Are you attending the Gilbane conference this fall? I hope you'll sit in on the panel I'll be speaking on, talking about usability in B2B. I'll be exploring how B2B expectations are changing, converging more and more with B2C practices, at the leading web and content management conference on November 30. B2B marketing and usability are changing. The recent explosion of mobile devices and apps, combined with the 
evolution of Web 2.0 have quickly raised the bar on usability expectations within the Enterprise. Corporate users of web sites and apps today compare their experiences to consumer products and services such as iPhone/iPad, Kayak, and Google. Today's marketers are scrambling to meet these growing user expectations. Join me, World Usability Day founder Elizabeth Rosenzweig, as well as other leading industry experts, for this interactive session on how to turn your B2B website or app into a a truly lovable "consumer"-like experience.
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Did you ever wish that there was an event to draw attention to the need for more usable products and services in everyday life? An international gathering that helped usability professionals explain what they do, network with each other, and educate the public about the newest thinking on how to make everything more user-friendly?
Well, there is. World Usability Day, founded by Elizabeth Rosenzweig of Bubble Mountain, is a one-day worldwide celebration of all things usability. This year, it will be on November 10, in cities from Berlin to Boston, countries from Peru to Poland, bringing together practitioners, the public, and companies to make the case for a more user-friendly world, in everything from websites to tools.
We're very proud to have built the website for World Usability Day. And we're excited to be hosting a World Usability Day event at the Microsoft NERD Center. Our own Jason Smith will speak on going from usability to lovability, and creating applications that are not just easy to use, but fun to use as well. We hope you can join us if you're in the Boston area - and if you're reading this from elsewhere, check out events in your city.
Curious about how much people are talking about usability and user experience, I did a quick search in Google Insights on the two terms. (Google Insights is awesome, by the way, tracking the relative interest in terms over time, based on how often people search on them).
The results were interesting: at first, it appears that people are struggling less with usability, since they're Googling it less often:
But type in "user experience" and we see the topic trending up:
Although the terminology may be shifting, interest in usability and the user experience is definitely growing. Usability remains a concern for a lot of people.
If people aren't taking some specific action on your site that you want them to take, such as making a purchase or signing up for your newsletter(conversion), you may be making it too hard for them to do so. The path to purchasing or signing up may be full of confusing signposts, with poor usability being one of the main reasons people are failing to complete actions on your site. Although complete usability testing is the best way to identify usability issues for real, your web analytics tools can identify issues for further investigation. Creating a more usable conversion path-that is, the path that takes people from your landing page through to a purchase-can make a double-digit difference in sales. My talk at D4DBoston 2011 focused on metrics that show you something is off with your conversion path, and examples of great usability and smooth conversion paths from some recent work.
Some key points:
- Look at Navigation Summaries to see how many people get smoothly from one page to another, and how many "wander off" onto irrelevant pages. Maybe you're making the links to the page you want them to go to hard to find.
- Look at how many people need to use your search feature to find something, and of those, how many still give up and leave your site without buying.
- See how many people need to refine their search multiple times before they find what they need.
- Unless you're selling a very big-ticket item that takes a lot of thinking about, look at how many visits people make before they buy. If it's a lot, your navigation and layout might be confusing.
Conversion optimization is a multi-pronged approach, one that involves not just marketing strategy, marketing communications, and creative but great usability. An easy-to-navigate site is like an easy-to-navigate store: it keeps visitors coming back.
On Saturday April 2nd, I’ll be presenting at Product Camp Boston at the Microsoft NERD Center, talking to product managers about how to make their web applications as easy and seamless to use as popular consumer web applications.
Why do you need a love-able app? B2B has gone consumer
As we’ve seen in our work with the publisher Elsevier, there can be resistance within an organization to using a new app if there’s a perception that it’s going to be clunky and unfriendly —and, let’s face it, there are a lot of B2B apps that are just that. Today, B2B users now have higher expectations for web applications, more in line with what they’re seeing in their consumer applications and products, with brands like Apple and Amazon setting a reference point of great quality and functionality.
Solve a Really Hard Problem, Simply
So how do you provide your end-users with an experience that’s more akin to Apple’s than to the typical B2B web application? Lessons from our project for Elsevier provide important insights. We focused on what Apple does right—anticipating consumer and user needs – and developed a system that solves a few key pain points with grace and simplicity. By anticipating end users’ real needs, we provided them with a solution that has only the features they need to get their jobs done. The result is a highly functional, easy-to-use app that is streamlining the book authoring process.
Tips for Making Your Web Application Love-able
Designing great, usable apps is a mindset that requires thinking about apps as a user experience, not just a final product. Some other ways we create apps that your people look forward to using:
- Focus on the whole experience, not just the core product. The pre-experience and post-experience are important, too. Think of the ways Apple products are presented, making you want to use them, from the store to the box.
- Think in terms of good customer service to create a positive experience throughout the whole engagement.
- Create expectation around a product—remember that how people come away feeling about you is what distinguishes an everyday app from one that truly resonates with users.
- The payoff in providing great apps people can’t wait to use is higher adoption, with a much less steep learning curve.
Did you miss ProductCamp this year? Join us on May 5 for a webinar based on this talk.
Today is World Usability Day sponsored by the Usability Professionals Association (UPA). This year's theme is sustainability.
Virtual and in-person events are being run in over 30 countries.
OHO Interactive and Usability
The World Usability Day site was produced by OHO Interactive and runs on the Drupal content management platform.
