Your Home Business Site"s "Usability" Can Increase Your Buyers by 40% and Boost Each Order B
Is your site easy to use?
Usability isn't the same as design. Just because you've hired a talented designer to craft your site and make it look great
doesn't mean it's easy to use. Looking good is a completely different matter from working well! After all, plenty of
beautiful sites have won design awards while losing customers by the thousands.
How many times have you gotten lost on a good-looking site or abandoned a purchase in frustration after you couldn't find the
information you were looking for? If you walk into a brick-and-mortar store and can't find your favorite brand of gherkin
pickles, you can simply ask an employee where they are. But on the Web, it's much easier for a customer to go to a
competitor's site than to go through the trouble of sending an e-mail inquiry.
Whatever your business is about, your web site will have specific goals, such as convincing people to...
Subscribe to your newsletter
Fill out a survey
Purchase your product
Inquire about a service you offer
Usability is simply a gauge of how easy it is for your visitors to do these things.
For an home business site, usability is especially crucial. If people can't follow your navigation scheme, they won't be able
to find your products. And if they can't find them, how can they buy them?
Obviously, a key measure of the success of your site is its efficiency in converting visitors to buyers. Yet did you know
that, according to market research from the Gartner Group, more than 50% of Web sales are lost because visitors can't find
the content they're looking for? And another study by usability consultants Creative Good estimated that improving the
customer experience increases the number of buyers by 40% and increases the overall order size by 10%!
With results like these, why doesn't everyone test their sites for usability? Some people mistakenly assume that usability
testing is too expensive, too time-consuming, or too complicated to bother with, especially for smaller companies.
Make no mistake: If you don't test your site, your visitors and customers will "test" it every day! The problem is, if
they're having trouble using your site, they won't take the time to send you a note offering helpful suggestions -- they'll
just check out your competition!
Usability isn't the same as design. Just because you've hired a talented designer to craft your site and make it look great
doesn't mean it's easy to use. Looking good is a completely different matter from working well! After all, plenty of
beautiful sites have won design awards while losing customers by the thousands.
How many times have you gotten lost on a good-looking site or abandoned a purchase in frustration after you couldn't find the
information you were looking for? If you walk into a brick-and-mortar store and can't find your favorite brand of gherkin
pickles, you can simply ask an employee where they are. But on the Web, it's much easier for a customer to go to a
competitor's site than to go through the trouble of sending an e-mail inquiry.
Whatever your business is about, your web site will have specific goals, such as convincing people to...
Subscribe to your newsletter
Fill out a survey
Purchase your product
Inquire about a service you offer
Usability is simply a gauge of how easy it is for your visitors to do these things.
For an home business site, usability is especially crucial. If people can't follow your navigation scheme, they won't be able
to find your products. And if they can't find them, how can they buy them?
Obviously, a key measure of the success of your site is its efficiency in converting visitors to buyers. Yet did you know
that, according to market research from the Gartner Group, more than 50% of Web sales are lost because visitors can't find
the content they're looking for? And another study by usability consultants Creative Good estimated that improving the
customer experience increases the number of buyers by 40% and increases the overall order size by 10%!
With results like these, why doesn't everyone test their sites for usability? Some people mistakenly assume that usability
testing is too expensive, too time-consuming, or too complicated to bother with, especially for smaller companies.
Make no mistake: If you don't test your site, your visitors and customers will "test" it every day! The problem is, if
they're having trouble using your site, they won't take the time to send you a note offering helpful suggestions -- they'll
just check out your competition!
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