It is often hard for those needing a website to justify the costs of design. Design is often viewed as a ‘talent’ before a learned skill, and as something that we either have or we don’t, and it naturally follows that if you ‘have it’ should be able to produce it without greart expensive.
Luke Wroblewski gave an excellent presentation at the An Event Apart 2007 conference (Chicago) that helps communicate the complexity and process of design, and the value a strong design can contribute.
Luke’s presentation focuses on the web form, which is any interface that accepts user input - common examples are login/registration, enquiry, and eCommerce checkout forms. It’s clear that many businesses depend upon their customers completing these forms to generate, maintaining and convert leads, and logically follows that the quicker and easier a form is to complete, the more likely those customers will do so.
Luke presents three simple variants of webform design to demonstrate the potential impact on revenue the design of the form can have. Each form input field has a label that tells the customer what information to put in that field. Luke’s variations placed the label above the field, and to the left of the field, either left-aligned or right-aligned. His referenced studies found that customers completing forms with right-aligned labels surprisingly did so twice as quickly as those with left-aligned labels, but that quicker still were those customers completing forms with top-aligned labels.
Clearly, big differences can be made to conversion rates by assessing the quality of your web form. Luke’s presentation is available on his blog, and goes on to discuss the consideration of required/optional fields, primary/secondary actions, contextual grouping and progressive disclosure, tabbing, the path to completion, inline validation and assistance, and feedback mechanisms.
He also provides excellent example of both good and bad web forms in a very accessible presentation that will ensure you know what to expect when commissioning the design of a web form.
These statistics source from a compilation of SERPS behaviour studies for which I’ve listed source information at the end of the article. If you disagree with a figure, or have additional figures or sources, please do post them to the discussion.
- 42% of search users click the top-ranking link. 8% click the second-ranking link, and the click-through rate (CTR) continues to drop thereof.
- When these two top-ranking links are artificially switched, the click-through ratio of 42-8% drops to 34-12%, demonstrating the importance of engaging copy in addition to rank position.
- 62% of search users click a link on the first page of search results
- 23% of searches progress to the second page. Presumably the difference between 62% ans 23% stems from searchers trying either another keyword or another engine, or giving up.
- 80% f unsuccessful searches are followed with keyword refinement.
- 41% of searches unsuccessful after the first page choose to refine thir keyword search phrase or their chosen search engine.
- 77% of search users choose organic over paid listing when searching, 67% choose organic search when purchasing.
- When the searcher is purchasing, organic click-through generates 25% higher conversion rates than equivalent Pay-Per-Click (PP) click-through.
- 40% of SEO campaigns aware of their ROI achieve returns in excess of 500%, while only 22% of PPC campaigns were able to achieve this value.
- Daily use of search engines rose from 33% in 2002 to 59% in 2005. The average day in 2005 reported 60 million people using a search engine. As of March 2007, Google accounts for 64% of US searches and 77% of UK searches
The validity of these statistics depend on various experimental factors (i.e. large, representative samples of searchers/searches), and on accurate statistical analysis.
For more in depth analysis, the sources for this article were:
Please post addition figures or sources, or your view, in the comments.
“Web Standards” is like another of these modern-day web buzzwords, like “Web 2.0″ and “The Blogosphere”. But buzzwords become popular for a reason - let me give this one a simple definition, and explain the business benefits of web standards, namely reduced website costs and risks.
Web standards are, quite simply, a set of coding guidelines developed by a consortium of experts to reduce the risks involved in producing a website. The simple principle is that if everybody codes in the same way, the standard way, then everybody is compatible. More >>
This presentation by Cameron Moll outlines very effectively how the business-oriented web designer, which I would argue is not the norm, will have a positive impact on your business objectives. The presentation is entitled Nine Skills that separate good and great designers, and is well worth a read if you’re designer developing your skills or a project manager interested in understanding how elements of design can forward your business objectives.
You may also be interested in my post discussing the value of design, specifically web design.
