Design is a process that is driven by both goals and principles. Goals come directly from analyzing your business and customer needs. Design principles come from research in human–computer interaction, as well as graphic design. Following these design principles as you iterate on your design will help you reach your goals. Most of these goals and principles will apply whether you're working on your site's information architecture, navigation design, or graphic design.

What does it mean to "get the site right"? This is where business, usability, and customer experience goals come into play. Some possible design goals include the following:

• Faster task completion
• Successful completion of more tasks
• Greater ease of learning
• Commission of fewer errors
• Abandonment of fewer shopping carts
• Greater pleasure or satisfaction
• More fun
• Increased visitor-to-customer conversion rate
• Increased customer repeat visits
• Increased revenue

Studies we have carried out show that achieving many of the usability and customer experience goals, such as giving a more satisfying experience, have a direct impact on achieving business-related goals such as increased customer repeat visits.

The key to achieving all of these goals is testing and measuring.

For example, suppose you want to know how long it takes to complete common tasks, such as checking out and finalizing a purchase. In this case, task completion time is an important metric. You could measure the time it takes to complete these tasks by recruiting representative customers to try out the site. Time how long it takes them to finish each task. See if they complete their tasks successfully. Observe where they have problems, and see if you can find commonality among the problems. Are the problems occurring in the same places? Are they navigation errors? Are they problems with the search feature? See if an existing design pattern from this book can help. Implement the necessary changes and retest to see if you solved the problems.

Say you find out from your server logs that customers who start to post messages in the community section of your site have a low rate of completing the postings. A follow-on usability study confirms that customers are distracted in the middle of the posting process and tend to follow some tangential links, never to return.

Another approach to achieving your design goals is to compare two different prototypes to see which one works best. You might find that with one of the designs, customers are 20 percent faster on average than with the other design. A similar approach is to compare the new site design to the existing design or the design of one of your competitors before fixing eventual errors of your website.

Alternatively, you might want to know how quickly customers get up to speed using the sites. Finding this out can be harder than it sounds. You could measure how many hours of use customers need on average to complete a particular set of tasks successfully. Or you could measure how many tasks customers complete in a certain amount of time. Both of these forms of ease-of-learning measures can be used to compare your site designs to one another and to the competition.

Or you could measure and compare the average number of errors made on each site. If your customers make errors and become confused, they will not be able to buy your products. To measure errors, first define them. Is it an error when a person clicks on the browser's Back button? For example, say the customer is purchasing five cartridges of printer toner online. As he finishes the checkout process and fills out a form with his credit card number and address, he notices he forgot to change the quantity on the order form on the previous page. The customer has to go back to fill it in, and then when he goes forward the billing information might be lost. Is this an error? Probably. You have to define what you're measuring.

Sometimes you can look at specific pieces of your site that do not necessarily indicate an interface problem but might indicate a general problem with your content or policies. For example, many sites measure the rate of shopping cart abandonment before checkout. Customers might abandon their shopping carts if they cannot find all the products they want to purchase. Or the checkout process might be too long (this problem is addressed in QUICK-FLOW CHECKOUT ). Another explanation is that your prices are higher than a competitor's, and people are just there to comparison shop. A fourth explanation could be that customers are surprised at how high the sales tax or shipping and handling costs are and decide to leave. At any rate, the abandoned–shopping cart metric is certainly tied to your business's revenue numbers.

The key to any of the numerical measurements discussed so far is to make sure you're presenting numbers that make sense. This is where statistics and research design come into play. Often 20 to 50 participants might be required, depending on the variability in their background and performance.

You might also want to look at more subjective metrics. Do your customers find your site more pleasing or satisfying than the last version of the site, or your competitors' sites? Is your site fun? You can measure responses to questions such as these on an ongoing basis to understand how your site and your customers' opinions change over time. This information will help you know when you need to conduct more in-depth research. Again, these numbers can be tied directly to your bottom-line revenue or profit.

You can measure these subjective issues with surveys. Online surveys are easy to create and can be sent to a representative sample of your customers, or they can be made available on one of your Web pages. Target additional surveys for specific pages, or for times when customers take specific actions. Would you like to ask visitors why they abandoned their shopping carts? You can ask them with a survey, right when it happens!

The design goals we have talked about so far are only an approximation of the higher-level client and business goals. For example, shorter task completion time and fewer abandoned shopping carts are important metrics to work toward, but the business goal for an e-commerce site is to increase revenue. The problem is that you simply cannot gather this kind of metric using prototypes. Still, prototypes are good enough to provide useful feedback that will bring you closer to the overall goals.

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