Overview

A year ago, we started wondering what made a web site usable. We had heard the opinions of experienced designers about what they felt it took to create a good site. We looked at books and magazines that talked about how to make a "cool" site. But no matter where we looked, we couldn't find any data based on real user experience about what it takes to make a usable site.

This report is our attempt to start providing that data to web site designers.

What Is "Usability" on the Web?

We set out to study usability of web sites, but we first had to determine what that means. The usability of a site depends on what users are trying to accomplish. Are they surfing?Doing research? Buying products? Downloading software? And it also depends on the organization's goals for creating the web site. Is the site aimed at marketing a service? Selling merchandise? Making information available to employees, shareholders, and customers?

Whatever the goal, information is a central theme. For intranets (internal web sites), information is the theme no one surfs the online employee policy manual just for kicks. Because of this, we focused our study on how successful sites are at providing people with information so they can make decisions. The more a site helps people find the information they are looking for, the more usable it is.

The Sites We Tested

We picked a set of nine popular sites with content...