Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

I was delighted to have recently been interviewed by Dave Chaffey, BSc, PhD, FCIM, MIDM, for my thoughts, recommendations and guidance on the key aspect of findability in online marketing. Dave is an author, consultant and trainer specialising in E-commerce and E-marketing education and guidance. Huge online resources, reports, books and interviews can be found over at Dave’s highly popular website.

The 5 questions that Dave asked me were:

1. What do you see as findability? Why is findability relevant to marketers?
2. How do you tackle findability in your usability projects?
3. What would you say are the biggest findability errors that e-retail sites typically have from a marketing perspective?
4. I know you’re a big advocate of card-sorting. Typically this is part of a heavyweight usability project. Is there any place for it in improve findability of an existing site which is not due a major upgrade.
5. When working at Littlewoods Shop Direct Group there must have been a tension between print-based design techniques for the catalogues and web-based design techniques. Can web designers learn from the catalogue merchandising techniques. Any tips and tricks?

Take a look at the full Q and A session, which from my commercial experience at Littlewoods Shop Direct is geared towards large multi-channel retailers.

Taking a different view of the upcoming FA Cup Final between Chelsea v Man United (come on the reds!), following the relaunch of the Manchester United website in 2006, which has since received multiple award nominations, I was interested to see how Chelsea are promoting themselves online, both in football and commercial terms, in comparison.

Surprising to say the least, but the current Chelsea FC website is a fully flash driven site, providing an ultimately different user experience to Manchester United.

As expected and required for a variety of reasons including search engine optimisation and accessibility, a text only version of the site has been provided.

Having spent some time exploring the Chelsea website, as I’m already fairly familiar with the Man United website in terms of information architecture, user experience and ultimately the user experience that has won them awards, I am beginning to un-cover some fairly significant user experience issues which can only be detrimental the overall Chelsea brand experience and online revenue generation currently.

Very top level, but below are some of my initial user experience comments, in no particular order (**editors note – as I have been analysing the Chelsea website to produce this post I have realised that I need to get back to paid work, so whereas the following list and this post in general could be alot longer, I had to hold off going into this subject too deeply!):

• non-caching flash homepage – the main flash movie that you view on the homepage (once it finishes loading, which even on an 8MB broadband connection feels quite frustrating) hasn’t been coded to allow for caching of the flash file, so therefore each time a user wishes to return to the homepage, (perhaps as they are feeling lost – but that is another matter) they have to wait for the full movie to load. To compound matters, viewing the site in Firefox actually made the flash file hang at some stages, requiring a browser refresh.
• mixed navigational methods – although one of my key recommendations for large, particularly e-commerce websites, is to provide users with alternative ways to navigate a site based on their browsing preferences ie. using the search facility, exploring the promoted products/information and navigating through the main navigational routes, the implementation of some of Chelsea’s browsing features, such as the zoom functionality in particular and the discovery of the sidebar sitemap, ensure that rather than generating confidence in the user, confusion is brought on followed by frustration at trying to understand how the site is working
• fixed site size, both horizontally and vertically – by using a full fixed width flash movie to display the site, a user has to continually click inside small internal frames to scroll through the content within the frame. By the nature of the site, articles and reports can be extensive, which requires significant amount of scrolling, although unfortunately not by the standard means of scrolling the browser window
• poor quality imagery – although the site isn’t actually selling products, the quality of the imagery used throughout the site is detrimental to the overall appeal of the site, as it provides a much less professional representation of the club and its sponsors to a visitor
• non-clickable areas appearing to be clickable – some of the ‘hit areas’ within the site have been incorrectly included within the flash movies, which result in the mouse cursor changing to signify a link when in fact the area isn’t clickable

What Manchester United are doing well from a user experience aspect

1. a structured, consistent and professional presentation of information
2. a standard but ultimately intuitive navigation and information architecture
3. a polished visual style which provides fans and business users with the appropriate levels of brand and club awareness and information
4. use of interactive flash where it can enhance the user experience ie. a virtual tour of Old Trafford
5. a highly visible and consistent search facility, a must for such a content rich and deep website

What Manchester United are doing well from a commercial aspect

1. constantly integrated promotion of commercial channels such as MU TV, MU Mobile, MU Pics, MU Finance
2. constant promotion and visibility of the register/login/account details functionality – ultimately by encouraging fans to register Man Utd can tailor content and offers accordingly, providing much more commercial value to the site
3. an integrated visual approach combining the brand and the sponsors
4. an overall professional visual style which caters for both the fans and corporate requirements, which ultimately reflects well on Manchester United as a commercial business

My recommendations to the online brand manager at Chelsea FC

If I was sat in front of the online brand/marketing manager for Chelsea, I would recommend a range of actions which would certainly help Chelsea focus their current online brand marketing.

1. carry out user testing, with a range of users such as casual supporters, die-hard supporters, corporate hospitality users, the press, visually impaired and more
2. obtain a heuristic evaluation of the website (view a 1 page overview of what is a hueristic evaluation and how it works)
3. develop persona’s of typical users of the site, concentrating on what key areas they are likely to be looking for within the site
4. carry out card sorting exercises to gain an insight into how actual users expect to locate different pieces of information throughout the site
5. based on the above points, consider testing a different, user centred design solution which would aim to vastly increase the usability and overall user experience of the site

In my view, although such a user centred design project will have resource and cost implications, by really focussing the site on the user, I would predict Chelsea FC would experience significant :

• increases in page views
• increases in length of visit
• increases in natural search traffic
• increases in uptake of commercial channels (betting, mobile, TV etc)
• increases in visitor loyalty, especially if user registration is introduced (similar to ONE United)
• decreases in visitor drop-out rates
• good press regarding the site and its usability and accessibility

Final thoughts

Comparing the 2 online presences currently, although Chelsea have made significant on the pitch strides to rival Manchester United, the current online battle is most certainly being won by Manchester United, who appear to be harnessing most of the commercial opportunities that can lead from an immersive and intuitive user experience.

Ultimately results on the pitch will always make the headlines (and provide the marketing) for a football club, but I look forward to seeing whether Chelsea will look to online as a marketing channel with which they can more effectively promote the club and the brand to what is now a worldwide audience.

I’d be interested to hear any feedback to this post, as well as finding out if anyone has more examples of potentially harmful rather than positive user experiences amongst football clubs and other sporting brands online?

Ashley over at E-consultancy has just posted a new article on multivariate and A/B testing, which they see as being a key testing and optimisation technique in the future. I agree and have posted a response, and I expect his post will generate a significant amount of feedback and interest from software providers and other online marketers.

In particular for e-commerce sites, from my experience these types of testing can provide clear commercial insights into what is and isn’t working on their website, and I expect to be involved in such projects quite frequently.

An article which I have come across is titled Multivariable Testing, which provides a very good insight and further links to anyone who is interested in this topic.

What thoughts or experiences do any of you have on this form of testing and optimisation? Please share your comments.

Bringing together a fantastic panel of industry leading guests, including:

• Jakob Nielsen, Principal of Nielsen Norman Group
• Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress
• Todd Purgason, Creative Director of Juxt Interactive
• Nick Finck, Web Analyst and Information Architect for Digital Web
• Eric Jordan, President and Creative Director of 2advanced

…Scene360 have asked a series of questions and raised issues to see what the hype is about tools and technologies, where we are at present time, and where we may be in the future.

The full article, titled Web Special: Past, Present and Future… creating for the web is a very useful read which tackles questions such as:

• What are common accessibility or/and usability errors found on websites? Do you care about issues from W3C (w3.org)
• Flash technology is popular. Adobe confirmed it with buying Macromedia. We see web studios, Group94 and HiReS!, dedicating a big percentage of projects in Flash. Are Flash sites just a trend and overall useless? Or do you consider there is room for Flash as there is with CSS, and yes, there are well-constructed sites with usability?
• Name a site that you consider an exceptional example (Paul Rouke comment – in relation to Flash). Explain briefly why.
• There is a lot of talk about “Function vs. Form”, which most of the time is actually related to “Visual Design vs. Backend Programming”. This topic has been known to cause frustration and controversy among designers and developers. What is good, what is not?—conflicting opinions that not always contribute to improving the Web. What can we do to unite these professions of different personalities, yet working in the same industry, if not together?
• Blogs are a phenomenon. Almost everyone has one, and it is simple to set up through open-source software. Blogs have influenced the growing use of standardized structured sites. What is your view on this phenomenon?
• What technology trends do you think will be used in the future?
• Because we don’t like concluding an interview with just a typical question: “What the future will hold?” Please highlight three issues or thoughts about the Web that is disregarded or you feel important to share with our readers.

In all I felt this extensive article was a great read and I expect it to circulate the net quite quickly.

A recent post on E-consultancy entitled Five reasons why you should embrace Usability provides the following reasons as to why businesses, especially true for businesses operating e-commerce websites, can’t ignore the challenge of making their online experience usable. Instead businesses should embrace usability:

1. You seriously can’t afford not to

Repeat: you cannot afford to ignore the user experience. Especially if you sell online. Or if you can afford to then you aren’t optimising your business performance. It’s that simple.

2. User experience can be more important than brand and price

It can be argued that the user experience is more important than both brand and price. What use is a brand like Gap when there is no on-site search tool on Gap.com?

What use is discounting prices when your checkout process is poor and haemorrhages prospective buyers? Conversely, a startup with no known brand and average prices can get on the map by being more user-friendly than established competition.

3. Gain the competitive advantage

There is a bigger picture here: a higher than average conversion rate will ultimately help you to outbid competitors on Google Adwords.

Usability studies can help you convert as many prospective customers as possible. Again, with Google Adwords in mind, if you are paying to attract these prospects then it becomes even more important to realize a return on your (paid search) investment.

Likewise, if your site converts well, then affiliates will like sending traffic to your site as the earnings per click (EPC) they get from you (how much money they make on average per referral they send you) will be better than your competition.

4. Focus on web standards

Usability studies will test your website for errors, as well as problem zones. Error-free code is important for various reasons, not least your Google rankings.

5. You are already spending on design

Websites should be constantly tweaked for optimum business results, but even if you only update your site every couple of years you will still spend a lot of money, so make sure you spend it wisely.

Invest 5%-20% of your design budget on usability to be sure that your new design is in line with what your users want. Usability first, changes second.

My thoughts on why businesses can’t ignore usability

Alongside the comments above, introducing usability into an existing website, by way of either small, subtle changes, for instance to the visibility of key site tools, or by carrying out a complete expert usability site critique, through a complete cycle of card sorting, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, user testing, eye tracking and carrying out focus groups (a non definitive list) businesses can achieve clear increases in visitor conversion rates, shopping basket sizes, registrations, applications, newsletter sign-ups and other specific goals which the business is targeting for their website.

Visitors experiencing good usability on an e-commerce site will:

1. be more likely to complete a shopping process
2. be more willing to browse additional ranges of products that wouldn’t normally be looking for
3. enjoy their experience and be more inclined to revisit the site in future
4. have confidence in the ways in which they can find the products they are looking for (ie. by an intuitive navigation system, by a clear and helpful search facility, by special seasonal specific promotions, plus viewing related products whilst that are browsing the ranges)
5. feel in control of their browsing at all times, avoiding the feeling of being lost and having to go back to the homepage and start again
6. recommend the site to friends and colleagues who share similar shopping styles, therefore providing the business with free publicity
7. be more receptive to marketing communications from the business

And my final benefit (for this post) to a businesses providing good online usability…

Customers will visit and shop from the site again and again, as it is somewhere where they feel comfortable and in control, which helps develop trust in the brand. Visitors are always more likely to remember a site they have enjoyed using than one which confused or frustrated them.