Talking of web sites and business promotion, I was on a hotel site this week and, try as I might, couldn’t find their postal address. Several clicks later it turned out the address, the only incidence of it appearing anywhere on the site, was on the contact us page.
An obvious place to look, perhaps. But after being on many hotel sites, I’d come to expect the postal address prominently on the home page, on the map page and liberally littered elsewhere around the site. As it was, the address was on a page I would have thought to go straight to two years ago. How times change.
This minor irritation had I actually intended booking rather than looking for their address would have been enough for me to abandon the site. What this one hiccup indicates is that we should regularly review our site and ask users for feedback on how we can improve the experience. For with so much choice available to consumers, it’s crucial that we go out of our way to be easy to do business with. And web site usability is one of the building blocks in today’s competitive online environment.
Get the basics rights and, everything else being equal, our web site stands as good a chance as any other at pulling in business. Fortunately, most sites these days are user-friendly to a greater or lesser extent. How it is done is by constantly fine tuning and improving web site layout and navigation to make the transition from casual viewer to paying customer as easy and as logical as possible. This requires the web site owner thinking through every step of the sales path carefully and planning accordingly.
But, human nature being what it is, we don’t always get it right. Users will often interact with a site in unexpected ways. Or sometimes the user will be thrown off course by a badly phrased question or instruction.
Checking web site logs and getting user feedback will highlight problem areas and help suggest fixes that can improve site performance and usability. One of the worse things is to appreciate a problem may exist but not do anything to investigate or correct it. Worst still, perhaps, is to be clueless that users are experiencing difficulties and be discouraged by our web site’s performance.
