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B2B Website Usability Basics – Part 3 – Testing

Once you have your new site design launched, the next step is to see how well you figured out your audience. Yep! That’s right – more research – and testing.

You’ll once again need to take a look at your website analytics/stats and see if people are staying on your site longer and going further into the site. You should also see less use of your search engine for the items that you linked to from the homepage. Take a look at your site overlay if you have one and you should also see where people are clicking on each page.

Now you need to continue to improve your site by looking at your analytics/stats and seeing what you can do to make the site even easier to use. If you can, call some of your website visitors and see what they like and dislike about the site. What do they have problems finding? What do they like?

Usability is a constant process of improving your site. Having a customer-centric site means making your site with your customer in mind. The goal is to help people (your customers) find the information they need so they’ll return to your site next time they’re looking. You should see more traffic as more and more people turn to your site as an information source.

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B2B Website Usability Basics – Part 2 – Layout

Now that we’ve done some research on what your visitors are looking for and at on your website, we can take our first stab at our layout, or where things should go on the website. Here are a few basics:

  • The menu should be either across the top or down the left. A link to the homepage should be the top or left-most link. Menu items should be links to what people are looking for on your site. Examples: Products, Services, About, Contact. You should setup a hierachy that makes sense. All your products should be listed on the first Products page (or have links from there). All your services should be listed on the first Services page (or have links from there). You get the idea….
  • A search box, if you have one, should be in the upper right. There should be a text box to input your search terms and then a button right to the right of it which says ‘Search’.
  • Your most important and/or most frequently updated content should be in the upper left. Visitors scan left to right and then back to the left further down the page, continuing until they have to scroll down the page. Use the research gathered in Part 1 to select the items that are most important and lay them out left to right, then down the page as if you are reading (you probably find yourself scanning down pages in this same manner on other sites). To borrow a term from print newspapers, items above the fold (or what is immediately viewable without scrolling) should be your most important content, products or services.
  • Provide text links at the bottom of each page to your highest level or most important links to make them easy to find.
  • White space should be incorporated to break up text and make it easy for visitors to scan your website for what they are looking for.
  • Minimize movement of pictures, ads and movies – they are distracting and annoying to visitors who are looking at your site.

Once you put your layout into place, you are ready for B2B Website Usability Basics – Part 3 – Testing.

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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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