Built For Use

Teresa Esser writes "Karen Donoghue's new book, Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience was clearly written for marketing professionals and upper level managers. Slashdot readers may find that some of the material in this book is intuitively obvious. But it's great to have a book like this on your shelf when you're trying to have a discussion with a co-worker who doesn't understand why corporate Web sites need to be user-friendly." Read on for the rest of her below. Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience author Karen Donoghue pages 262 publisher McGraw Hill rating 9 -- great for its intended audience reviewer Teresa Esser ISBN 0071383042 summary Provides important information about how to make corporate Web sites user-friendly

Built for Use is the kind of book that can be slipped under a door or surreptitiously dropped into a mailbox to make a point without wasting time on yet another useless conversation.

The book is filled with tidbits like:

1. The best Web sites don't necessarily come from the best designers.

2. Frustrated artists with nose rings and black turtlenecks should not be allowed to turn a company's Web site into a piece of experimental non-performance art.

3. Flashing lights are great for Las Vegas, but who wants to work in Las Vegas?

Usability is not, and never has been, sexy. Grayscale sites like Yahoo! deliver value to their users because they load almost instantly and provide access to the things that people want.

This is basic, logical, intuitively obvious stuff. Yet it seems like a lot of this material is completely foreign to many of the people who make the final decisions about what corporate Web sites are going to look like.

As we move forward into a world where EZ-Passes will be used to finance fast-food purchases and where nanotechnologies will be woven into the threads of our jeans, it's important to learn -- and learn quickly -- that sexier is not always better.

Before companies sink millions of dollars into the development of yet another annoying and impossible-to-use Web site, they need to ask themselves:

1. Can the site be used by its intended audience?

2. Do the customers understand the language on the site?

3. Are the customers' computers fast enough to download all of the relevant material?

4. Are the customers savvy enough to find their way to the cash register?

5. Will the cash register accept the customers' money?

6. Is the system completely integrated with the company's back-end software?

7. If you call the company on the phone, will you get the same experience that you get when you visit the corporate Web site?

Companies need to make sure they are delivering the same messages through their Web sites that they are delivering through their phone banks, through their television ad campaigns, and through their product delivery channels.

If you say that you have sold me something, and you charge my credit card, then you had better deliver that thing to my door, and soon, or you will lose my trust.

Slapping a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval type "trust" sticker on some Web site does not build customer loyalty. Customer loyalty needs to be earned, one transaction at a time.

Could you imagine how annoying the world would be if retail clothing chains like The Gap put invisible trip-wires in front of their clothing racks, so that whenever you reached for a pair of khakis you crashed to the ground?

Could you imagine how annoying the world would be if retail stores covered all of their cash registers with a layer of Saran Wrap?

That's basically what some Web sites are doing now. If a retail site looks great but you can't use it to buy anything, or to access interesting content, then the site stinks.

If you work with marketers who desperately need to know a thing or two about user-experience strategy -- or maybe all nine -- hand them a copy of Built for Use. It will save time, and they'll praise you for allowing them to discover the truth on their own.

This book has a website, located at http://www.humanlogic.com/. You can purchase Built for Use from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit yours, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Hmm..

[gabec]

Someone at mozilla.org could make some use of that book, methinks. Their website is not made for the average joe. Granted it has gotten better but it's still chock full of unexplained keywords and high expectations of the customer's tech-savvy. I can just see sending my mom to download Mozilla and telling her 'just look for links that say "downloads for windows", don't get sidetracked by trying to figure out what Mozilla is. Just download it and find out later.' It would be nice if someone went through with a user-friendly stick and beat every page, at least a little bit.

And one of the reasons why flash...and xml...

[Vengie]

Will not replace HTML is simply put: The old era of _BLINKING_ text and hideous flash intros (should be) is dead. Many a "net savvy" site has reverted to the early days of the web -- white backgrounds and simple fast loading text. Layers are dead -- tables are back and frames are less overbearing. Thank god.

And yet...

[Rikardon]

Not all useful sites need be "grayscale design," though. Just this morning, I was reading a new article by Don Norman (he of "The Design of Everyday Things" fame), wherein he acknowledges that the emotional impact of a design affects our ability to use it.

"Yahoo-style" design is great for a directory, where the volume of information is such that speed and "cleanliness" are paramount: nobody expects the White Pages (or the Yellow Pages) to evoke oohs and aahs for their design: we expect them to be efficient, no-nonsense directories. But the design of other types of sites (or other software, or hardware for that matter) can be more complex, especially if one is creating a new interaction model and has precious few (if any) precedents on which to base one's design.

Re:Hits close to home...

[scott1853]

http://riverwalk.ebaseinteractive.com/

They're a web design company. I would think that they should realize nothing is quite as annoying as not having any text but in the ALT tags, so you have to hover over every graphic to find out if it's a link, and if so, where to.

Re:Probably worth a read.... Statements are true.

[cowboy junkie]

The sad part is that too often the person making the decisions has a fast computer on a fast connection with the latest version of IE, and they think this is how everyone's experience is. So web designers can not only get away with this crap, but too often their clients will be *begging* for it...

Another reason for site simplicity - protection

[Animats]

More and more browsers are now protected against obnoxious behavior by web sites. WebWasher for individuals has been around for years, but now there's a "WebWasher corporate firewall". Other companies offer similar products. If you want your site to display in business environments, it had better not do anything viewed as hostile by such firewalls.

A good test is whether the site remains at least minimally usable with JavaScript turned off. If your site comes up blank with JavaScript off, there are probably users at corporate sites that see it that way.

TIme to order this book

[RembrandtX]

Considering that I am the webmaster for a powertool company .. AND I happen to be owned by the marketing department.

How frustrating do you think THAT is ..

5-6 years of experience of working on corporate sites (my previous company was Comcast@home)
(and before you scream 'web-weenie' I have the C.S. Degree to back it up .. just happened that at the time .. it payed very well to be able to do stuff on the web.)

And WHOM do you think they ask first about pretty much anything ? There are folks in the accounting department that are more in touch with what we are going to be putting on our website.

Currently two of our braintrusts in marketing are trying to convince each other how we should start using an *alternate* pre-packaged software to run our website .. because the current one keeps dying.

because every marketer I know is a system anylist.

Totally ignoring the fact that it was a marketing decision to buy it in the first place .. when IT suggested we just write our own.

This is being closly followed by the idea that we can use flash .. or generate dynamic images to 'save work'

because every marketer I know is also a graphic artist/programmer/dba.

To be fair .. we have TWO guys with MBA's from Kellog's .. and *THEY* know what they are doing .. These are the guys who have cd's full of end consumer data and churn through it to find out what folks want.

The others are all people who were promoted internally from TOTALLY non marketing positions .. who just come up with ideas of what they think we should do - with very little actual research.

We spent over $3Mil developing a tool, plus the costs of manufactureing it, packageing it, and sending it to market. A month before it went on sale, someone had the bright idea to do customer focus group things about the tool.
2 people out of about 110 said that they would buy it .. the rest said it wasn't worth the $$.

what a thing to find out after its already done.

but every marketer I know is psychic too.

Im beginning to agree with Douglass Adams, lets put them on a colony ship with the phone sanatizers.