Sep 21 - Nielsen, 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities (Alertbox)

10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities

Summary: Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.

Following here are 10 Internet tactics with a particularly high return on investment (ROI).

1. Email Newsletters

Email newsletters let you maintain a relationship with your customers that lasts beyond their visits to your site.
The newsletter is the perfect website companion because it answers a different user need: newsletters keep customers informed and in touch with the company; websites give customers detailed information and let them perform business transactions.
Newsletters are fairly cheap. They require little technology and mustn't be published too frequently.
If you don't have a newsletter, then publishing one is probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence.
If you do have a newsletter, then improving it according to research findings will likely make it several times more valuable to your organization.
Newsletters have one more benefit: they are the primary way to liberate your site from dependence on search engines.

2. Informative Product Pages

The product pages on e-commerce sites, marketing sites, and B2B sites all suffer from information deficit. It's rare to see product descriptions that tell prospects everything they need to know to make a purchasing decision.
In my recent book, I present data showing that poor product information accounted for 8% of the usability problems on the websites we tested. Even worse, poor product information accounted for 10% of the user failures (that is, cases where users gave up, as opposed to "just" being delayed or annoyed).
Designing product pages according to user needs is a highly targeted way to encourage sales at a point where users have already indicated interest by virtue of visiting the page.
You need detailed product information, but it must be written in a way that makes sense to people who aren't experts in your field.

3. High-Quality Photography

One of the simplest ways to improve product pages is to show better photographs.
For the hero shot at the top of the page, show the most representative photo in a small size. Below that, offer several additional photos that show different angles and close-up details. Also, remember mistake #10 of the top-10 Web-design mistakes of 2005: linking from small pictures to pictures that are only slightly bigger. Instead, link to photos that are as close to full-screen enlargements as possible.
Using huge enlargements might seem to contradict the guideline about fast response times for downloading Web pages. But there's a big difference between bloating a navigational page with irrelevant graphics and showing a big photo after the user asked for it.
In the first case, the slow download interrupts the user's flow. In the second case, the delay is expected, and while delays are never welcome, they are less of a problem when they're clearly necessary to fulfill a user request.
For software products or online services, show full-resolution screenshots instead of photos.

4. Product Differentiation and Comparisons

You must soothe user fears about buying the wrong product, or they'll postpone their purchases and probably never buy from your site.
When you have multiple products in the same category, you must explain product differences so clearly that it's obvious to people without industry expertise why they should buy one particular product over the others.
Even if you have a small and clearly defined product line, you must make the differences blatantly obvious on your site.
Comparison tools can also help users choose and thus overcome decision paralysis and facilitate sales. But such tools work well only when they illustrate key differences in a concise and unambiguous manner.
Too often, websites take the easy way out and simply throw up a huge table of specifications without highlighting the points where products differ.

5. Support for Reordering

To make people spend more money, make it easy to reorder.
People often need the same things again and again. Why require them to navigate five levels down your site each time? In B2B, customers often need to order supplies, spare parts, or accessories for equipment they've already bought, so you should also facilitate those types of supplementary orders.
In one of our studies last month, test participants especially appreciated it when FreshDirect, an online grocer, let them reorder from their previous shopping lists.
Reordering is a matter of total user experience, beyond the website's user interface. Compose your product line with a view toward reordering. Continue to carry classic products so that people can order new copies of things they like. If you need to launch new products, keep sizes and similar parameters the same.

6. Simplified Text

You can usually double website or intranet usability simply by rewriting the text to follow the guidelines for online content.
Better writing is probably the single most important improvement you can make to your site, but it appears fairly far down the top-10 list because it's not a one-time fix.
You must hire good writers for all your projects, train them in writing for the Web, and have all of their content edited by even better editors who are even more knowledgeable about content usability.

7. Catering to Seniors

Older people are the fastest-growing segment of Internet users. In fact, they are virtually the only remaining growth market in rich countries, where most of the younger people who want to get online already have accounts.
Best of all, you can take advantage of the fact that most websites discriminate horribly against older users. Even government websites that supposedly target retirees are designed according to guidelines for thirty-somethings.
Because so many sites are hard for them to use, seniors will shower you with business if you're the honorable exception who acknowledges their special needs. (And, those needs aren't even that special -- it's much easier to make sites usable for seniors than for users with disabilities, plus there are many more seniors and they tend to be richer.)

8. Gift-Giving Support

Wishlists and gift certificates are low-cost features that give you incremental sales and introduce your site to new customers.

9. Search

Users increasingly depend on search as a primary interface to the Web.
While search is getting fairly good for the Internet at large, it remains miserable on most websites and intranets.
You must fix your content so that it's searchable. For example, you have to write meaningful page titles that actually explain the page's content so that people will know what they'll get when they click on a search hit. You also have to write using your users' vocabulary.
While it's expensive to rewrite your content for findability, doing so also improves your standing in external search engines, and SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the highest-ROI Internet marketing tactics.

10. User Testing

User testing should really be #1 on this list because of its ability to set your project right with almost no investment.
However unpopular, I still recommend that you do your own user testing. There are always issues that are unique to your own industry that can't be resolved by reading general research insights.
And remember: usability studies can be cheap, especially when you use low-cost paper prototypes that let you test an interface while it's still in the early design phase.

Bonus Tactic: Loyalty Program

For 10 years, I've recommended loyal-user programs, such as frequent-browser points modeled after airlines' frequent-flyer miles.
We've recently been observing people shopping online and are seeing some user loyalty emerge: more users are now starting out at a preferred site rather than a search engine. Perhaps we're finally seeing some websites that are good enough to be worthy of a bit of loyalty.
To encourage more loyalty, reward your repeat users.

Serving Customers, Not Chasing Hype

The high-ROI ideas I have highlighted here have one thing in common: they add value to your site by enhancing its value for customers. That is, they give users what they want and need. These ideas are not the latest over-hyped stories the trade press loves to cover.
Users want you to get back to basics and invest in the simple things that really matter to them.
Interface design is about making money for the company. Execution and workmanship are what you need, not fashion and advanced features. Do the basics, and do them well.

Source:
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, March 12, 2007:
10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/high-roi.html
10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)