Najjar, L. (1999). Beyond Web usability.Internetworking, 3.3 (June, 2999). Retrieved from
Beyond Web Usability
Lawrence J. Najjar, , iXL
Abstract
Although it is important for Web sites to be easy to use, a usable Web site is not necessarily a successful Web site. This is especially important as more Web sites provide e-commerce. To be effective, we must design Web sites that motivate the first-time visitor to stay, provide valuable information or services, support the brand identity of the product or company, help sell the product, and motivate the visitor to return to the site. This paper provides specific design suggestions for meeting these goals.
Introduction
The World Wide Web is becoming increasingly popular as a medium for shopping, researching information, and being entertained in the United States. Thirty-one million US households are currently on-line, and that number is expected to double by 2002 (Jupiter, 1998). In 1998, on-line retail purchases totaled over $8 billion (Delhagen, 1999). Electronic commerce ("e-commerce") is expected to be as high as $3.2 trillion in 2003 (Forrester, 1998).
Counting use at home, work, and school, on-line users spent almost 11 hours per week on the Internet (Jupiter, 1998). This time spent on-line often came at the expense of watching television (Jupiter, 1998). Due to this incredible growth, the Internet/World Wide Web will soon rival in size cable television and newspapers as a medium of communication (Jupiter, 1998).
Web Usability
Since more people are using the Web for more tasks, especially e-commerce, Web site usability has become an important element of successful Web sites. Web sites must be easy to use. Hard-to-use sites frustrate customers, forfeit revenue to on-line retailers, and erode the image of the company's brand (Manning, McCarthy, & Souza, 1998). The second biggest reason on-line shoppers did not buy from a Web site was navigation difficulty (Kadison, Weisman, Modahl, Lieu, & Levin, 1998). In one survey, 28% of Web shoppers had trouble finding the product they wanted and 62% of Web shoppers gave up looking for a product on-line (Seminerio, 1998). Bad news travels fast. A dissatisfied shopper tells around 10 other people about the shopper's bad experience (Albrecht & Zembre, 1985).
Beyond Web Usability
Although it is very clear that Web sites must be easy to use, usability is not enough. A usable Web site is not necessarily a successful Web site. As Web user interface designers, we must think beyond our traditional training and experience. We must do much more than make a Web site easy to use.
Motivate Visitor to Stay
We must encourage the first-time visitor to stay at the Web site. Web visitors are impatient. Visitors have many Web site choices and nearly every site has a competitor. An alternative Web site is only a click away.
To encourage first-time visitors to stay at your site, include information or services that are helpful to the visitor. You can do this by creating a user profile and performing a needs analysis and a task analysis. Provide simple, attractive graphics, short download times (Nielsen, 1999), and obvious, straightforward navigation (Fischler, 1998). To speed downloads, don't use animations. Limit your use of graphics. Keep the total file size of a screen to 20 kilobytes or less (Sullivan, 1998).
Provide obvious, consistent locations for navigation controls. A Web design standard that is beginning to emerge is as follows. Place the global, permanent navigation controls to major sections of your site horizontally across the top of every screen. Put the local navigation for a selected global navigation section in a column along the left side of the screen (Rosenfeld & Morville, 1998). When the visitor selects a local navigation choice, indent any sub-navigation under the selected choice.
Use the top, left navigation control to consistently take the visitor to the home page of the site (Nielsen, 1999). If appropriate for the site, put on every screen a search entry field at the top of the left column, below the home navigation control. Also, design the navigation controls, highlighting, and screen titles so they tell the visitor, at a glance, where the visitor is, how the visitor got there, how to get back, and where else the visitor can go in the site (Fleming, 1998). One site that uses some of these design conventions is
Provide Valuable Information or Services
Your site should provide information (Koman, 1998) or services that the visitor considers helpful and worthwhile. It is not enough to use your Web site to tell visitors about your company. Web visitors now see these "brochure-ware" sites as dull, self-serving, and outdated. Instead, visitors now expect to find unique information or services that they can use for their own benefit. These features may include product information, product recommendations (as on job applications, customized news and links (like my.yahoo.com), entertainment (such as and e-commerce. In fact, visitors are increasing their use of the Web for on-line shopping because it is convenient and fast. E-commerce was one of the biggest changes that companies made to their Web sites to satisfy visitor demands (Sonderegger, McCarthy, Armstrong, & Souza, 1998).
Support Brand Identity
Brand identity is the impression, feeling, or reaction consumers have to a product or company name. Brand managers try to build brand identity by using advertising, product packaging, pricing, and associations with celebrities, events, or other products.
You can use logos, color, graphics, photographs, and background textures to create the impression that the brand is hip (like conservative, high tech, goofy, elegant (such as or friendly. Other techniques include using the Web site interaction (Nail, Bass, & Aldort, 1998) and the content of the site to promote the brand. To provide a consistent brand identity, make sure the Web site branding matches the branding used in print, television, radio, newspaper and other advertising media. Use the same colors, logos, slogans, and promotions.
Brand identity is especially important on the Web
New companies with competing brands can quickly and easily establish a presence on the Web. With so many choices, on-line shoppers may prefer to purchase a familiar brand. In fact, after improving ease-of-use, a survey of new media executives (Hagen, McCarthy, Berman, & Souza, 1998) found that creating brand awareness was their top Web design priority.
Branding and its impact on customer loyalty don't last long
This is especially important to keep in mind with the Web, where even the best-known Web brands, such as amazon.com and cdnow.com, are losing money (Weil, 1999). You will need to constantly refresh the branding on your Web site (Simons, 1998). Some Web sites (for example, and update their "look" every six months.
Help Sell the Product
To justify their cost, many Web sites must sell or help to sell products. The Web site must show an obvious, positive, measurable return on investment. To meet this objective, companies may re-engineer their business processes (for example, just-in-time inventory, on-line tracking of shipments) or move resources from traditional business development techniques (such as in-store promotions) to development on the Web. According to one researcher (Allard, 1998), "The best ... model for interface design is one where the business managers define the business priorities and the designers match those requirements to the needs of the user and the needs of the brand."
The average look-to-buy ratio on the Web is a paltry 2.7% (Kadison, Weisman, Modahl, Lieu, & Levin, 1998). To help sell products, keep the user interface simple and uncluttered. Create familiar product categories that encourage shoppers to browse the product catalog. Include on the first screen (and possibly every screen) a convenient search entry field for shoppers who know what they want. Pique shoppers' interest by spotlighting one or two products, such as the bestsellers, on the first screen. Offer a discount, free gift, or free shipping to first-time buyers (Delhagen, 1999; Kadison, Weisman, Modahl, Lieu, & Levin, 1998). To reduce buyer fears, include on the first page links to descriptions of the company's credit card security techniques and personal information privacy policy. Get certification from a neutral third party, such as TRUSTe ( and include their logo on the main page and the privacy policy page.
Motivate the visitor to return to the site
There are many techniques to include in your user interface design that will motivate visitors to return to your site. One effective technique is to encourage visitors to register and complete a short profile that includes their product interests and preferences. By putting this information into a database, you can deliver an array of attractive, personalized features (Sonderegger, McCarthy, Armstrong, & Souza, 1998). Since you know the visitor's name, billing and shipping addresses, e-mail address, telephone number, and credit card information, you can streamline the purchase process. For example, amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com provide one-click buying (McQuiveyGazala, 1998). Expedia also asks the registrant for his preferred departure airport, then provides three-click airline ticket purchases (Aviation Daily, 1998).
Dell's Premier Pages Service ( uses business logic to provide only information and buying options relevant to the specific customer's account. To allow product research to continue over several sessions, registered visitors can save the results of their product configuration requests in an idea vault (Hagen, 1998). A wish list (like encourages the registered visitor to make purchases in the future. When items of interest to the registrant become available, you can send a personalized e-mail notification (Kadison, Weisman, Modahl, Lieu, & Levin, 1998). You can also display these preferred products when the registered visitor signs into your site (like flights on expedia.msn.com, books on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, and garden supplies on garden.com).
Other incentives you can use to encourage visitors to return are extra frequent flier miles (for example, and on-line, real-time updates of order status (for example, CDs on cdnow.com, packages on fedex.com and ups.com). Finally, when a visitor selects an item for purchase, you can suggest other related products that may interest the visitor.
However, probably the most effective way to get visitors to return to your e-commerce site is to offer prices that are lower than retail or catalog prices (McQuiveyGazala, 1998). In one survey (Jupiter, 1998), 86% of on-line buyers surveyed said that pricing was important to them. Unfortunately, only 31% of on-line businesses plan to improve sales by providing aggressive price breaks (Ernst & Young, 1998).
Conclusions
It is not enough for us to make Web sites easy to use. We need to hook the first-time visitor. We need to make visitors want to return. We need to promote our sponsor's products or company. We need to get visitors to make a purchase. We need to think beyond Web usability.
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