PET Means Persuasion Emotion and Trust

Is User Friendly Design Enough?

This is one of the areas in web site development that generally takes time. You will also require analysis of data to refine usability. We would all like to think we know what the user wants when they come to our web site but that is not always the case. Good usability is defined by the user themselves. Each user is unique and looking for the same thing but with different eyes, mind and mood-set. The first thing to do when you want to zoom in on user friendly design is understand your own desirable outcomes. This is important because we can all work together attaining them (IM team and your staff). Additionally we can measure them with our “must have” Google Analytics tracking.  Scroll down a little past halfway in Avinash Kaushik’s  Post on how to segment people that reach your outcomes.

If you are serious about becoming a player you’ll want to read on, usability is NOT ENOUGH…

Now we can ask ourselves how easily we have made it for our visitors to achieve those outcomes. We can also carefully configure web analytics software to track certain key performance indicators based on our goals (outcomes). Looking at your key user pages will help you see the good, the bad, the ugly in your end page usability features, especially with a nice goal funnel set up. In my mind, this is the best way to constantly improve the usability & sell through attributes of your website.

Usability inspection is the generic name for a set of methods that are all based on having evaluators inspect a user interface. Jakob Nielsen

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The User Knows Best

User friendly design really depends on your audience. To give you a good example; suppose your audience were all blind people. Then you would need to make sure your site is optimized for the majority of your visitors. Suppose you had another web site that was related to your blind people website about colorblindness. This means that this audience cannot see colors. Colorblind people generally see tints as colors. Once again, this must be factored into the web site design for good user friendliness.

IT’S NOT ENOUGH

According to well respect CEO of  Human Factor International Labs usability is not enough. With 32 years experience he says usability is no longer enough … persuasion, emotion and trust need to be focused on.

Getting Closer

Becoming up close and personal with your audience will help you quickly create a user friendly environment for web site visitors. Try to factor in many of the stereotypes that are associated with your audience for your web designers to digest. At the end of the day your product needs to wrap around your audiences brains, emotions, win trust and make them say WOW- I WANT THAT!

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