Usability: it’s all about the user experience

What is website usability? Is it simply making sure your website works in every web browser? Or creating a mobile version of your website to meet the needs of your ever-growing number of people browsing the Internet from smartphones and tablets? Or designing an efficient navigational structure to link all your site’s pages to each other? Or is it something more?

Effective website usability involves all of the above activities, and more. It’s about the whole user experience. Smashing Magazine’s e-book, Emotional Design Elements, equates the components of effective website usability to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, in that there are basic needs that must be met before more complex needs can be addressed, and only with all the tiers working together will your website’s usability be as effective as it can be. And we agree. Here are the tiers we focus on when crafting your site’s user experience:

Tier 1: It must be functional – your website needs to do what it has been designed to do. If your website is an e-Commerce site, it needs to be able to allow customers to place items into an online shopping cart, input their shipping and billing information, process PayPal and/or credit card payments, and alert the business running the site that an order has been placed, so they can fill and ship it promptly. If it can’t do this, then no matter how crisp, clean, and fancy the design may be, it will not be profitable.

If you have a service-oriented site (without e-Commerce capability), it’s purpose is likely to be to collect leads so you can secure new clients and/or contracts. For your website to accomplish this goal, it needs to inform prospective clients about your services, be persuasive, offer a method for prospects to request more information while also collecting data on each prospect who expresses interest. This is likely to be accomplished through a sign-up form whereby the information the prospect inputs triggers an e-mail drip campaign designed to provide more detailed information and eventually persuade that prospect to become a customer. If your prospects cannot find the form, or if the form does not work properly, then your site will have failed in its purpose to gather leads.

Tier 2: It must be reliable – Your website can’t just work correctly some of the time; it needs to work correctly all the time. If a customer can successfully buy a product or sign up for a newsletter on Monday, but taking the same actions on Tuesday triggers an error code, your site is not reliable.

Tier 3: It must be usable – These are the usability considerations that most moderately web-savvy people may think of when they hear the term, such as browser compatibility, mobile accessibility, an easy-to-use navigational structure, and the like. Every page of your website needs to clearly guide your prospective customers or clients to where you want them to go, and enable them to find and understand the information they seek.

Tier 4: It must be personable – This is the area of website usability that is often overlooked, partly because it blurs the line between usability considerations and design considerations. Your website needs to be personable and persuasive if you are to have any hope of it bringing in new business for your company. It must speak to your target audience’s needs using language, reasoning, and emotional appeals to which they can relate. Your website’s content should sound like you are speaking directly to your customers in a friendly, personal, yet still professional manner, just as you would in a face-to-face meeting.

At Niche Marketing PR, we examine your entire website, page by page, with the perspective and mindset of your target audience to identify components of your site’s user experience that could use improvement. We will make sure that the entire experience of using your company’s website will leave your prospects with a feel for your company’s culture and attitude, all the information they will need to take the next step in the customer conversion process, an indication of what you would like that next step to be, and an easy-to-use, consistently-functional means of taking that next step.

Speaking of next steps, website usability isn’t the only area we’re prepared to help you improve; it’s just one component of what we like to call The Ability Factor™. The Ability Factor™ is our secret sauce for turning prospects into customers via online marketing using a combination of:

• Design considerations (design-ability)
• Relating your message to your customers’ needs (use-ability) < back to top of page
• Getting your message out via SEO, social media, and more (vis-ability)
• And gathering analytics data so you can see your return on investment (ROI) grow for yourself (profit-ability)