Dear Companies, Marketers and Individuals, please read carefully. What you are about to read will have profound affect upon your profitability. Great, that got your attention. Let me tell you 5 things that will make me leave your website before you can say “website usability”.
1. If you don’t have a Search button
I’m a busy girl. I don’t want to waste my time scanning your clothes website for where I can find your selection of “long dresses” if I’m trying to buy a dress for prom. I’d rather ‘waste’ my time picking out which one I want to order. Place it in the upper left or right hand corner.
2. If your site freezes all the time
If I’m in a zone with really good Wifi, I will have no patience or interest in your site if it is taking ages to load. So make sure that your site can handle all the (hopefully) beautiful high quality videos, pictures and content you have on your website.
3. Low quality photos
Just thinking about this, I’m cringing. It looks so unprofessional if you can’t take pictures or even find pictures on Google that have a suitable resolution for your site so they turn out grainy or stretched.
4. Way too many unintuitive tabs
Organize, organize, organize. I’ve spent way too many hours on my university’s (Copenhagen Business School) intranet, e-campus, trying to figure out where to find the information I need. Information isn’t always under the right tabs, and the tabs don’t have drop down menus that tell you what sections are in each tab. What’s even worse? The website doesn’t have a search button.
5. Too much text
A little less conversation, a little more pictures please. And headings. If you just have pages and pages of text, you’ve lost me.
Header image source: http://www.hallaminternet.com/assets/over-optimisation-keyword-stuffing.png