How can a user-friendly web presence improve customer experience and get you more clients?
BrowseWorks employs a five-step process to make your website super-usable:
- Inventory your complete web presence
- Analyze traffic statistics (if available) to pinpoint problematic areas
- Create a customized strategy to improve the usability of your website.
- Develop a thorough plan, including a timeline and budget
- Implement the plan
Why do you need Usability Optimization?
Let's say you’ve optimized your website so that you’re now on position 2 of page 1 of a Google search results page. Your traffic has tripled compared to what you had six months ago, but your visitor-to-customer conversation rate has not appreciated. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that become customers during their encounter with your site. Your conversion rate may be depressed because visitors to your site can’t access information quickly or utilize features efficiently.
In recent years computer scientists began studying this problem and after observing data they found that the conversion rate was heavily dependent upon how the visitor perceived the site, otherwise known as the user experience. In fact, research has shown that key performance indicators (one of which is your conversion rate) surge upward by as much as 6,567% (that's not a typo) when a website is made more user-friendly. Check out this authoritative report on the subject written by the pioneers of usability, NNGroup.
What is Usability?
Usability optimization, in the context of web presence, improves the interaction between humans and websites. Its goal is to help create efficient and engaging user experience via user-centered design. This is achieved by making sure one has considered all possibilities of all actions a user is likely to take while visiting your web site and making sure that 'all bases are covered' and the user never gets lost and frustrated. There could be nothing worse than making the visitors to your website feel uneducated, as if they are doing something wrong just because they can't make sense of your website. Trust us, that is not an effective approach to earn new clients.
Usability is a field of study that started about 25 years ago and was popularized by Jakob Nielsen, Donald Norman, and Bruce Tognazinni. At the time the focus of development was on making products more powerful and to include as many features as possible. Easy to navigate and interfaces that improve the user experience were not being considered. With the advent of the Internet, however, the field of Usability has grown exponentially, over 5000% since when it came to life. Still, too few understand how important it is to place high priority on what people want and need from the Web. For those who do, usability presents an excellent opportunity to expand their market and gain new customers.