As the days count down to launching Sales on Rails, I’ve started doing some usability tests. In my first usability test, I learned a lot about my sales site for Sales on Rails in addition to a ton of useful information about some of my competitors. Best of all, it only took 25 minutes.
A lot of the following points may seem obvious, but when you see a new user struggling with your or your competitors’ websites, the direct experience really underlines how important usability tests are.
Speak the customer’s language.
While building a software product, you’ll probably immerse yourself in forums, newsletters and RSS feeds that deal with design, development and new technologies. Your vocabulary will expand into these fields and words you’d never heard of will soon become commonplace. Don’t make the mistake of letting this new jargon seep into your interface.
In my target market, fancy-sounding terms like “B2B”, “e-commerce” and “platform” are irrelevant. I need to focus on things like “sales order management”, “payables” and “receivables”. Your customers don’t care how smart your application is; they just care if it solves any of their problems.
Present information according to customer priorities.
A classic mistake is a large logo or a prominent “About” link on a product site. Your customers are interested in your products. They’re not interested in you.
The biggest item should explain what your product does.
Again, in your customer’s mind, your company is secondary to your product and whether or not it helps a customer solve a problem. The most obvious element of a sales site should be a simple explanation of what the product does.
Make your pricing obvious.
The best way to annoy your customers is to hide your pricing on a back page of your site, or worse, behind a phone call and a salesperson. It’s important to you that your future customer hears the pitch, but your customer is only annoyed by the inconvenience. Respect that their time is precious. Make your pricing obvious and easy to access.
In 25 minutes, I learned a lot about what I’m doing right and what my competitors are doing wrong. For the most part it was good news, and it came cheap and easy. For a great introduction on simple usability testing, check out Steve Krug’s excellent book, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.
