That’s not the point of a marketing website. That’s just the cost of showing up.

Obviously, there are e-commerce and lead-generating sites that are hard to use, sites where you can’t figure out what they’re selling or how to buy it. Sites where you can’t take the desired action – “convert.”  That’s a whole other post. I’ll go out on a limb, though, and say this without any data to back it up: It’s not that hard to convert on most marketing websites, whether that’s filling out a contact form or buying a widget. Those sites may not be pretty and they may be annoying, but it is still possible to buy something.

What can a usability professional do for a marketing website? How do we improve task performance when the task is to read about a product? How can we improve efficiency in the contact process when there’s a great big, bright “Contact Us” button prominently displayed on every page?

Living in marketing world, I now deal with persuasion and affect. Was a site persuasive? Did users find the information that they need to make a purchasing decision?

I’m not sure. This means change – I know that. Can you round up 5 usability testing participants, put them in front of the website, and then ask them if they were convinced to buy a widget? Those people would have no actual motivation to buy a widget. Maybe you’d get useful data and maybe you wouldn’t.

As a usability professional, I’ve got to start doing more to capture data about what people are doing “in the wild” – what real users do in real situations with the site. This means more analytics, more remote usability testing, and learning new methods for data collection. In future posts, I’m going to explore these topics further.