Prairie Sunspots

How usable is your website? Could there be features that are confusing your users or giving them a less than favorable customer experience?

Research indicates that usability offers a better return on investment than almost any other business action. A good experience is essential for a customer to return to your website. If a website is difficult to use or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave.

The business benefits for improving web usability include:

• Improve overall customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Increase productivity
• Decrease training and support costs
• Increased sales and revenues
• Reduce development time and costs
• Reduce maintenance and support costs

Incorporating ease of use into your website will actually save you money. Reports have shown it is far more economical to consider user needs in the early stages of design, than it is to solve them later. For example, at one company, end-user training for a usability-engineered internal system was one hour compared to a full week of training for a similar system that had no usability work. Increased usability will reduce the number of support calls and the about of time spent by staff providing assistance when users encounter difficulties.

A Usability Expert will help ensure your site is intuitively easy to use, appropriate to the task, and accommodates your user’s needs. Your users will achieve their goals effectively and efficiently and will enjoy interacting with your website. Products and services look better, demo better and sell better, as they are more intuitive to use and more effective.

Synopsis from article written by our Usability Expert, Lori Robertson.