The site featured a well designed navigational system consisting of prominent links displayed on every page (i.e., a navigation bar - see Fig. 2). Users were very conscious of these links and used them as their primary method of navigating the site.

Figure 2 The Original Navigation Bar for the Corporate Site

Other users looked for the store option by using the links found on the standard navigation bar. Unfortunately, there were no links to the web store found by using this method either. Most users just gave up.

So, even though the client had the best of intentions, their best efforts failed them. The web store link was the biggest link on the page and yet it still did not produce the desired results. Let's examine some of the mistakes they made and how we corrected them.

The first mistake was making the link look like a banner advertisement. Users have been developing what many call "banner ad blindness." This is a condition where users will actively ignore anything that looks like an ad. You may have experienced this condition yourself. Next time you are on a large commercial web site, make a special point to try and spot all the ads on a page. You may be surprised how many ads you automatically skip over as you surf through a site.

This is a central point to usability theory. Users do not want to be distracted from the task they want to accomplish. Banner ads are usually a distraction and so they are automatically ignored.

Another error in judgment was to place the link at the bottom of the page. As previously mentioned, the client believed that this was the appropriate place for the link as they believed that users would be looking for a store link after perusing the page contents. In reality, many users went looking for the store first. This means that they did not look at the page content at all, but instead they went searching for a link to the web store.

Furthermore, the web store link was placed "below the fold." This is a term that comes from newspaper publishing. Anything visible on the upper half of a folded newspaper is called "above the fold." This is, presumably, where the most important items will be such as the headline. Anything not visible is termed "below the fold." In terms of web page publishing, anything visible on the screen without scrolling is called "above the fold." If you have to scroll to see something on a web page, then it is below the fold. In the case of my clients banner link, it was as far below the fold as you can get.

Best practices indicate that you should have your most important features or information visible above the fold. The client's navigation bar was a very prominent feature visible immediately upon loading any page. This probably accounts for users' attempts to use this navigation bar to find the web store. Users believed this was where the important links would be, such as a link to the web store.

Figure 3 The Revised Navigation Bar for the Corporate Site

As a side note, we didn't simply make the new navigation bar link say "Web Store" although that probably would have been enough to get the point across to most users. Instead, we used an imperative statement that was more in line with what the user wanted to accomplish (i.e., "Buy Online Now"). This borrows from the field of banner ad design which indicates better performace of ad banners when an imperative is used as part of the text (i.e., "Click Here Now").

The moral of the story is that improving usability need not be an expensive or complicated process. Obviously, this is a simple example but it points out that even well-meaning designers and corporate marketers often miss the point of designing a good user experience. The user's goals should be supported in an easy and intuitive manner.

Discovering those goals and finding out how users want to use your site are the first steps to designing a good user experience. You also need to continually test with real users to be sure that what you believe to be true actually is. In our example, the corporate staff had very logical reasons for designing things the way they did. However, the users saw things differently.

Designers, programmers and corporate marketers are often too experienced with their own projects to be objective. Sometimes they are unable to "see the forest for the trees." By listening to and observing real users, you can get a wealth of information in a cost-effective and efficient manner. In our example, the cost and effort expended was most assuredly recouped on the first day that the changes went into effect. Not all projects have this type of immediate impact, but those that do are well worth the time spent.