Simplicity: the mother of adoption

There's an often misunderstood distinction in the IT world between Web sites and Web applications:

• A Web site is typically designed for casual or infrequent usage by individuals who often do not know, or do not even want to know, too much about the deeper mission of your organization.
• A Web application, such as an HR Intranet or portal that a company provides to its employees, is a very different system that must be optimized for a different use case.

    

It's important to make a clear distinction between Web sites and Web applications for three reasons:

1. To define what the site or system is optimized to do
2. To identify how the user is going to approach the features that are being made available
3. To pinpoint which specific use cases your designers and developers must create and test

For Web sites, consider that most users are coming through a search engine or by browsing the Web. If they are not able to quickly and easily find what they're looking for, they usually take off. The most common example would be a marketing focused, "brochure" Web site. Casual site visitors like to ease into getting to know your company and will rarely take the time to learn all of your products in their first interaction with your site.

Designing an interface that is easy to browse and navigate should be a high priority. Marketing Web sites that are difficult to navigate, or those that have poor search interfaces, experience high abandon rates, poor pull-through and fail to meet marketing goals.

Web applications are different in that their users are likely coming with a very specific goal in mind. Taking the HR portal example a bit further, consider that some of your HR staff believes that employees like to browse the HR resources available to them. Based on that assumption, they design a content-rich Web site that offers company information, articles of interests, special employee discounts, etc. In fact, the more likely scenario is that employees only tap the HR Intranet when they have to fill out a vacation request, or to update their benefits information, etc. Because these activities are performed less frequently, it's important that they be optimized for usability.

When the interfaces for processes such as requesting leave, or updating benefits information are not optimized for usability, employees must re-learn them each time they approach the system. They soon grow frustrated with the system and look to "back-door" their process, perhaps working offline or registering complaints with IT. One of the first rules in user experience design is to consider the user. And frequency of use is one of the most important attributes of that user.

When considering these two examples - a marketing website and an HR portal - it's much easier to see the potential impact of designers/developers treating a Web site and a Web application as one system from a user interface design perspective.

The next time you decide to build a Web Application, ask yourself if it really is a Web application or if it's a Web site to some of your users. Regardless of what you're building -- a Web site or a Web application -- you should assume that they will get no training before they use it and that you need to make a significant investment in understanding their usage scenarios and incorporating them into your design/development plan.

As President and CTO, Tim sets the vision and overall direction for new product development and partner strategy at Siteworx, an interactive agency with deep roots in Web content management, analytics and enterprise search.