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Usability Testing and Design
How usable is your site?? |
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The secret to selling on the Web
This seems obvious, but judging by the vast majority of today's Web sites it's not: Make it easy for prospects to buy. Make navigation through your site intuitive, the key specifications and prices of products and services obvious, and ordering a no-brainer. Recent research has shown that people are spending less time on each page so your site must capture their attention and make it easy to search for what they want. Only 33 percent of site-specific searches were successful. (Nielson Norman Group)
Why usability is important to you:
Travel is the largest sales category in online commerce, according to Human Factors International. With more than 100 million Americans using the internet to make travel plans and reservations in 2005, the ROI from conducting usability studies is enormous.
- In a study of 8,600 Web-using households, Forrester Research found that 67% of users cited ease of use and 59% cited download speed as reasons for continuing to return to Web sites.
- Other studies show:
- 27% of all Web transactions are abandoned at the payment screen while 75% of shoppers abandon their shopping cart without making a purchase.
- According to Userlab, Inc. (ULI), 40% of people never return to a Web site after a negative user experience.
- Slow-loading abandonments, not being able to find what they are looking for, confusing pages, and difficult booking/buying processes cost online businesses up to US$20 billion annually in lost revenue.
- One site studied dropped abandonment rate from 30% to 8% by reducing download time by one second per page.
- Of all the Web sites studied, 84% had pages that downloaded too slowly.
Example:
When office-supply retailer Staples.com relaunched its site following an extensive redesign-for-usability, measured results included:
- 31% decrease in rate of exit from the home page
- 45% decrease in rate of exit from catalog pages
- 67% increase in number of repeat customers
- 80% increase in unique daily visitors in the holiday season, compared to 40% (average) for all e-commerce sites
(Source: MediaMetrix)
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Here are some of the ways ACRO can help you realize the full potential of your site:
- Usability laboratory testing producing documentation of what happens when consumer surrogates complete key conversion scenarios on your Web site.
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Heuristic (expert) evaluation of the usability of your Web site
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Actionable recommendations for redesign to improve usability and conversion rates
- Surveying your customers and prospects to determine what they're coming to your site to find
- Creating scannable pages that lead prospects to the content they've said they want
- Putting the right links in the right places, and making them easily identifiable
- Clearly distinguishing your most important pieces of content
- Making pages readable
- Creating navigation that tells users where they are, how to get where they want to go, how to get back to where they came from
- Keeping contact information and the BUY button in front of users at all times
- Creating indexing and searching capabilities for the non-linear navigation that many users prefer
- Giving your site a consistent look and feel throughout, compatible with the image you want to project to your most valuable customers
- Localizing your site for your specific target markets, domestic and foreign (See our Localization page for more information.)
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E-mail or phone ACRO for a FREE usability assessment:
Let ACRO's professionals evaluate the usability of your current Web site and your information-architecture needs for competing effectively in present and future target markets.
To learn how we can improve the usability of your site, please e-mail us at info@acroglobal.com or call us at 207-633-3934. (Outside the US and Canada, please call 00 1 207 633 3934.)
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