How Usable is Your Web Site?

I long for journalism's olden days, back when editors packed you off to
remote locations to follow a story. Today's story would have taken me
to Israel but, alas, the Information Age removes the need for me to
board a plane bound for Haifa. Everything comes to me via phone and
email, instead.

Whether you're a mom 'n pop operation or an enterprise the size of
General Motors, if you're engaged in e-commerce your business probably
revolves around your Web site. And if you're like most enterprises,
then a committee of executives, Web designers, engineers, and marketing
people review the site and decide whether your Web site is adequate.

Let's see...executives, Web designers, engineers, and marketing...who's
missing here? End users! Every aspect of creating a Web site must keep
that end user in mind. To that end, every member of that committee
should be asking the following questions:

* What's it like to be an end user at our Web site?
* Is that flashy intro taking too long to download for end users
without high-speed connections?
* Do end users have to click through too many screens before
reaching their desired action?
* Is navigation confusing?

Asking end users is one way to find out what they think, but getting
together a focus group of end users willing to fill out a survey isn't
always easy. There are Web site metrics, of course. If you use a
hosting service, then you probably have access to some basic reports
showing hit rates, page views, and other information. For those of you
hosting your own site in-house, plenty of software tools are available
that can run the same reports (Ilux, for example). Web site metrics can
supply some insight into your most and least popular pages, your
visitors' point of origin, and the times of their visits. ErgoLight
(http://www.ergolight-sw.com), a Haifa-based company called, takes Web
metrics a step further with a new idea that's worth trying out. The
company's usability reports really tell you what it's like to be an end
user.

Regardless of how you get your information -- from your hosting
service, an in-house software package, or a service like ErgoLight --
it all begins at your server logs. Server logs are incomprehensible in
raw form, but the data can be transformed into nifty charts and graphs
(i.e., what you get from your hosting service) that make much more
sense. ErgoLight's approach transcends charts and graphs. Their
usability rating of your site indicates difficult pages to find, pages
that may be difficult to read or comprehend, and the pages likely to be
abandoned due to long download time. Besides the usual charts and
graphs, ErgoLight delivers a narrative explanation of each usability
rating.

ErgoLight isn't a piece of loaded software; they operate more like an
ASP. Besides the automatically generated diagnosis, the reports
incorporate a human factor that provides better insight into the
results and recommendations for making the pages easier to navigate.
The process is quite simple too. You send them your server logs, they
analyze them, and then send a report back. A single report runs $200,
while a before/after report costs $300 -- meaning even a smaller
business can use the service.

» posted by ITworld staff

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