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Find this article at: http://www.business2.com/content/magazine/marketing/2000/10/16/20801

Navigate, Don't Wait

From the October 24, 2000 issue

Jim Sterne

Why are you providing customer service on the Web?

A) To reduce the cost of customer service
B) To increase customer satisfaction
C) To learn more about customers

If you picked any of those three choices, why is it so hard to navigate your site? Don't forget, customer service is everything in this business. If you make your site easier to navigate, more people will be happy with what your site has to offer.

If you think you're one of a few navigational miscreants, you're not. There's a splash page, for example, that hides the regular homepage of the American Advertising Museum site and a "brochure cover" that obscures the Scuba San Diego site. Or, take a look at "The Top Fifteen Mistakes of First-Time Web Design" from Uniweb. The rules posted on the site are all valid, but check out number six: "Dark text on a dark background will be hard to read." OK, but you may have to highlight this page before you can read it. You get the idea.

Most navigation problems stem from the fact that your company looks over a proposed design for your next-generation Website. Why is that a problem? Because your company staff is not the target audience; you all know too much. You may forget that you have to write your Website in the language your customers use.

So where do you turn for help? Don't turn to your friends and family. Not one of them wants to tell you your baby is ugly. Well, maybe your brother-in-law. He was right about that AMC Pacer you wanted to buy.

Try Jakob Nielsen instead, author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity . His Website, useit.com, includes a "Top Ten Mistakes" list and a follow up list entitled "Top Ten Mistakes, Revisited Three Years Later." Nielsen's tips on site building are based on years of research, and the major mistakes he lists continue to clutter the Web. Here are a few:

• Broken "back" buttons. When you open a new window or use immediate redirects, the back button goes gray. This is the most-often clicked button in any browser–why break it?

• Webpage Frames. They might make your site a joy to behold, but they are a pain in the mouse to navigate, print, and forward.

• Non-standard navigation or colors. Everybody's trained on the de facto standards–why fight ‘em? Using red links that turn blue after a visit to a page, for example, will not help people move around your site.

• Changing URLs. If you've been working hard at it, there are lots of inbound links to your site. Originator sites can't keep track of your naming changes, so don't expect them to. You want those links to remain live.

Chief among Nielsen's insightful recommendations is that a usability study need not be an extravaganza. Just ask five people–who do not know your business or your Website inside and out–to sit down and try to find the price of a set of your finest steak knives. Ask them to locate your return policy. Get them to do any of the mundane tasks you expect most of your customers to be able to accomplish. And then stand back and watch as they click themselves into oblivion. Web surfing is a lot harder than you think.

Another good resource for navigation help is WebCriteria. Its "Max" software surfs your Website and reports on possible trouble spots.

Max surfs like a human. Max counts the cognitive and motor skills required to reach a certain point or to accomplish a specific task on your site. Max takes into account things such as how long it takes a human to read a paragraph. It accounts for other things, such as the fact that embedded text links generally are not given a more than cursory glance. Then it renders a navigability quotient.

Of course, Max assumes that the human it's imitating understands all of the navigational and operational choices offered by your site, that visitors make the right choice every time and never tire of the process. Max looks at your site through best-case-scenario eyes. Then it compares you to your competitors.

A sample on the WebCriteria site reveals why Amazon.com is beating out Borders.com and bn.com. Although Amazon's load time is reportedly four seconds longer than Borders' and only one second shorter than bn.com's, the number of clicks it takes to get from the homepages to any other page within the sites is the same for all three e-tailers. So where does Amazon shine? Scan time.

Max measures how long it takes for a human to figure out where to click. Scan time is the time it takes for an average user to mentally process all the content between the top of the page and the link. According to Max, Amazon's scan time: 27 seconds; Borders': 41 seconds; bn.com's 67 seconds.

Haven't considered scan time? You'd better. It's things like scan time that can make the difference between users successfully navigating your site, or simply ignoring it.

Jim Sterne ([email-masked]) ,a marketing consultant for Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Target Marketing, has written a number of books on Internet marketing.

Content copyright © 2000 Imagine Media Inc.