Your Site Is Not Perfect
A lot of thought and effort goes into putting together a Web site, and there's a great deal of resistance to making change.
Monitoring site performance helps to identify problem spots, and also helps to provide objective evidence of the problems that exist: high bounce rates on important pages, low conversion numbers, unusual navigation patterns, and the like are strong evidence that improvements are needed.
Some techniques for overcoming problems:
- Audience Role Modeling - Put together a script of steps that a user might take when they land on your site (research, comparison, purchasing, arranging for delivery) and walk through the site to ensure they can be done easily
- Web Traffic Analysis - Look at the audience profile (locations and languages), the technical capabilities of their system, the percentages of new/returning visitors, the depth of interaction, sites that refer traffic, most popular pages, etc.
- Onsite Search - Look at the phrases entered into your on-site search engine. What are people searching for and finding no results. (EN: search is navigation of last resort - so even for popular terms, why do people feel the need to search?)
- Usability Testing - Like role modeling, only you get real users into a lab and ask them to perform certain tasks to see where they encounter difficulty
- Eye-Tracking - Determine what "spots" on your page are drawing the user's attention, and consider designing to accommodate that.
- Phone Reps - When the web site fails, people all, and the phone reps are probably well aware of the problems the customers are having.
More than anything else, usability is the key issue with Web sites: a user who is interested in completing a task gives up because it seems too difficult. It's especially important when facing new customers, as they tend to be less forgiving than established ones: they will have less patience, they will feel no commitment to your company, they will skim rather than read, they will seek what interests them, and they do a lot more clicking than reading.
Things to consider:
- Information Architecture - Is it easy to get to the page that contains the information I want?
- Accessibility - Are there any design or technical obstacles to using the site?
- Language - Is the site written in a language I can understand, and is easy to skim
- Tone - Is the information clear, factual, and task-oriented, or am I being herded?
- Layout - Are the elements of pages arranged in a way taht makes it easy for me to find what I need?
- Graphics - Do the images on the site help me to understand, or are they just eye candy?