Millions of visitors come to websites every day to do simple things. Make a doctor’s appointment. Pay a bill. Learn about a product. Find an answer to a question. The frustrating reality is that these simple tasks often require hours of clicking, searching, and guessing. The problem is even more egregious considering organizations spend millions of dollars developing websites that make life harder for their customers. So what happened?
The Organization Designed for Themselves, Not the User
Most businesses organize themselves by function. Marketing team. Finance team. Sales team. HR team. IT team. When a company builds a website, those functional groups fight for placement of their favorite content on the homepage. Marketing wants banners and brand messaging. Legal wants disclosures. IT only cares about how things are built. Executives want the site to look modern.
Visitors just want to accomplish a task. When organizations design for internal needs rather than user needs, you end up with cluttered websites that lack focus, are difficult to understand, and require hours of training just to navigate.
Sexy Doesn’t Mean Usable
Most modern websites don’t suffer from clumsy, outdated designs. Instead they boast giant introductory videos that span full-screen. Complex animations. Interactive product Explorers. Sleek hover effects. Designers often confuse visual appeal and ease-of-use.
Pretty much anything can look good if you slap it on a Photoshop canvas. But just because a design looks good doesn’t mean it’s intuitive or usable. If people struggle to find pricing. Can’t figure out how to contact you. Get lost while trying to make a purchase. Then your website isn’t beautiful, it’s broken.
Websites aren’t designed to win awards or get accolades from colleagues. Websites are designed to allow people to achieve their goal with ridiculous efficiency. Good design is invisible. Think about the last website that was beautiful. Now think of a website you use all the time. Chances are the most successful designs are the ones you forget about because they just work.
We Know Too Much
Sometimes the single biggest barrier to great design is knowing too much. Everyone involved in the development of a website knows all the menus. Every navigation path. All the features and benefits. Heck, they even know where all the rabbit holes are.
When you know where everything is, it becomes difficult to judge if something is obvious or not. This is called the curse of knowledge and it plagues designers and developers everywhere. For people exploring your website for the first time, your product might as well have been written in an ancient dialect.
There is a Simple Solution…
Watching real users interact with your website is the single best way to understand how easy (or difficult) it is to use. Period.
Watch Five Users Test Your Website
Jakob Nielsen is the grand-daddy of usability. Over the years, he’s preached that watching five users complete basic tasks is the best way to identify usability problems. And you know what? He’s right.
Watching five users is not always practical but most websites only have a handful of major usability problems. By watching representative users try to Complete Basic Tasks, you will quickly identify gaps in your design.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Lookup info for a specific product
- Find a store location
- Schedule an appointment
- Download an invoice
- Submit a support form
- Locate customer service
And then say nothing. It will be tempting to explain where things are or what links do. Don’t do it. Every time you explain your website to a user you should take notes. Notes like, “We should have designed this better.”
Using analytics is great but analytics only tells you what happened. Watching real users stumble through your website will tell you why. The true power comes from using both.
You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Know
Remember how I said that organizations design websites for themselves? The best way to ensure you are designing for the user is to … watch users! Organizations that build websites. Then test them with actual users. End up with way better designs. The key is to start simple and continuously improve. There is no such thing as launching a perfect website.
Aim for good, then make it great.
Usability Testing is Humbling
Did you know most web designers are not designers. They’re marketers or programmers who decided to learn how to design. The same is true for anyone who builds websites. Which means… you’re not your user.
There will always be disagreements about how things should work on your website. When there is a debate, default to watching real users. Little else is as humbling or revealing as watching someone try to make a purchase and not click buy because they can’t find the button.
Become comfortable saying, “I don’t know.” Then watch your users so you do know.
Wrapping Up
At its core, usability is about understanding that every website is unique. Every visitor is unique. And what makes sense to the team building the website might not make sense to the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of users that visit your website each month.
Knowing is half the battle.
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