Perceived Affordance, Usability and Online Sales:

One of the most important goals of web site usability testing is finding and fixing perceived affordance issues.  You can increase your usability, conversion and thus your web site Return on Investment (ROI) by improving perceived affordance.

What’s perceived affordance?  For web site owners, it’s the art and science of designing objects like ‘buy now’ buttons in such a way that your web site visitors know just by looking at it that they can click on it.

One of the most important functions of web site usability testing is to evaluate the perceived affordance of links and buttons.  By testing and optimizing perceived affordance of critical objects, such as “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” buttons, web sites can dramatically increase conversion, and thus ROI.

Definition of Perceived Affordance:

According to Don Norman, the Godfather of design and usability and the author of the book “The Design of Everyday Things,” the concept of perceived affordance is defined this way;

“The word “affordance” was originally invented by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson (1977, 1979) to refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal).

What the designer cares about is whether the user perceives that some action is possible (or in the case of perceived non-affordances, not possible).

In product design, where one deals with real, physical objects, there can be both real and perceived affordances, and the two need not be the same. In graphical, screen-based interfaces, all that the designer has available is control over perceived affordances. The computer system, with its keyboard, display screen, pointing device (e.g., mouse) and selection buttons (e.g., mouse buttons) affords pointing, touching, looking, and clicking on every pixel of the display screen.”

According to William Gaver, there are three categories of affordance:

• Perceptible
• False
• Hidden

By evaluating the design elements that communicate perceived affordance for various objects in your web site, you can determine which category an object fits, and if wrong, take steps to correct it.

Perceived Affordance is Critical for Your Web Site Success:

When you think about your web site, your ROI in fact lives or dies on your ability to successfully manipulate design to improve perceived affordance.  Your web site is primarily a one-way pipe of information, the majority being visual information (with the potential for some audio).  You provide the visual information, and your web site visitors consume and comprehend it (or at least try to).

Because the primary interaction that takes place on your site is one-way visual, you must be zealous in your attempts to understand and evaluate how well you are communicating perceived affordance.  Testing and optimization of elements that impact perceived affordance should be your number one goal, because it directly impacts your conversion rates, and thus your web site’s ROI.

Actions your web site visitors take such as mouse clicks or typing characters, although very important, are never going to happen unless you provide clear, consistent and effective visual clues about how to take actions.  You do this by continually testing and optimizing the crucial elements of your site that establish and communicate perceived affordance.

Examples of Perceived Affordance in Buttons:

Let’s examine a few examples of perceptible perceived affordance in action.  In order to visually communicate that a button is clickable and will enable the site visitor to take action, it is necessary to use design to visually separate, distinguish and illuminate a function.

As demonstrated above, Amazon.com uses many design elements to generate high perceived affordance of their “Add to Shopping Cart” button, including use of:

• Strongly contrasting yellow button color
• Only use of that yellow color on the page
• Heavy outline border around button
• Round strongly contrasting icon of shopping basket
• Text in button “Add to Shopping Cart”
• Larger font for button text
• Elongated shape, round on left side, squared on right side
• Gradient fill in top of button to visually mimic 3-D shape
• Dark blue background color for surrounding box

Another example is eBay, which creates a high perceived affordance of the “Buy It Now” button.

For eBay, the “Buy It Now” button uses multiple design elements to effectively communicate perceived affordance:

• Strongly contrasting blue button color
• Only use of that blue button color on the page
• Largest sized button on page
• Text in button “Buy It Now”
• Larger font for button text
• Strong contrasting colors, white text on blue background
• Dark gray background color for surrounding box

To provide contrast, let’s examine use of design elements that appear to provide a function, but in fact do not.  This is known as false affordance, and can work against web site visitors.

False Affordance:

A false affordance is an apparent affordance that has no real function.  False affordance is a major contributor to lower web site conversion and lost online sales.  This is because a false affordance breaks the faith a web site visitor has in the web site’s functional abilities, and causes doubt and confusion.

Example of a False Affordance:

In this example, the prominently displayed “Featured Gift” and photo of the toy seem to indicate that more information about the toy might be available by clicking, but where?  Web site visitors who come across the display are left wondering, because no clear action button seems available for this toy.

A common tool many web site designers use is to make the image of the product clickable.  But that is not the case here.

In fact, there is no action available, the image of the toy is not clickable, nor is the heading “Featured Gift.”  There is no way to navigate to the featured toy using the visual designs offered, thus the connection with a “false affordance.”

There are many types of designs that can lead to false affordance, some of the more common being:

• Objects that look like buttons, but are not
• Photos of objects that are not links, especially if place with photos that are links
• Placing a blue outline around an image or link, yet no link is present
• Underlined text that is not a link
• Use of blue in text that is not a link
• Form data entry fields that are not active

For web site owners, false affordances are extremely damaging, and cause many more problems than simply lost clicks to a particular item.

By prominently displaying a false affordance on the home page, a web site causes damages including:

• Lost faith (visitors wonder – “is this clickable, what about this, or this?”)
• Lost focus (visitors spend more time trying to solve a navigation problem than shopping)
• Lost sales (frustrated visitors will often not complete their task)
• Lost trust (many visitors will simply leave the site – never to return)

Finding and fixing false affordances should be a high-priority job of every web site owner, especially those who own eCommerce sites – as false affordances  cost lost visitors, conversion and sales.

Poor Design and Hidden Perceived Affordance:

As with false affordance, poorly designed techniqes can hurt perceived affordance and can cause major performance issues for web site owners as well.  This is referred to as Hidden Affordance.  In the case of poor design, visual clues that a link or function is present are not displayed as visually separate, distinguished and illuminated.

Example of poor perceived affordance:

The example above demonstrates a site that provides web site visitors with a display of products available for purchase.  However, the function associated with “Checkout Now” – in this case a link to an online order form – is poorly displayed because it has minimal visual clues as to it’s function, and thus has low perceived affordance.

Among the perceived affordance problems with the “Checkout Now” button are:

• No button shape around the text
• Yellow text color is not a strong contrast against the white page
• No underline when mouse rolls over text
• Text in button visually close to “Back to results text”
• Missing a background color to call attention to location
• Upper left location not typically associated with ‘continue’ action

Improve Perceived Affordance with Testing:

So how do you improve your web site objects perceived affordance – with testing and re-testing.  There are four primary types of testing that can be used to analyze and optimize perceived affordance.  They are:

1. Expert Usability Review – Also called a “heuristic review.” This review uses expert analysis of interaction devices such as buttons, links and related functions against industry standards and best practices.  The best form of an expert usability review is to receive several, since each expert might focus on unique aspects that grouped together form a better picture of what needs to be improved and why.
2. Usability Testing – Using 1-on-1 moderated testing, a web site owner can quickly find problems with task flows for critical tasks.  These often involve issues with perceived affordance.  Because usability testing only needs about 7 or so participants, and because it uses real web site visitors, and can be done very quickly and for low cost, usability testing is a great way to find issues with perceived affordance.  It is the only method a web site owner can use to determine the “why” of an actual web site visitor’s behavior.
3. A/B Testing – Two different versions of a button, link or related object can be tested on your web site at the same time using a traffic split.  50% of the traffic goes to the version that has the “A” version (the original version of the object usually) and 50% to the new test “B” version.  After enough statistically significant results are captured, a winner can be picked based on interaction rate.  A/B testing is pretty reliable, assuming enough traffic is present.  However, it won’t tell you the “why” of the visitor behavior, and of course it might negatively impact your conversion if the “B” test version is worse than the original version.
4. Multivariate Testing – For sites with large amounts of traffic, multiple versions of objects can all be tested at the same time.  This allows for rapid analysis and iteration of the best possible combination of elements.  The downside to multivariate testing is it needs lots and lots of traffic to establish statistically significant results.  In addition, as with A/B testing the “why” of visitor behavior won’t be know, only which combination of elements performs the best.

Conclusion, Increase Your Usability and Website ROI with Perceived Affordance

Perceived affordance is critical to your web site success, and to your conversion and ROI.  Perceived affordance determines how well your interaction object designs communicate their function and use to your web site visitors.  Poor perceived affordance hurts your web site interaction, conversion and sales and results in lower ROI.  You can increase your ROI by conducting testing and optimization with the interaction objects on your web site.  An excellent way to identify potential issues and optimizations of perceived affordance is with usability testing.  Continual testing and re-testing ensures you are maximizing your potential usability, perceived affordance and thus ROI of your web site.

For more information about maximizing your web site’s perceived affordance and ROI contact me.

Usability Testing and Online Marketing Campaigns

Usability testing in action

Usability testing is a tool typically thought of for use with improving web sites or web-based applications, but if you are responsible for online marketing here’s important news – usability testing can provide you with a killer online marketing campaign.

What you and your competing marketing managers may not realize is usability testing an online marketing campaign is an easy, fast and cheap way to increase conversion – and increase the ROI of your marketing spend.  Why?  Because usability testing is all about improving tasks, tasks like;

• Understanding the message of an online advertisement
• Easily clicking through to a landing page
• Quickly completing a landing page form
• Efficiently entering data in a buy-flow to purchase a product

Usability and online marketing optimization

So why should you add usability testing as one of your online marketing optimization tools?  According to Forrester’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast, interactive marketing will near $55 Billion, represent 21% of all marketing spend, and interactive marketing media will cannibalize traditional media to do it.

The money you invest in online marketing must not only equal traditional marketing results, it has to beat it – because your competitors are busy doing the exact same thing.

Reasons to add usability testing

There are several reasons why adding usability testing to your online marketing optimization mix is highly productive:

First:  Usability testing is fast and easy

Usability testing doesn’t need thousands of statistically significant responses or multiple focus groups.  To usability test a task like going through an online marketing flow, you don’t need a lot of time, effort or input.  It’s fast and easy to quickly create a test and learn from it.  This can come in handy when you are trying to make decisions about important elements in your future online marketing campaign – well before launch.

For example, while your online marketing campaign is still in development you could quickly use usability testing to determine how easy or difficult it is for your prospects to click through to a landing page, understand the message on the page, complete a form, and/or successfully navigate the order or sales path.  By watching just 7 usability participants try to complete your online marketing path, you’ll know instantly where there are problems in your task flow – and will probably have a pretty good idea of what to do to improve it.

Second:  Usability testing is cheap and very low risk

Setting up a usability test, asking 7 participants to go through the test, observing their behavior and debriefing them at the end can all be done in less than a week for minimal cost – especially if you use remote moderated testing.

If you compare asking 7 participants to try to complete an online marketing flow, versus conducting an A/B test where perhaps hundreds or thousands of real potential customers are going through the flow, usability is far cheaper because you’re not losing orders or sales due to a potentially bad “B” version.  And usability testing is cheaper because you don’t have to test live production versions of a campaign, you can test pre-launch versions and not risk the potential costs involved in creating a bad live campaign.

Third:  Usability testing uses your real target prospects

Testing with the actual people you are targeting means you get feedback directly from the people you want to engage.  Want to know what your actual prospects think as they interact with your online marketing campaign?  You can with usability testing.  By finding test participants who exactly match your typical online marketing prospect, you’ll be testing your campaign with the actual people who could be interacting with it.

By evaluating how easy or difficult it is for your online marketing prospects to interact with your online marketing flow, you’ll have credible feedback to help you improve the experience.   This takes the guesswork out of trying to determine the “why” of user actions, something click-stream, A/B or log file analysis simply cannot provide.

What to usability test?

Usability test a landing page to optimize conversion

So what elements in your online marketing campaign should you usability test?  The possibilities are endless, but there are probably 3 or 4 critical elements of any campaign that would be simple, cheap and effective to test.  And the information you receive from the test can improve your online marketing campaign right away.  They are:

1. Call to Action Function – Conducting a usability test of an online advertisement with a call to action button is a quick way to determine if your call to action graphic is doing what it’s supposed to.  Does the test participant see the graphic in context with other ads or content?  Does the button look like a button and stimulate response?  What does the participant expect to see after they click the button?  Usability testing will provide all those answers, and more.
2. Landing Page Content and Information Architecture – Once your prospect is on your landing page, does the content meet their expectations?  What about the information provided, is it clear and easily understood?  Does the participant know where to go, and what to do next?
3. Order or Buy Flow Form Function – Assuming you have a form on your landing page, is it easy to use?  Does the participant make any mistakes, or have confusion when entering data?  How long does it take to enter the data?  Are there too many fields, or not enough, from the participants viewpoint?
4. Next Steps – After completing the form, does the participant know what will happen next?  What are the participant’s expectations?  Does the participant receive their expected feedback?  Are they satisfied with the experience?

Conclusion – Add usability testing to your online marketing and make it Killer!

Adding usability testing to your online marketing efforts can help you take your ho-hum online marketing campaign to killer marketing campaign status.  Usability testing does this because it’s all about tasks, not opinions, it is cheap and very low risk and it uses your real target prospects to identify where there are problems in your flow.

With the increasing use of online marketing in the overall media mix it becomes even more important to make sure your online marketing efforts are optimized for success, and usability testing is a tool you can use to accomplish that.

For more information on how to add usability testing to your online marketing mix just contact me, I’ll be glad to help you increase your conversion.

The 3 Pillars of Successful Web Sites

There are three pillars that comprise the foundation of any successful web site, including your web site.  For your web site to be effective it must perform well before the visit (at the awareness stage), during the visit (the evaluation phase) and during the finding, ordering or buying phase (the action phase).

I call these the 3 Pillars of Success, take any one of these three pillars away and your website will not perform to its full potential:

The 3 Pillars of Web Site Success

To be successful, your web site must be:

1. Findable – SEO, paid advertising, links, quality content
2. Trustable – Persuasion, emotion and trust
3. Usable – Usability, web metrics

1. Findable – SEO, Paid Advertising, Links, Quality Content:

For your web site to be effective, it must be Findable.  This includes using search engine optimization best practices to ensure the site can be found and indexed by search engines.  This is a critical and often overlooked component of web site success.

“If Google can’t find your site, your site does not exist.”

SEO guru Bruce Clay and Susan Esparza wrote an excellent book detailing how to perform search engine optimization: Search Engine Optimization All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies.  Applying search engine optimization best practices means your web site is easy for search engines to find, index and qualify from a quality standpoint.

Being findable also includes paid advertising with tools such as email, SEM, using Pay Per Click or Pay for Performance online advertising media, impression based ads and related online marketing tools such as affiliate networks and social media conversations.  Traditional advertising also applies, including radio, TV, direct mail and more.

Another component of being Findable is using a good quality linking strategy and set of tactics.  Remember that the web (internet) is exactly like a spider web, in that spiders use interlinked threads to create the structure of their web, and to enable navigating quickly and efficiently to any area in the web they need to go.

So too the internet uses connected threads of information to link similar topics and concepts.  The links to your site on the internet is the structure and the navigation system, which in this case is used by all of your web site visitors, including the all-important search engines.  The more high-quality links to your web site, the more Findable you are.

Finally, the last, but perhaps most important element of being Findable is having high quality content on your web site.  Your site must be worthy of being found, which means it must provide high-quality information that is helpful and useful.

Don’t underestimate the power of other web sites (even competitors!) linking or pointing to your high quality content as a powerful mechanism for your web site being found.

Findable tools:

• SEO – Easy for search engines to find & navigate
• SEM – Advertising where your prospects are
• Paid Media – Pay for performance including affiliates
• Social Media – Connected conversations
• Links – Highways to your site
• High-quality Unique Content – Worthy of being found

2. Trustable- Using Persuasion, Emotion and Trust to Influence Behavior

Once you have web site visitors, you must influence them to take action, this is the Trustable component.  To influence your visitor’s decisions and get them to commit (order, buy, contact you, whatever your web site success metric is) they must trust you and your web site.

By utilizing the science of persuasion to optimize the content, graphics, positioning and related elements of your web site, you will be influencing your web site visitor’s behavior.  Done well, this makes your site more Trustable, believable and will influence more of your visitors to take more actions.

Human Factors International calls this PET; for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust and offers persuasive techniques courses to teach you how to design using persuasive methods.

Trustable and the Psychology of Persuasion

A leading expert in the field of Persuasion and how to influence people is Robert Cialdini, former Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University.

Cialdini’s study of psychology and how influence is used to change human behavior resulted in a popular book, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.”

In essence, his research defined 6 elements of influence that can be manipulated to persuade and influence people’s behavior.  Using these elements on your web site effectively will enable you to influence your web site visitor’s behavior, resulting in more actions and thus more web site profit.

Trustable Tools – Cialdini’s 6 elements of persuasion and influence:

1. Reciprocity – People have a tendency to return a favor.  If I scratch your back, you’ll scratch my back, or as in LinkedIn, if I give you a recommendation you’ll most likely give me one.
2. Commitment and Consistency – When a person commits, either in written or audio form, he or she will be far more likely to follow-through with their commitment.  Once we commit, we seek to fulfill that commitment (some call it honor) because failing to do so causes us cognitive dissonance, which is when our actions do not match our desired goal.  As an example, agreeing to quit smoking is a commitment which if later broken, causes us ill feelings about ourselves (cognitive dissonance).
3. Social Proof – All of us are to a certain extent followers, if you see people around you suddenly start running in one direction, it’s highly likely you’ll start running too.  Amazon uses social proof very effectively with their “People who bought this item also bought.”
4. Authority – Authority figures such as police or firemen are obeyed because you have built-in authority following tendencies.  Even when you may know an order is wrong, or goes against your beliefs, you are likely to follow the order consider the disaster that was Enron as an example of following authority figures.
5. Liking – The odds are your friends can easily influence you to do things that a stranger or acquaintance could not do.  Pyramid marketing schemes like Amway are founded on this principle; that your friend can influence you and a group of others to buy products that a stranger at your door could never do.
6. Scarcity – Limited time offers, limited quantities or other forms of scarcity have a tendency to cause you to take action.  An example of this being the special sales that occur for only a few hours early in the morning the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S., causing large numbers of shoppers to stand in lines waiting for stores to open at unlikely times like 4 or 5 AM, something they would normally never do.

3. Usable – Applying usability and metrics analysis

Once Trust and a desire for action have been instilled in your web site visitor, the 3^rd pillar, Usability comes into play.  Usability means making the tasks of finding things, ordering or buying on your web site as easy and simple as possible.

You must apply usability best practices to make it as easy and fast as possible to take action, and complete the transaction or ordering or purchasing with no errors or confusion.  Usability best practices are applied at this point to make sure task flows have minimal problems.

Usability testing of the order flow is crucial, anything that interferes or causes user confusion must be eliminated, else abandonments and lost sales.  Usability testing of the rest of the site is also important, if your web site visitors have trouble getting to the order flow, there is no order flow.

The usability author Steve Krug wrote a book that defines the goal, Dont Make Me Think.

Put simply, make it brain-dead simple for your web site visitors to accomplish their tasks, especially the tasks of ordering or buying from your web site.

Web metrics is the other tool that is required to find and address any usability issues.  Tracking critical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) as well as funnel abandonments, time-on-task, error rates and related performance indicators will point to places of poor or under-performing  tasks.

An excellent source for information about metrics and analysis is Avinash Kaushik, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.  But just tracking is not enough, the analysis of the metrics must lead to follow-up actions, otherwise there’s no point in tracking the metrics.  And this leads us into my next point:

A final note – Testing

In no event should you consider the above 3 pillars to be one-time only events.  It is critical that on-going testing be conducted, including methods such as A/B testing and multivariate testing to try new ways to make it easier for your web site visitors to become customers.

An excellent resource for further information about A/B and multivariate testing is Bryan Eisenberg’s Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer which although focused on Google’s A/B tool can be applied to any web site tool for testing purposes.

Conclusion – 3 Pillars of Successful Web sites

For your web site to be successful, it must have the 3 pillars, and must do these better than the competition.  To be successful, your web site must be:

1. Findable – SEO, paid advertising, links, quality content
2. Trustable – Persuasion, emotion and trust
3. Usable – Usability, web metrics

The continuous process of evaluating, testing and optimizing these 3 pillars is what separates the successful (and profitable) web sites from the unsuccessful web sites.

For more information about the 3 pillars of web site success, or for an evaluation of your web site’s 3 pillars, just contact me.  As a consultant I’m glad to help you increase your web site profits by evaluating and recommending improvements to your 3 pillars.