Your Site Through Other Eyes

Think your site design is top notch? Think your visitors understand your navigation system? Think your site's visual design clues are sending the message you expect?

What if your site doesn't "work" the way you believe it does. Will anyone tell you? (Ever had spinach clinging to your front tooth all afternoon and no one mentioned it and you didn't discover it until *after* you left the bosses office and you just wanted to fall through the floor in embarrassment?)

Yes, you can, and certainly you should, verify that your forms, databases, and other site automation and logging work as they should.

But how do your visitors feel about your site?

All the automation in the world, fortunes spent on advertising, teams of consultants, and active political favor will all fail to make your site a long-term success if visitors don't feel comfortable there.

Here are some clues that your site isn't doing the job you want it to do:

1. Traffic is not increasing over time and/or you have very few return visitors.
2. Traffic stops at the first page and very few visitors see the "inner" pages.
3. The features of your site that you thought would be most popular/valuable/draw the most traffic are being ignored.
4. Sales of your product or service do not meet your expectations even though you seem to have adequate traffic.
5. You notice people are asking you questions about something that you thought was adequately explained or demonstrated. (i.e., "How much does your product/service cost?" when you thought the answer self-evident right there on the page.)
6. Your comments/feedback forms have little activity.
7. Your "recommend this site" form is rarely used.

Well-funded organizations can afford to buy usability surveys. These are the type where people are put in front of computers. There actions and comments are then recorded and integrated. The results may be skewed because a laboratory atmosphere is not the usual atmosphere of your site visitors, but at least there can be valuable indications of potential problem areas.

But many small businesses simply don't have the funds for such surveys.

You can't really know everything your visitors are going to perceive and feel about your site, but some steps can be done to help you gain more assurance that your site's message is what you intend.

1. If you didn't do this at the beginning of the design process, do it now: write one or two paragraphs describing what you want to accomplish with your site -- define its purpose in writing.
2. Describe your ideal visitor, your target audience; i.e., age group, gender, web experience level.
3. Test your site with a variety of people.

   You want to know more than just how easy or hard your site is to navigate or to find information or other mechanical aspects. You also want to know what feelings your site tends to engender. As examples, you might want to know --

• When arriving, does your visitor sense order or confusion.
• Does your visitor develop an urge to explore or an urge to flee.
• Is your navigation easy or frustrating.
• When using your site (forms, navigation, searches) is your visitor empowered or made to feel stupid.

First, ask a few people who are "web savvy" to check out your site and tell you their impressions. What did they like about it. What annoyed them. What do they think is the purpose of your site?

Next, ask a few people who have no knowledge of your particular business to visit your site and place an order or gather information or do what ever it is you wish visitors to do at your site. Find out how difficult or easy it was for these people to complete the tasks. Did they feel frustrated at any point? Did they like your site or was it just "kinda about average".

Last, ask a few people who represent your target audience to visit your site and provide you with similar feedback as in the previous trials.

4. Keep testing. Keep tweaking. Keep your site fresh.

It is important that your testers feel you really want to know their personal reactions and not just what they think you want to hear. Encourage your testers to do a live commentary into a tape recorder rather than typing an email. You want spontaneous, unedited impressions.

It is important to step aside from your ego and really listen to what your testers have to say, and realize that what is not said can also be clues to problem areas. If someone found it difficult to locate the "recommend this site" link, maybe the blinking gargoyle GIF in the top right corner of your page was distracting. Maybe the other links were so interesting that the "recommend me" was unseen. Or maybe it was because they didn't really want to recommend or know anyone who would be interested in your site.

It is also important to understand that just because someone has an opinion about something doesn't mean you must change things accordingly. You're looking for feelings and clues, not dictates. If your ideal visitor is middle aged and your tester is a teenager, and your tester says your site should have more colors, then you might put that observation aside for later consideration or discard it altogether. But if your teenager says they really enjoyed that little bouncing ball on your order page and watched it for hours, then you might seriously consider the purpose of the bouncing ball and redo it so it's less distracting. But if your site's ideal visitor is a teenager and you manage to hold one's attention for more than fifteen minutes with a bouncing ball, then you have something with huge, one might say tremendous, potential!

And the most important of all: No matter what you do to please your visitors, you site must still be pleasing to yourself. Otherwise, you may lose the self-satisfaction associated with having and maintaining your own site.

Success, probably in most ways it has ever been defined, includes self-satisfaction as part of its definition.

Will Bontrager
©2001 Bontrager Connection, LLC

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© 1998-2001 William and Mari Bontrager
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