Chapter 6. How Did They Do It?: Monitoring Web Usability

Jakob Nielsen once said that in the first 10 years of the Web, doubling conversion rates was easy—you just had to be sure you weren’t making silly mistakes with your web design.

Those easy days are over. Now a usable site is the price of admission. Visitors decide whether to leave or remain within seconds of first arriving. Modern sites must surprise and delight visitors by not only giving them what they need, but also by exceeding their expectations. Of course, if your product or service sucks, even the best website in the world won’t save you. However, there are plenty of companies with excellent offerings that fail because users can’t interact with their websites. We have to change how we think about usability—not just fixing it, but using it as the basis for innovation and differentiation.