EVER wonder why every second web site you visit looks the
same? You'd think that, after almost two decades of the building of the Web,
designers of sites would have become so skilled, savvy and creative, no two
sites would look the same.
Ironically, you can lay the blame on the quest for the ideal
website. In the business world, that is referred to as best practice.
The past five years have seen a major shift in the design
and quality of websites. Especially in the media environment, the understanding
of best practice has evolved in clicks and bounds.
The result is that most media sites are slick and
user-friendly. But also that most media sites tend to have the same general
structure.
The unforeseen consequence of a general embrace of best
practice in online design is that it has also evolved into "standard
practice". This results in a rash of "me-too" sites, followed
inevitably by shorter attention spans among site visitors.
It comes as no surprise then - except to the site owners - when
a site redesign is followed by a drop in time spent on the site.
A lack of a coordinated strategy in most companies means
that it is difficult to refine these sites unless a complete redesign is
commissioned.
In the process of benchmarking and auditing South African
web sites for more than a decade, my company has often found the design process
to be a wrestling match between marketing teams and IT administrators.
Each believes they should have the final word. And, because
best practice is now so well established and accessible, each believes they can
do it by themselves.
The truth is, they need each other. But even more important,
they need the user as part of the process. Some have misunderstood this
requirement to mean focus groups and "crowd-sourced" recommendations.
This seldom works, as focus groups cannot tell you what they don't know.
They cannot tell you why they experience a site in a certain
way, and certainly cannot advise you on potential strategies of which they are
not even aware.
This needs a combination of best practice - ie expert
knowledge and skills – and of what one can call "best experience". By
putting yourself in a users head, and seeing a site as a user sees it, you get
to understand precisely what is being experienced.
It is taking a subjective experience and giving it an
objective interpretation. This is the exact opposite of the focus group
approach, which allows the user to give a subjective interpretation of a
subjective experience.
How do you put yourself in a user's head?
Enter the eye-tracker.
A new generation of tools measures precisely how users
experience websites or mobile apps by tracking the movement of their eyes.
With appropriate software tools providing a dashboard of
this experience, along with expert analysis, it is possible to show why and
where a site isn't working, and how and where it should be fine-tuned.
The Webagility Vision system designed by World Wide Worx is
just one example of this kind of approach. It is a suite of analysis tools that
reveals all areas where users' eyes focus and fixate.
These tools provide a visual representation of what is seen
and what is "invisible", rank the strength of focus on distinct site
elements, and establish the overall sequence in which visitors explore a page.
It includes video animation of this sequence and of eye-movement on screen.
Based on the resultant analysis, sites or apps can be
optimised on the basis of both best practice and best experience. Not only is
it in-depth, but also effective for both websites and apps.
It can, for example, measure the effectiveness of a Facebook
or Twitter presence at the moment of exposure to a visitor, compare it to that
of competitors, and then provide a roadmap for enhancing it.
It's not the only tool of its kind, but it underlines the
power of the options that have become available even as differentiation of
websites becomes a greater challenge.
* Arthur Goldstuck is managing director of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. You can follow him on Twitter at @art2gee.