Make Your Website Better

Some interesting comments from the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) on the ROI of usability. The article  provides examples and statistics for each return on investment. I find the observation on increasing market share, quoted below, particularly compelling.

Web sites are becoming more usable across the board as noted by Jakob Nielsen, showing general improvements as certain  conventions become more widely adopted. Sites that are difficult to use will fall even further behind in market share, and sites that do it well will continue to stand out. Here is a partial list of the returns on investment:

• Increase transactions/purchases
• Increase product sales
• Increase traffic (size of audience)
• Retain customers (frequency of use)
• Attract more customers (increase appeal)
• Increase market share (competitive edge)

An Example

• “Usability is one of our secret weapons.” The secret weapon appears to be working. Schwab’s main Website for U.S. investors, www.schwab.com, handles more than $7 billion in securities transactions a week, with more than 2 million active customer accounts holding $174 billion in assets. With those numbers, one might wonder why Schwab would need to make any changes to its Web site at all. But Schwab knows it cannot afford to coast; as more and more newcomers get online, and the competition for their dollars increases, more e-commerce sites are making ease of use a differentiator. “A year ago, it was a rush to put up applications and functionality,” Thompson says. “It’s now a rush to be useful.” (Kalin, 1999)

Some Statistics

• “The importance of having a competitive edge in usability may be even more pronounced for e-commerce sites. Such sites commonly drive away nearly half of repeat business by not making it easy for visitors to find the information they need (Manning).
• The repeat customers are most valuable: new users at one e-commerce site studied spent an average of $127 per purchase, while repeat users spent almost twice as much, with an average of $251.” (Nielsen, August 1, 1997).

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