The Effective Website: The Seven-Minute Checkup Jun 1, 2007 12:00 PM
, By Larry Becker
JobZone
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Can you evaluate the effectiveness of your Website in a mere seven minutes? We developed this Seven-Minute Site Checkup as a fun diagnostic for the free, fast-paced Medical Center sessions at last month's ACCM. Of course, this exercise can't approach the value of a comprehensive third-party review, but it can help you get up to speed on usability and conversion basics before your commit to your next Web project or a paid third-party review.
Here's a tip: Double your investment by performing the exercise twice. Before examining your own site, “wipe your glasses” by walking through a checkup on a site from a retail category other than your own. You'll get a clearer sense of the usability patterns underlying all effective sites, and you'll be in a position to diagnose your own work more objectively.
MINUTE 1: home page
A comprehensive home page analysis requires a detailed review across scores of benchmarks, but for your seven-minute checkup, take your page's vital signs with three questions:
What can I do on this site?
Why would I do it here?
How do I start?
If the home page is effective, these questions can be answered in seconds — that's how much time you have before your user opens up another browser tab to shop a competitor or simply leave.
Pay particular attention to question 2; the answer is your site's unique selling proposition. Does your site compete on service? Breadth of assortment? Price? Make sure the reasons to shop your site instead of the competition's are apparent at a glance.
Tip: Keep these three home page questions in mind as you evaluate other landing pages on your site. For sites reaping the full benefits of paid and natural search, the home page may account for as few as 20% of entry pages, so all your landing pages need to make a quick, easily scanned argument for sticking around.
Next check the home page's shopping scent. The simplest way to help your visitors pick up a strong shopping scent and start finding and choosing product is to provide an easy-to-find site search box and well-organized, clearly labeled site navigation.
MINUTE 2: navigation
Take a look at the site's primary navigation links. Is the number of choices manageable or overwhelming? Research shows that more than seven links is pushing it.
Quickly read though the navigation labels. Do the words make clear what the site sells and how the products are organized? Odds are the home page's prime real estate is spent on products your company deems important. As you look at the site navigation, is it clear which categories would logically contain these featured products and the ones just like them?
Start clicking to see if you guess right. As you drill down, do you always know where you are and where you can go?
Tip: Effective site navigation keeps users oriented with clear page headlines, consistent breadcrumb trails, and links that look unambiguously clickable.
MINUTE 3: category page
Time is tight, so let's boil down these key pages to their essence: Category pages are lists and ways to manage lists.
Is the category page on your screen immediately recognizable as a list of products? Is the reasoning behind this list's default order apparent (price ascending, alphabetical by brand, etc.)? How easy is it to change that order?
What tools can help you narrow the list and choose a product? Are filters, if used, relevant to the products on the page?
For those users who prefer traditional merchandising, does the page precede the product list with price-tiered, good/better/best recommendations?
Now go back to your list of home page questions and use them to evaluate this category page as an entry page to your site.
Tip: Effective Websites design for users first but recognize the importance of formatting content for natural search too. Here are two quick search-engine optimization checks for your seven-minute evaluation:
Does each page on the site have its own unique title tag?
Does the site use properly formatted HTML headlines to help search bots find the most-important ideas, or does it hide key concepts with rendered graphical text that the engines can't read?
