Mr. Tarasofsky

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

Making Sure Your Site is User Friendly

By Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO, iPerceptions Inc.

If you are not clear why you are investing in the development of this unique channel, it will be near impossible for you and your team to create a site that is user-friendly and builds long-term relationships.

In the hospitality sector, building long-term relationships is critical if your site is to produce an acceptable return on your investment. The pool of potential visitors to your site might seem bottomless, but in fact, there has been significant research to indicate that once users abandon a visit because of a negative interaction, there is very little likelihood they will soon return. In other words, above all else, your site must incorporate a "user-friendly" personality that begins the moment a visitor types in your URL.

Even something as simple as the URL you choose when registering your site can contribute to a sense of user-friendliness. You can try and be creative, but most people when searching the net will enter www.(your hotel name).com or use one of the more popular search engines like Google or Overture to find you. Do not throw in unnecessary words or dashes to complicate the URL. Keep it short and true to your name. Your users will appreciate it.

The moment a visitor arrives at your site is when the proverbial "rubber meets the road". All your hard work and energy, your investment in top quality art and photography, the millions of dollars in technology and design and the people hours invested to insure your visitor has a pleasing experience will mean nothing if your home page takes more than 20 seconds to open. Our predictive business intelligence based on feedback from over 30,000 visitors to some of the most recognized brands in the hospitality sector confirms that slow download speeds are a major factor in contributing to a low user satisfaction rating.

You may have great high-resolution photos of your property or a trip-planning calculator, but if it takes too long for them to open on your visitors PC, you have wasted your money and your visitor's valuable time. Even more important, you have an unhappy customer on your hands. Remember when you are designing your site that not everyone is accessing it from the office with a high-speed broadband connection. One option you might want to consider is to let your users use a version of your site based on how they are connected to the web. For example virtual room tours, videos, high-resolution photos, music and ambient sounds etc might be offered on broadband versions only, while dial up users are offered features tailored to the download times of their connection. This would insure EVERY one of your visitors had a web experience tailored to meet their needs. And meeting their needs is what you must do to insure they return.

In order to make a site user-friendly you have to cover all the basics. Our clients use a strategic behavioral framework that encompasses all aspects of an actual user's experience to predict and measure user satisfaction. They look at all aspects of the experience beginning with the site's basic navigations tools and paths. Is it easy to get around the site? Can the visitor find the information they are looking for? Are visitors getting lost and frustrated? If you don't have the answers to these questions, you can be sure some of your visitors are leaving your site with a less than satisfactory experience.

Content is the next dimension you must be on top of if you want to insure you have a User-friendly site. You must be able to measure your user's level of satisfaction related to the overall content found at your site. Are you giving them enough information to make a reservation? Are you giving them enough detailed pricing information? Is the information on your site current and does it accurately reflect your brand. Your web team must have this information at their fingertips on an ongoing basis if your site is to remain user-friendly. The one constant on the web is that it is constantly changing. A feature your users liked and took advantage of last quarter may be old and outdated next quarter. Listening to your users is an ongoing exercise, not something that is done once a year.

Another basic element in every user-friendly web site is Interactivity. You must insure your users are able to interact with the site. Tools like help buttons and site maps are mandatory if your site is to be perceived as user-friendly. Giving your users contact information is another way of demonstrating that there are real people concerned with satisfying their needs and ready to interact with them if needed. It goes without saying that if your organization is going to offer e-mail as a communications channel, it must be prepared to respond to e-mail within a reasonable time frame. From a net perspective, anything longer than 24 hours is not acceptable. Enhanced Interactivity is a key factor in building user trust, which in our experience is by far the most important attribute related to enhancing user loyalty.

Being user-friendly also means providing your users with a reason to return. Motivating them to use your site as a resource and making it a first stop when they are seeking hospitality related information. Providing motivation can be as simple as helping them save a little time with access to a calendar for example. Constantly adding new features, services and content to your site is also a great way to insure people are motivated to check back in to see what's new. Having said that, you need to monitor their feedback, preferably in real-time to make sure your new features for example are not making it more difficult for your users to navigate throughout the site. Waiting months for a research report to indicate there is a problem is not a good idea.

"User-friendly" is a state of mind. It is not something you achieve by offering your visitors less of something or more of something else. It is about listening to and understanding the needs and wants of your users and aligning those needs with your objectives. If you follow my suggestions and listen to what your users are telling you, you will have more than enough information to make your site genuinely user-friendly.

Jerry Tarasofsky is CEO of iPerceptions Inc. Its webValidator® "captures the voice" of the online customer, helping companies learn more about their customers. Using a comprehensive perceptual framework to evaluate key elements of the visitor experience and, algorithms and modeling to identify attributes that drive satisfaction. The webValidator solution turns data points into easy-to-understand strategic and tactical decision support. iPerceptions’ clients in the hospitality sector include Crowne Plaza, Omni, Savoy, Wellesley, Homestead, Radisson and Holiday Inn. Mr. Tarasofsky can be contacted at jerryt@iperceptions.com Extended Bio...

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