Ease of use has the most wide sweeping impact on your website. Understanding how and why ease of use impacts user experience and profitability is essential to understanding your investment in usability research.
Ease of use has been found by independent third party research to impact the brand experience and to increase:
- Intention to Purchase (Stern School of Business; Andersen Consulting).
- Customer Retention (Forrester Research, Jupiter Media Metrix, Gomez, Gartner).
- Perception of Trust (Cheskin-Studio Archetype Research).
- Perception of Credibility (Stanford University).
- Advertising effectiveness (Jupiter Research; OgilvyOne).
How does ease of use enhance how users perceive your website? How can your site differentiate itself from peer sites with ease of use? How can ease of use help your customer feel successful and create a favorable impression of the company or the brand? To answer these questions we perform comprehensive ease of use assessments to gain insight into the "how, why, and where" of website functionality. Assessing ease of use helps you understand how your website is used based on your customers actual usage. To determine ease of use, we perform expert usability reviews to determine problematic, confusing or difficult areas of the site. The design reviews are based on industry standard best practices including adherence to industry wide User Interface Style Guides. The expert review allows you to rapidly identify critically under-performing areas such as website customer retention leaks, high-bail out pages and functionality that mismatches customer expectation causing confusion and distress.
The other technique we use for rapid evaluation of a website or a web application is the usability test. Usability testing involves actual users who are asked to perform realistic tasks on the site. User behavior is observed, interpreted and compared with known usability issues and cognitive phenomenon. Usability testing allows you to quickly find gaps in how users react to features and functionality, and what the design solutions may be.
So what areas of a design does ease of use impact? Here are a few common areas:
- Navigation systems
- Design and layout of functionality
- Screen real estate
- Use of white space
- Color and graphic elements
- Link label and positioning
- Content design and display
- How features are applied
Contact us and find out how we can help you improve your usability today.