Moments with Krug - Eureka!

Steve Krug's book, Don't Make Me Think, is candid, fresh and original. My first (of a few!) eureka moment happened early on in the book - page 19.

"Your competitor is only one click away" is bandied about almost to the point of being trite as the first and foremost reason for companies to invest in usability. Krug suggests another, more basic reason, which is backed up by psychological research.

His argument is that "making pages self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better" (author's emphasis). It's so true! As usability practitioners, we witness users getting increasingly frustrated as they struggle to navigate their way through badly designed sites. People simply don't just switch sites when they encounter frustration - they have spent some time and energy getting to the site in the first place and they want this to pay off. Only when the frustration becomes too much do they throw their hands up in the air and move to another site. So in fact, your competitor may be more than one click away, but a user's negative exp[erience on your site could have even worse ramifications (e.g. never visiting again, or even worse, associating a poorly designed site with poor quality products).

On the other hand, a good experience at a website could have great consequences for brand image and product awareness. Dion et al's (1972) famous article "What is beautiful is good" argued that people ascribe positive personality traits and life outcomes to more attractive people. I tend to think that the same would happen for websites - a more positive experience on a webiste that looks better would probably have an effect on people's perceptions of the products and services offered by the webiste. Shoddy website = shoddy products: easy, usable and attractive website = great products and services (see my post on usability and aesthetics for a more in depth look at this).

A recent study by Everard and Galletta (2005) supports this notion. They found that poor style, hypothesised errors and incompleteness were inversely related to users' perceptions of the quality of the online store. This relationship also held for their level of trust in the store, as well as their purchase intention.

So the moral of the story is: your competitors are only a click away. But most users won't take this opportunity. Instead they will persist with your unusable, badly designed site and transfer their negative affect from the experience onto your products, brand, services, etc. Perhaps its time to see usability not as a service associated with IT, but marketing?

Refs:
Dion, K., Berscheid, E. & Walster, E. (1972). What is beautiful is good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24, 285-290.
Everard, A. & Galletta, D. F. (2005). How presentation flaws affect perceived site quality, trust, and intention to purchase from an online store. Journal of Management Information Systems, 22, 55-95.