USEworthy May 2002
The monthly Newsletter from The Usability Company

Welcome to this months edition of USEworthy. We have had a busy month testing how easy it is to purchase insurance online, meeting and speaking at the New Media Age show, and generally researching things that we think will interest you.

New Media Show

Catriona Campbell, our CEO and an increasingly popular speaker, has been busy presenting to packed audiences at The New Media Age Show on both usability and accessibility. Those of you that attended would have heard the interesting case studies and offerings that usability and industry experts had to offer.

Catriona was thrown in at the deep end, discussing the importance of usability to 'creatives.' Catriona stood out amongst the 'creative teams' sighing and groaning at her insistence of designs, which are usable. After explaining that a usable site does not necessarily stunt all creativity the crowd began to relax. As Joe Noburn of The Royal Bank of Scotland pointed out, designers should still: 'push the boundaries. You can still use rotating banners, Pop-Ups, Pop-Unders' DHTML, and Flash but only if it has a purpose.' The boundaries between a usable site and an accessible site became blurred, but Catriona hastened to add that a usable site might not necessarily be accessible and vice versa.

Catriona also chaired a panel on which Donna Smilie (RNIB) Helen Baker (MD, Lastminute.com) and Joe Norburn (Royal Bank of Scotland) also participated in.

The panel highlighted the importance of accessibility and warned that it was only a matter of time before a big case comes to the UK courts similar to that of the Sydney Paralympics Website being inaccessible to its' audience of disabled users . The organisers of the Olympic Games are being sued somewhere in the region of six million Australian dollars, and UK organisations could face a similar punishment. It seems unbelievable that the web, although designed by Tim Berners- Lee to be used by everyone, is still problematic for 1 in 7 users who have some form of disability.

That translates to a potential spending power of £50 billion. Considering that designing a sight with accessibility and usability in mind has only a nominal cost and frequent testing is only a fraction of the amount that a business can save it seems strange that businesses do not offer an accessible and usable site to their customers.

Catriona acts as a representative professional for the field of Usability on the E-Envoy's Government Framework Committee and is setting down guidelines for government sites and also advises on International Standards Committees in the field of Human Centred Design. We are therefore well positioned to inform you of any new developments in the accessibility world.

Online Travel Insurance

Recent media coverage in Metro highlighted the problem of the small print when buying travel insurance. A boy's family were lumbered with a £4,000 rescue bill after the boy fell into difficulty in India whilst paragliding. Although the family had taken comprehensive insurance, which included 'dangerous sports' such as Hand gliding, Paragliding was not covered; in this case the small print was very small.

Research conducted by The Usability Company demonstrated how difficult it was for users to get a 'full picture' quote online for family travel insurance from the following companies by testing with real users:

www.Americanexpress.co.uk
www.columbusdirect.co.uk
www.directline.com
www.eaglestar.co.uk
www.endsleigh.co.uk
www.thomascook.com

'All I want is a quote' was a familiar frustrated cry from participants that could not understand why in general the companies required so much personal information, which invariably slowed down their progress through the site.

Four out of six users couldn't understand what they were purchasing cover for. They had been asked to find adequate cover for Scuba Diving. It was generally agreed that people would have to phone up to see if they were in fact covered for the less common sports.

Perhaps the greatest flaw was that users did not find it easy to find a telephone number throughout the numerous stages of the process.

When pressed to finish the process with each insurer, all participants could find a travel policy of some sort on the sites. However users admitted that under real world circumstances most would have given up and gone elsewhere.

Users do not want to be required to enter personal information just to get a quote; they are more likely to proceed with buying the insurance if the quote process is as quick and simple as possible.

The sites need to be made easy to read for all users. 3 out of the 6 sites tested were difficult to follow for users without domain knowledge of the insurance sector.

The number of consumers booking through a travel agent has dropped from 74% in 2002 to 64% in 2001. In the same period, the volume of bookings at internet-only travel agencies increased from 8% to 17% (forrester.com)

The message is clear, users are turning to the web in increasing numbers and the usability of the site will determine the winners and losers in the online insurance sector.

Steve Krug - Book Review

"Don't Make Me Think" is probably the best book anyone new to usability could read on the subject. Krug's subtitle for the book is 'A common sense approach to usability' and it is exactly that.

Easy to read in a day, this book offers practical guidance on usability and design. It's frequently amusing illustrations along with its witty anecdotes make it very enjoyable to read.

Unlike most usability books, whose pages are full of facts, figures and best practice, 'Don't Make Me Think' offers more practical guidance for the non-usability specialist, than academic gospel.

Krug introduces the reader to concepts such as; designing pages for scanning, not reading; the art of writing for the web; designing home pages & navigation with the user in mind; how to keep usability testing simple; and how to interpret results. A good example of his practical advice is 'Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left' - Krug's third law of usability

So we think we have said enough!

Usability in Action - a case study from the healthcare sector

The practical application of usability research is described in a case study that illustrates the use of a Usability Evaluation immediately prior to the launch of a new transactional website by Smile-On, a company part owned by Boots the Chemist.

Smile-on was launched in April 2000 and has quickly become the leading UK provider of online services for the whole dental team. Their aim is to provide members of the dental community with a partner throughout their professional life and has more than 7,000 members. The online store offers over 20,000 products for the Dental practice, which enables clients to order all of their supplies and equipment in one place, 24 hours a day.

The report, produced as a result of our Usability Evaluation, documented a range of problems and associated recommendations across a number of areas including: Registration & Login; Search; Navigation; Product Catalogue; Shopping Basket; Custom Basket; Checkout; Order History; and Advertising.

Overall the report identified 46 separate issues that had a negative impact on the user experience and made over 60 recommendations, providing multiple options and suggestions for many of problems.

Summary of the benefits:

The Usability Company's research validated some of the problems that the Smile-on team had already found but it also identified a number of unknown issues. The benefits have been demonstrated both through increased revenue and reduced costs.

The number of orders taken on a monthly basis has increased 350% with the associated value also increasing. For new customers the average order value has increased by 186% whilst repeat or existing customers have increased their order size by 237%.

The number of new clients purchasing from the site has also increased, by 244% and the number of repeat customers has increased by 173%.

The improved user satisfaction with the site has lead to a significant reduction in support costs. The number of calls asking for support has reduced by a factor of 20:1.

The ROI for the project was greater than 10:1 in a twelve month period.

Clearly there are a number of factors that have lead to the overall improvements, such as the site re-launch itself and associated press coverage. But the significant reductions in support costs and increases in basket size and conversion rate suggest that usability improvements have had a major impact.

Usability: An Introduction
Part IV - The Role of Usability in Benchmarking Performance

Following last months introduction to usability techniques we look forward to how these can be applied to benchmark the performance of digital interfaces.

Using standard techniques it is possible to make a mark in the sand and say that on a given revision version of the site a certain percentage of users were successful at the specified tasks. We can see how long those tasks took and how many errors were made, by applying the scientific measures described in last month's newsletter.

Once recommendations for change have been made and implemented the same tests can be run again with different participants, and analysis can be performed on the two sets of results. This enables the impact of the changes to be measured in terms of the metrics previously decided upon. The process can then be iterated almost indefinitely with the effects of changes being measured each time. The benefits are obvious as well as allowing the customer to be innovative with their designs.

We can take this one step further. If we combine usability metrics with business metrics and technical performance metrics; the impact of usability can be directly measured in terms of return on investment and the impact on the bottom line. In all cases to date, usability can be shown to provide real benefits but until these sorts of data were collected in conjunction with bottom line business numbers the ROI has been difficult to prove.

The flip side of this is that we can also use technical and business metrics to focus the attentions of our Usability Specialists. If, for example, we discover from our technical readouts that out conversion rate is very low because 75% of all our users stumble on the transactional elements of a site, then that is going to be a number of screens worthy of further investigation. No number of user groups will show the reasoning behind why users are failing. The only real way to determine the problem areas would be to carry out a focussed Usability Evaluation and let users show and tell you what the issues are.

Although it may not be possible to collect business metrics and some technical metrics about competitors' sites, there is nothing to stop you carrying out Usability Evaluations and comparing them against your own usability metrics. It might be frightening but at least you would know you if were falling behind or ahead of the game... powerful information indeed!

Click here to print

Back to The Usability Company website