When I talk to clients I have found these three things really resonate- A website needs to be easy to find in search engines, easy for visitors to use and easy to update. It would be hard to say one of these items is more or less important than the other.

4 years when I first started building websites all my clients wanted them to “look good”. There was very little awareness of search engine traffic, Content Management Systems and even less awareness of the importance of user testing. Basically they wanted a brochure website. I’ve noticed a big shift in the last year. Businesses and organizations I talk to are more focused on ease of use and discovery.

So let’s break it down:

Easy To Find: what good is a website that no-one can find in search engines? Very little. A modern website needs to be built from the ground up to be search engine friendly. This means site architecture, keyword research and implementation. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is serious stuff. You do it right and the world is knocking on your door. You do it wrong, or more often not at all!, and your business can wither and die.

Easy To Use: now that you’ve got people to your website does it convert? Do they know what to do? Consider this, if your site has a 1% conversion rate you can either work to increase that rate to 2% through user testing and changes or work to double your traffic via search engines, email etc. They both have the same outcome. Guess which one is easier? A “beautiful” website is a fine thing but it is meaningless if it doesn’t convert.

Easy To Update: this is probably the number one complaint that I hear from clients. “I can’t update my %&$* site! I have to pay the Web company to do it, it takes forever, costs too much.” Back in the late 90s and early 2000s many sites were built without a Content Management System (CMS).

Is your website easy to find, easy to use and easy to update? If not then it’s time for a real website that will actively grow your business.

Let me preface this by saying how strange it is to write about not reading. With all the arguments about e-books and the sanctity of the well-bound durability of the traditional page turner, the death of the newspaper and what will become of library; I don’t worry. I like reading books and newspapers at libraries. But you probably didn’t even read this paragraph, because…

People Don’t Read on the Web.

They scan menus, headings, lists, icons, images and labels looking for the juicy little bits of text that will lead them to the few words that communicate the information they want, need and were looking for all along.

Everybody’s writing about it.

Jakob Nielsen , Usability Guru, has done the research.

“79 percent of our test users always scanned…16 percent read word-by-word.”

“The introductory paragraph(s)… is what I call blah-blah text… such as “Welcome to our site, we…”

“On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.”

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Carsonified , Experts on Web Design, offer this equation.

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Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, suggests a dull knife.

“Get rid of half your text and then get rid of half of what’s left.”

Conclusion: Write for the user, not for yourself.

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Seth Godin writes

It’s a good question, here’s how I would answer:

The web seems really complicated but not to me. I just see it as a series of decisions that require particular expertise to do correctly. The best decision is the one that makes the next one seem more apparent. There is never going to be one person who is right about everything all the time. What’s important in doing a web site, or marketing strategy, or making any series of decisions is to make each one as close to right as you can so the next one is clearer.

We do that by first and foremost attracting the top talent in the region. Then we challenge them to do more, to understand the implications of these important decisions. Then we provide what we hope to be the top level of customer service for our clients.

The results are clear to me, some are big and some are small. I take a small amount of pride in knowing that we are growing while other web companies are going out of business or shrinking. But what I take the most pride above all is the relationships that I have built with those in the box with me, and the way we extend it to our clients. Of the huge number of sites we have helped produce, 99% of them are still online exactly as we launched them.

Key to our growth is the way we have extended our services beyond designing and programming websites. It is a complete array of services our clients need, and some they don’t. That’s the real Small Box difference right there, whatever people think they know about us, there is more.

I have become obsessed. All I can think about is usability. I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse but it occupies my mind constantly. All day I dream about….usability.

This has been sparked by a few recent developments. Some conversations with colleagues (shout out to Jon from Tuitive Group again) sparked my interest but some new tools have really changed the way I look at websites.

I am coming to see usability as the other side of the Internet Marketing coin. Getting people to your site with good search engine marketing/optimization (SEM/SEO) is a good start. Getting them to make convert is the other half of the battle. How do you know what problems they are encountering? What are they looking for that they can’t find? Why are they bouncing back to Google? This is where usability comes in.

In my search to be better equipped to provide this service for our clients I have found 3 valuable web-based usability tools.

The first is GetClicky.com.

I’ve been using this service for a while and it has steadily stolen ground from the ol’ Analytics standby Google Analytics. Get Clicky has some real advantages to Google and I won’t go into all of them here. The main thing I like about Get Clicky is that it forces me to see visitors as real people. The Visitor and Spy views are really good at creating a narrative. Where Google Analytics is strong on numbers, Get Clicky is strong on story. You feel like you are getting a snap shot of who the person is more so than other services. Here’s a screenshot of the Spy view for the Small Box site. The Spy view is a real-time feed that shows activity as it happens on the site.

Cost: $100 a year for a premium account (recommended)

Bottom line: Get Clicky forces me to see visitors as people and to see their visits as a narrative.

The second is FeedbackArmy.com

With this service I can get 10 real human beings to answer up to 6 questions about a website for only $10. I have already used this service with a number of clients and my Small Box website. Albeit some of the responses come from outside the US and you have to be a little suspicious of that feedback since I think usability and design is somewhat related to culture. I usually ask, as one of the 6 questions, what country they are coming from to help filter the responses and give more weight to the ones from the US since most of my clients are targeting the US market. Still the outside-US responses are often helpful. I would like to have the option to not publicly display the results but I would hope that option is in the works.

Cost: $10 for 10 responses. $20 for 23. $40 for 50.

Bottom line: FeedbackArmy.com gets you real human feedback for a fraction of the cost of doing “real” user tests.

Related: Check out 10 responses for SmallBoxWeb.com

The Third, and most interesting one, is UserFly.com

UserFly does screen captures of your visitors. You embed some code on your site and it captures real users using your site. Where their mouse goes, what they click on, how long they stay on each page, etc. A little creepy I know but useful, very useful. You can tell when someone is looking for something that they can’t find. Shortly after installing the software on our SmallBoxWeb.com site we noticed that people were clicking on our “Team” images in hopes of getting the contact form but getting, instead, the profile page for that person. So we made a change, now the image of the team member opens the contact form, and started seeing a nice little uptick in contacts from the site.

Cost: $25 for 1000 captures

Bottom line: UserFly.com is quickly becoming an indispensible tool for understanding how users really use a website.

userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.

What are your favorite usability tools?

Ok, I don’t really hate my website but I’m more than ready for a new one.

The current SmallBoxWeb.com is only a little over a year old but I feel that we have already outgrown it.

I don’t want to beat it up. It has done a great job of growing our company. It’s got a nice clean look, easy to update (thanks to our CMS) and has lots of useful information on our services and work. But it’s got problems.

Some people find the site confusing. The big blue box in the middle of the site can cause usability issues. We have too many services and too many portfolio items. The whole thing needs to be streamlined and re-thunk.

I didn’t come to this conclusion overnight. It started a few months ago. What triggered it was a closer look at how people are actually using the website. In a way we had built it for ourselves, not really considering how others might use the site. Sure, we thought we were building it with normal people in mind but really we built the site without any real user input.

Lately my eyes have been opened to importance of usability tests. I must give credit to Jonathan Arnold at Tuitive Group for having a hand in this awakening. His company does elegant and highly functional web design based on user testing.

I now have a couple new mantras. “Stop assuming, start knowing” and “Tweak and repeat”.

Stop assuming you know what people are doing, what they expect what issues they run into, etc. Start using the metrics that the web provides along with user testing to know what people are doing, what they are looking for, etc.

Once you get something going in the right direction don’t stop there. Continually fine tune and tweak. Never stop tweaking your site based on real metrics and user feedback.

So, we are in the middle of planning for our new one. To prepare we are doing user tests on the current site. I feel strongly that a web design company has to be prepared to re-build their site at least every 2 years. Do you have any feedback for us as we work on the new site? Be brutal, be honest, tell us what you really think.

I am planning another post that addresses usability more head on including some links to services we use to do user testing. Stay tuned!

Lately I have been shown time and again how important small, seemingly meaningless changes can have a dramatic impact on a website.

I was on a panel recently discussing e-commerce with several local experts on the topic- Brandon Corbin from Sigma Micro, Jon Arnold from Tuitive Group, Kyle Lacy from Brandswag and Jeremy Dearringer from Slingshot SEO. To be honest I was probably the least knowledgeable of the group on this particular subject so it was a learning experience for me as much as the audience.

One of the most striking take-aways for me was how important small changes to a website can have such dramatic ROI. For instance, increasing the size of the search bar, having multiple value propositions throughout the site (Free Shipping! etc), modest design changes to a product page, using “cart” not “basket”, etc. All these items have been proven by multiple studies to result in a serious impact on sales. Sometimes the difference was millions of dollars per month depending on the site!

I just came across this blog via Twitter, thanks to @donschindler, and it reinforced my growing awareness. It’s also a book that you can buy on Amazon, etc.

Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

Let me boil down what I’m taking away from all this:

• Don’t assume. That’s the starting point. Stop working from assumptions that have no basis in facts. Stop thinking about how much work you put into your website to get where you are now. Be willing and open to completely re-thinking your project or website. Chances are you won’t have to scrap everything but come into the review process with an open mind.
• User tests. Find out what people are really doing, what walls they are hitting and why they aren’t filling out the form, making the purchase, etc. Determine where the issues are before you start trying to fix them. This requires user surveys/tests, watching analytics closely, reviewing what the competition is doing, etc.
• Herd mentality. We, meaning humans, are still very much interested in being part of the herd. For instance use “Other users also liked these items” instead of “We recommend these other items”. The first sounds like the cool thing to do the second sounds like a sales pitch.
• Fewer choices, more answers. People think they want choices but they don’t. They want answers. Focus on answering questions that you know your users have based on testing and analytics. Anticipate what the user wants and they will be more likely to convert.
• Tweak and repeat. Once you find something that works, tweak it, improve on it and then repeat that methodology to other weak areas.

“It’s right at the top of the page.”

How many times have I had this exchange when I am trying to tell someone how to find our newest service? It’s a Free SEO Scorecard that tells you exactly how your site performs on a wide array of benchmarks.

“It’s on this page! Go back to the top.”

If you provide the web addresses of your competitors and a few of the keywords you are trying to rank well for this document is an essential road map for your Internet Marketing plan, which for many begins with Search Engine Optimization.

As a side note I am thinking about calling it GEO since Google is the one that matters the most, yet we continue to act like the much smaller players are as important.

But my main point is one of usability. In the half dozen or so usability exercises I have done, I notice over and over that when someone goes to a new site they have never seen before, they automatically scroll down a little bit, assuming that the only thing at the top of the page is some kind of unessential banner ad or something.

And we always talk about designing so that all the most important information is “above the fold” (which in itself is pleasantly anachronistic). Watch for yourself sometime how it happens.

But what are the implications of this innocent gesture on the most artfully executed web designs? Should I tell my clients and designers not to put important information at the top of the page?

Clearly the most important element of design when it comes to usability has to be the focus on the middle of the page not the upper periphery.