Categories: semantic design usability

Many times when I hear a person talk about “usability”, they really mean “subjectivity”.  Sometimes, usability is one of those buzzwords that web developers use when they don’t want you to know how much they don’t understand. According to Wikipedia, usability refers to the methods of measuring the principles behind an objects’ perceived efficiency or elegance.  Or you could say, “how to measure why Web visitors do, what they do”.

Is it possible to control a Web visitors behavior?
Control would be the wrong word. Maybe producing a stimulus response or some sort of behavioral theory would be plausible, but control would be something else entirely. Usability is the concept of using analytic s to determined if a sites purpose and function are aligned.

Many years ago, when I was a young Web developer, I designed a Web site for a publishing company. The sites purpose was to inform those interested in writing how the publishing company could help them publish a book.  After a few months the site owners realized they were getting a lot of emails asking how to break into the book publishing business. The publishing company were very responsive to answer any question, obviously with the hopes of increasing business. After a year of responding to many email questions, the publishing company wanted to know how they could get so much traffic, having questions, but couldn’t convert any to clients. After analyzing there traffic, it was pretty obvious that their visitors were using them as a source on “how to get a book published” as opposed to using their publishing service.

My suggestion for the company was to re-align the “purpose” of the site to match up with the “function”.  By adding a forum to answer questions on how to publish a book they could benefit in two ways. First, they would benefit from all the rich user-generated content and second they added a level of loyalty by requiring their users to become members of their forum they now could develop an on-going relationship of engagement and ultimately get some to use their book publishing service.  The process of aligning a sites function and purpose is called “Reciprocal Evolution”.  We change it, and it changes us until we’re organic. A synonym for reciprocal evolution on a large scale project would be a form of semantic design.
Your only real control in Web usablity are your measurements. Be 100% certain that what you are measuring is what you want to measure. I’ve had clients whose metrics were all over the board. Everyone’s analysis seemed to be about empowering their department as opposed to improving general operations. Setting the best metrics can be tricky. Think of Maslow’s Hammer when analyzing data,

“When the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem begins to resemble a nail.”

Increase your tools and understand how to use them. Avoid a tool belt that only has a slot for a hammer.

3 Steps to Measuring Interaction

  • 1. Know what you want to measure
  • 2. Figure out a way to measure, compare and contrast data correlations
  • 3. Determine the interaction that’s causing the reaction