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Readers of a printed brochure do not truly interact with that piece.
On the web, we click like crazy. People READ brochures. We SCAN web sites and FIND what we might be interested in reading.
In approaching web usability, we first acknowledge and accept some truths:
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Web users are usually in a hurry. Much of our web use is motivated by the desire to save time. Visitors don’t have the time to read ANYTHING more than what’s necessary.
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We know we don’t need to read everything. We’re really interested in only a fraction of what’s on a page. Scanning is how we as web users find our valuable information.
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We’re good at it. We’ve been scanning newspapers, magazines and books all our lives. We know how to dig quickly for information.
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From the user’s standpoint, there’s not much penalty for guessing wrong. People click away at their heart’s content, because they can. They hate trying to figure out which link is the right one, so instead of thinking, they click. The worst case scenario from their standpoint is one in which they’d have to click the back button and try another link.
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From the company’s standpoint, the penalties are enormous for requiring too much guessing. While users are not malicious in their “zapping” of bad web sites and moving onto the good, a company with a bad site is penalized dozens or hundreds of times a year (most of which they never know about), by losing valuable prospects to a competitor’s more usable web site.
eMagine will combine our experience in web interface design with RESEARCHED usability statistics.
- The right combination of text and graphics will be used.
- Page elements will be positioned according to researched habits of web site users.
- Pages will load in under 20 seconds on a 56k modem.
- Considerable customer-focused thought will be put into the naming of links.
- A site search engine should allow visitors to search the entire site (**search strings used by visitors will be saved to a database for ongoing analysis)
- The most critical page elements will be visible “above the fold” (in the first screen of content, without scrolling)
- Links will clearly be links to visitors. It’s important for users to be able to recognize what is “clickable”.
- Language and copy will be user-focused, without use of terms that only company employees understand.
- We will determine in a strategy session the most likely paths average visitors will take from entering the home page and make certain this path is easy to follow, starting with the first link.
Read about each of the other essential steps to the web design process:
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