Next week: Searching for better search engines
He or she who clicks the mouse holds the ultimate power on the Web. Users go where they want to go: today, tomorrow, and any time. This means that the only path to success on the Internet is to design for the users: making sites trivially easy to use and focused on supplying the exact information and services users want. Fast.
Let me repeat that: fast, fast, fast. Speed is one of the main usability criteria for web design. Every single user I have ever studied in a usability test has said the same thing: "I don't want to wait for pages to download."
A very easy way to distinguish a well-designed site from a useless one is to measure the time to download the home page: it must be less than 10 seconds to satisfy basic human factors guidelines. If there is a splash page that fills the screen before you reach the content, you know right away that the site is going to be difficult to use since only somebody who has no respect for users' time would force them to wait for an unnecessary page to download.
With the growth of the Web, usability has become a necessity for company survival. It is rather simple: if you can't find a product, then you can't buy it.
Usability is a fairly old discipline and I have worked in the field for almost 20 years. But until recently usability was not considered strategic. In fact, usability was given low priority in computer companies relative to their eternal search for more and more features.
This approach has given us designs where you have to click on "Start" to stop your computer and where the average user has no clue with respect to using most of the features on his or her machine. Most computers around the world are pasted over with yellow stickies that list the magic incantations that are necessary to make the computer do even simple things like drawing a pie chart.
The computer industry has mostly ignored usability because it has not mattered much to its business model. Users pay their money before they get to experience the product in detail. Only after you take a new computer or a new software product home do you discover that you can't make it draw pie charts. By then, the manufacturer is laughing all the way to the bank and the buyer is left with countless hours of frustration.
The Web reverses the equation. On the Web, you start out by experiencing the usability of a site. Only if the site is easy to use will you stay there. Only if you can find the products will you buy them. Only if the user experience is positive will you turn into a loyal customer and return to the site. Consider the difference in the sequence of events: With computers, money comes first and usability comes second. On the Web, usability comes first and money comes second. This is why websites must focus on usability in order to succeed.
The main finding from my six years of usability studies of web users is that they are extremely impatient. They want answers and solutions right away. Not only are they unwilling to wait for slow downloads, they are also not interested in overblown or fancy design.
Simplicity is key to satisfying users. They don't want to spend time learning how to use a site. The very concept of manuals or help text is laughable, since we know that users don't read instructions.
If they can't figure out how to use a site, then their solution is not to read the manual. Their answer is to go to another site. Ruthlessly clicking the "back" button. But then users do have eight million sites to choose from, so why should they waste time on a site that is too difficult to use?
Every single user votes with every single mouse click. And most of these votes go to websites with high usability. Sites with high traffic score much higher in usability metrics than sites from famous companies with lower traffic.
In 1999, I tabulated the number of violations of my usability rules in two groups of websites, and the high-traffic sites only had two-thirds of the violation score of the sites in a control group. The difference was most striking in download times. High-traffic sites downloaded in an average of eight seconds, whereas low-traffic sites took 19 seconds. In other words, better usability means more users.
Currently, the vast majority of websites are much too difficult to use and users get lost most of the time when venturing onto a new site. Luckily, there are pretty simple ways of improving the usability of a web design, and 90 per cent of current websites are so horrible that they could double in usability by following my rules. About 10 per cent of sites have a clue but could still improve substantially by an increased focus on usability in the design.
Because users prefer sites with high usability, sheer "design Darwinism" will ultimately lead to the survival of the most usable sites. High usability means more users and more sales and thus makes sites thrive.
Jakob Nielsen PhD is a web usability guru and joint principal of Nielsen Norman Group with the former head of Apple Research, Dr Donald A. Norman. Nielsen's book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity was published recently by New Riders. Info: www.useit.com