UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER'S TASKS WHEN DESIGNING A WEBSITE

Understanding customers' tasks means explicitly cataloguing and scripting what people can do when using the Web site. A customer might describe her task like this: "I want to send my grandmother an online birthday card," or "I want to find the best digital camera for under $500 and buy it." The task description says what the customer wants to do, but not how he or she would accomplish it.
At a more fundamental level, though, understanding tasks also involves thinking critically about how your Web site can help streamline or even augment what people do today.

As a negative example, consider what happened to one of us while looking for a refund form on a company's Web site. The first task was to find this form online, but the site was so confusing that it was impossible. The company did not understand that this might be a common task that its customers would want to perform. In addition, the company's search engine was relatively useless. Even after the right page was located through an Internet search engine, the only information the site provided was a fax number to request the right form.

If the design team had performed a task analysis, they might have discovered this task and streamlined it by letting people download the right forms and print them for themselves. A task analysis would have articulated the things people do, the things they act on, and the things they need to know. Taking their analysis one step further, the team could augment how the task is done today by having an online form that people can fill out and submit electronically.

You might be thinking, "What does it matter? He spent half an hour to find the right Web page, but he still got what he wanted in the end." That is true, but consider these issues: First, how many people do you think he told about this bad experience? Second, do you think he will ever buy something from this company again? We rest our case.

Design teams patterns should consider how they might help reduce the amount of work customers have to do. One way to do this is to use a metaphor that people already know. Spreadsheets did this by using a metaphor to existing paper spreadsheets. E-commerce sites do this by using metaphors to things in real stores, such as a SHOPPING CART. However, replicating an existing interface is not always the best approach. For example, a design team could create a Web-based telephone directory by taking images of real telephone directory pages, sticking a page at a time on the screen, and adding buttons to turn the pages. Now, whether they should do this is the real question.

This approach ignores the problems with existing telephone directories and fails to take advantage of the Web medium. It takes time to find a listing in paper-based telephone directories, even if you know the exact spelling. Paper directories are also hard to use if you know only part of a listing. A better approach would be to take advantage of the computer's abilities to do fast searches and to make partial and close matches.

One factor to consider with regard to understanding tasks is how much training is involved. For example, engineers spend many years learning very specific terms and procedures. A Web site targeted at professional engineers might assume a certain level of knowledge. However, a Web site targeted at homeowners interested in maintaining their homes on weekends cannot make the same assumption. It is your job to decide how much hand-holding customers need.

One of the myths of the usability field is that everything needs to be intuitive on first use. Certainly this is true for kiosks at tourist sites or handheld tour guide devices—things a person might use only once. But in many cases, with a little training your customers will become highly effective using the tools you provide.

There is a real difference between ease of learning and ease of use. For example, kazoos and triangles are walk-up-and-use musical instruments, but they are not all that interesting. With many years of practice, however, people can master playing a difficult instrument such as a violin, and in some cases become creators of music instead of just consumers. Computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart said it best: "If ease of use was the only valid criterion, people would stick to tricycles and never try bicycles." (This notion of training the customer or relying on the customer's existing training is one of the key ideas behind the Web design patterns in this book. People become accustomed to operating in a certain way on the Web, and in many cases it makes sense to take advantage of this knowledge.)

Design teams have to be careful, though, because it is far too easy to use the bicycle-versus-tricycle argument as an excuse for poor Web design. You should know how much training customers are realistically willing to undergo. Paul Saffo, the noted futurist, writes:

We do not use tools simply because they are friendly. We use tools to accomplish tasks, and we abandon tools when the effort required to make the tool deliver exceeds our threshold of indignation—the maximal behavioral compromise that we are willing to make to get a task done.

Customers often do not take kindly to having to train to use a product. In this way, Web sites are different from desktop software. With desktop software, customers have already invested a fair amount of time and money purchasing and installing the software, and thus have a motivation to learn how to use it. With Web sites, it is just the opposite. Customers are not likely to buy something on a Web site or avail themselves of its services if they have to spend lots of time learning to use it, unless they can see that it provides significant benefit. For example, it is highly unlikely that customers will spend more than a few minutes learning how to use an entertainment Web site. On the other hand, look at how kids attach themselves to video games. They are willing to learn fairly complex controls because they think the game will be a lot of fun.

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