Do not assume your customers are as knowledgeable as you are when
building a Web site
E-business activities can contribute significantly to corporate
success, but some organisations benefit more than others.
The winners are those that recognise that their customers are
people who simply want access to information, goods and services
and who are by no means computer experts. Although the need to
ensure that customers can understand and use our Web sites seems
self-evident, my study of many commercial sites indicates that we
keep missing the mark.
Common sense suggests, and independent research has confirmed, that
Web visitors arrive with a purpose in mind. As an industry, we have
developed a truly bewildering array of different ways to defeat
that purpose. I will focus here on just one, the tendency of site
designers and owners to assume that their customers know more than
they really do. If we make unrealistic demands on our site
visitors, they will find other ways of satisfying the purpose that
brought them there in the first place.
Randolph Bias of Austin Usability, a Texas-based usability
engineering firm, recently wrote, "A lot of businesses have gone
out of business because their users were too stupid." Bias points
out that customers don't know much about computing. In fact, our
unrealistic expectations often relate to knowledge that we consider
far more mundane.
A study of Web sites in the travel industry has identified
interesting examples. It seems reasonable to assume that most
travellers have only limited knowledge of local geography at their
destination. Why then do travel-related businesses design their
sites to serve the local population?
Let me explain. My office is in Windsor to the west of London.
Windsor Castle and other attractions make this a popular tourist
destination, but it is not one which can meet all travellers'
needs. I used a range of suppliers' sites to look for certain
travel-related services using "Windsor" or our office postal code
in the search.
Despite the fact that all of the organisations I searched have
facilities at Heathrow Airport (about eight miles away) or nearer,
most returned no relevant information from their own facility
selection function. If I looked through each company's list of its
own facilities, I could find sites in nearby towns such as Slough
and Staines or in Heathrow Airport. But the point is that the
traveller does not have the local knowledge to recognise these
places as being close to Windsor.
In another example, I looked for flights from a city in North
Carolina that is served by two airports. One carries the name of
the city, while the other is in a nearby town and handles larger
aircraft and far more flights.
While this information can make a huge difference to cost and
convenience, the average traveller simply would not know about it.
After trying the three major independent US travel sites and a
number of US airlines, I found only one site that indicated the
availability of the second airport.
This syndrome may be simple to explain. Web site owners operate
from a position of knowledge of the industry they serve. They know
things about their products and markets that they perceive to be
general knowledge or common sense. Those involved in the design
process also know why each step exists and where it will lead.
They fail to recognise that a sequence of operations that seems
entirely natural to them may be completely senseless to others.
Just as an author is handicapped when proof-reading or editing his
own work, those within an industry cannot easily see from the
perspective of an outsider.
Usability testing can help, but it is not a complete answer. Test
subjects tend to evaluate new processes in the light of their own
prior experiences. If they have not seen a process handled
particularly well, then mediocrity will fall within their expected
range.
When handled properly, the Internet has been shown to deliver clear
business benefits. The challenge is in the detail. Getting it right
in this environment requires rigorous analysis of what customers
know and don't know, what will help them to achieve their goals on
your site and what will leave them frustrated or ill-informed.
Dan Benatan is Web site score card specialist at Giga
Information Group