Usability is everybody's business

Pressure to deliver a return on investment (ROI) on corporate websites means that marketers need to share the responsibility for good site design.

Most corporate websites are still built more around a company's priorities than what users actually need. As a result, they don’t deliver for users, resulting in frustration, lost opportunity and lost sales.

User Interface Engineering reported recently that half of all transactions on the web fail, because users fail to reach their goal (for ecommerce transactions, the figure is 65 percent). Meanwhile, only 30% of users find what they need on a site using search, compared to a 53% success rate when they use only links within the site to search for information.

Customers are finding little value in business website content. Forrester Research reported last year that Web users visit manufacturers' sites to research products – and 84% of these active prospects expect those sites to provide the best product information. But only 45% offer relevant and complete content.

According to the Forrester report, “Even though consumers, business customers and site executives underscore the need for a great user experience, most Web efforts don’t deliver it…. User experience matters, but most sites don’t deliver.”

The blunt usability expert Jakob Nielsen sums up the situation succinctly: “If people can’t figure (website usability) out, they deserve to go bankrupt.”