Why You Have to Increase the Usability Aspect of Your Website
Why the Need for Boosting the Usability Aspect of Your Website
When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), you might have come across the phrase “website usability” in a number of blogs and articles. Many website owners don’t know the importance it plays in the success of your website. For your information, web usability is the ease of use of website. Some broad goals of website usability are the presentation of information and choices in a clear and concise way, a lack of ambiguity and the placement of important items in appropriate areas. A usable website can result in huge benefits for not only your website, but also for your business. Usability refers to developing your website for users to easily find what they are looking for.
According to a study conducted by the Nielson Norman group, redesigning your website usability strategy can improve your overall business aspects by 83 percent. Just this fact shows that improved usability can bring about a series of positive changes for your website. Here are the valuable benefits you can reap from improving website usability.
Cost Reduction in Web Redesign and Customer Support Service
It is true that you will need to make some investments in improving your website usability. At the same time, you can save a lot on redesign costs if you identify the usability issues early on. When your website provides the basic information that customers seek most, you will get fewer emails and calls related to customer service. This means can cut back on support costs and focus on other important aspects of your business. For instance, Kodak has tested its usability aspect and introduced simple support tools along with basic troubleshooting guides. Visitor satisfaction increased significantly after six months, and there was a decrease in calls made to Kodak’s customer support lines. In addition to helping you lowering costs, improving your website usability can give you a significant ROI.
Improves Retention Rates
You may be wondering why many of your website visitors leave the site immediately after visiting the homepage. The answer can be found by performing a “usability testing”. This experiment helps in finding out why you are unable to retain new users to your website. There are many reasons why people leave a website within a few minutes of landing on a page.
- Slow loading page
- Requirement of plug-ins such as Flash
- Irrelevant information published on the website
- Annoying or distracting music playing on the background while the site loads
Reducing Abandonment of Shopping Cart
Abandonment of shopping cart is one of the biggest problems faced by many ecommerce websites. This is when shoppers add items to their cart without checking out and actually making the purchase. Improving your website usability to a great extent can tackle this issue. But first, you need to run a usability test to identify the cause.
For example, popular clothing retailer ASOS simplified their checkout process for customers and managed to decrease their abandonment rate significantly. They eliminated the need for users to create an account when checking out. This cut down their shopping cart abandonment rate to 50 percent.
Improves Your Brand Image
You must know that your company website is a reflection of your overall brand image. If visitors had a pleasant user experience on your website then they are more likely to have a good impression of your brand. Otherwise, there is a chance that you will lose them to your competitor who has a more simplified or interactive website design. Site errors, broken links, complex layouts, misspellings, and overall bad content quality can turn off most site visitors.
For instance, Orange improved user experience by changing key website usability aspects. The development team focused on the aspects that were important to customers. Orange created a customer benchmark and monitoring tool using a proprietary algorithm, to collect helpful metrics. It helped in improving the overall quality of their brand image.
These are some of benefits your business can gain through the improvement of usability aspects of your website. You need to discuss this strategy with your web development team and come up with a plan to implement them successfully.
