From Apply Now,
Your Guide to Web Usability.
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Millions of Sites

There are innumerable sites on the web today offering a variety of goods, services, information and entertainment. The current challenge is attracting users and keeping them coming back to your site when they can easily browse to another site. Usability can help.

Studies of user behavior confirm that users are impatient and have a low tolerance for difficult or slow web sites. Poor usability can lead to wasted time, reduced productivity, increased frustration, loss of repeat visits and loss of money. If users can easily find what they’re looking for, they will be more satisfied with your site. Over time, this builds trust and loyalty.

Survival of the Fittest

• Early studies on web usability indicated that when users get frustrated with a web site, they leave and seek another alternative. Jakob Nielsen summed these up well in a classic (but still relevant) Alertbox column on Failure of Corporate Websites
• Research by User Interface Engineering, Inc. shows that users can’t find the information they want on web sites around 60 percent of the time. Usable web sites stand out from the crowd.

Users on the web don’t take training classes on how to use your homepage, and they don’t take the time to read manuals cover to cover. If getting around your web site requires users to solve a jigsaw puzzle, they will leave.

What Users Say Versus What They Do

Usability takes into account the weaknesses of focus groups and customer surveys by focusing not only on what people say, but also on what they do. Focus groups alone cannot tell you what to fix about your site. For example, people may be “wow”-ed by a cool, slick web site, but when left alone they may not use it if it is too hard to understand.

Usability focuses on what people do versus what they say they do. Usability methods like user observation mean you can watch people use your web site in the way they normally would in the course of day-to-day life. Your users are the real experts, and you can learn a lot from watching them use your site in a real world place like the office or at home.

A Little Goes a Long Way

You don’t need to be a usability guru to benefit from usability techniques. Your company may not have an official usability staff, but some of the most effective usability methods can be done cheaply and have lasting effects on a site’s usability. Even fixing one small usability problem can help and improve a site.

If a task takes ten minutes to complete on your site before a usability test and only five minutes to complete after a usability test, then you have saved the average user five minutes. This may not seem like much, but over time and many users, the time saved adds up.

Usability As An Investment

Why spend valuable time and money on usability? Whether you’re fixing an existing site or planning a new one, the time and money spend on developing good usability shows great returns.

Usability increases customer satisfaction, productivity, and leads to user loyalty.

Studies have shown that the time and money spent on web site development, site maintenance, training and support could have been saved if usability was a major consideration early on in the planning stages of a site. For example, IBM estimates that every dollar spent on usability will return $10 to $100.

Over time, usability can create trust and loyalty and help your site stand out from the crowd. It’s not difficult to start making your site more usable today, and a small amount of effort can have great returns. Usability matters for all of these reasons and more.