Usability |
Usability ( or User Centred Design ) is simply designing sites that behave the way your customers expect them to behave. It can be amazing how easy it is to do this badly, to make a site that seems "logical enough" but which annoys or frustrates your customers. You know yourself how small glitches can be enough to make you leave a web site.... forever.
The area of usability overlaps with a number of other disciplines, including...
- Information Architecture
- Information Design
- User Interface Design
- Branding
- Content Strategy
One of the biggest benefits that hiring a usability company brings is the Fresh Pair of Eyes effect. Simpy being an outsider to your company frees the usability person of jargon blindness. Even the most user-centred of organisations, knowing how easy it is to "get too close" to your subject matter, bring in external help to provide new insights for improvement.
Usability methods has been shown again and again to provide Return on Investment ( ROI) and can be used early in the design process to prevent creating something unusable or late in the delivery process to catch the glitches. Of course I believe that user centred design principles should be embedded in the whole process but often usabilty companies are used to rescue sites gone bad.
There are a number of ways I can help you make your site more usable:
Expert Review. An expert review will usually be a list of problems, fixes and recommendations to improve your site, often prioritized by the severity of the problem or by how simple the fix would be to implement. This document can be delivered in a presentation or as a document given to your technical team to implement. You may want me to make recommendations specifically to improve conversion rates or look for issues that are causing your visitors concern.
Wireframes. Wireframes are detailed sketches of web page content that show layout and functionality without specifying the look 'n' feel. These are often scribbled and improved on in a meeting.
Activity Flow Diagrams, Scenarios, Customer Journeys. These diagrams show how people will move through your site making sure they can find what they need easily and that there aren't any usability dead-ends.
Working Prototypes. It's often not until something is "on screen" and working that it all conceptually comes together. A prototype can save you time and money by highlighting the omissions and suggesting improvements. Because prototypes can be made and tested quickly a site's functionality can be evolved quickly.
Usability Testing. Running real tests with real people is one of the very best ways of finding any issues your site may have. Even very small guerilla tests are valuable in helping you improve the quality and relevance of your site.
Personas and Use Cases. Personas and Use Cases provide customer insights essential to designing sites your customers will appreciate. Creating a persona or a fictional "example customer" is an exercise that focusses your user-centred design process.
Paper Prototyping. It may sound silly but you can test your software before a line of code is written. Producing working code is expensive. Using just pen and paper you can start planning, testing and improving your site.
Card Sorting and Mental Models. These exercises help you be less company-centric and more customer-centric when designing the terminology for your navigation. It is like reverse engineering your customers to create a Site Map that makes sense to them.
Ethnography and Stakeholder Interviews. The tools your team use to create your site are often over-looked as an important usability issue. Shadowing your web team for a day can reveal dozens of small improvements that have a huge impact on your site's usability.
If User Centred Design is designing sites based on the way our mind work, Persuasive Design is based on realising that not everybody's mind responds to the same things.
Usability ensures you can actually do something, Persuasive Design is about convincing people they want to do the thing in the first place.
Are you somebody who likes specific detail or do you respond to clever branding? Are you visual or textual? Are you logical or emotional? The truth is that it is difficult to pigeon hole ourselves but when creating a site, we need to take into account all our facets and design accordingly.
Presenting the facts or figures is never enough. Borrowing ideas from Neuro Linguistic Programming, or Hypnotic Marketing, Persuasive Design looks to speak in ways that convince your sites' visitors that they want to buy your products. This is not about manipulation but about removing all the anxieties or customers your customers may have.
Does your site speak to the different kinds of people your customers inevitably are?
I can provide you with a Persuasive Review of issues and recommendations to help make your design and copy more persuasive to improve how your messages are conveyed and increase conversion rates.
