Design / Usability

Brains Agree: The Case for Website Usability Guidelines Todd Follansbee , WebMarketingResources.net - Apr 12, 2011

Bear with me as I explain vital way to boost your site's conversion rate: usability guidelines. You'll understand better if I begin with your brain.

The brain deals with billions if not trillions of bits of incoming information each second. Signals come from the 30,000 auditory pathways in your ears and 6 million cones in your eyes. The millions of nerves in your skin tell you how well your shoes fit or how comfortable your chair is. Ten thousand taste buds join the nerve endings in your nose to send what we hope are signals that your brain finds appealing. Whatever your measure, the brain processes massive amounts of data each second.

Random Numbers and Your Brain

Its capabilities all seem quite impressive until you try this simple test. Look at this number for 5 seconds; then look away and try to repeat it:

643792813562

Most people's brains stumble over recalling 12 random numbers. On average we can hold 7 (plus or minus 2) random bits of data in memory at one time. How can our remarkable brain manage millions of data bits yet not be able to hold twelve random numbers in memory?

Now, try this second test. Look at this number for 5 seconds, then look away and try to repeat it:

121212121212

No doubt, you can recall these twelve digits perfectly. Keep in mind that while you took this quiz, your brain continued to handle the incoming mountain of sensory information. Why are we designed to remember patterns well, but not random information? And how does that affect your web business?

Hierarchical Thinking in Your Brain

The "thinking" part of the human brain, the neocortex, handles information in a hierarchical structure. It may help to think of it like the structure of a factory.

The Factory Analogy of the Brain

Assembly line workers go about their tasks and only speak up if there is a problem. When they speak up, the supervisor looks at the problem, responds and all is usually fine. When the worker has a problem that the supervisor can't solve, the supervisor contacts the department manager. The department manager may be able to address it or may have to move it up the chain to the head of production or even possibly the president.

Pattern Recognition

Each step in the hierarchy tries to recognize a pattern in the problem that suggests a solution. As soon as a solution is clear, the problem stops moving up the chain and things work smoothly. When a problem is too random to fit a perceivable pattern, it is passed up the hierarchy to the president. The president directs the response and as she awaits further news, her focus can return to other issues. The hierarchy in our neocortex has six levels of information processing and it works a lot like this example.

The brain's powerful desire and ability to find patterns also makes it excellent at recognizing something out of the norm. For example, remember how you felt seeing a piece of spinach on your friend's front tooth? We expect faces to fit our model of a normal face: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, etc.

Things that Don't Fit Distract with "Noise"

The brain doesn't like things that don't fit right. More accurately, it doesn't like things that don't fit the way it expects them to fit. When something is not as predicted, it also goes up the chain of command (hierarchy) until it gets resolved. It is common for something simple like the piece of spinach to be distracting enough that we must concentrate just to hear what our friends are saying to quiet the "noise" about the spinach. Your friends' newly trimmed beard gets little more than a quick glance, but your brain will not let you easily ignore a missing eyebrow or black spot on his nose.

The Brain's View of a Website

The way your visitor's brain experiences your website is quite similar. When he lands on your homepage, his brain begins to search for patterns it recognizes.

Often the first thing to look for is a hyperlink, the basic key to web information. If it can't identify the hyperlinks, or if the hyperlinks don't consistently fit a recognized pattern, the workers all yell up the chain, "we don't know what to do!" When one hyperlink is black and another is green, when one has a mouse-over effect and another does not, the workers can't find a 12121212 pattern.

Does Your Site Distract with "Noise"?

The brain keeps trying to make sense and when things are too random, the "noise" may become too distracting for the president to work. She recognizes she must look at every word to discover a hyperlink and she associates this pattern with the "set" of sites that belong to confusing and unprofessional businesses.

Let's assume though that your hyperlinks consistently follow the instantly recognizable convention of underlined blue text (though most any consistent pattern can work). The worker hierarchy is quiet and the president decides to look through the site. As she does, the workers try to complete their mental model of the site. They continue to check to ensure that all hyperlinks behave as predicted and then look at other elements of the model. Does the navigation structure work as expected and behave like other good sites? For example, does "About Us" provide whatever you need to know about the company?

"Noise" Diverts Focus from the Content

As long as the workers can fit site elements into a workable model, the president is free to focus on content. When something is abnormal, they distract the "president" with their questions: "We don't recognize this, and we need you to tell us what to do." She must divert her focus from the content and decide on a course of action. The "noise" may be an unrelated random picture and after a quick diversion, she can quickly return to the task. Occasionally, the distraction may be unsettling, such as a broken link or a product claim so extreme that it requires proof. Her decision may be to find another site.

Curiously enough, as long as a site easily fits a clear mental model, the president is only minimally aware that the modeling is going on. We only become aware when things aren't right. We always try to fit information into a recognized pattern. That is how we humans have learned for thousands of generations.

Usability Guidelines Reduce "Noise"

You can reduce "noise" on your site by ensuring that your site meets usability guidelines. Guidelines are based upon expert understanding of how the brain processes information. When you comply with the guidelines, you make it easy for the brain to find patterns and build a clear mental site model, regardless of how creative or innovative the site may be. The goal of user experience guidelines is to simplify, not complicate.

 If you want to achieve the 10%, 15%, or even 20% conversion rates that highly usable and persuasive sites achieve, you must first meet the basic user experience guidelines.

You may meet internal resistance because you and your developers have a working mental model of the site based upon your knowledge of the business and repeated visits. It is nearly impossible for you to see the site objectively. Complying with the guidelines is demanding work but it is necessary for any serious web business to excel. We rarely see a site that meets even 50% of the guidelines, so it is no surprise that conversion rates average about 2.1% and cart abandonment at over 70%.

If you are building a new site, give your developers a detailed set of user experience guidelines at the outset. In the end, it costs little to meet guidelines when starting from scratch.

Improve Your Site through User Experience Guidelines

When I help sites improve conversions, I ensure that the visitor is free from distracting noise like spinach on the teeth. I want visitors to focus on the important issues such as, "is this the best product available?" When the mind is distracted by "noise," it is harder to make decisions. People do buy from poor sites, especially when there are few alternatives, but the "workers" remember and will always prefer a useable site.

What should you do next. Here are your options.

1. Download a set of user experience guidelines and make improvements on your own.
2. Purchase a guidelines compliance tool to score your site and help you to decide what to fix first. read more.
3. Take a course in usability. One is offered, for example, at the Online User Experience Institute.
4. Hire a usability consultant to review and make recommendations on your site. Resource: Usability Professionals Association.

Todd Follansbee is founder of WebMarketingResources.net. He is a usability and persuasion consultant who has been helping sites improve conversions for over 12 years. His methodology won a top ten award in Entrepreneur Magazine. He has contributed to several books and his columns have reached millions of readers. Todd's performance based consulting plan enables you to profit within the first month by "hiring" a part-time virtual user experience expert.