Your audience is not stupid, despite what you may think. Providing users with a consistent, easy-to-use interface to your Web site isn't just good for your hit count, it's a simple matter of respect for those who have chosen to visit your page.
But how can you be sure? How can you know that the design you've stressed over for so long is appropriate? Feedback is one way - paying attention to the email you get from people who take the time to write. But a more powerful solution is actually watching people use your site, asking them simple questions as they surf, and then changing your design accordingly. Usability testing is easy, as long as you know what to expect from the tests.
Forget about the jargon-laden disciplines of cognitive psychology and behaviorism. While they offer hard, scientific methodologies for understanding how people comprehend and process information and tools, you're just interested in common sense. Sitting users down in front of your designs and watching them use your site will uncover the countless mistakes you overlooked while putting your pages together. And, rest assured, you made them.
Have you ever stared at a word for so long that it stops looking like a word? Same holds true for designing pages on the Web. After spending so many hours on your projects, simple mistakes slip through. Here's a perfect example:
When our designers redesigned the Wired News Web site, they included a navigation panel down the left side of the screen. It pointed to the various sections behind the frontdoor: an area to check stock prices, the week's top 10 stories, and a collection of articles from trade magazines. However, when our testing subjects saw the navigation bar and its respective links - Stocks, Week's Top 10, From the Trades - they instinctively grouped the sections together. When asked what they thought the links pointed to, users all agreed the Week's Top 10 was about the best-performing, publicly traded companies, and From the Trades must be about large buys and sells from the exchange floor. They mentally grouped everything around stocks.
A simple test - a half-dozen subjects using the Web site for a half-hour each - uncovered a potentially confusing design. Armed with this data, our designers modified the link placement and made the site less obtrusive and easier to use.
Try it yourself. You only really need a few friends and family members. Sit down with them and simply have them use your Web site for a few minutes. Ask them to speak their thoughts aloud as they click through the pages. When they appear to be looking at a link, ask them what they expect to find behind it when they click, then follow up with questions about what they found and whether or not it surprised them.
You'll get plenty of feedback, and it's important to know what to listen to and what to ignore. Remember, users' expectations are much more valuable than their opinions. The difference? Compare these quotes: "Oh, I thought that button would take me to a search engine, not an archive of stories." vs. "Hmmm ... that background color is a weird shade of blue - I don't like it."
A good designer can respond to user confusion over an interface without succumbing to a lowest-common-denominator approach to the aesthetics and ideas behind a Web site.
You'll never make everyone happy all the time (thank goodness), but at least you'll be explaining things clearly enough to let them disagree with you.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
