Of all the things that frustrate Web-design guru Jakob Nielsen -- and rest assured, there are plenty -- one of the biggest is that Web-site developers wait to do usability testing on their sites until after the site has launched. Nielsen believes that those critical early days are far too valuable to be wasted. That's because the enterprise's most enthusiastic, motivated customers are the ones likely to arrive first, whether led by word of mouth or advertising. If their first experience is annoying or confusing, a company squanders a huge opportunity to acquire happy customers who will pass the word along.
One recently launched e-business, Ideas.com, testifies to the advantages of gathering usability insights early on. The startup aims to bring together corporations and people in need of help and ideas on various projects with the wellspring of idea-generating Web users.
Chief Technology Officer and founder Sharat Singh was a Microsoft veteran who had plenty of experience with usability labs inside the software giant. Singh contacted Nielsen a few months into the company's development process at the suggestion of a backer, and Nielsen was instantly intrigued with the company's goal of matching idea generators with enterprises and projects that needed them. However, Singh and some others were skeptical at first. Their biggest worry: Many traditional usability processes involve weeks of testing, then more time to process the results. "We were really concerned with turnaround time," explains Singh, because when the company became acquainted with Nielsen in June, it had a September launch target. "If we went into usability, what do we do -- stop coding for three weeks while we wait for the data?"
"HALF-BAKED." But the more they spoke with Nielsen, the more sense usability testing made to them. Plus, he assured them that the tests would not set back their full-speed ahead efforts. "You'd like to think you've got all these people who are intimately involved in the Web environment, and you don't need testing, but you find out you're just too close to it," says Singh. "People look at the Web as a medium among many that they look at in a day or a week. The only real test is when you launch, but if you wait for that, you launch a half-baked product."
Nielsen's team integrated testing into Ideas.com's development, using two different sets of testing sessions. After each session, Nielsen's team would take the code that had been finished that very day, test it with users in the evening, and have feedback evaluated and ready to influence the next day's work.
Ideas.com, which officially launched on Nov. 9, has supplied Business Week with one set of "before-and-after" pages that were directly influenced by usability testing (below). First the "before" homepage:
Among the issues users immediately reacted to was one so basic and simple that Chris Goumas of Ideas.com says it simply blew the company away: "Users came back to us and said they couldn't figure out where to start. It was absolutely unobvious" where they should begin interacting with the page, he explains. What was the culprit? Turns out, much of it had to do with the relatively large photograph on the top right-hand side of the page, meant to give emphasis to a testimonial from a user of the service. However, says Goumas, "users usually look at the middle and then the left side of the page, but that picture was quite large, and it was stealing eyeballs from the rest of the page."
SUBTLE POINTS. Another simple-seeming land mine: On the original design, the page offers both a "log-in" and "registration" options in the upper-right-hand corner. This is a classic case where people who spend many hours on the Web every day perceive these as two very different, distinct types of actions. In user testing, however, "people could not figure out the difference between log-in and registration. To many people, it's just not obvious, and they would keep trying to log in when they hadn't registered," says Goumas.
Look also at the muddy colors and odd spacing on the navigation bar at the top of the page. They're difficult to read, and Goumas says user reported "funny words" that they didn't understand when they read them, such as "brand ideas," which mean absolutely nothing to anyone. "No one had a clue what that meant."
As this sort of feedback shows, usability testing is not necessarily about finding big conceptual flaws with a site, or glaring mistakes, or collecting harsh user reactions to colors or graphics. Much more often, it's about subtle, not very obvious elements that will nonetheless stop users cold - and prompt them to click away.
Now, review the site that resulted from this first round of feedback.
Several things are immediately noticeable: First, the overall impression is less cluttered, especially with text. Nielsen is adamant with clients that they need to rethink their approach to textual communication on Web sites and emphasize powerful headlines, summaries, and bullet points, not long blocks of text that annoy and put off readers. Goumas notes: "On the original version, you'll note that there are hundreds more words. There's a quarter of the words and number of ideas on the newer site. That was definitely based on feedback."
More changes:
The color of the navigation bar and words on it shifted to a more readable blue, and the language was changed to become clearer.
More effort was made to distinguish in different places between registration, which is aimed at first-time visitors, and log-in, which is for returning visitors.
The testimonial photograph was made smaller and dropped on the page, and the eyes are averted to keep from trapping users' eyes.
It's clear from the headline and the treatment of the top left-hand box that that's where one "starts" on this page.
Finally, one change (not apparent here) went to the heart of the process by which users were guided through the site. Originally, Ideas.com featured "wizards" that used shortcuts based on user responses to various questions. However, the wizards did not test well. "We learned they actually made it too simple," says Goumas. "Users wanted more hand-holding and walking-through the process."
Meanwhile, the Ideas.com crew seems to have learned Nielsen's most fundamental lesson: Keep testing, keep adapting. As your users change, so must you. By their launch date, they had made more tweaks, based on more user testing. To see those results, check them out at www.ideas.com.
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