Go Beyond Usability

I’m a big advocate of usability as a tactic. You certainly don’t want to place obstacles in front of users. However, we urge our clients to go beyond usability.

Usability is related to the individual’s subjective experience. The same 64-ounce glass mug I love to drink from, is a disaster waiting to happen for my young daughter Lucy. Is the mug usable? Yes, for me. Not for her.

The general problem we have with usability as a discipline is its focus on use, not the user. When users land on your website, they bring their own needs, wants, perspectives, and motivations. They’re volunteers on your site and choose whether they’ll continue interacting with your site. If they feel you don’t understand them, if they can’t figure out what to do, or if you’re just not providing the value they want offered, they’re one click away from your competitor’s website.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t remove the faults that usability can identify or eliminate. However, your site being usable can’t overcome an inability to meet the motivations and desires of users.

There is a great article that I reference to often, written back in 2003 titled - Are Usability Experts Any Use?

A commercial website (one in which a business needs to meet ROI objectives and have visitors take some sort of desired action) is more a persuasive and interactive dialogue. It’s akin to the visitor having a conversation with your website, which acts as a digital salesperson.

Salespeople instinctively adapt their sales presentations to fit customer preferences in real life. Reading the customer’s facial expressions and body language and listening beyond the customer’s questions to interpret tone of voice, the salesperson “sells” each customer in whatever way that customer prefers to be sold.

A digital salesperson correctly reads the customer’s interests, then adapts the websites presentation accordingly. Like its human counterpart, the digital salesperson will adjust and conform the flow of information to suit the needs and preferences of each individual. Each click on a hyperlink or query in a search engine is a question your visitor needs answered. You present the information in a way visitors want. The problem in our market at the moment is companies optimise their sites to rank highly for “Search Engines” (machines) however when their prospects get to the site it has a very small change of converting me to the next page because it hasn’t been planned for persuasion.

Are you designing your website with the sales process or just the development process in mind?

Summary:

• Product Feeds and syndication : unimportant
• Usability: important
• Good programming: necessary
• Persuasive copy and design: critical
• Business objectives balanced with customer needs: invaluable
• Customer satisfaction and profit: priceless

Helping customers see what they want, when they want it, and in the way they want to see it is substantially preferable to forcing them to go in a back-and-forth path.

Visitors will reward your newfound respect for persuasive planning with an action that speaks louder than words: a conversion, and hopefully you’ll get that promotion for exceeding company KPI’s!