Visiting www.annies.com, I’m told to push on the bunny’s tail to enter the site. I click and nothing happens. I click again. No change. Wondering whether the problem lies in the old browser I like to use, I switch to a new browser. The problem recurs. Eventually I realize that I was clicking on the word "push" rather than on the tail–my stupidity and my fault, right?

No, the fault lies with the site, according to Web usability gurus, who conduct laboratory studies that observe how people interact with Web sites. Again and again these usability experts discover that real people may not understand what may be obvious to a site’s designers, and that despite careful thought and planning, users often cannot find what they’re looking for, complete shopping transactions or, as in my case, even get in.

An epidemic of unusability
"Too often, the design of a site makes people leave the online store," says Jared Spool, usability expert and founder of User Interface Engineering in Bradford, Mass. "In one test, when we gave people money to spend and pointed them at sites that had what they needed, at the first 18 e-commerce sites we studied, they purchased only one out of four times. We counted no less than 280 obstacles to purchases."

Users’ difficulties included thinking that the site required them to register to shop when it didn’t, not being able to discern the style of a pair of pants from a tiny photo, being asked to type in a credit card number before shipping prices and policies were revealed, being told the CD store didn’t carry a favorite performer (the customer mistakenly typed "Dione" instead of "Dion"), and much more.

When a site redesign removes the obstacles identified through usability testing, there are dramatic improvements in the percentage of transactions completed. Future Now, for example, a New York e-business consulting firm, studied the problems users were having at www.magmall.com, a magazine subscription service site. Changing the site navigation, colors, page layout and fonts, as well as adding the company’s guarantee, privacy policy and notice of its membership in the Better Business Bureau up front, increased the rate at which visitors completed sales by 125%. Soon afterwards, merely adding a text link with the question, "What magazine are you looking for today?" again doubled the closing rate by making the navigation simpler for site visitors.

"Originally the site had a very scary orange background," says David Weltman, chief operating officer of Future Now. "We made the background white, like all the top e-commerce sites. It also made a big difference when we included scannable text, by putting key phrases in bold or a different font." The visual equivalent of sound bytes, highlighted phrases like "over a thousand popular magazines" or "subscriptions for your company," enable visitors to orient themselves quickly upon arriving at the Web site.

The usability approach
In contrast to the purely aesthetic perspective that is instinctive to many designers, usability requires that a site’s appearance take a back seat to functionality. Designers should accommodate rather than fight the reactions of users.

"In the airline industry, they eventually realized that planes were designed to make the probability of pushing a wrong button very high," says Jakob Nielsen, author of Designing Web Usability, and a usability guru who is both revered and resented by Web developers. "When it’s easy to make a mistake, the design is wrong. With Web sites, the reaction of developers at first is normally that the users having problems are stupid. After watching four or five people struggling in the same way, they begin to understand that not everyone can be that stupid."

For instance, Tom Weathington, a usability specialist for the professional services firm Deloitte & Touche, recalls asking people to answer a certain question about one of Ford’s truck models on the Ford Web site. Even though the answer was there, users couldn’t find it because the graphics diverted their attention away from the text. "We’re finding that cutesy tricks of displaying something important, like product specs, don’t work. Most people go on the Web to do something and then move on, not to be entertained," Weathington says.

Usability testing delivers insights that you won’t learn from traffic numbers or patterns, Nielsen adds. "The number of hits a site gets can indicate that people are frantically clicking around, lost."

What testing involves
According to Kelly Goto, creative director for Idea Integration in San Francisco, formal usability testing takes place in a controlled testing facility, led by specialists in a field called human factors engineering. While being videotaped and sometimes also watched from behind a one-way mirror, prescreened users undertake a series of tasks at the computer while they describe what they are thinking. Formal testing might cost $2,000 to $10,000–not counting redesign costs–but Goto says that even free, informal testing with friends, family members or co-workers yields results. Just observe the cardinal rules of formal testing: Remain neutral and never provide hints.

"Before we went live with our own site, we tested it with people in the office who’d never seen it," she says. "In a couple of afternoons we discovered problems in our navigation bar, readdressed it and made the site about 20% more usable."

Another cost-saving usability strategy recommended by Weathington is to investigate how a successful Web site handles a given problem or situation and then use it as your model. "Once we had an application under development for internal use, interviewed a lot of potential end users, and discovered that a question and answer format would work best," he says. "We went to see who used a Q&A style and borrowed ideas from askjeeves.com."

Prospects and payoff
Web sites have a long way to go to match the efficiency of some offline methods of getting what we want, says Spool–some companies are even getting worse. In one project, he asked people to go to the Disney site and find the least expensive motel on Disneyland’s monorail. In 1996, one out of five users succeeded, while in 2000 only one in 20 found it. Yet every user who researched the question by calling a travel agent or the Disney Call Center found the answer–usually in less than two minutes!

Sites that take usability seriously experience a clear-cut return on investment of typically 200% to 400%, according to Nielsen. "Even the cheapest, simplest usability effort can bring you 50% more sales," he says. "You’ll definitely be able to identify the biggest, most glaring problems." Setting aside 10% to 30% of the development budget for usability work means you’ll become a leader in your field, Nielsen claims.

Weathington agrees that this approach pays off. "Put yourself in the user’s shoes as much as possible, see what his goals are, don’t make any assumptions and test the site. It sounds basic," he says, "but companies find that when they do all that, they see a breakthrough in their success rate." P

Marcia Yudkin is the author of Internet Marketing for Less Than $500/Year, from Maximum Press, and nine other books.