The 5 levels of site optimization (part 2 of 3)

In this second part, we will review the first two levels of the optimization pyramid, proposed by Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar in their book a/b always be testing , which are the necessary bases before any ergonomic and marketing optimization . However, if these first levels are a problem, you should feel it very negatively on your conversion rate since users could almost not reach their goal. In some cases, they might not even be able to reach it at all as I have experienced, and so can you if you have carried out the tests in part 1 of this article , with the Sydney Opera House site .  

The optimization pyramid works the same way as Maslow's pyramid of needs : when you have completed the first level, you can go up to the second and so on.  

LEVEL 1: YOUR SITE MUST BE FUNCTIONAL.

• It should not have a multitude of 404 error pages or no action button for the user to achieve their goal like the Sydney Opera House site

• it should not have long periods of disconnections for updates or other

• unlike the Opera Australia site, it must be secure for all parts that are sensitive (check-out, etc.)

Consequences :

• The user risks losing trust in your company.

• He will not want to enter personal information or else he will take risks.

• He will not come back for a long time and always with the fear of coming back to a site that does not work and which is dangerous for his personal information.

• Loss of potential revenue

LEVEL 2: YOUR SITE MUST BE ACCESSIBLE.

• You must give the possibility to people whose eyesight is impaired or impaired to navigate on your site with the "alt" tags of the images, by using font sizes that are not too small and/or by offering character enlargement features for example

• Your site must have a design in CSS and not in tables so as not to block screen readers used by the visually impaired.

• It is also necessary to give the possibility of navigating on your site with the main Internet browsers available.

• Not having a drop-down secondary menu which is offset from the menu and therefore prevents reaching the elements in the drop-down part (although if it is too offset, it will fall into level 1: site not functional)

Consequences :

• In some countries, such as the United States with section 508 , but also in Canada , the user could take legal action against you, as was the case against the Target site .   

• Or more simply, you will lose an audience, more or less important according to your site which is often not sufficiently respected and which, in fact, will be much easier to persuade.

For these first two levels, we can only warn you of the problems encountered and the corrections to be implemented by your designers and developers. This is a first part that you should be able to do mostly by yourself, helped by your designers and developers, before actually entering the Web ergonomics and optimization phase.

In this regard, in the next and last part of this article on the optimization of a site, we will enter the heart of the subject which interests us more particularly, namely the good ergonomics of your site, the intuition with which users can browse your site and its level of persuasion.