Good Design & Usability Shouldn’t Stop At The Home Page
Your website is on a job interview to first time visitors. Like a job interview where you will be judged firstly on your appearance than on your interaction the same goes for your website. e.g.
|
Appearance |
In Person |
Website |
|
Are they clean and tidy? |
Is the site well laid out |
|
|
Are they wearing the appropriate clothing for the job? |
Are the fonts, colours and imagery appropriate for the kind of business |
|
|
Interaction |
In Person |
Website |
|
Are they well spoken? |
Can I read and understand the content? |
|
|
Are they able to explain themselves and articulate their ideas? |
Can I navigate the site easily and find what I am looking for? |
|
|
Can they be trusted? |
Can they be trusted? |
A study carried out by a Canadian team and published in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology found that it takes less than 50 milliseconds to decide if a you like a website or not. It also found that once this opinion was formed it can cloud subsequent attitudes towards the site such as usability. This effect known as the “halo effect” where in that a user will look for evidence to confirm their initial impression and ignore that, that doesn’t.
Also if our surveyed statics are anything to go by, which indicated that on average 61% of users are arriving to a website via a search engine (predominantly Google). It also indicates that on average the home page attracted only 19% of the websites traffic which leaves 81% (2nd 20%, 3rd 8%, 4th 3% and 5th 3%, all other pages 47%) of the website attracting majority of the traffic.
Therefore make sure that you invest the time and budget in the design and usability of your site as a whole not just your home page.
This can involve:
-
User testing
-
Business requirements
-
Prototyping
-
Functional specification
-
Creative briefs
Related reading
