|
Making Usable Websites
|
|
|
|
Related Links
|
|
Making Usable Websites:
Effective Web Sites
by Dr. T V Gopal
(The author of this article, Dr. T.V. Gopal, is an assistant professor at Anna University in the of School of Computer Science & Engg,. Chennai - 600 025. He can be contacted for further details at
gopal@annauniv.edu)
Introduction
An estimated 90% of websites fail to provide even adequate
usability for their customers. Forrester research finds that
as a result
- 50% loss of potential sales
- 40% of potential repeat visitors do not return
- severe brand erosion, because every dissatisfied customer
tells an average of 10 people
- $1.5 - $2.1 million wasted each year on failed redesigns
Improving website design and effectiveness can increase
online sales by as much as 50%.
The first step in improving the situation is to know the
profile of the users and the technology accessible to them.
Here are a few pertinent statistics
- Average Age : 35.1 Years
- Gender : 38.7% females
- Major Occupation
- Computer related field : 22.3%
- Education : 26.2%
- Professional : 21.7%
- Marital Status: 45.44% Married
- Monitor Screen Size
- 14" : 21.69%
- 15" : 24.67%
- 16"-18" : 27.62%
- <13" : 4.93%
- Computing Platform
- Windows 95 : 48.30%
- Windows 98 : 38.67%
- Windows NT : 5.71%
- Macintosh : 2.89%
- Web TV : 1.76%
- Windows 3.x : 1.44%
- Linux : 0.20%
- SunOS : 0.19%
- IRIX : 0.05%
- Browser Used
- MSIE 4.x : 53.35%
- Netscape 4.x : 27.21%
- MSIE 3.x : 6.57%
- Netscape 3.x : 5.44%
- MSIE 5.x : 4.80%
- Web TV : 1.72%
- MSIE 0.x : 0.79%
- Netscape 5.x : 0.07%
- AT 3.x : 0.03%
- Netscape : 0.02%
- Screen Resolution
- 800 X 600 : 55.00%
- 1024 X 768 : 21.66%
- 640 X 480 : 16.56%
- 1280 X 1024 : 1.81%
- Other : 3.37%
- Colors
- 64K (16 Bit) : 53.29%
- 4.2 Billion (32 Bit) : 18.45%
- 16.7 Million (24 Bit) : 14.77%
- 256 (8 Bit) : 13.49%
- Connection Speed
- 28.8 Kbps : 70.6%
- 14.4 Kbps : 4.2%
- Browsing Strategies (Multiple Usages)
- Favourites/Bookmarks : 82.14%
- Index : 76.35%
- Meta-Index : 54.91%
- Opportunistic : 57.66%
- URL Known : 68.4%
- Finding WWW Pages
- Search Engines : 82%
- Other Web Pages : 88%
- Printed Media : 62%
- Friends : 58%
- TV : 37%
- e-mail Signatures : 33%
- Usenet Newsgroups : 30%
- Primary uses of Browsing
- Gathering Information : 86.03%
- Searching : 63.01%
- Browsing : 61.29%
- Work : 54.05%
- Education : 52.21%
- Communication : 47.02%
- Entertainment : 45.48%
- Shopping : 18.65%
- Problems Using the Web
- Speed : 64.8%
- Broken Links : 49.90%
- Finding Known Info. : 30.31%
- Organizing Collected
Info. : 27.80%
- Finding pages already
visited : 12.16%
The web of today provides no clue about the needs and motives
of individual readers. As unknowable as individual needs are
questions regarding the motivations of web users as a group
have specific and knowable answers. For example, 90% of the
users want information.
Web-usability problems fall into two categories
- Site-Level Usability
- Home Page
- Information Architecture
- Navigation and Search
- Linking Strategy
- Internally Vs. Externally focussed design
- Overall writing style
- Page templates
- Layout and site wide design standards
- Graphical Language and commonly used icons
- Page-Level Usability
- Specific issues related to the individual pages
- Understandability of headlines
- Links and Explanations
- Intuitiveness of forms and error messages
- Inclusion or Exclusion of specific information
- Individual Graphics and Icons
A website Usability test takes about 39 hours (including
writing the report) with 5 Users. 80% of site-level usability
problems and 50% of page level problems are typically found.
It does not cost much.
|
![[Next]](../../../homepage/ar_right.gif){kind=small}