Usability – designing for people

I have updated my list of on-line marketing essentials and top traffic generators.

In many cases, marketers are spending a proportion (probably too small) of their budget on creating a Web site, but not actually marketing it. There is still a misconception that customers find Web sites automatically and traffic grows without any further effort.

This is a bit like getting a fantastic brochure designed and printed at considerable expense, but leaving most of the print run in a skip outside the printers, hoping the right people come along and find it.

Good Web development and e-marketing agencies will be fully up to speed with how things should be done, but if you need to know what kind of measures need to be taken for correctly building and successfully marketing a Web site, this is a good place to start.

There is no doubt that usability is incredibly important for most Web sites, yet an alarming number of sites exhibit serious usability faults suggesting strongly they were not user tested and probably not developed with user-centred design practices.

Usability is becoming an increasingly important element of Web design and development, yet why is it such a tough sell?

1. Consequences are invisible – users might be shaking their heads in despair and bailing out of a site within seconds of arriving, yet most usability problems go unnoticed and unreported; if you can’t see a problem, there’s nothing to fix.
2. Clients want click-click-wow! – Web sites typically get judged on very superficial criteria. A great concept and slick design are enough to get a thumbs up and the invoice paid. Like any business, agencies must satisfy their clients.
3. Fun factor for the project team – creativity, innovation and pushing boundaries are undoubtedly more fun than dry boring user-centred design practices.
4. Usability perceived to stifle design – if a project starts with and is driven by a creative process, there will be resistance to user-centred design practices interfering with aesthetics. There is no reason why this should be such a problem. Teams need to work in harmony.
5. Overstretched budgets – what gets dropped when the budget starts to run out? Usability, and documentation are often the first to go. Core activities gobble up budgets which are already eaten in to by client/project acquisition costs.
6. No measurement of success - remarkably, many Web sites are not evaluated for how successful they are. With most other forms of marketing or promotional activity, measuring results is essential. Web sites seem to escape this scrutiny.

What is missing here? Users.

Clients quite correctly assume that when their appointed design/Web agency creates a Web site, the job will be done well, and this includes whatever needs to be done to deliver a successful project.

Taking responsibility

So, if important work like usability (which includes accessibility) and basic SEO get neglected, is the client or the agency responsible?

Few clients will insist upon specific technicalities, never mind conduct due diligence checks. It is therefore up to agencies to ensure that project scope includes work like usability and that budget allocation covers it.

Herein lies the problem: Web sites are more time (and therefore, cost) intensive than most people realise and it is the less visible work which typically gives way when tight budgets are stretched, particularly by expansive agency overheads.

The solution, therefore, is not only to raise awareness amongst both clients and agencies, but also for budgets to be more accommodating. For this to happen, clients need to appreciate the value, importance and scale of their online initiatives, and agencies need to control costs and manage budgets more carefully.

It is not unusual for large proportions of a Web site budget to get consumed by project acquisition costs and creative work, even before the developers have fired up their code editors. This leaves little room for the likes of usability, copywriting, content development, QA testing, SEO, security audits, online marketing…

It is quite understandable that agencies are driven not only by their own creative values, but also by a desire – and business need – to satisfy their clients. Until users, customers and true results start to count more, usability will struggle to attain the level of importance it needs and deserves.

Laterlife.com has quite a few problems, but consider this one forms-related issue:

View the work and retirement survey form and check out the highly prominent ‘reset’ button near the ’submit’ button. Just what you don’t want to click on by mistake after filling in this long and badly designed form.

Reset buttons are nearly always a bad idea due to accidental clicking. Users rarely want to clear a form and start over.

The reset function can be useful as an undo button for editing a pre-filled form, but we rarely see undo buttons in situations where they would actually be useful rather than a hazardous.

There is no doubt the pace of development in mobile Internet on phones and handheld devices is moving ahead fast. Recent announcements from Apple and Google only serve to highlight this trend.

It’s all happening, and with Apple, it’s not only the excessively hyped iPhone, but the new iPod touch – the phoneless iPhone with its WiFi Web browsing capability – which will help to push mobile Internet applications forward.

Archos also offers some WiFi enabled handheld media players with Web browsing capability, and improvements in mobile phone software and connection speeds are starting to make Web browsing only a thumb tip away wherever you are.

I predict that convenient, usable devices like iPod touch, will bring handheld Internet access to the masses. Even in the home, where many people already have WiFi broadband connections, accessing the Web anywhere in the house on a handheld without needing to fire up a personal computer – even a notebook – will be a big winner.

I have been using mobile Internet services on my phone for a while now and almost take it for granted. The Gmail mobile applet is great, Google Maps for mobile is super useful and Opera Mini makes non-mobile Web sites usable on a small handset. We are also seeing more Web sites starting to serve pared-down mobile pages for speedy access to existing content on the move.

Handset developments are seeing bigger better screens, a choice of connectivity options, some of which are very fast, and built-in GPS which will might have a good effect on mapping and location-based services. Even though it is possible to determine the location of a mobile handset without GPS, this is rarely used due to privacy and accuracy issues.

The mobile networks are doing their bit as well: affordable flat rate data tariffs are becoming more common and fenced-in network access is a thing of a the past.

Developers and agencies need to get on board with this sooner rather than later. Get into the habit of making your Web sites work on mobile devices, at least ensuring that navigation is usable and essential content is available.

Standards based coding will go a long way to achieving this, but it may still be necessary to employ transparent content negotiation techniques. Browser testing will become a bigger issue and mobile browsers, particularly variations of Opera and Safari, will need to be tested.

It makes sense for a Web site to reach the most number of users as possible, and with many more people experiencing mobile Web access, this is another source of eyeballs which should not be ignored.