Infographic: How web design impacts people and profits

NEW YORK, Oct. 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- We've all been there. You go to a web site with a particular task in mind, like booking a hotel room or finding a new credit card. You visit the home page, you click a link, you enter information, you read, you back up and try again. After a while, you give up.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20131009/NY94034-INFO )

You are not alone, according to researchers at Change Sciences Group, a consultancy that specializes in measuring and comparing how people experience web sites to identify best practices. Roughly a third of all web visitors to the average site fail to complete simple tasks. The new data is based on Change Sciences Experience Cloud platform, which is a growing data set that includes the experiences of over 3,000 people using 120 sites in the last 6 months. Jump to the infographic: https://www.changesciences.com/trending/web-design-infographic.

Some types of sites are better than others at getting people where they need to go online. For example, people are able to complete hotel booking roughly 80% of the time, but on business banking sites they are only able to complete common tasks 50% of the time.

It's not that people aren't trying. The average person using a web site will try for 60 seconds before giving up. And it isn't that people have trouble because they lack web skills. People who describe themselves as "wired" give up as often as everyone else. Instead, patience with cumbersome and confusing sites may be on the wane. Minimizers, a new type of web user identified by Change Sciences, are people who are distancing themselves from technology to simplify their lives. In contrast to Wireds, Minimizers give up much sooner, on average after only 28 seconds, but give up just as often as Wireds.

Why is it so bad? According to Steve Ellis, a partner at Change Sciences, "Much of the problem is with how web teams operate. They may have good data about how people experience their own site, but they lack insight about how people experience competitors' sites and the best sites on the web. The experience users have with the best sites not only sets expectations (Amazon, the current top site overall has a high task completion rate), but it reduces patience."

According to the Change Sciences data, sites that improve usability by 1% will see a 0.5-1.5% jump in trust, and a 1-2% jump in conversion. Conversion is a measure of how likely people are to take a given action, such as signing up for a service or buying a product after interacting with a site, and it's a metric that web teams live by. With conversion, even small improvements lead to big rewards.

The two most frequent complaints about web sites include both that there is "too much going on" and "not enough information", implying that many sites are long on clutter and short on meaning. Third and fourth on the list of user complaints are "text too small" and "navigation difficult," complaints which are consistent for Boomers, GenX, Millenials, Minimizers, Pragmatists and Wireds. The only exception is that Minimizers report problems with navigation nearly twice as much. To view the full infographic, please visit our web site here: https://www.changesciences.com/trending/web-design-infographic.

About Change Sciences 
Change Sciences is a group of qualitative researchers, data scientists, and programmers dedicated to helping organizations improve usability, engagement, and conversion. It counts 18 Fortune 100 companies as clients and has completed more than 700 projects in the last five years for clients in financial services, healthcare, entertainment, travel, government, e-commerce, and e-learning. Learn more at https://www.changesciences.com.

Media contact: Kelly Nolan, 888-864-1160 ext 730, [email protected]

SOURCE Change Sciences

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