HotHouse makes brands work for people online

We all know usability is key to optimising the user experience which in turn can increase sales, reduce customer service calls, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Everything on an entry page of your site must be designed and written to entice a visitor to click deeper into your site.

Websites clearly need to be easy to use, but these days, that’s just half the story. Websites also need to be easy to find which means that search also has such a huge bearing on usability and design.

When search users land on your site, their query keywords need to be present in the content on your page, giving the search user a level of confidence that they’ve found what they are looking for and are on the most appropriate page on your site.

Prominent, focused keywords help encourage visitors to take a desired action or to continue navigating your site.

Of course, different sites have different objectives, so the desired action comes in many forms, from registering for an event, subscribing to a newsletter, to completing an online purchase or the ‘contact us’ page and so on.

For a site to achieve its goals, its visitors must first achieve their goals. Essentially your website’s ability to persuade visitors to take a desired action is a reflection of the site’s effectiveness.

Clearly mapping out and designing your website so that it’s engineered to help your visitors achieve their goals will ultimately lead to a more positive user experience and maximise the return on your company’s investment.

So it’s critical to get the basics right, both from the point of view of using design best practises and adopting keyword density practises into your pages that allow for optimal organic search results.

But where do you start? How do you prioritise your redesign efforts?

Usability checkup

Objectively assessing your site’s usability and performing periodical audits of your website identifies areas for improvement - those interface flaws that may be stopping your users from achieving their goals - and yours.

Now usability is not rocket science, but it does constitute more than an average slice of common sense. You need to evaluate your site against how well your users can accomplish their goals and as such, your business objectives:

• Value. Is you site offering content and functionality that closes sales and enhances your brand?
• Navigation. Are your menus helping users find the value on your site?
• Presentation. Is your value proposition built into your site?
• Trust. Do you give your users control of their personal data?

As your business is constantly changing - as you launch new products and services or enter new markets or reach out to new demographics, then so your website needs to evolve in tandem. Evaluating your site to ensure it is meeting its goals and delivering ROI is an important ongoing process.

And naturally identifying and prioritising fixes for key flaws that hurt the customer experience will directly impact your bottom line.

But redesigning your site to ensure your users reach their goals isn’t the end of the story. You need to ensure your site is effectively optimised so that users can actually find your site in the first place.

Search is integral

Without doubt, search engines have become an integral part of the online experience. Think about how many times each day you type a handful of keywords into Google.

And it’s not just you. It seems like most of the world relies on Google to deliver fast, accurate and unbiased search.

To be highly visible in natural search results, your site must get crawled and your site’s content and links must be optimised to increase its relevance to search engines.

But does search bring prospects to exactly what they want on your site — or does search take them to a page that frustrates and confuses them? And the first thing they do is hit the back button.

Optimising your site’s content with clear writing which also includes keywords in bullets or headlines and replacing generic terms like “products” with terms specific to your business is critical to ensure that the search users feel that they’ve landed on the correct site.

Knowing who your customers are helps you identify the keywords that best represent their intent when searching for you.

For example, users searching for “air conditioning” may be looking for information on manufacturers of air conditioning systems, or for companies that install or maintain them. With this in mind, companies who install and maintain air conditioning systems can buy more specific key words and develop their ads accordingly.

Clearly how your site is designed and how you optimise your keywords in your site is not a mutually exclusive exercise. It is vital that usability goes hand in hand with findability. Doing one without the other, simply doesn’t add up.

Forrester methodolgy

HotHouse practices the renowned website review methodology from Forrester. Known as an “expert review” or “heuristic review” we conduct these reviews with our qualified and trained Forrester analysts who:

• Attempt to accomplish critical user goals on your website.
• Examine the site for compliance with well-known, research-based design principles and identify flaws that block customers from critical goals.

From this review, you can see the overall strengths in content, functionality, navigation, service, reliability along with important areas for improvement, their priority, and specific recommendations.

And because good usability is the key to findability, the Website Review methodology has organic search optimisation hardwired into the usability evaluation, and as such can identify the areas for keyword usage and optimisation on your site.

Australian Internet use and spending is echoing online growth internationally, as Simon van Wyk writes.

Although Internet usage and spending statistics for North America and Europe are reliable indicators of trends in Australia, it’s a continuing source of frustration that there is so little Australian-based data readily available.

Fortunately, several recently released reports show what’s happening in Australia, and they clearly show the Internet revival is in full swing in our part of the world.

A report from technology analysts Frost & Sullivan has revealed that spending on Internet advertising climbed nearly 50% last year to $605 million, with the report’s author, Foad Fadaghi, predicting 25% annual growth for the next four years, bringing total online advertising spend to more than $1 billion a year in Australia by 2009.

He said Internet’s share of spend will top magazine and radio advertising by the end of next year, catching up with newspaper revenue in 10 years and commercial television in 15 years.

“What we’re seeing here is a generational change with the Internet,” Fadaghi told the Sydney Morning Herald. “Ultimately, what we will treat as normal TV in 15 years’ time will be delivered over the Internet.”

While the average Australian home buys only 3% of its consumer goods online, Frost & Sullivan predicts this will grow to 7.5% by 2010.

Broadband moves

Meanwhile, as the number of broadband subscribers approaches double the number of pay TV subscribers in Australia, broadband providers are stepping into the ring against their television counterparts by offering premium video content.

BigPond has signed a deal with Sony Pictures for the debut of the country’s first internet-based video-on-demand service in March, while a Sydney company, ReelTime is using a network of internet service providers to roll out a movie download service for 20th Century Fox titles that connects to consumers’ televisions via a set-top box.

BigPond is also offering a package of sports highlights, music videos, and game and film trailers in a four-hour bundle updated every week. The packages will be available to both BigPond subscribers and the general broadband public.

On the mobile front, Telstra has done a deal with John Fairfax to offer material from the Sydney Morning Herald and Age websites on Telstra’s i-Mode and Hutchison’s 3 3G mobile phone service. This follows last year’s deal between Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd and Optus mobile’s 3G service.

You have 1/20th of a second to impress me

A problem common to websites in Australia and around the globe is capturing viewers’ attention. Canadian researchers are now claiming in a new study that Web surfers make up their minds about whether they like a Web site or not within 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second) of viewing the home page.

In the study, published in the Behavior and Information Technology journal, volunteers were shown images of Web pages and asked to rate the pages’ visual appeal. They were then asked to re-evaluate the same pages after studying them for a longer period of time.

The study found that the participants’ snap judgments lined up well with the more detailed examinations: opinions formed on seeing the page for just 50ms were very similar to their opinions after a more-measured read.

The researchers reported that the consistency of the subjects’ snap judgments and their detailed examinations of pages may be attributable to a “halo effect,” where an appealing, attractive design may make users more inclined to regard the rest of the page positively, where an unappealing design may cast a negative pall on even the most engaging and relevant content.

They said people enjoy being right, and tend to look for things which reinforce their first impressions before admitting their impression may have been wrong.

“Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” said report author Gitte Lindgaard.

“It really is just a physiological response. Web designers have to make sure they’re not offending users visually.”

Not everyone agrees with Lindgaard. Within days of the survey being published, Web content management expert Gerry McGovern wrote in his email newsletter that, “Not many people would say that eBay is a pretty website. Nor would many defend the visual appeal of Amazon, MSN, Yahoo or AOL. I remember the original Napster website looked like it was designed on the back of a beer mat.

If first impressions are so important on the Web, then why have all the above websites been so successful? Perhaps the answer is that the look of a website comes second to the function of the website.

It is not advisable to ask anyone to judge the visual attractiveness of a website until you have discerned their opinion in relation to how the website allows them to carry out basic tasks.

McGovern concludes, “Function and visual appeal do not have to be in conflict. However, it is clear that websites that are making the most money are focusing much more on function than visual appeal.”