Interesting article on site redesign focusing on QuickLoans. Summary:
- As usual, user testing is the best source of design improvements
- Don’t listen to users say they want – it’s often not what really satisfies them. Instead, watch what they do and satisfy their demonstrated need.
- Add meaning to functionality and context to content by associating content and functionality (in this case, linking to mortgage term definitions from mortgage calculators)
- Time of task completion is more important than page download time.
I feel justified in telling the last point to my clients now. Summed up by Jared Spool:
Just how subjective a medium is the Web? Extremely. In another test, Spool found that users rated Amazon.com Inc.’s site faster than About.com Inc.’s — a major reason why they liked the Amazon.com site better. Paradoxically, Amazon.com’s pages took an average of 36 seconds to download over a 56K-bit modem, while About.com’s pages loaded in only 8 seconds. Spool’s conclusion, from watching how users traversed the site: Speed equals ease of information retrieval. “If you want to improve the perception of how fast your site loads,” says Spool, “get users more quickly to the information they’re looking for.”