Recently in Usability Category
(Part 2 of 2)
As I discussed last time, in the eyes of your user (i.e. customer) usability is a very important aspect of any website. Despite this fact, so many websites out there fail to address usability in their design. Why is this? There is pretty much one reason, heard far and wide from companies large and small:
Usability takes so much time!!
Without a doubt, creating a usable website is a slower process than creating an unusable one. When creating a usable site, a lot of planning goes into the early stages of the project to ensure that the final result meets the goals of not only you, as the client, but also of your users. This can make the first few weeks seem unproductive because you don’t get to look at any pretty pictures (or, what the design department prefers I call them, “comps”), or click through any websites. All you see are long documents with information about goals and requirements and process flows. Yawn.
Of course, when we talk time, we also talk dollars; the added time usability research adds to the bottom line. Because you don’t get to see any of that fun stuff that comes later in the process, usability seems like the best place to cut costs.
However, by skipping ahead to the fun stuff, you miss important work that ensures that the fun stuff actually meets your goals! If you rush into putting a poorly researched site on the web, you will find yourself getting complaints from all sides. Internally, you will find that you don’t have the pages to add the content you need to have on the site, or that you didn’t build in the backend functionality that will make site maintenance easy. You will hear from your customers that they are unable to find the information or complete the process that brought them to your site. Before you realize it, you will have to completely redo your website from the ground up because it wasn’t done right in the first place. When you think about the time and cost associated with a whole new website, it becomes pretty clear that usability is worth it in the long run!
You can always find people out there who will give you a website quick and cheep. However, here at Cornerstone Media Group, we would much rather take a little more time and money to give you a site that you and your customers will be happy with for a long, long time. Your customers will increase your revenues when they find that visiting your site is a pleasure and accomplishes their goals with a minimum of effort.
As I discussed last time, in the eyes of your user (i.e. customer) usability is a very important aspect of any website. Despite this fact, so many websites out there fail to address usability in their design. Why is this? There is pretty much one reason, heard far and wide from companies large and small:
Usability takes so much time!!
Without a doubt, creating a usable website is a slower process than creating an unusable one. When creating a usable site, a lot of planning goes into the early stages of the project to ensure that the final result meets the goals of not only you, as the client, but also of your users. This can make the first few weeks seem unproductive because you don’t get to look at any pretty pictures (or, what the design department prefers I call them, “comps”), or click through any websites. All you see are long documents with information about goals and requirements and process flows. Yawn.
Of course, when we talk time, we also talk dollars; the added time usability research adds to the bottom line. Because you don’t get to see any of that fun stuff that comes later in the process, usability seems like the best place to cut costs.
However, by skipping ahead to the fun stuff, you miss important work that ensures that the fun stuff actually meets your goals! If you rush into putting a poorly researched site on the web, you will find yourself getting complaints from all sides. Internally, you will find that you don’t have the pages to add the content you need to have on the site, or that you didn’t build in the backend functionality that will make site maintenance easy. You will hear from your customers that they are unable to find the information or complete the process that brought them to your site. Before you realize it, you will have to completely redo your website from the ground up because it wasn’t done right in the first place. When you think about the time and cost associated with a whole new website, it becomes pretty clear that usability is worth it in the long run!
You can always find people out there who will give you a website quick and cheep. However, here at Cornerstone Media Group, we would much rather take a little more time and money to give you a site that you and your customers will be happy with for a long, long time. Your customers will increase your revenues when they find that visiting your site is a pleasure and accomplishes their goals with a minimum of effort.
(Part 1 of 2)
You will hear me talk about usability a lot on this blog...and everywhere else. We have a passion for usability, and yet this very important aspect of web design is often overlooked not only by clients, but also by many web designers and developers. In this, the first post of a two-part series, we will explain what usability is, and why it is important to you as you look to create a new website for your business.
Simply put, usability is how usable, or user friendly, a website is. The average web user only notices usability when it is lacking. We're sure you can think of a time when you had a specific goal when visiting a website and, no matter what you did, you couldn’t accomplish that goal. Maybe you couldn’t find a phone number for customer support, or see how to delete a product from your shopping cart, or even just how to get back to the site’s home page. More than likely, the experience made you feel stupid, frustrated, or maybe even angry. No matter what you felt, it wasn’t your fault you had a bad experience on the site – it was the sites!
When usability is done right, you leave a site feeling satisfied with what you have accomplished and with the company whose website you were on. You are far more likely to spend more time on that site, come back often, and even allow yourself to become better acquainted with the company and most importantly, give them more money!
At Cornerstone Media Group, we strive to use every usability methodology to ensure that each site we create is as user friendly as possible. This includes being aware of current findings in the field of usability, putting ourselves in the shoes of your website’s users to better understand what they will be expecting, and even spending time with your users to learn directly from them how they react to your site. This results in a far more successful website for you and your customer.
Come back for part two in this series, in which I’ll discuss why you should invest in a website that is user centered, despite what may be perceived as drawbacks to this approach.
You will hear me talk about usability a lot on this blog...and everywhere else. We have a passion for usability, and yet this very important aspect of web design is often overlooked not only by clients, but also by many web designers and developers. In this, the first post of a two-part series, we will explain what usability is, and why it is important to you as you look to create a new website for your business.
Simply put, usability is how usable, or user friendly, a website is. The average web user only notices usability when it is lacking. We're sure you can think of a time when you had a specific goal when visiting a website and, no matter what you did, you couldn’t accomplish that goal. Maybe you couldn’t find a phone number for customer support, or see how to delete a product from your shopping cart, or even just how to get back to the site’s home page. More than likely, the experience made you feel stupid, frustrated, or maybe even angry. No matter what you felt, it wasn’t your fault you had a bad experience on the site – it was the sites!
When usability is done right, you leave a site feeling satisfied with what you have accomplished and with the company whose website you were on. You are far more likely to spend more time on that site, come back often, and even allow yourself to become better acquainted with the company and most importantly, give them more money!
At Cornerstone Media Group, we strive to use every usability methodology to ensure that each site we create is as user friendly as possible. This includes being aware of current findings in the field of usability, putting ourselves in the shoes of your website’s users to better understand what they will be expecting, and even spending time with your users to learn directly from them how they react to your site. This results in a far more successful website for you and your customer.
Come back for part two in this series, in which I’ll discuss why you should invest in a website that is user centered, despite what may be perceived as drawbacks to this approach.
A sitemap can come in many forms. It can be used in an Information Architecture document at the beginning of a project to provide a visual display of how the pages of a site link together. It can be an html page that exists on a website to show the user of the site all of the pages that are available to them. It can also be an xml document that is created and submitted to search engines.
These last two are the ones I will focus on.
HTML Sitemap
An html sitemap will usually live in the root folder of a website (www.mysite.com/sitemap.html). If a user wants to quickly find a page in a website but isn't sure where to find it in the navigation then they can go to the sitemap.html page. This page will have all of the links for the site organized by how they are arranged in the navigation. You can see ours at http://www.csmediagroup.com/sitemap.html From a Usability standpoint this is an important page to have.
It is also important from a Search Engine Optimization perspective. Having an html sitemap ensures that Google will be able to find all of the pages of your site. Our corporate site has its navigation in Flash which means that Google can't see it. Including an html sitemap provides Google with a way of indexing all of the pages in our site because Google will follow all of the links on a site to see where they go.
XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is an even better way of making sure Google sees all of the pages on your site. There are many automated tools out there that will create an XML sitemap for you. All you have to do is give them your url and they will do the rest. Once the document is created you can submit it to Google. Again, this is important to do to ensure that Google sees all of the pages on your website.
A sitemap is something that is often overlooking when developing a site but it is an essential part of good SEO and Usability.
These last two are the ones I will focus on.
HTML Sitemap
An html sitemap will usually live in the root folder of a website (www.mysite.com/sitemap.html). If a user wants to quickly find a page in a website but isn't sure where to find it in the navigation then they can go to the sitemap.html page. This page will have all of the links for the site organized by how they are arranged in the navigation. You can see ours at http://www.csmediagroup.com/sitemap.html From a Usability standpoint this is an important page to have.
It is also important from a Search Engine Optimization perspective. Having an html sitemap ensures that Google will be able to find all of the pages of your site. Our corporate site has its navigation in Flash which means that Google can't see it. Including an html sitemap provides Google with a way of indexing all of the pages in our site because Google will follow all of the links on a site to see where they go.
XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is an even better way of making sure Google sees all of the pages on your site. There are many automated tools out there that will create an XML sitemap for you. All you have to do is give them your url and they will do the rest. Once the document is created you can submit it to Google. Again, this is important to do to ensure that Google sees all of the pages on your website.
A sitemap is something that is often overlooking when developing a site but it is an essential part of good SEO and Usability.
