Many business websites too hard to use - expert
This article appeared in 14 March 2005 edition of the Dominion Post newspaper, and was written by Adrian Bathgate.
First impressions count, and that applies as much to the world of business as other aspects of life.
For many businesses, the customer's first point of contact is now online, making it vital they have a user-friendly website.
But too many websites turn people away rather than attract them in, says Sam Ng, a director of Wellington company Optimal Usability which shows companies how to improve their sites.
Mr Ng said technical considerations often overtook the need to make the website easy to use.
He and fellow director Trent Mankelow formed the company two years ago. Since then they have been in the business incubator Creative HQ. They met several years ago while working for computer giant Unisys and were both interested in pursuing the goal of making computers and applications more user-friendly.
After finding that nobody was offering the service commercially, the pair formed Optimal Usability in February 2003.
The company provided impartial advice, Mr Ng said. In most cases it made recommendations for changes, but rarely did the work itself. This objectivity gave it the ability to see faults in a project that the developers might not.
Mr Ng said the evaluation process used aspects of psychology and anthropology, sociology, computer design and market research in determining whether any given website was easy to use.
"The primary way of determining what's good and what's bad is to get real people to use it under observational-type research conditions."
He likened the evaluation process to a customer walking into a shop. "You'd want the same level of service and help (from a website) that you'd get from talking to someone."
The "usability industry" was in its infancy in New Zealand, but he was keen to see greater awareness of how it could work to everyone's advantage. To that end a usability association had been founded.
The potential market for such services was about 10 per cent of any IT project, Mr Ng said. That amounted to millions of dollars in the long term, but the first priority was educating the market.
Optimal Usability was now in full stride after a long period of explaining the advantages of the service, Mr Ng said.
The company has grown 1000 per cent in the past year and now has a turnover of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clients include ACC, Victoria University and Canterbury Clothing.
While most of its work is on websites, the company also looked at software and mobile devices. It employs a pool of contractors, depending on the work. The two founders have opened an Auckland office to be closer to the source of much of their work.
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