Usability Category

Like many businesses we have online forms on our website to make it easy for prospects to get in touch with us. Unfortunately like many businesses this means we also get a lot of spam. Did I say a lot? I mean a ton. It’s frustrating and takes time to be cleared out of the in-box each day. So much so that my husband and I have discussed adding a captcha option to our forms.

If you’ve not heard of captcha before I’m sure you’ll remember a time you’ve filled out a form online and had to enter some funny looking characters before you could submit it. I also suspect you had to fill it out a few times because they never seem to be accepted first go. Now I don’t know about you but this frustrates the heck out of me - I just want to submit a form - why are you making it so difficult?

So I suspect you know what we decided. Not to captcha. Its a fantastic idea, and definitely has some uses, but why should we make our prospective clients lives that much harder to make our lives easier? It just doesn’t make (business) sense.

I am researching the competitive market for a new client and have been surprised at how poor the usability is on many of their websites. And these aren’t the sort of errors that could be overlooked - they are basic mistakes that anyone using their website will come across.

If any of these sites had performed some basic usability testing these mistakes would have been found and corrected. And it’s so easy. Grabs some members of your family and friends and watch them while they visit your website. Ask them to perform some tasks (eg purchase a widget, make an enquiry, find the contact details) and watch how easy or hard it is for them. This will give you a good indication of what areas of your website need improving. Then improve them.

Making your website an enjoyable, easy experience will help turn your visitors from frustrated browsers into customers. And who doesn’t want that?

My friend, Kim has a great video interview out talking about SEO and Usability. Kim is a great proponent on ensuring a website is usable once a visitor lands there. As she says there’s no point in being number 1 in the search engines if visitors can’t find what they’re looking for on your site.

Kim also talks a little about the start of Cre8asite Forums, my home away from home. It’s a great interview and well worth a look.

I’ve been researching a particular market for a client and every single website I land on has audio - not just the crappy music we all know and love but someone speaking. Good grief how can one read the text and follow the audio at the same time? It so annoying and of course there’s no way to switch it off bar muting my speakers.

I suspect some enterprising soul has gone and pitched to all the businesses in the area. Telling them how great, and cutting edge having an audio commentary is. Not. If I was an actual buyer I’d be off those sites so darn fast my mouse would leave rubber marks.

I wish more people would put themselves in the shoes of their users and consider whether a “feature” really is a “feature”. 9 times out of 10 I’d bet my house it does nothing but drive people to their competitor’s websites. Which, when you think about it, is really good for my client.

I’m a book lover. Everything about books, from their smell and design to the content inside appeals to me. So you can imagine my pleasure when discovering great books about my other great passion - web design. So without further ado here’s 3 of my current favourite web design books:

1. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

As much about usability as web design, this book is one of the best resources on building effective websites. As Steve says:

It’s a fact: People won’t use your website if they can’t find their way around it.

2. The Big Red Fez by Seth Godin

A simple, straight forward book focusing on how to make any website better. Again focused on usability as much as web design The Big Red Fez provides real world examples of what it takes to create a website that satisfies your visitors and ensures they keep coming back.

3. The CSS Anthology by Rachel Andrew

As a relative newcomer to CSS this book provides practical solutions to building a CSS, standards compliant website.

This list is by no means exhaustive but it’s a great start. I’ll keep adding to it as I discover new books I love. It’s also an excuse to keep buying them.