How do convince management this is important.

[Johan007]

How do you convince management usability is important? Giving the customer a friendly easy to use website that would never frustrate them pays off heavenly in the long run.

A company that never does user testing and the current designs and “improvements” are simply there to make sites appear valuable in terms of management should they want to sell it on.

I makes my blood boil or am I wrong and users are not always the important things in real business?

[chaka42]

you are right on in your assessment of usability ... it is one of the most crucial yet overlooked things in web development. i'd set up a meeting with the powers that be and make a presentation for usability. the most important thing for you to remember when trying to sell them on it is not usability itself, but profitability that will result. that is the bottom-line with the decisions management makes, will it make the company money?

[Johan007]

...it also costs money in terms of spending time looking and monitoring new and experienced users. Then using that feedback to make design changes and if no changes can be found or the ideas get dismissed thats a bad mark against me.

[chaka42]

use examples of companies that have placed usability high on their priroritie list ... for example, because of the increasing implementation of accessibility on the Internet, companies like MSN and ESPN completely revamped their sites to meet this need. find some sites that have focused on usability in the development phases which have lead to an increase in profits and popularity, i.e. amazon. i recommend you purchase a book called "don't make me think: a common sense approach to web usability" by steve krug, that is of course if you haven't already bought it. it has examples of sites, the breakdown of issues surrounding usability and usability testing.

[imaginemn]

Improving web usability slightly increases your site's revenues, membership, or readership but it's not guaranteed. Your competitors will be investing more in usability and gaining customers. Take a look at the most successful web sites like amazon.com and cancer.gov. They are all easy to use, provide security, promote trust and privacy and have good content.

Sites that have poor usability are typically not popular with users. They fail to provide the things that users want- information, products, services. The end result is that users go else where, telephone or visit "brick and mortar" establishments to obtain what they need.

There have been many studies of user behavior on the web and it's been proven that people have a low tolerance for difficult designs or slow sites. People don't like to wait and don't want to learn how to use your site. If they have to think they will abandon the site. Your job is to make it as easy as possible. People are not idiots, they are just busy and don't have time to figure out what you were thinking when designing your site. The easier you make it for the customer the more profitable your site will be.

Convincing management is always the hardest thing to do. Telling them that they made a bad decision in their designs or web site is never a good topic to discuss. The best way to handle this is to highlight what is working with the site and slowly sneak the bad in.

Is this a company you work for as an employee? Or is this a company you consult? This makes a bid difference because if you are an employee you run into the "our employee is not the expert, because they don't work for a web design firm" type of thinking (regardless of how talented you are) and sometimes all it takes is an outsider or a customer to complain to make them think differently. If you are consultant or hired help, the will think "they just want more money", our website works so why should I pay to change it. Management typically thinks that their product is the best regardless of how bad it's doing. It's tough to admit that they made a mistake, but not correcting it is a bigger mistake.

You need to show them numbers. Management deals with numbers. Show them statistics. Telling them it needs to be changed will never work with management unless you prove to them that it HAS to be changed. Tell them you are getting X amount of visitors and only X are buying. By changing Y we can improve our conversion rate. If the abandon rate is really high, they will start asking why so many people left the site without buying? That is where you tell them what needs to be changed. Let the numbers speak for themselves. You need to prove to them that they will not only save money but make more money in the end.

One thing you need to remember is that you are taking a risk here. The harder it is to convince them the higher the risk and the more they will expect. Make sure you research the numbers because if they don't have a high abandon rate, usability will not help and then you will have to explain to management why your changes did not work. I will ALWAYS vote for usability, but if it's not broken, don't fix it.

If you need some more help with is let me know. I can run a Web Usability Assessment for your site that you can use as a guideline. Free of charge of course. PM me the details of the site. If not good luck with this.

imaginemn

[gorillaboy]

Some of this stuff may help too.

http://useit.mondosearch.com/cgi-bin...bility+testing

[Johan007]

Thanks for the offer imaginemn but there are too many user tasks and logins across two sites so I will do some reading and will post here if I need more help.