| |
Usability AKA - Search PERSON Optimisation
This phrase was coined by our resident genius. After spending much time in his
laboratory, deliberating over the future of online marketing met his "Eureka" moment.
What if you developed a strategy allowing you to focus on people instead of the search engines? Would
there be any value in that?
Traffic can be expensive. If you cannot afford an SEO who can do the job properly and deliver revenue
generating keywords OR have a pay per click budget of a few hundred or thousand per month - then what
other options do you have?
You'll probably already have visitors coming to your site if you check your logs, or ask your web guy to
do it for you. Nowadays this is standard and you'll even be able to see what kinds of keywords people
have found your site under.
The problem is that those visitors haven't filled in your forms, clicked your buttons, added to cart or
signed up to your newsletter. Whatever your business model, you require visitors to "use" your website
to achieve a specific goal and convert them into a customer immediately or eventually through your
pipeline.
What can you do about it?
Usability is defined as the quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The
word "usability" also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.
Five quality components:
- Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
- Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
- Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they
re-establish proficiency?
- Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover
from the errors?
- Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
There are a few eye tracking companies who have developed technologies which determine where our eyes actually go on
a page. Why is this important? Well because you can easily control your mouse movements, however it is more difficult
to control where your eye is going to fall on a page as this response is governed by factors we automatically or
subconsciously react to rather than decide on.
Below is a heat map which outlines some common findings on a Google search page

Typically, red is the area of most focus, followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and grey.
We have learned behaviour such as reading from left to right (in the western world anyway) - hence the area of
highest focus tends to be the top left of a page and then moves down the page and moves across the page from there.
The big red line is the fold on the page - the area where people need to scroll past to see the lower area of the
page. This is quite important as I see a lot of sites who have their calls to action or most important offers below
this fold. It has been proven people don't like having to scroll and depending on the resolution and monitor your
site is being viewed in - people will see more or less of your page.
Quite simple considerations but once applied can cause conversions to soar
|
|