Customer Experience vs Usability

Usability is one of those things that’s swung in and out of popularity over the years and it’s making somewhat of a resurgence lately as more and more references are made to it within mainstream media.

But what value is it to e-business/e-commerce website owners? In it’s favour, it is fair to acknowledge that a site that has poor usability is unlikely to attract, convert and retain customers. So does the flipside of the coin mean that a site that passes a usability test will convert visitors into customers? Of course it doesn’t, and here’s the big danger with the narrow and somewhat academic focus of usability testing.

For a site to be successful, it has to meet the underlying goals and drivers of the site visitor and site usability is just one small part of that. Usability tests present test participants with scenarios and tasks that force these users down a path that [hopefully] exposes flaws with the sites usability. The basic problem here is that these scenarios and tasks are fabricated and not real for the customer.

Usability tests don’t explore site persuasiveness or individual motivations, two critical factors in conversion. The willingness of a visitor to engage in a conversion process is directly tied to her own motivations, intentions and goals. These are often completely different than the scenarios and tasks presented in a usability test. Therefore, I’m not saying don’t do usability testing, I am saying treat the results with caution.

With ‘Customer Experience Evaluation’, you go way beyond usability testing by exploring the complete end-to-end experience for a customer as the engage with your site. This involves exploring from the search results in Google, through competitive sites and through your site in a manner that is very real for the customer.

Instead of asking the test participant to do a pre-specified task, you must get them to a place that is real for them and then let the testing follow that direction. This involves some careful dialogue that that is more research focussed to get to understand the underlying intrinsic motivations etc. This provides much more contextual meaning to the results and enables you to question and explore site elements and features that are not even present. It is this kind of exploration that extracts the real gems of customer knowledge that lead to winning website redesign.

So, remember that an easy to use (usable) site only helps reduce your prospective customers frustration levels as they attempt to use your site. But it does not help to meet a visitor’s underlying goals, nor does it persuade him to take the actions you want him to take.