Chapter 10 - Usability Testing the Movie

[Diamond Website Conversion]

In this chapter, Krugg gives us a useful way to conceptualize how people feel about using your website. When a person begins browsing your website, they have a certain amount of goodwill that they are willing to expend. Whatever problems or confusions that they run into deplete this reservoir, until finally a person becomes so frustrated that they leave the site and try to find what they are looking for elsewhere. These reservoirs are different from person to person, and are also different for the same person in different times and circumstances. A person in a hurry will have much less goodwill than a person who is only browsing.

There are a lot of different things that can diminish a person’s goodwill, but the major mistake evident in them all is wasting time. When you waste a person’s time, you are saying to them (whether explicitly or implicitly) that their concerns are not important to you or your business. Having graphics-intensive pages that take a long time to load, poorly organized navigation, or information that is simply missing, are all time-wasting and goodwill-depleting mistakes. Fortunately, you can do a lot of things to help increase goodwill as well. A lot of the basis of this is making certain that your site is easy to use, and doesn’t require much thought or concentration from the user. You can check the list on pages 166-167 for more exact examples of ways to increase visitor goodwill.

When was the last time that you were really frustrated by a website? Do you think that your website could be frustrating? This may be evidenced by a lot of hits with low conversion rates. What can you do to put more goodwill into your visitor’s reservoirs?

[Shelby]

Make it user-friendly & make sure it's optimized for conversion! It will be interesting as the years go on how much small businesses are going to catch on the importance of a usable website. It's not all about have a pretty site. Some are learning that the hard way right now, especially in this economy.

[Anne]

Yes, our website is very frustrating, both from a user's and a marketer's perspective. Challenging right now, to attempt to guage whether when they went to the site they wanted to browse or possibly had a well-defined goal in mind.