Usability Genius

USABILITY Genius

This phrase was coined by our resident genius. After spending much time in his laboratory, deliberating over the future of online marketing met his “Eureka” moment.

What if you developed a strategy allowing you to focus on people instead of the search engines? Would there be any value in that?

Traffic can be expensive. If you cannot afford an SEO who can do the job properly and deliver revenue generating keywords OR have a pay per click budget of a few hundred or thousand per month – then what other options do you have?

You’ll probably already have visitors coming to your site if you check your logs, or ask your web guy to do it for you. Nowadays this is standard and you’ll even be able to see what kinds of keywords people have found your site under.

The problem is that those visitors haven’t filled in your forms, clicked your buttons, added to cart or signed up to your newsletter. Whatever your business model, you require visitors to “use” your website to achieve a specific goal and convert them into a customer immediately or eventually through your pipeline.

What can you do about it? Usability is defined as the quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.

Five quality components:

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
• Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they re-establish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

There are a few eye tracking companies who have developed technologies which determine where our eyes actually go on a page. Why is this important? Well because you can easily control your mouse movements, however it is more difficult to control where your eye is going to fall on a page as this response is governed by factors we automatically or subconsciously react to rather than decide on.

Below is a heat map which outlines some common findings on a Google search page

Typically, red is the area of most focus, followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and grey.

We have learned behaviour such as reading from left to right (in the western world anyway) – hence the area of highest focus tends to be the top left of a page and then moves down the page and moves across the page from there.

The big red line is the fold on the page – the area where people need to scroll past to see the lower area of the page. This is quite important as I see a lot of sites who have their calls to action or most important offers below this fold. It has been proven people don’t like having to scroll and depending on the resolution and monitor your site is being viewed in – people will see more or less of your page.

Quite simple considerations but once applied can cause conversions to soar

More information

If you’d like to speak to one of our Usability specialists then please call +44 (0) 845 053 9238 or email hello@theonlinegenius.com

Pricing

Our Prices Fit…You

In order for us to give you a quote for our Usability services we’d like to have a chat with you.

Please give us a call on +44 (0) 845 053 9238 or email hello@theonlinegenius.com for a tailored quote, just for you.

Case Studies

SisterhoodTV.com

• Sisterhood TV Show – her story, her journey, her success.
• The Sisterhood TV Show is a primetime show featuring interviews with successful women from around the world.

Brief

Our mission, which we chose to accept, was to take SisterhoodTV from the small screen to the computer screen.

Pain Points

The key issue with this project was to translate the nature of the SisterhoodTV television show to the web – we wanted to keep the feel and ethos of the program, while ensuring that users had a pleasurable experience when consuming the content on the internet

We considered these key elements

• Back-end architecture
• Front-end usability
• Database structure
• Look & Feel
• User journey tracking and research methods
• …and so much more

Our overriding objectives were to

• Create a site which was compelling, fun to use and somewhat addictive
• Deliver a cracking ROI for our client

So, how did it turn out?

Here’s the SisterhoodTV Home page

Here’s a SisterhoodTV Show content page

Want more info?

If you’d like to speak to one of our Website Usability specialists then please call +44 (0) 845 053 9238 or email hello@theonlinegenius.com