Usability is defined as “The effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments” (ISO-Norm 9241-11).
But what does a company expect when it hires an usability expert? Would it be interested in the user reaching his goals more efficiently and effective? Or wouldn’t it rather want to reach its goals and increase the conversions – e.g. user actions like teaserclicks or registrations ? Wouldn’t it want to sell more products and to increase the revenue?
But how to spark a users interest in your products?
Dr. Eric Schaffer, CEO of Human Factors International, said “You still need good usability – if people can’t find something they can’t be persuaded by it – but soon usability will no longer be the key differentiator it has been. It’s often not enough to design a website that is easy to navigate, understand, and transact on. Just because people can do something doesn’t ensure that they will.”
In the future Persuasion, Emotion & Trust (PET) will get more and more important. Only websites which are able to convince the users on an emotional basis and to gain their trust will be successful.
What exactly is persuasive design?
B.J. Fogg, author of “Persuasive Technology”, defines persuasive design and technology as focusing on the design, research and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviour.“ For a website this would mean that design, pictures, headlines, text etc. will have an influence on the behaviour of the website user.
The necessity of web analytics
But even if you were following the usability experts suggestions closely and had changed the website, the processes etc. – how were you to know, which changes, action or combination of methods were resonsible for the uplift or subsidence of the conversion rate? There only is one solution: You will have to measure the different actions and the user’s behaviour.
And that is where web analytics comes in. For each of the actions you will need to measure which impact they will have. Is it only a single action that is causing the difference, is it the combination of them? What if you’d use another combination of actions? You will need to test and measure the different methods and see which ones turn out to be the best. Maybe you will also need to take different actions for different user groups. Will, for example, the users coming from Google first want to know something about the company while others would go to the shop without delay?
Conclusion
Persuasive design? Yes, of course, but to measure the success of different actions taken you also need web analytics. Combine both and you’ll get more out of it.
