In her 2006 book, Talk to the Hand 
, Lynne Truss identifies her discontents with twenty-first century manners. One of these is ‘why am I doing this?’. While she acknowledges that ‘do it yourself’ was ‘a refreshing and liberating concept in its day’ it is now, she asserts, ‘completely out of hand.’ Her complaint is built around two areas of self-service: wading through ‘self-service’ menus on the telephone and using the internet. In both cases, she objected to the ‘unacceptable transfer of effort in modern life … Why do these people never put themselves in my shoes? … Fuming resentment is the result.’
While Ms Truss may express herself more forcefully and more publicly than most of your customers, she is not alone in her resentment. And whether the purpose of your site is to sell a product or promote a cause, resentful visitors aren’t going to help. So why don’t you put yourself in the shoes of the people who visit your site?
I love being able to pay my bills in ten minutes online, rather than standing in a series of queues for half an hour or more, but because this is a chore I need to undertake regularly, it’s worth the effort to learn the layout and logic of my bank’s website. For something I only need to do occasionally, I do not want to invest a significant amount of my time learning to do it your way.
Booking conference facilities
Not long ago, I wanted to check conference facilities at a local hotel which is part of a large international chain. A search led me to a website which from its description should have been for the local hotel: instead it consisted of a page with a single line of text: ‘Click to visit the [Hotel chain] Website’. A click took me (as promised) to the website for the hotel chain, not the local hotel – I needed another two clicks for that. I then scrolled down to the foot of the page, where I found a series of small images with text inviting me to find more information about HOTEL, CITY PROFILE, ROOMS & SUITES, RESTAURANTS & BARS, LEISURE & FITNESS, and MEETINGS & EVENTS. The first of these was the worst, as it actually took me back to the top of the page I was on – no more information there! Meetings and events did have useful information about their range of facilities, but no indication of cost. While there, I decided to look for a location map, to help interstate visitors: the only place I could find this was under ‘City profile’ – a page with some very general information about Tasmania and nothing at all to say about Hobart!
The site has since been rebuilt: some of these problems have been corrected, but many new ones have been introduced.
By contrast, at the website of another local hotel only a few blocks away, a single click took me to a list of their function rooms, including their capacity and prices. The location map, complete with driving instructions, was accessible from every page via a link straightforwardly labelled ‘Location’.
Which business (or their website design team) had paid more attention to users’ needs? And if both these venues have rooms suitable for the conference, and charge comparable fees, which am I likely to recommend?
Making life easier for your customers
So what do you need to do about it? If you’re the owner of a medium-sized business, and you have taken the trouble to get a website built, how can you be confident that using it will get your potential customers into a positive mood? The most common approach seems to be to assume that web designers know what they are doing, and will produce a usable site, and in an ideal world this would be true.
Sadly, we don’t live in an ideal world, and it’s not true. It really isn’t difficult to build web pages. HTML, the basic language of the web, was designed to be easy to use (and services like WordPress make it even easier). Anyone with a computer and a degree of chutzpah can call themselves a website designer. And even if you are very good, it can be difficult to judge your own work objectively: you know what you meant when you labelled that link ‘Passion’, so if the customers don’t it must be their fault – mustn’t it?
A website designer can (and should) conduct usability tests throughout the design process, but it’s even better if someone else does it for them. If you’re sitting down at a computer, trying to find out how to buy the widget that is somewhere on this new site, it’s much less intimidating to know that the person sitting beside you is not the one who created those baffling menu options. Even if the designer resists the temptation to point out where the customer should go, their body language may well be saying ‘isn’t it obvious?’ Similarly, it’s difficult to run usability tests yourself: you know your business, and you know what you call your products, but do you know what your customers call them?
You could spend tens of thousands of dollars on the opinions of an internationally-respected expert like Jakob Neilsen. You could buy Steve Krug’s Don’t make me think! plus a video camera and spend some time learning how to conduct effective user testing yourself. Or you could buy the services of a web editor who can identify what you want your customers to do when they visit your website, and why they’re not doing it.
Make life easy for your customers, and they can stop saying: ‘Why am I doing this?’