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A Speedier Day at the Cyber Races Axcis, a site that provides statistics for horse-racing and sports bettors, got pointed advice: Make the message clear -- and lose the pop-ups When I was a child, we took lots of car trips. My father used to have a saying I always think about when I find myself on a Web site that seems confusing to use or navigate: "Never let somebody who has lived in a town all his life be in charge of the signs there." Many entrepreneurial Web sites have been developed by folks who are managing servers with one hand, writing HTML code with another, and scouring clip-art collections for graphics in their free time. When it comes to navigation, they're so intimately familiar with what they've put on the site that getting from any one place to another, to them, always seems "obvious." No wonder that a fresh visitor to their "town" can easily become baffled.
However, the company has always relied on internal resources to develop its look, feel, architecture, and navigation scheme. Unfortunately, by piling on different kind of tricks and elements to try to make certain features stand out, the site has become cluttered, slow to load, and more confusing than visually interesting. Axcis also has another difficult challenge with this site: Its best customers fall into two extreme categories of Web savvy. Its horse-racing aficionados are older and less comfortable with computers and the Web, while its younger, data-craving sports bettors are eager to compute mega-variable point spreads for the Super Bowl. MEET THE EXPERTS We took these problems to two top Web-design experts. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group is one of the Web's leading proponents of the importance of "usability." George Johnson is vice-president and creative director of Novo, a San Francisco-based Internet professional services company. Johnson has worked in a design capacity for some of the world's most widely known brands, including Nabisco, Continental, General Motors, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Eastman Kodak, Fisher-Price, Cellular One, and Drexel Burnham Lambert. As always, we alert our readers that the reviews and makeover suggestions presented here aim to address common problems seen across the Web. Were a company to retain these experts for a true site makeover, the designers would spend considerably more time evaluating and often reorganizing the entire information architecture to make it look and work better today -- and to be scalable for the future. Below, you'll find a sleek, clean redesign for the Axcis home page from Johnson and his team at Novo. It turns out that both Nielsen and Johnson had very similar critiques of the existing site. But before we go to the new page, we'll start with a discussion of usability from Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen is a passionate advocate for putting the user's needs first and foremost in Web design. And he doesn't pull his punches.
The Axcis site's first sin, according to Nielsen, is far too common across the Web today as enterprises struggle to grab user attention to a special feature or new content: Axcis tries to flag "hot" news with a pop-up screen. Nielsen: "The very first impression a user gets when visiting Axcis is a slap across the face. Without asking permission, the site pops up an annoying extra window. Most users will react by reflex and kill the pop-up as fast as possible without even reading it since pop-ups usually contain irrelevant advertisements for dubious services. Professional sites should shun this technique. "If the 'hot' stuff is really that hot, it should be on the home page and be used to enhance the site's value proposition by showing off the important information it provides to users. The current home page smells stale and could use some news -- particularly for a site that provides daily updates about horse racing. "The text on the home page is tiny, and readability is further reduced by the use of a low-contrast color. Users always complain that they do not like to read text from a computer monitor. Why stack the deck even further against you by using anything but the highest-contrast colors and the user's preferred font? When in doubt, use black on white -- just like 99% of the newspapers in the world." NO WAY BACK Axcis prevents users who tunnel into the product pages on the site from using the "back button," a widespread but self-defeating strategy that Nielsen calls a "violation of basic user rights." "After reviewing a product page, it is impossible to return to the home page through the use of the simplest and most frequently used interaction technique: a click on the back button. So unless a user happens to pick the right product in the very first click from the home page, it is very likely that he or she will stop right there and go away. Back is your friend. Back is your lifeline. It returns you to safe territory." In Axcis' Player's Club area, a row of little colored circles reveals its links only if the user sweeps the mouse pointer over them. Nielsen calls this Web design trick "Scratch-n-sniff" and believes it infuriates impatient Web browsers and will chase them away. Additional recommendations from Nielsen:
CREDIBILITY IS KEY George Johnson and his team are similarly focused on the user's experience, with a goal of "more accurately communicating the credibility of the company and the integrity of its services. "By restructuring and streamlining the information, we were able to clarify the experience. The streamlined page allows users to evaluate what they require and where they can find it. Also, by re-addressing the hierarchical order of the information and reducing the importance of less critical information, we were able to ensure a rich and relevant user experience."
Explains Johnson: "We needed to make it clear what the company did and what services the company provided." Sounds simple, but that was far from clear on the existing home page. "We did this by adding a corporate tag line and including a 'welcome' paragraph clearly stating the company's business. "Finally, we evaluated the design and layout. We added order and simplicity to the page by limiting color palettes, typefaces, and graphic elements. The new design reflects the legitimacy of their business. It also conveys their leadership in the industry." VANDERBOSCH RESPONDS "The redesigned site looks great. Very clean and well organized. Of course, there is still the challenge of keeping it simple as the user gets deeper in the site, and has multiple products to choose from. But overall, I think the initial objective -- keeping people on our site after we have committed extensive advertising dollars to get them there -- is well served by this design. My Webmaster and I are already discussing how to implement." THE PANELISTS  Jakob Nielsen (www.useit.com) is a "user advocate" specializing in Web usability and a principal of Nielsen Norman Group (www.nngroup.com), which he co-founded with Donald A. Norman, former Apple Research vice-president. Nielsen's most recent book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, has been the No. 1 best-selling book on Amazon.com in the computer/Internet category every week since Jan. 5. Nielsen's Alertbox essays about Web usability have been published on the Internet since 1995 (www.useit.com/alertbox) and get about 6 million page views per year. Nielsen holds 45 U.S. patents, mainly on ways to make the Internet easier to use.
 George Johnson's background includes comprehensive interactive, Web, and editorial design as well as creative direction. Prior to Novo Interactive, Mr. Johnson was creative director at Automatic. He was assisted on this project by Angela Dryden, information design director; John Steward, design director; and Nancy Edge, visual designer, all of Novo.
Joan O'C. Hamilton writes Business Week's Digital Dispatch column. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
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WEB POINTERS Click here to visit some of the sites mentioned in the story: Axcis.com useit.com www.nngroup.com www.useit.com/alertbox Novo Web-site makeovers: CNN/Sports Illustrated virtualgourmet.com | |||||||||||
