Designing For Your Audience

I did a usability analysis on a site called Affordable Health Insurance today, and they agreed that it was alright for me to write about it here. I don’t plan on doing to much bashing, it was actually a very well done site.

Looking at the home page you can immediately see what the purpose of the site is through its introduction message, and its form. My first impression, excellent. Throughout the site you will find each page is easy to read, well defined by headers, and has a clear purpose. I can only imagine, that with a little bit of marketing they will get a great deal of visitors completing the site owners desired goal. Could they do better though? I believe yes, and I believe substantially.

They reason I say yes, and substantially, is because I don’t believe the site was designed for it’s target audience. I may be completely wrong on this, but I would think that most people searching for health insurance are those over the age of forty. There could be a few falling below this age bracket, but still, I think those under the age of thirty hardly even think about health insurance. So lets assume a high quality visitor for this site is forty and over. Even on the home page the main form asks if you are over sixty-five.

So What is Wrong With Being 40 an Older?

Hopefully nothing, I am forty. Statistically though, many of us begin needing glasses to read though. This can easily be avoided though by the handy little function that both Internet Explorer, and what Firefox has. You can simply adjust your font size to be bigger, and then you don’t need to put on your glasses. Here lies the first problem with this site. They have assigned the font size to a static size by means of pt or pixels, and using Internet Explorer, as many forty and older viewers do, the font size is not adjustable. So now the target audience is those over forty, and only those that can read the font size they have picked. Hopefully this isn’t too large of a percentage. If the webmaster had set the font size to EM the site would still appear the same at first, but the target audience will still be the entire forty over group because they would be able to adjust it.

I’m Old, Stop Making Me Work

Now let’s assume our visitor is a little older. Say they are sixty-five or older. Looking at the screen shot I took above, that is pretty much what I saw in my viewer without having to scroll. Well guess what, there was almost an entire page below that in content. Here is what was below:

It may seem a little silly in thinking that I am too old to scroll down to the bottom half of the page to see the entire home page, but it wouldn’t if you have extreme arthritis, which many people do, especially those over the age of sixty-five. The way I see this home page for the sixty-five and older group is basically, bottom half content, does not exist. How do you fix? Increase the sites width. Right now the site is designed for a 800 pixel monitor. Less than 10% of the global audience uses a monitor so archaic. By making the site wider, you make use of the screen, not the scroll bar. It is much easier and faster to read, then to use buttons.

If you look at their more extensive form to get more health insurance, you will find it is a complete nightmare for those with arthritis. To fill it out, the visitor must switch from mouse, to keyboard, and back, with almost every field. This is bad style, even for those who are young. It’s time consuming to switch back and forth. It’s also a good way to keep a form from getting filled out. Group like field types if you can. To clarify what I mean on this, group your input fields by text, drop down, check boxes, and so on. This will allow the visitor to accomplish more with less physical action.

Over all there were only a few additional items I would change on this site, but by spending the time to understand your audience a little more could make a huge difference in site performance. Right now Affordable Health Insurance is missing out on those who need glasses, and those whom might have arthritis. This is a pretty large group if you consider their target audience.