Step 4: Usability and functionalities

Usability

Usability is the ease through which your visitors can achieve their goals on your website effectively, efficiently and intuitively.

• Effective – Your portal satisfies the needs and expectations of the users. They can complete tasks such as downloading a market intelligence report, conducting an online assessment or making a consultation appointment.
• Efficient – The time required to complete a task is minimal.
• Intuitive – Users can easily and almost automatically learn how the portal works by observing, doing and completing their tasks by following their intuition.

This sounds logical. However, according to recent research in the USA, customers cannot find what they’re looking for on government websites about 60% of the time… This leads to frustration, loss of visitors and trust.

User expectation

Your interface and interaction design has to connect seamlessly with the expectations and needs of your priority target users. Who are they, what are they looking for and how can you provide that through the portal in the shortest possible time, providing a positive user experience and customer satisfaction? In Step 3 on content and formats you can read that your priority users:

• Focus on opportunities
• Are less inclined to read
• Increasingly appreciate visuals, infographics and videos
• Scan and look for action, accelerated by the popularity of mobile devices

It is your challenge to satisfy those expectations and needs. So, your Trade Intelligence Portal has to be:

• customer focused
• as simple as possible
• action-oriented

This is your point of departure for your interface and interaction design.

Connect with the daily practice

With the popularity and importance of social media in the B2C and B2B environment, the question arises how to relate the Trade Intelligence Portal to the daily social media practice of your users. If your target users are used to the interfaces of popular social media channels, to what extent should you consider features of such interfaces for your Trade Intelligence Portal?

In Step 5 on social media integration, we look into how to connect portal and social media channels effectively. Already, the InterAmerican Development Bank goes a step further and has developed an initiative, the so-called Connect Americas. It is a trade and investment portal for which the interface and interaction design is based on social media features. This new concept looks very promising and may become a model for future Trade Intelligence Portal interface design. Definitely, a concept to monitor.

The concept of Connect Americas

The concept of Connect Americas is based on three service areas: Connect, Learn and Finance. Watch the introduction video below for a quick insight. 

Usability key success factors

Below, you find some of the most important usability factors to take into consideration for the interface and interaction design of your Trade Intelligence Portal.

AIDAS 

The AIDAS principle is an important concept to continuously focus on the customer and conversion to the desired action. AIDAS stands for:

• Attention: Attract the attention of visitors with an attractive design proper tagline and intuitive copy
• Interest: Increase the interest of the visitors by emphasizing benefits and advantages
• Desire: Create a desire for the goal you want your visitors to accomplish through testimonials and success stories
• Action: Include calls-to-action to facilitate visitors to act and complete a conversion
• Satisfaction: Create a positive user experience to satisfy your visitors and turn them into repeat visitor

KISS

The KISS (Keep It Short and Simple) principle is another crucial concept when it comes to usability. Less is more! Always remember, when online, people do not tend to read, they scan. So, be concise.

• Minimize the number of words in sentences.
• Challenge every word. Do you really need it?
• Eliminate ALL unnecessary words.
• Minimize the number of sentences in paragraphs (max 5 lines).
• Use headers for every paragraph.
• Do not put a prose text on landing pages.
• Use list or bullet items where possible. They are easy to scan.
• Use an active writing style (present tense).

These guidelines should be part of the procedures and laid down in operational manuals, see also Step 7 on the operational plan.

Page layout

To facilitate finding information and moving towards an action easily, quickly and intuitively, create pages that are not cluttered or overloaded with information. The page appearance should be quiet, clear and scannable. Use lots of white space for easy scanning. A few years ago, usability guidelines recommended minimal use of scrolling. Usability testing proved that the majority of users did not scroll. Today this has fundamentally changed. It is largely due to the increased use of mobile devices and the ‘swipe’ behaviour users. Therefore, pages can be designed in view of anticipated swipe behaviour, meaning longer pages. A fat footer (see below) should enable users that scroll down to continue navigation.

Homepage – 5 seconds to convince your visitor

Your homepage is likely the most important entry point for users of your portal, and you have to give it your best. Why? Because you have 5 seconds! Within these 5 seconds, your homepage should convince your visitors to continue exploring the portal. From Attention, to Interest, and Desire to Action. That means:

• Clearly communicate the benefits of your portal: The Value Proposition.
• Since the value proposition is different for different target groups (see Step 1 on needs assessment),  connect to different users with different propositions.
• Pictures should support your main message and enhance the attention power and attractiveness of your value proposition.
• News enhances the attention power, since users  always scan for news.

Calls to action and conversion

On the internet, users DO NOT READ! Your users are looking for action, and so are you. In line with your objectives, you want visits to convert into completed actions. Therefore,  focus on calls to action, as a kind of sales process (funnel or pipeline) based on the expectations of your exporters and international buyers. Your portal should therefore:

• contain no dead ends
• offer multiple interaction possibilities
• offer content organized around your customers’ tasks, not your organization
• trigger action through calls to action that are reflected through outstanding buttons/links. The calls to action are clearly designated (attractive design, bigger font, larger size, highlighted colour).

Examples of calls to action are:

• Find opportunities
• Contact us / make an appointment
• E-mail us
• Call me back
• Download
• Register
• Subscribe
• Check your price
• Assess your export readiness
• Follow us (in social channels)
• Share (in social channels)

The art of effective forms

By making your forms easy to understand, you help your visitors to get things done quickly without having to ask for assistance. This saves valuable time and can lead to better customer service. Guidelines for effective forms can be found at the Howto website, also in PDF. 

Navigation

The navigation on the portal is the main tool for the user to find his way to complete his tasks. It is one of the key elements in usability. Some golden rules:

• Navigation menu on every page.
• Always offer a home.
• Always include a keyword search.
• The main menu has less than 9 buttons.
• The most important service is offered after home.
• The main menu features a mega-menu to display the site structure in a user-friendly way.
• Every page has a fat footer with main (mega-) menu items repeated.
• Breadcrumbs show the user where he is on the website.

Mega menu and fat footer

The mega menu is a user-friendly dropdown navigation that shows the site structure and can contain additional text and calls to action, images and even video. On top of that it is well appreciated by search engines like Google and can therefore contribute to higher rankings in the search engine result pages.

The fat footer is a user-friendly navigation, especially now that there is a trend to make pages longer. When users scroll or ‘swipe’ down to the end of a page, the fat footer is available to support continued navigation. The fat footer can replicate the mega-menu, but can also include or emphasize calls to action. On top of that, just like the mega-menu, it is well appreciated by search engines like Google and can therefore contribute to higher rankings in the search engine result pages.

 

Browser compatibility

Depending how your portal has been developed, it may not necessarily display equally good with all different browsers. There are various compatibility issues that may occur:

• Flash technology that is not supported by tablets or smartphones.
• JavaScript that may not be supported by some browsers.
• Nested tables that create problems mobile devices.

There are multiple free tools for compatibility testing available. An example is offered though Powermapper. Also, in your website analytics, you can see which browsers your portal visitors use.

Responsive design

With the rapidly increasing use of mobile devices, it is extremely important to develop your portal using a responsive (or mobile friendly) design. The overwhelming majority of the trade promotion organization representatives in the ITC expert panel reported this as one of the main issues to address. If your portal does not respond well to tablets and smartphones, you are loosing out to a large and fast increasing community of users. Besides, you will need to consider: What makes sense to mobile users?

A responsive website layout is build up in blocks with a logical sequence. Depending on the screen size, the width and sequence of these blocks will adapt. The desktop and laptop computers will show the full website, while a tablet or smartphone may organize the content and navigation differently and show the navigation differently and stack the content in blocks underneath each other. Also make sure to read related information on mobile friendly formats in Step 3.

Functionalities

Your Trade Intelligence Portal contributes to enhanced and sustainable trade performance of different target groups. Depending on your ambition and added value (see Step 1) as well as your strategy (Step 2) your portal can have different functionalities. We propose the following functionalities, most of which we consider as basic. Others can be considered as more advanced functionalities.

Functionalities

Basic

Advanced

Keyword search Contact form Event calendar and application function to trade shows, missions, seminars, workshops, events Download reports (multiple sector select) Related information Registration for e-newsletter Social media integration: sharing and following Embedded videos Blog incl. feedback option, categories, tags Filter and sort news, blog, MI articles on date, category, popularity, rating Print friendly Google Analytics and download tracking Call me back form

Chat functionality Registration for customized e-newsletter/alerts (profile based, sector/subject preference) Registration in exporters directory (self service module) Statistical tool, self service trade flow analysis Integration with CRM and commercial opportunities Syndication and affiliation (RSS feed or database linkages) to access statistical databases, tariff databases, standards databases, business directories E-learning, self assessments, compliance checkers, calculators, document generators and gamification E-commerce / online payment

In Step 5 we look further into the issue of  social media integration. In Step 6  we will address the issue of  syndication.  Step 8 covers the analytics functionality.

Below we emphasize related information, e-learning, checkers and games.

Related information

You can add value to a service by providing suggestions to the user based on the actions (s)he performed online. For example, when a user is searching for market information on processed food to Japan, the same user is likely interested in information about doing business or events in Japan, and in your assistance and other support services about doing business in Japan. This functionality to offer related information should be integrated in your website.

E-learning: checkers, tools, games

In Step 3, it was already mentioned that in addition to offering content, some subjects are very suitable to be dealt with through e-learning tools and interactive checkers. At the same time, these online tools can provide a possibility to diagnose companies for further support and generate management information on explicit needs that can be relevant input for service development. A good practice can be found at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.

 

Gamification

An interesting development in online learning is the so-called gamification, adding a game-element into the learning environment. The Connect Americas platform has integrated gamification into its community concept whereby users can earn points, badges, increase their expertise levels, as is common in digital games. In Connect Americas, users can actually exchange points for tangible benefits form the sponsors. Gamification is increasingly used in management courses and is likely to gain ground in online information and advisory services. Hence, there may be an interesting future for integration gamification in Trade Intelligence Portals as well.