Usability Problems
While for large commercial sites investment in full-scale usability studies may be not just useful but essential, few small sites can afford such luxuries.
However, identifying problems with usability for your site need be no more complicated than asking a few (honest) friends to act as guinea pigs on your site and, if possible, watching them silently as they do this. Watching users try to find information at your site can be both instructive and quite surprising.
Remember that if at any stage you feel the urge to intervene and explain, then you have identified a usability problem.
List of the most common usability problems
* The site does not state its purpose clearly
* Java applets, huge images, banner ads or flashy elements slow down loading; 10 seconds is about as long as the average user will wait for a page.
* The site requires specific software to be used. Have you ever actually changed browsers or downloaded a piece of software just to see a site?
* Poor navigation, too little navigation, too much navigation and, not uncommonly, no navigation at all
* Bad design leading to poor readability
* Discomfort due to ugly design or inconsistent design. Almost always because a designer overestimated their skills.
* Irrelevance of content - for example the business site that includes biographies and photos of each of the board members. Happy egos on the board; bored users!
* Complexity or excessive originality of design, which requires users to learn how it works in order to use it.
* Inaccessibility because the site cannot be used by browsers used by people with disabilities
Building Interactivity and Personalization
Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you any questions they might have pertaining to a product. Personalization of your website is another key element that can lead to customer delight and can increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross selling and up selling when the customer is buying online.
It tries to restore to the online business the magic of personalized attention that is one of the chief reasons why most people still prefer in-store purchase. You can use personalization to match your customer with the right products through either rules-based or customer analytics based processing. Thus as your software stores customer information and preferences, it can help categorize them into groups. At the same time, observations over time can suggest products to cross-sell and up-sell. Thus when a person buys a subscription to a fitness site, exercise equipment is also offered. Amazon pioneered personalization on the net – when you a buy a book, it shows you other books in the similar genre saying “people who bought this book also bought these”, inducing you to buy more.
|
Home
Tutorial
Home Page
Contact
