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Want a site that clicks? Talk
to your customers
By Mark Watson
The Commercial Appeal
Poor Web design, in terms of
usability, caused $3 billion in losses in 1998, David Mabury said.
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WEB DESIGN TIPS |
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Tips from information architect David Mabury
on how to keep a Web site usable:
Be consistent in the design throughout.
Speak the user's visual language. If every other E-commerce
site uses a shopping cart for storing planned purchases, your
site should, too.
Speak the user's actual standard language, whether Swahili
or Swedish.
Keep the user informed about where he is in the site.
Give the user the option of simplifying the online experience.
Don't force users to get software plug-ins.
Avoid designing a site in such a way that it cannot be bookmarked.
Make bookmark titles useful, not generic. For example, certain
sites, when bookmarked, have the title "home page," which
is not informative.
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Mabury is an "information architect,"
which means he helps companies determine what they want to do on
the Web, and then, helps make it happen most efficiently.
He discussed usability standards
at Thursday's meeting of "Lick the Toad," an informal group for
Internet business people.
Mabury struck out on his own
early this year after leaving IXL. He developed his standards based
on Web design guru Jakob Nielsen's principles. For more about Nielsen,
visit his Web site, http://www.useit.com
As an example of what usability
is not, Mabury cited MCI WorldCom's treatment of its telephone card
unit.
"To buy one, it's about six clicks
deep into the Web site," Mabury said. "Why are they bothering? It
would be like Wal-Mart hiding their front door by the Dumpsters."
The premise of usability is fairly
simple, Mabury said. It means determining what people want from
your Web site and then making it easy for them to get it.
"We're not talking about some
pie-in-the-sky, altruistic thing here," he said. "It's all about
return on investment. Why would you spend a half million dollars
on a site, and then no one will use it?"
Clients occasionally ask how
their Web sites can be placed at the top of the list on search engines
such as Yahoo! and Google, Mabury said. The engines often use the
popularity of a site as a guide to where it should rank on the lists,
and that is a function of how convenient the site is to use.
"Buzz builds bookmarks and return
visits," he said.
Usability is "not terribly expensive,''
Mabury said.
"You just have to know what standards
to apply, and you have to talk to your users, formally or informally,"
he said.
Ross Gohlke, owner of Web development
company Grinz Interactive, said uninformed business people occasionally
read an undercurrent that setting up a usable Web site is free.
It is not.
It is particularly important
to research the needs of prospective users, he said.
"Depending on what you want,
you're going to need $50,000, $100,000 or $1 million," he said.
"They don't want to pay for that discovery, when, a lot of times,
that's the most important part."
Mabury suggested visiting sites
he helped structure: http://www.hunterfan.com,
http://www.plandepot.com
and http://www.matcu.com
"They recognized the sites they
had up needed to evolve, and what they have now is very attractive,
very useful, and they didn't have to spend $10 million on those
sites," he said.
To reach reporter Mark Watson,
call 529-5874 or E-mail watson@gomemphis.com
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Appeal
