Is your website doing all it can to improve your company's bottom line? Before you can answer that question you need to understand a little about how people use websites. User Interface Engineering in Massachusetts has done a lot of research into how people use websites, and their findings can help in determining if your website is doing it's job to your best advantage.

How Do Visitors Use Websites?

What UIE has found is that websites fail when visitors can't easily find what they're looking for. Now that may sound obvious, but the fact is most websites do not do a good job of presenting appropriate useable information to their users.

In designing a website we must take into consideration these facts:

1. people find it harder to read text on a computer screen,

2, people read 25% slower on computers than from print material, and

3. 79% of people merely scan Web-text for headlines, captions, and bulleted points, ignoring the rest until they find what they're looking for.

Faulty Design Loses Customers and Business

This scanning process has a definite affect on the information visitors are able to garner from your site. Unless your copy-text is specifically formatted in this type of headline-point-form style, you stand a good chance visitors will:

1. miss your critical marketing message,

2. only pick-up a portion of your message, and/or

3. misunderstand your message altogether.

UIE's research has come up with some startling facts that most IT people will find hard to accept: