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Website Usability is Overrated

By: Chris Goward
Date: December 14th, 2007

Conversion Rate Hamster Usability is often where web marketers mistakenly turn when they need to improve the lead generation or e-commerce results from their web site.

The problem is that Usability “experts” will often recommend a plethora of time-consuming and expensive projects that will beguile the marketer into believing that they’re increasing their site’s effectiveness. The sheer magnitude of activity involved can divert attention from the important areas that the marketer should be focusing to increase the site’s persuasiveness.

Imagine you’re designing a new car. Usability research will help you figure out what words to label your air conditioning and stereo buttons with. Great. But, more importantly, does anyone want to drive the car? If it’s a family sedan, does it make families want to enjoy a road trip or does its design send the wrong message? Is your car too expensive (or less than your customers want to pay)? Do your customers even buy cars?

Usability professionals are technologists that use their library of “best practices” to create a “standards-based” site that’s exactly as expected. But when you want your site to inspire more of your visitors to move through your sales funnel, you need direct marketing experts with that unique mix of art and science that can persuade them to act.

We take a different approach to Usability by letting your site visitors choose which version they like better with statistically valid accuracy. We call it Quantitative Usability Testing. The difference is that through realtime A/B Split Testing and Multivariate Testing on your live site, we can quickly learn what really works to persuade more prospects to Act – not just guess by what a non-representative small sample tells you they like.

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1413 ResponsesWebsite+Usability+is+Overrated2007-12-14+18%3A53%3A21Chris+Goward to “Website Usability is Overrated”

Tim McGuiness Says:
December 17th, 2007 at 10:29 am
This makes me think of an eBay merchant I worked with a while ago. We tested two product layouts.

The first was designed elegantly and according to all rules we understood about usability and conversions. I found it to be very appealing.

The second was cheesy and cluttered. It had things like flashing American Flags and over-the top copy. I would have been turned off by it.

The results? It wasn’t even close. The cheesy one KILLED the elegant one.

Like the point of your post, sometimes we spend time on stuff that really isn’t important. And testing helps to solve that problem.
Weilliam Says:
March 9th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
While I understand the premise behind this article, I feel that this article is wrong on so many levels and littered with argument fallacies throughout.

First of all, usability is something different from “selling a product”. Even having the most usable website will not result in more sales leads for product that no one needs, or a poor quality product.

What usability helps, is that it allows a website’s customers to be able to find the product that they want, or add it to and check out the products, or to make payments without encounter errors, getting lost or confused in the process. A recent study done in UK has shown that usability flaws in the websites of many retailers have cost them approximately £100m for the Christmas period of 2007. While we cannot guarantee that good usability will increase sales leads, we are sure that online customers will abandon the site or terminate the purchase process faster than you can say “usability” if your website is not usable.

Then, you mention that “usability experts will often recommend a plethora of time-consuming and expensive projects that will beguile……” Now I don’t know if you had the unfortunate experience to work with such so-call “usability” companies, but any usability professional will tell you that this is not the way it works. As a professional in this field myself, we and our competitors do not make recommendations for the sake of it. To do so would be unethical, and would only be destroying our own name and potential for future working relations with our clients. When we make recommendations on “time-consuming and expensive projects”, we will only do so if there is a very strong need to do so, it justify the ROI for the client, and if such projects fit the strategic objectives and goals of what the clients are trying to achieve.

Next, your car analogy is a strawman. I could spend some time and argue on the point that usability isn’t just about button labeling, but I will focus more on your example instead.

Buying a car is more than looking at labels. It’s about the shape, the feel, the driving experience etc. Nobody buys a car purely on labeling of the buttons, so an argument based on this point is moot. How it will help though, is that a good labeling will improve the experience of driving the car, in the context that users don’t have to fumble around the controls or the buttons.

In fact, why not use another more valid example of how being “usable” helps in the product design? How about the iPod, where its popularity is a result of it’s simple and elegant interface?

Your point on “Usability professionals are technologists that use their library of “best practices” to create a “standards-based” site …….” is another strawman and ad-hominem. Firstly usable websites don’t have to be ugly; there are plenty of usable websites which are beautiful and inspirational in their own rights; and 2ndly, usability professionals don’t recommend just on the basis of “best practices”. We make recommendations based on understanding our client’s business, goals, objectives and the users, the context in which users will access the content. If it were all to be simply based on “best practices” we could simply sell a “best practices” book and there would be no need for usability professionals.

Your last paragraph is perhaps the most ironic portion. Basically you have made multiple points against usability and usability professionals in your article, yet you end it with “this is how we approach usability”. It typically validates that usability is still important, and then again you are also part of the “usability professional” that your whole article have been deriding all along.
Chris Goward Says:
March 10th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Thanks for your thoughtful response, Weilliam.

The point of the article is not to deride the Usability practice as a whole, but to warn marketers and web sales managers that:
1. Usability should not be the reflexive tactic to raise conversion rates
2. Alternatives to in-depth usability studies can often achieve the same or greater results with lower cost/time/effort.

Usability testing for physical products clearly can be an investment well-spent, and the car analogy was clearly (and intentionally) not a perfect parallel to the web. The advantage on the web is that we can ask a statistically significant sample of your prospects and customers which alternative layout and design works best for them and know with near certainty the effect and magnitude of the change. Apple didn’t have that ability when designing the iPod.

Usability testing does have its place in website improvement as a qualitative problem identifier in some cases. At its best, it can be used as a qualitative idea generator that can inform the statistically valid Quantitative Usability Testing that we perform.

It’s unfortunate that you didn’t leave your web site url, Weilliam, as it would be great to see the services that you recommend. You’re most likely one of the valuable usability professionals that is able to quickly identify site problems and recommend potential solutions that can be tested without breaking the bank. Thanks again for your comment.