What good is a memorable design if the user can’t get what they want from the site?

I think that first rule about creating websites is to understand that users are very busy. There are just too many demands on their time. What they want (and deserve) is to get specific answers, in the shortest possible time.

Yesterday, I spent several hours searching for a specific time & attendance clocking system. Most of the sites were unmemorable, possibly all. But when I found sites that might offer what I wanted, I bookmarked them to come back later. Now, they don’t have to be memorable for me: to get onto my bookmarked list, they have to be valuable in terms of the answers they provide.

Searching threw up several issues for me: Once I got to a site, I wasn’t able to find the information quickly because no one thought about me. The sites were mostly self-promoting and time-consuming to work through. I would have appreciated clear, unambiguous headlines (that I could scan through), clear answers to my questions such as system requirements for their products and most importantly, clearly outlined benefits of their products. All of this I had to search deeply for. Many websites were just too cumbersome to explore.

Here are a number of primary questions that I think every website must address:
1. What can your product do that will interest me?
2. Why should I do business with you?
3. What can you guarantee me?

I don’t care if your benefits are unique or not, I just want the right combination specific to what I want.

Sorry if the above sounds abrupt or selfish, but I represent the ‘holy grail’ – a web visitor and potential and immediate buyer!

One book that I found very simple and striking is Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think”. This provides a journey into the mind of the site visitor and how she thinks. He discusses conventions that work (so why change them), how users “muddle” their way through, the visual hierarchy, usability testing and so on.

Anyone serious about usability should give thought to these issues.

1. The visual aesthetic of the site does make the user more willing to put up with using it, but the design should be tailored to the audience. Google uses a lot of data and separates it cleanly with whitespace, but what if your audience is primarily visual, like a skateboard website? Imagery becomes paramount. Research is key to a great visual layer.

2. Dynamic feedback is great if it’s subtle and allows the user to confirm their actions without thinking, but too much can get annoying fast. In-line form validation? Awesome. Ridiculous page transitions? Really annoying. We typically like to use metaphors as opposed to analogies because it allows us to translate real world behaviors into web norms. You have to work within the medium.

3. Study after study has shown the users will continue to click into a site as long as you’re giving them something useful and relevant to click on. The click-depth lie is just as misleading to designers as the “page fold”. Good information architecture is letting the person know where they are within the structure of the site, not limiting the structure of the site to make everything appear in one place.

4. There are a very limited number of applications where a user wants to spend time to get to know how to use an application. That’s why we have progressive disclosure. Refer to the 80/20 rule, 80% of your users probably only use 20% of an application or site’s features. So you design around the happy path and offer “advanced” features only for the people that want them.

Finally, I don’t really know why the author chose to use terrible websites in the examples. There are so many great and useful sites that aren’t built in flash just to be flashy and allow people to accomplish a great deal of tasks.

It seems as though the internet is turning into its own medium, that is not unlike any other medium.