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B2B Website Usability Basics – Part 1 – Research

What type of information do you need to start redesigning your site to be customer-centric and usable? You need to understand why your visitors are coming to your site and what they’re looking for. This type of information is going to come mainly from your analytics software. If you don’t have any analytics software, you need to get one to improve your site. Google Analytics is offered for free or you can have someone set it up for you for minimal cost. (I go over analytics and a few packages to explore in the post Measuring Your Success in the B2B Marketplace.)

You’ll need some information from your analytics package to begin with: the keywords people are typing into search engines to get to your site, what people are clicking on once on your site, and where people are leaving your site.

  • Keyword information is sometimes called keywords, sometimes referring sites. Collect a list of your top 100 keywords for the previous six months categorized by search engine. Are there products or content searched for specifically by title or name? These are should have links accessible right from the homepage to make them easy for people to find.
  • To see what people are clicking on once on your site find a report of your top pages. If your analytics package offers a site overlay, this will be particularly valuable to see where people are clicking on each page.
  • Where people are leaving your site gives you an indication what made them leave. This information is often under exit pages and sometimes in path information. Are their exit pages where people consistently leave your site?  These may need to be redesigned to keep visitors on your site longer.

Google’s Webmaster Tools can also give you valuable information about how Google’s search engine looks are your site – with information about the top keywords, pages that Google has in its index, and the top queries from Google to your site. Yahoo has a similar, but not as robust tool, SiteExplorer, which can also give you some valuable information.

If you have a search function on your site, take a look at the logs. Visitors often search for things they cannot find on first glance. If you have important products or content that are constantly being searched for, they should have links on your homepage.

Next step – basic layout lessons in B2B Website Usability Basics – Part 2 – Layout

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B2B Website Usability Basics – Introduction

As mentioned in a previous post, usability is important in designing a customer-centric site. Usability, as defined by Wikipedia:

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.

In the non-Internet world, we expect certain things to be in a certain place and to act in a certain way. In the US, traffic lights have red (stop) at the top, yellow in the middle, and green (go) at the bottom. Even someone who is colorblind can read the traffic light due to the consistency in the position of the lights and what they mean. If every state had different colors and positions of lights, we would see a lot more accidents.

Design on the web is the same way, people expect certain things to be in a certain place on a website. If they are not there or are in a different place, they have to waste time trying to find them. Often people won’t bother with searching for things. They will just visit another site that is designed in a manner that they expect. Designing for usability is extremely important for eCommerce sites where one misstep leads visitors out of a buying process. While not quite as obvious as when a visitor has an item in a shopping cart, design missteps on corporate websites can be just as damaging, but not as easy to measure.

Designing for usability is not particularly difficult. You just need to be patient, know what to look for, do some testing, and be prepared to make constant improvements to your site. Redesigning your site can certainly help, but you will get the best results out of constant refinement.

We’ll examine what data to look at when redesigning your site in Website Usability Basics – Part 1 – Research.

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Customer-Centric Sites

In Good vs. Bad B2B Websites, I introduced the idea of customer-centric sites: designing your site with your customer in mind instead of your company or organization. Why is customer-centric design important?

Your Customers will go somewhere else. There are plenty of websites and companies out there that do the same thing. If your customers can’t find what they are looking for on your site, they will quickly look elsewhere. According to a 2006 Online Transactions survey conducted for Tealeaf by Harris Interactive,

The top problems that would cause online consumers to immediately and permanently turn to a competitor’s website are:

  • Incorrect information or lack of adequate information on the website (41%);
  • Inability to complete the transaction due to an endless loop (36%);
  • Difficulty navigating the website (37%); and
  • Being automatically kicked off the page (25%).

Your Customers will tell their friends. With the proliferation of blogging, message boards and instant messaging, your customers are talking to each other. If one customer has a bad experience with your website, the others will quickly know. You can benefit from this communication and react instantly to your customers’ needs with a community on your own website.

InformationAge – Action/Reaction: Web 2.0: The fastest-growing websites are those geared towards interaction and community.

If you don’t, your competitors will. As competition on the web grows, companies are forced to improve their websites in order to stay in business. Websites used to be a required for the credibility of a company. Now they are often the only way a company communicates with its customers and potential customers.

Next Steps: The idea of customer-centric sites is tied intimately to the usability of a website. Here are some good sources of more information on website usability:

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