Usability Optimization is one of those terms that folks in our business love: it's ten syllables long, undeniably technical, and so cryptic that the uninitiated have no choice but to accept whatever meaning we experts throw at it.

On the other hand, it's hard for a prospective client to feel a lot of demand for something he can't define. So let's have a look at Usability Optimization within context of something we all understand: the corner hardware store.

The owner of the store—let's call him Bob—has two fundamental challenges:

1. Get lots of people to walk into his store.
2. Get lots of them to walk up to the cash register with their wallets out and a product in hand.

Now, we can make a couple of observations about Bob's challenges:

• They're different. Bob has complete control over what goes on inside his store, but only limited control (at best) over what goes on outside.
• One fundamentally limits the other. In other words, under no circumstances is Bob going to sell products to more clients than actually walk in his door.

So what does this have to do with Usability Optimization? Usability is about what goes on inside the store. Can a better store attract more customers? Sure... but only after some satisfied customer goes out there and talks about it. The effect of store configuration on incoming traffic is secondary; primary factors are advertising and marketing efforts like Organic Search, Sponsored Search, and Affiliate Marketing.

On the other hand, Usability Optimization has a direct effect on Bob's on-site conversion rate: the proportion of visitors to his store who actually buy a product. If Bob's conversion rate is low, all the traffic in the world will do him no good at all. On the other hand, even small improvements in Bob's conversion rate translate directly to his bottom line.

In hardware stores, there are a number of factors that contribute to usability. These include:

• Intuitive store layout. Ideally, a shopper should be able to walk into Bob's store and just know where in the store his desired product is located. Ever had any trouble finding the lumber department at Home Depot?
• Good signage. For the less intuitive stuff, Bob's shoppers should be able to follow clearly visible signs that take them exactly where they need to go. Imagine finding a waterproof junction box at Home Depot without aisle signage!
• Easy access to help. Those aprons worn by Home Depot employees are bright orange for a reason.
• Fast & secure checkout process. Imagine standing at the back of a Home Depot checkout line during the early-morning contractor rush, and realizing there's a Lowe's right next door with an empty parking lot. What would you do?

There are a million other factors, of course, but you get the point. Online stores are no different! Consider this:

• Store Layout = Site Design. Just like the corner hardware store, e-commerce has developed conventions that help people know how to find what they want.
• Signage = Information Architecture. Home depot has aisles and departments. You website has menus, categories, tabs, and pages. Either way, your goal is to organize your merchandise so a shopper can find what he wants in as few steps as possible.
• Help is... help! Sometimes a shopper just needs a helping hand. Help can be self-service—like a store directory offline or a FAQ online—or involve a live human being, but either way a shopper who can't find it when he needs it is just going to go someplace else.

The list goes on.

So how does a company like Profit Rank actually perform Usability Optimization? Again, very much like in the bricks-and-mortar world.

If Bob gets the sense that he's losing a lot of customers, he's going to start fiddling with his store to see what happens. Maybe the end-cap displays are obscuring product. Maybe the signs are confusing. If Bob has security cameras, he might review his tapes to see what paths shoppers take through the store... maybe there are aisles they never even enter!

Once Bob makes a change, he's going to watch for a few weeks to see if his change had any effect. Over time, Bob is going to repeat the process until his changes stop producing measurable improvements. This kind of iterative process is called optimization.

Online, we have a few more tools in our box than Bob does.

The most important one is called an analytics package. This is a piece of software that—like Bob's video camera—tracks every visitor to a website. Analytics programs gather a huge amount of information about site visitors. The following list barely scratches the surface:

• Where they came from (search engines, another site, etc.)
• Where they are physically.
• Any keywords they may have typed into a search engine to get to your site.
• What pages they looked at on your site, in what order, and for how long.
• What kind of machine, browser, and operating system they were using.
• Where they went when they left.

Not only do analytics packages gather all this data, but most can display trends over time and do more or less anything that a good spreadsheet could do with lots of numbers.

This is a powerful tool... so if a website doesn't have analytics installed or properly configured, the absolute first step of Usability Optimization is to fix that situation. The good news? One of the very best analytics packages out there—Google Analytics—is provided by Google for free.

One less thing.

Once an analytics package is installed and collecting data, the process is very similar to Bob's: examine the data, formulate a hypothesis about why site traffic is behaving the way it is (or how to get it to do what you want), and then perform experiments to test the hypothesis by changing the site accordingly and watching the data to see what happens.

Over time, the measured return from a cycle of usability testing and implementation will eventually drop below the cost of the cycle. This is the point of diminishing returns, and—barring a complete site redesign—you're done.

How much does it cost? That depends entirely on the complexity of a website and on what the data says. For a medium-sized website, Profit Rank generally charges about $5,000 for analytics configuration, a full site review, and a set of recommendations. At that point, some clients choose to pass the information to their in-house programming staff for implementation, while others ask Profit Rank to coordinate implementation with a third-party vendor and to conduct follow-on optimization cycles.

The real question to ask is this: what's the return? Nearly any e-commerce website will benefit significantly from a round of usability studies, particularly if a site has recently undergone a redesign and so lacks an established performance baseline. On the other hand, a site that has been operating for a while with a good analytics package in place needs only to analyze existing data in order to complete their first Usability Optimization cycle. Less work means a lower cost, so even moderate results can produce a healthy return on the investment.

So, what's the bottom line? Bob spends a lot of money getting customers to walk through his door. The more of them who walk out the door with a product and a receipt, the happier Bob is. On the internet, Usability Optimization is the tool we use to keep Bob smiling.