Use a high level of security when processing credit cards. Make your visitors aware of all the steps you are taking.
  27. Only ask your visitors for information that you really need. For example, for an email newsletter sign-up, only ask for an email address, nothing else is necessary.

Building and gaining trust with your visitors mostly comes down to common sense and good business practices. You can never do too much to build trust. Continually learn what makes a site trustworthy or untrustworthy and implement the relevant changes to your site.

Small Business, Usability, User Experience, Website Design

Quick Fixes to Simplify Your Website

Simple website design focuses on a visitor experiences your company’s website. By creating a goal oriented website you will get your visitors to the information they want quickly and easily.

Listed below is a short list of simple fixes to increase the clarity and ease of use for your company’s website.

  • Gather only task critical information. Asking for information that you don’t immediately need, even if the fields are optional, will make the form look at a long and decrease completion rates.
  • Don’t ask for information that won’t use. Example: Fax numbers – Seriously, when was the last time you actually faxed anything?
  • Use bullet points to clarify information and facilitate the visitors’ inclination to scan.
  • Create clear and understandable links – leave the marketing fluff at home.
  • Simplify your checkout process. Your visitors have close to a decade of online experience they don’t need an explanation of how to pay online.
Design, Usability, User Experience, Website Design

15 Tips for a More User Friendly Website

Visitors tend to only scan your website’s rather than spending a large amount of time thoroughly understanding the site. As such it is of utmost importance to make your message and options clear. Failing to do so will leave your visitors lost, confused and frustrated. Any of these options will end the same way – a missed opportunity and little chance of a repeat visit.

15 simple tips for a more usable website

  1. The home page should clearly tell your visitor what the site is about
  2. Make sure each page of your website has purpose
  3. Organize content so that headings are in hierarchical order to give clear structure to the copy.
  4. Don’t make your visitors guess about your navigation make the links obvious
  5. Use consistent and meaningful terminology for navigation items and hypertext links (read loose the “cutesy names”)
  6. Restrict the navigation bar to a manageable number of links or buttons
  7. Clearly indicate what your next steps are for your visitors
  8. Remove any clutter that may distract your visitor from the appropriate next steps
  9. Don’t change interactions through-out your site stick with what works
  10. Make it easy to find information such as contact details, pricing and delivery charges
  11. Contently review your site for errors that will make your site look unprofessional
  12. Make sure you text is large enough to be readable (at least 10px, 72% or .75em)
  13. Use a font easily read online (Verdana, Georgia, Arial or Times New Roman ) for your body text
  14. Do not underline any text that is not a link
  15. Include ample white space in the page layout

The more user friendly your website is, the greater the chance of converting your visitor into either a prospect, customer or both.