Introduction by Klaus Kaasgaard

A few years ago I consulted for a company on its web strategy and design. Hoping to avoid becoming yet another victim of the dotcom implosion, they had launched an initiative aimed at driving users from the free-to-use part of their web site to the pay-for-services part of the web. They had marketing reports and analyses showing that the potential customers were out there; they had done all their homework before launching their paid-for services - or so they thought. It turned out that far fewer than expected signed up for the service. The company executives were baffled. In meetings, a number of highly skilled and highly paid people came up with a number of explanations ranging from failed marketing efforts to a business strategy gone haywire. However, it turned out that the right explanation to the low sign-up rate was far more concrete: the sign up procedure was designed in haste as the last thing before the service launched.

"..he gives us what is mostly needed: a valuable and straightforward introduction to the process and methods of usability engineering and user-centered design"

The result was that actually signing up for the service was cumbersome and problematic to many end-users. An example was that the field in which the user entered his or her credit card number did not accept spaces. However, most users enter their card number exactly as it is written on their credit card, i.e. with spaces. Not only did the site not accept this common practice of writing credit card numbers, it failed to effectively assist the user in addressing this problem, partly because error messaging had a low discoverability rate (a problem many web sites suffer from), and partly because the message content was incomprehensible to many users given the amount of effort that people are typically willing to invest in such a process (another problem that many web sites suffer from).

As a result, a high percentage of the users never completed the task successfully, but instead decided to get the service elsewhere or simply live without it. By usability testing the process, we identified half a dozen of such fairly mundane problems, corrected them in about a week, and re-launched the pages. The result: sign-up rates went up to what was projected in the original plan. None of these problems were hard to detect, nor were they hard to correct. Nonetheless, actually doing so resulted in significantly increased revenues for this particular company.

This story is a testament to the importance of web usability. But it is also a testament to the lack of knowledge about web usability and to a lack of familiarity with the principles of user-centered design, in which questions about user needs, behaviors and attitudes are proactively addressed throughout the development process.

Forrester Research - an independent research organization - recently published their latest yearly review of "the best and the worst of site design" (autumn 2003). Forrester concludes that basic usability errors are common and that they reveal the immature state of customer experience design on the web. Retailers seem to come in first in a disappointing field where media sites, travel sites and automotive sites all fail to reach the overall bar as set by Forrester Research. Even the best sites had troubling flaws damaging the user experience and essentially damaging site objectives. But when user experience flaws are fixed - or better yet, avoided by leveraging user-centered design principles - there is money to be made directly in the form of increased revenues and sales and indirectly through increases in customer satisfaction, retention, and brand equity. It is hard to give good examples of specific return-on-investment calculations for user experience research and design projects because most organizations either don't measure or don't provide the data necessary to perform such calculations. The few available independent studies aimed at such calculations use somewhat unreliable methods and they fail to reliably establish causation. However, in general, all available studies show relatively high returns on investments in user experience research and design on all key business metrics, such as conversion rates, traffic, and user performance. My own experience certainly supports this, and I think that very few people doubt that focusing on - and investing in - the quality of the user experience is good business.

Unfortunately, many web companies do not have the right skills available or the necessary resources to focus on this central and important aspect of web development and management. Small companies with relatively small web site budgets, especially, struggle to leverage user-centered design processes and techniques to enhance the quality of their offerings. But this is exactly where the value of the book you are holding in your hands becomes evident. Thomas Snitker shares with us his experience from more than 500 user experience research studies, but instead of telling us how to design our web sites he gives us what is mostly needed: a valuable and straightforward introduction to the process and methods of usability engineering and user-centered design.

As you most likely know (since you are interested in this book), designing usable and useful web sites is not as straightforward as my initial example above may suggest. As a matter of fact, designing web sites that meet user needs as well as business objectives is often a complex task involving many different competencies, coordination, skill and devotion. However, familiarity with a core set of techniques and processes will bring you a long way in your efforts to target your web site to your audience, enhance product quality, and increase customer satisfaction, productivity, retention, and the profitability of your web site. This book is a great first step, so turn the page, learn, enjoy, and go out there and help enhance the quality of our web-based experiences and the effectiveness of our web-enabled businesses. We need both!

Klaus Kaasgaard
User Experience Research Manager
Yahoo!

Sunnyvale, November 2003

Klaus is the author of Software Design & Usability : Talks with Bonnie Nardi, Jakob Nielsen, David Smith, Austin Henderson & Jed Harris, Terry Winograd and Stephanie Rosenbaum (Copenhagen Business School Press 2000).