Using a variety of best practice case studies, the paper outlines three key design practices for usability and suggests how they can positively impact a company’s bottom line. It also provides concrete guidelines on how to test for web site usability on a shoestring budget.
Squiz’s three essential rules for designing ‘ultra-user-
* Designing ‘same but different’ layouts: so that users remain positively anchored as they browse, and ‘bounce rates’ are reduced
* Paying respect to established navigation conventions:
* Establishing trust through compelling copy: so that users immediately see their requirements reflected in content when arriving from ‘cold’ through searches or referrals
* …all with a view to ensuring that users get engaged more quickly and are more easily converted into sales, sign-ups and requests.
The 20 page report is designed to be read and digested in under 20 minutes and is available for download free via Squiz’s web site at: http://www.squiz.co.uk/
“Without good usability you’re seriously undermining your ability to make money on the web,” said Steve Morgan, Managing director at Squiz UK. “And what’s worse, you could also be burning all that precious marketing cash that you spent acquiring traffic in the first place!”
“We know this field intimately via our work with some of the UK’s leading e-commerce outfits in competitive marketplaces like travel. And time and again we see that simple, common sense tweaks to site structures, template designs and content can make all the difference in terms of conversion rates.”
“Our new usability paper distils this know-how into a format that can be read, understood and actioned within 20 minutes by a broad cross-section of business readers. If you’re a webmaster, a marketing manager or a CEO, I urge you to read it. I promise it’ll help to make your cash registers ring!”
About Squiz
Squiz helps some of the UK’s leading organisations to gain more control of their web sites and intranets. For example, Oxford University, The Royal College of Nursing and Future Publishing all use Squiz’s MySource Matrix Content Management System. In doing so they’re saving money, improving the services they’re delivering to users, and gaining more control of their web development. We develop MySource Matrix as an open source product and then provide support services around it to help our clients get more value from their web spend. We’re kind of like the Red Hat of the CMS world. Our approach is successful because of the strength of our CMS and our experience in diverse fields. We’re also cost-effective because being open source, MySource Matrix costs nothing to acquire or use.
