How important is website usability?

The easier our websites are to use, the more people will buy from us. That's the message repeated in various ways at the website of Jakob Nielsen, self-proclaimed website usability guru.

Let's look at some of what he says.

What to do to increase site usability

• State clearly what the website offers.
• Make information easy to read.
• Answer key questions.
• Use clear navigation.
• Provide a good search function.
• Make tasks easy to do fast.

What not to do

• Use links that don't send site visitors exactly where they want to go.
• Force visitors to scroll a lot to find information.
• Distract visitors with pop-ups.
• Withhold prices so that people have to contact the company to get pricing information.
• Put stumbling blocks in the purchasing process.

All of these principles make sense. If people find a website difficult to use, they will leave. Right?

Not always.

How poor usability can lead to conversions

In a recent forum discussion, a poster wrote about how she'd ended up spending more time at a site because it was difficult to use. Being forced to look around more to find what she was searching for exposed her to information about services she hadn't known existed.

The discussion continues with illustrations about how the technique of making items difficult to get to is often used in bricks-and-mortar stores. At Ikea, for example, shoppers have to walk a long and winding path past many displays to buy even one item. When faced with all those choices and then a lineup to pay at the end, how many shoppers make just one purchase?

With Ikea, items that go together are grouped together. Go to Home Depot, and you may spend more time looking in different sections unless you know your way around — and perhaps buy more things along the way.

The contact factor

Not publishing pricing and other information is one of the top 10 mistakes in web design, according to Nielson. On the other hand, forcing people to contact the company for information can benefit the company. The sales people then have more opportunities to interact directly with site visitors and to work to convert them into customers.

So who is right?

Are Nielson's website usability guidelines really worth following? Or do the bricks-and-mortar marketing experts have it right by making customers spend longer in the store?

Each way has its advantages. The effectiveness of each approach depends in part on these factors:

• How easy it is to move on to another store (bricks-and-mortar or online)
• How available the information, products, or services are elsewhere

For shoppers at Home Depot, the next store with the same products might be miles away. But when shoppers are browsing online, the next store is only a couple of clicks away. Convenience may be good for consumers but not for us. But if what we offer at our websites is as unique as Ikea products, our conversion rate may be good even if our sites fail usability standards.

The same applies to withholding information at our websites. If people can find the same information elsewhere, they're going to go elsewhere. If they can't, our inconveniencing them by forcing them to contact us may increase our sales. And, unfortunately, their frustration level.

According to a 2001 article, testers were able to complete e-commerce tasks at various websites only 56 percent of the time. Success rates may have improved since then, but there's still probably a lot of room to make e-commerce sites more user-friendly.

But the faster people finish their tasks at a website, the less time they spend there, and the less they're exposed to what our sites offer.

The answer? Perhaps a combination of techniques. Make the website usable, but provide a lot of information and links all along the path to checkout. Shoppers don't have to wander through the whole store to be exposed to well-organized displays by the door, lining the aisle they walk down, and next to the cashier while they're waiting to pay for their purchases. A well-designed site can be informative and usable.