Mr. Martin

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

Web Site Usability: The New Differentiator to Keep Customers Coming Back

By Maurice Martin, President, COO & Founder, iRise Inc.

By now, every hotel and travel company executive has figured out that a good Web site is as critical to their operation as an inviting lobby or a responsive front desk. But as many a perplexed customer will tell you, just having a Web site is not enough. A good site must be as clean and inviting as the room itself. And it must be as friendly as your staff.

Ease of use, or usability as Web designers call it, is especially important. You would not expect your guests to return if they couldn't locate the pool or gym, couldn't find a parking spot or valet, couldn't order room service or locate the menu to your restaurant. Likewise, potential guests who have dropped in on your Web site need to be able to locate the amenities there, as well-directions to the property, 3D walk-throughs of the rooms, lists of services and nearby attractions. And these days, visitors also expect to be able to view your room rates, easily determine whether you have vacancies and book a room.

If your site thwarts these activities, rather than encouraging them, you either lose a customer, or your guests will phone the customer service number for help, thereby defeating the very purpose of having a usable Web channel.

Many hotel executives also don't realize that a big benefit of a hotel Web site is in cross-selling and up-selling. A well designed site can suggest a larger room, an additional meal or a booking with a business partner. It may also offer exclusive entertainment packages for events or attractions which require a specified hotel stay, thereby pulling in the traveler by selling a bigger experience. But here again, the look and feel of the Web site will determine your success.

One simple way to approach Web site usability is to follow the same standards you uphold throughout your hotel: your rooms are clean and inviting; your desk clerks are trained and efficient. Both elements help reinforce your brand. Similarly on a Web site, the design should be clean, inviting, helpful and intuitive. That means balancing graphics with text.

For example, if the site is too graphics heavy, the page will load very slowly for the user and could make the experience so lengthy that the traveler abandons the process. Conversely, if the page has too much text or not enough slick photos, it may serve to undersell the hotel experience. The happy medium lies in the middle and the way to understand that is to conduct a user group where you can test out your proposed site look-and-feel and get user buy-in up front.

For independent operators, the Internet has another advantage: it levels the playing field, putting your brand on the same footing as the larger ones. This is particularly true if you represent a boutique group of hotels where you're going after the same sophisticated customer. Your Web site, however, can make up in experience what you don't have in sheer marketing staff.

So how do you make your site so engaging so that people want to come back over and over again? The trick is to develop the Web site with the user's perspective in mind. Thanks to current technology, there are scores of tools and techniques available that do great work with usability without having to create your expensive Web site first.

For example, a usability lab that contains one-way mirrors and video cameras, can be utilized to rapidly test different site designs directly with your customers using low cost, high fidelity simulations instead of coded applications. The idea is to fail early and often when it's cheapest, so when you do actually make changes and come up with a new reservation system, you can test it ahead of time with your own customers-before a single line of code is written.

If you can capture these critical user-necessitated changes before you develop the actual Web site, you stand to save millions of dollars and ensure that the final product is going get rave reviews from your customers. The cost of reworking a project, fine tuning it until the code finally meets the needs of the various stakeholders within the enterprise, can be astounding. According to the Standish Group, only 29 percent of IT projects succeed, meaning they are delivered on time, on budget and with all the promised features and functions in place. More than half (53 percent) are "challenged," meaning they arrive late, over budget and/or without all their required features and functions. Nearly one in five (18 percent) fails completely and is never used. Forrester Research estimates that North American companies invest $100 billion in custom-built software annually. Between outright failures and half-baked applications, cost overruns gobble up some $30 billion annually.

Thanks to software simulation, hotel and travel companies can test-drive Web sites before the coding process even begins. Expensive ambiguities, omissions and mistakes can be avoided when business analysts - the person translating the business needs so IT knows what to build - can actually see how the application will work before a version is given to them as "code complete."

If you recall the old advertising campaign, "Is it live or is it Memorex," then you will understand what these simulations look like. The business stakeholders cannot tell the difference between the real site and the mocked up or simulated version. The site carries all the branding and interactivity of the real site.

By understanding where users get stuck on a page or lose interest, you can easily adjust the simulation until it is easy for them to use. Of course, if you combine information culled from market research and weave that into what you've learned from the usability lab environment, then you will be armed with knowledge to have IT develop a site that meet the needs of the customer, the first time around.

In the travel and hospitality industry, unlike other vertical markets such as financial services, the barrier to entry is much lower for users to switch allegiances when booking travel. Outside of loyalty programs which require heavy usage to often keep consumers coming back, companies are continuously faced with finding ways to keep bring the customer back to their particular site.

To get inspiration of how some well-known companies succeed with their Web site, you needn't look very far. Amazon makes buying a book online effortless. You know exactly where you are as it shows you that you're in 'step 3 of 5.' Some travel sites such as Orbitz provide a visual cue with sequential dots that light up to inform the user that their request is being processed. Clothier Old Navy allows the user to quickly envision the desired piece of clothing in other colors. Many of these features are generated by Rich Internet Applications (RIA) which generate a high degree of interactivity consumers have now come to expect.

Simulation software helps business analysts get the specifications right the first time, avoid costly rework, and deliver successful IT applications on time. And no matter where the IT team is based, visual simulations help business and IT people communicate and collaborate much more effectively. Better communication and collaboration means a better product. Iteration is a necessity when creating a Web site. But now organizations have a choice on when to do it - early on via simulation when it's inexpensive, quick and fun, or late in the software development cycle when it's expensive, time-consuming and very painful. Too bad most decisions in business aren't this easy.

Maurice Martin founded iRise on an early and accurate prediction of Java acceptance and Internet growth in 1996. In addition to his business management role, he shapes the iRise corporate vision, and guides the product strategy and roadmap. He gained his business and technology acumen during tenures at Deloitte Consulting and Accenture, working with clients such as Capital Group, Kaiser Permanente and Southern California Gas Company prior to founding iRise. Maurice earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Mr. Martin can be contacted at 310-426-7886 or mmartin@irise.com Extended Bio...

HotelExecutive.com retains the copyright to the articles published in the Hotel Business Review. Articles cannot be republished without prior written consent by HotelExecutive.com.