Following good usability “best practices” can go a long way towards improving conversion rates on your website.
However, as actively involved as I am in usability testing and the usability community, I often find myself at odds with many of the usability “Gurus” recommendations.
Particularly when these recommendations are aimed at encouraging ecommerce merchants to follow usability best practices simply for usability’s sake.
When selling online the objective is not just maximizing usability, the objective is maximizing sales and profits.
And higher sales and profits are achieved by focusing on maximizing conversion rates and visitor value.
A prime example is the popular “rule” thrown about by many usability gurus that “navigation should be consistent on every page of a website”.
This may be true for many types of sites, such as purely educational or informational sites. However, my extensive split and multivariate testing data has shown…
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