By Peter Wolchak

A customer walks into a store to buy a pair of running shoes. The store has the shoes in stock, and at a good price, and the customer has money in her pocket. Now, what are the chances she will walk out of the store with shoes in hand?

Pretty good, right? A 100 per cent chance, or close to it.

Now, apply that same scenario to the online world. A buyer hits LotsOfShoes.com. He doesn’t know it yet but the site stocks the right product at a great price and offers a good deal on shipping.

It’s exactly what he was looking for when he ventured online. Now, what are the chances he will buy these shoes?

About 40 per cent, according to experts.

That’s because the design of most corporate sites is so terrible they actually stop people from conducting e-commerce transactions.

That shoe shopper will get lost because the site navigation is confusing or missing altogether, or the screen fonts are unreadable, or the order form is indecipherable, or the search results so vague he never knows the shoes are even available.

These problems, and many others, exist on countless e-commerce Web sites today, according to Tara O’Doherty, the usability director at Cossette Interactive in Toronto. “I’ve tested online order forms at huge companies in Canada that are sitting at 11 per cent effectiveness, which means 11 out of every 100 people are able to actually order the product or service they want online.

I’m talking about people who have decided to [spend money at the site] but the order form is not clear or the language is confusing, and most of those people just bail out.”

And these problems are very common: experts interviewed for this article said about 80 per cent of Canadian corporate Web sites display serious usability problems. O’Doherty points to Ticketmaster.ca as an example. “I’ve tried to order tickets there many times but their system times out in five minutes, and…I’ve never been able to get through their system in time.You get to the very last page, and it says ‘I’m sorry, you’ve timed out’ and now you have to start the whole thing over again.”

Enter usability
Most corporate sites were built or rebuilt a couple of years ago, when the emphasis was on content and style. Whether the site was actually easy to use…well, who cared? Good sites had lots of content and drew lots of hits.

That mindset created a lot of pretty but frustrating sites that no one likes to use, and as that fact dawns on site owners they have begun to look at the issue of usability.

Usability is the extent to which a Web site is effective, efficient and provides a satisfying experience for users. “That means all users, with different backgrounds or profiles, can come to your site, find what they want and leave in a reasonable amount of time without making any mistakes,” O’Doherty said.

Companies wondering if their own sites are effective, efficient and satisfying should pretend to be users for a while, said David Carter, the president of Webpartz, a division of iUpload in Burlington, Ont.

“You have to ask yourself: what are people going to do on my site? And as common sense as that sounds, people often put up sites and throw some information on them and don’t really think about what people need to do.

“I have been on sites…where I go nine steps down a 10-step process to buy something and number nine asks for my state. Well, I don’t have a state, I have a province and the site throws me away because it can’t handle provinces. So the point of usability is to test to see how many people actually complete a given task.”

Hiring a usability expert can cost as little as $1,000 for 10 hours of consulting work, Carter said. At Cossette, prices range from about $5,000 to $100,000, and those fees may include an evaluation by a group of usability experts, test users behind one-way glass, and a sizeable report detailing the problems and the recommended fixes. Common mistakes When usability experts review a site they see the same problems over and over again, including:

Online forms: “Most people’s order and registration forms are horrendous,” O’Doherty said. She has often watched site testers try repeatedly to enter a credit card number into an online form. The site refuses the number over and over again. “What these users don’t realize is there are spaces between some of the numbers on the card but online forms never accept those spaces. I’ve seen people in usability tests go through this process five times and then just give up, with no clue why it isn’t working.

“So how do we solve that problem? It’s as simple as putting ‘No spaces, please’ on the form, yet it’s a primary reason people can’t make purchases online.” Navigation: Navigation buttons have to be consistent from page to page, said Tracey Baker, a Web designer at Vertebrate Design in Hamilton, Ont. She also recommends each site give users three ways to navigate and find information. “For example, you give them navigation buttons, a search box and a bread crumb trail, which is the link trail that appears at the top of the page and tells you where you are and where you’ve been.”

Search: Most sites now have search functionality but it is often so poorly implemented that it’s useless. “We’ve had horror stories with search, in the way companies tag their pages,” Carter said. “Users perform a search and all the results stay the same—just the company name and a standard description—because [the builders] just used the same template for the Web pages. That’s a common mistake and it makes search useless.”

Scrolling: A little bit of page scrolling may be unavoidable, but too much is death, according to O’Doherty. “A lot of product people love their copy and they don’t want to cut it down, but you know what: no one reads it. People don’t read online, they scan.”

Fonts: “People do terrible things with fonts. Sometimes they get so small you can’t see them, or they’re using dark blue on a light blue background, and you can’t see it. For reading you need at least 80 per cent colour contrast,” O’Doherty said.

The ROI
All this concern over usability is important because an unusable site contributes little to a company’s bottom line.

“The end user determines the success or failure of a site. If that person can’t use the site well then you’ve lost a sale or turned off a customer,and that translates directly into dollars,” said Lynda Chiotti, content and information design manager at WebFeat Multimedia in Toronto.

A recent study from NFO CFgroup in Toronto put numbers to that statement. The study examined why online shoppers abandon their shopping carts, that is, why they cancel out of a purchase they have initiated. The study identified more than 10 factors (see chart) but six of those are directly attributable to usability issues.

According to the study, 36 out of 100 surfers who gave up on a purchase did so for usability reasons.

“Seventy-nine per cent of people in this study were willing to buy at the beginning and a large chunk of these would be swayed by a betterdesigned site,” said NFO CFgroup associate director Darko Radjevic.

Put another way, usability drives revenue, O’Doherty said. “The research says every $1 you spend on usability returns between $10 and $100 in revenue.That’s not necessarily because usability in itself is so great, it’s because usability on sites out there is so poor.”

Web usability
Cossette Interactive http://www.cossetteinteractive.com
NFO CFgroup http://www.nfocfgroup.com
Vertebrate Design http://www.verte-brate.com
WebFeat Multimedia http://www.webfeat.com
Webpartz http://www.webpartz.com