Miriam & Liam got me thinking when they made this point:

“It’s a sad fact of life that a major percentage of web designers out there continue to confuse graphic design skill with web design know-how. Kids fresh out of design school and even more experienced designers who really should know better continue to produce splash/flash/image heavy web pages that read as utter blanks to the search engine spiders.”

The issue of web versus graphic design moves beyond SEO. Most websites are not very usable. Most website viewers have to guess where to go, what to do, or what to expect when they “click here”. Beyond that, graphic-intensive web sites exclude two important segments of the market: dial-up users and the visually impaired.

Dial-up users require more time to load pages because their connection is slower than the broadband most developers have access to. Having lots of graphics or Flash plug-ins (or worse, a whole site designed in Flash) means long load times.

Guess what? Most people don’t wait. Even dial-up users have a threshold for pain and the pain of waiting for an 200K splash page to open is just too much. By time it finishes loading they could have got what they wanted from your competition - and the viewer knows it (how does this experience affect your brand?).

About 8% of internet users have some kind of visual disability. Do you want to pick up 8% of your market that your competitor isn’t reaching? Support the disabled. It isn’t difficult and isn’t that much more expensive but it does require a firm understanding of the W3C guidelines and usability issues that don’t seem to be covered in design class when all the students are trying desperately to “outcool” each other.

By the way, unless you are a design firm “cool” doesn’t sell.

Professional website design is clean, clear and attractive. Professional website design disappears in favor of the message presented. Professional web design enforces your brand without attaching a bad user experience to it.

Web design does use a lot of the principles of graphic design. Having your “look good” in action requires an understanding of composition, color use, typography and more. But web design takes these principles to a much higher level when the screen asks the viewer to do something no piece of paper has ever managed to do.

Interact.

Graphic designers must understand graphic design tools and have a good working knowledge of how the ink will hit the paper. Web designers have to have a good working knowledge of code, browser issues, scripting, resizing issues, speaking multiple languages, plug-ins, bandwidth, presentation, sales and even graphic design!

The best web sites are not fliers or brochures. They engage the viewer. They elicit a response. And they provide a memorable journey that somehow improved the viewer’s life.

Even at 56K.

Posted in Graphic Design, Useability, Web Design

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Generally, it is assumed that web site usability is about optimizing websites to achieve high Return on Investment. But is usability only that?

Usability principles

The principles of usability form around optimizing websites so site visitors could understand what the site is about, find what they want easily and do whatever they came for. The process of website optimization generally includes using logically complete site structure, clear site content, readable text formatting, etc.

Usability is for the people

Though web site usability is about improving websites, it is done for the people. That’s why you need to consider your target audience demographics, its surfing habits, ability to navigate the website, website comprehension abilities, etc. Of course, your content should reflect their needs as well.

On understanding what your visitors may need (not only to learn something, but to be able to navigate around your site easily), you can broaden the scope of your website usability. By focusing on providing value to your visitors, you can gain an understanding of multiple ways to make your visitor’s life easier by improving your website.

How to improve usability yourself

You can always pretend to be your customer and try to do some basic tasks your visitor might want to do on your website:

• understand what the site offers
• find the right product
• learn the product details
• see how to order the product
• learn how to use the product

For instance, you can see for yourself if text is readable or not. Just try reading it yourself and see if you have trouble reading it, if you have to lean forward to the monitor to read the text or adjust your browser settings. Another moment is website navigation. A simple rule of being able to access any page with three clicks from the homepage is quite efficient in assisting you develop versatile navigation.

Generally, any business site owner should be able to distinguish what’s good for the visitors, as they also understand the reasons why people come to their websites and how to satisfy their needs. Becides clear click paths, the site has to have clear content and simple language so visitors could gauge if they need the product.

Rounding up

As seen from above, optimizing your website usability for the people can be quite easy, if you know what to look. If not, you can learn usability on forums, such as Cre8asite Forums, V7N or SEO Refugee, etc. if you need any assistance. Of course, if you need everything now and fast, you can consult a website usability consultant.

Posted in Useability

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I’ve covered a lot of ground in a very short period of time. This time last month I didn’t even know how to use WordPress (though I had used other blog solutions) and now there are dozens of posts - some of which are actually useful!

Here are the “top 10″ posts from me so far…

1. What is wrong with sales?
2. 5 questions that will save your business thousands of dollars
3. The ungolden rule: customer relations
4. 10 ways to promote trust with your viewers
5. Listening to negative feedback
6. Marketing online: tips for making friends
7. What is search engine optimization?
8. On web site usability
9. Case for accesibility: Target
10. Keyword cause and effect

I’d also like to give a nod to Liam & Mirriam of Solas Web Design who have also contributed to this blog with:

• Are your fingers still doing the walking?
• Waaaay Cool SEO Tool from Jim Boykin

Posted in Customer Service, Useability, Promotion, Marketing, Web Design

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Occasionally I will ramble about usability on this blog. This is because it is critical to a web site’s success.

So what is web site usability? There are many opinions. In the context of 14th Colony usability means:

1. Design that creates an equal experience for all viewers supporting them to make appropriate actions intuitively.

2. Web design that gets the design out of the user’s way.

The first definition has a lot to do with accessibility, which is making sure every visitor can access and use your site comfortably regardless of any physical limitations. For example, some people may have bad eyes and increase the default font size. Most web sites fall apart when that happens. Or other people who can’t see at all use audio browsers that read the web site contents out loud to the viewer! Target didn’t pay attention to accessibility and has suffered the consequences through court decisions and bad publicity.

Supporting a viewer to take appropriate actions can be tough. Whole books are dedicated to making this happen through copywriting, psychology, design and more. Mostly I consider this a design issue. If a page offers too many choices the viewer is likely to overload and do nothing. How the page is laid out makes a big difference in the path your customer chooses. And how the page is designed determines if any choices the viewer makes are intuitive or not.

The second definition applies to intuitive web design. Intuitive design is very difficult to achieve and extremely powerful. Intuitive design determines whether a viewer clicks through a web site with confidence or if they have to figure it out as they go along.

Put another way, intuitive web design is so obvious and easy to use the design isn’t even noticed!

A well-framed picture makes people comment on qualities of the picture - not the framing. A web site should operate the same way. The site needs to have enough color, line, shape and texture to guide the viewer and achieve the desired results but anything beyond that is clutter. And clutter stops sales.

To determine if your site is intuitive ask yourself this: Whose ego is served: you, the designer or the customer?

Posted in Useability, Web Design

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Yesterday my wife had some bad food. She has been very (violently) ill ever since. Since we suspect food poisoning she can’t even breast feed our daughter.

Over the weekend, Metro PCS turned off my phone. That made me very ill, though on a different level.

So I have been taking care of my wife and our 1-month-old baby and trying to be calm while my phone wasn’t working.

Being a very internet-oriented person I went to Taco Bell’s web site and was told that the latest version of Flash is needed to display the site. Because of security issues I don’t use my computer as the admin so updating on the fly is a problem. When I said “no thanks” I was directed to the “noflash” version of the site… oops, there’s nothing there.

So now I can’t even get a phone number to call because I didn’t have the latest widget installed. I guess I could try calling information but since I’m not sure where the Taco Bell customer service center is located I don’t think that will do me any good. We don’t keep phone books in the house because 99.9% of the time I can find what I’m looking for online in less than 30 seconds.

The problem with MetroPCS is that they applied my payment to the wrong part of my account. This is not the first time this has happened. We got the issue identified and they were set to resolve it and I thought that would be a good time to bring up how I love their phone service but that their billing department had become a “serious customer service issue” with me. It was made clear that the woman I was talking to wasn’t interested. Now I have two serious customer service issues.

You see, MetroPCS offers the ability to make payments through their web site. This is so convenient that some of their branches use the site to make payments for their customers. I don’t use the web site because every time I do my phone ends up being turned off and it seems to always happen on a Friday and their billing department is closed on weekends.

I recently moved and didn’t realize the local branch uses the web site for payments. When I saw the receipt my gut twisted. And sure enough, there was a problem. A problem that took days to remedy.

Now the point of this post isn’t to knock on MetroPCS or Taco Bell. I like them both a great deal and don’t expect them to be perfect. The point is to show how their online business is considered a separate entity from the core business and why that is a problem. When I talked to the woman at MetroPCS it was clear she wasn’t interested in feedback about the web site because there wasn’t anything she could do with it.

That’s a problem.

Taco Bell may want to wake up to what Target is going through. It’s bad form to require users to have a plug-in and creating alternatives is not difficult. Taco Bell is excluding a big part of their audience - including the search engines by having their site structured the way they do.

MetroPCS is failing their customers by not readily accepting feedback or having the systems in place to work with that feedback. If a customer is going to take the time to explain how you can improve your service it is worth listening to!

Anyway, my phone is back online so if you were trying to reach me please try again. If you are one of the people I owe a phone call to, don’t worry - you’ll get it tomorrow and I apologize for any inconvenience. I guess it’s time I looked into backups for my phone service so that I can avoid future bad relations with my own customers.

And in a very similar vein you may want to look at this post at cre8asiteforums that covers the power of blogs and how customer reviews can greatly influence a business reputation. This is also covered in the book I am currently reading and I will post more about this later.

Posted in Customer Service, Useability

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