sponsored by

Hosted by
eROI

Usability is Over Rated
How to weed out the undedicated
by Aaron Gray

Last night I had an epiphany. I finally realized that I’d been on the wrong side of the usability debate for years. I’ve wasted a good part of my life speaking for, well, a bunch of dimwits. Design is about designing, and if people can’t figure how to use a web site, that’s their problem. Frankly, you don’t want those people on your site, anyway. All they want to do is take up your time trying to buy your products. As if you don’t have better things to do with your time.

In this spirit, I’ve put together a list of things you can do that will weed out all but the most dedicated of customers, giving you plenty of time to play golf.

1. Mystery Meat Navigation. This is a subtle thing you can do to really increase the amount of time it takes people move through your site. It’s really simple to implement. Instead of using labeled icons or text links for navigation, design a series of unlabeled icons that have nothing to do with the content or function associated with the link. The real benefit is that it completely eliminates the user’s ability to predict what the result of an action will be. Designers who don’t fully understand this technique will sometimes put descriptive text in the rollover state of the icons. While it’s true that this is almost as effective at frustrating your customers as providing no labeling at all, it’s just not going to get you maximum time out on the greens.

2. Merchandising everything everywhere. This is a great thing you can do to ensure that you realize little to no up-sell revenue and at the same time make it really difficult for your customers to drill down to the product they’re after. All it takes is putting as many "hot deals" on as many pages as possible, regardless of their relevance to the user’s current task or past behavior. It’s especially effective if you put in that little extra effort to obscure the navigation the user will need to drill down to the product page he or she is looking for.

Among the cheapest ways to sabotage the user experience, this method can be hard to get right. But here’s the secret -- you can accomplish this feat simply by hiring the lowest bidder on the design contract, as they’re not likely to know what an Information Architect is or that merchandising isn’t a word you made up yesterday. Better yet, hire your neighbor’s kid to be your in-house designer. But be careful, if he starts asking you to buy him books about usability or to send him to user-interface conferences, fire him before his disease spreads. You’re not going to have time for petty things like employee education.

3. Use cute word plays or company jargon as names for navigation. A sure-fire way to prevent all but the smartest people from finding what they want (and that’s the whole point, here, isn’t it?) is to use company jargon and cute word plays to name your navigation links. This one is really great for getting at those pesky customers who don’t yet know any of your products or services, but would like to find out more. It stops them in their tracks, as they don’t recognize the jargon and the word play makes no sense to them. It’s a great way to get back at your competitors, too, as the people who can’t use your site will most certainly go use theirs, leaving them little to no time to play golf. That’ll show ’em.

4. Make every product 3 clicks from the front page, no matter what. An excellent trick, and a deceptive one, at that. Deceptive, because you can tell your customer that you’ve done it for their convenience. Knowing that you’ve made it "convenient and easy-to-use," they’ll feel even dumber than usual when they can’t find a single product of interest. The beauty in this technique lies in the little known fact that forcing everything into a "3 click" architecture means that the categories have to be so broad that it isn’t possible to give them meaningful names. Which is great because you can just tell your web team to "make it all three clicks away" and then walk away. You’ll finally have time to take that month long trip to Arizona, land of the golf cart.

5. Bury important navigation in copy. I know of no better way to slow down unsophisticated users than to make them read through all the copy to find the navigation links they’re looking for. This is especially effective if you pay close attention to making the copy really verbose and long. Understanding that web users skim text for relevant information, including headlines and bullet points, it is important that you not provide any of these layout aids. If you think you can stand all the fun you and your buddies will have getting a tan on the course, go for broke and don’t break up any of your copy into paragraphs.

April Fools!