When Hodgson conducts a website audit for a company, one of the key areas we review is trust—how does the site establish and build trust with the end user? For most sites, trust begins and ends with the user account and log in processes.

There are great business advantages to having user accounts and logins—you are able to track who is using your system, how often they visit, and what they do on the site. Information, such as order history and billing info, is stored for later use, and administrators can tailor content and services reserved for your best clientele. The downside is that, as usability test after usability test shows, registration and sign-in processes are the most common areas that scare users away from shopping on e-commerce sites.

Here are some common pitfalls to avoid when designing a user account/login system:

• Unreasonable Sign-Ins: Avoid having sign-ins unless absolutely necessary. Most customers hate having to create an account to do something simple, such as download a white paper or pay for a product they've chosen. As one online shopper said recently during a usability test, "I don't want to develop a relationship with these guys. I just want to buy something."
• Requiring Sign-In Too Soon: Amazon sets the gold standard by waiting until the last possible moment to require sign-in. Clicking on "My Account", users see the entire list of account support options before they identify themselves. In some cases, such as one-click shopping, Amazon never asks the user to sign-in. The cookie on the machine is good enough.
• Not Stating the Benefits of Signing in: Creating an account puts a burden on the user. They have to answer your questions, worry about how their information will be used, and hope that unwanted spam will be kept to a minimum. What’s the benefit to the user? At Midwest Airlines, they list right on the sign-in page what the benefits are: access to your frequent flyer account, booking award travel, the ability to change reservations after they are made, just to name a few benefits.
• Hiding Links: Often, returning customers can go straight to their specific home page, but if their cookies have been deleted or they access the service from a different machine, they may need to log in from the default home page. Default pages are often designed to sell—the registration button is very visible, but member login links often take a back seat. Make the links for your returning customers easy to identify.
• Asking for Too Much Information: Once a user starts filling out questions, it’s tempting to think that it’s possible to ask them everything you could possibly want to. Typically, users want to answer as few questions as possible. Start by asking for as little information as possible, and if you do need certain information that users might be reluctant to provide, such as a phone number, make sure you clearly state why you need it, for example, “Please provide a phone number where you can be reached in the event of a problem with your order.”

The key to an ideal user account and login system is to balance business objectives with the perspective of the end user. After all, no one’s business ends are served if the process is so cumbersome that prospects abandon your site before you have a chance to convert them to clients.

Lately we have been getting lots of requests to help clients install tracking tools on their sites. With the easy availability of full-featured, free online services like Google Analytics, implementing web analytics tools has never been easier.

While some of these implementations focus on older metrics like page views and click-throughs, today's web analytics tools can provide a rich set of business intelligence metrics that allow you to drill down to much greater depth in understanding user behavior.

Here are a few ways to use web analytics to understand user motivation:

• Traffic Measurement and Analytics: Source the quality, volume and engagement of users who enter your site through referrals from other sites and marketing campaigns, free (organic) traffic from search engines, and paid search engine traffic.
• Measure and Optimize Conversion Paths: Provide an audit of key navigation paths, calls-to-action, pricing and discounts, and measure the effectiveness of individual web pages.
• Test and Optimize Conversion Enhancement Programs: Track effectiveness in growing revenue from current buyers through up- and cross-sell strategies.
• Measure “Bounce Rates”: Discover which pages in the site cause users to drop off, highlighting deficiencies in the web site navigation or content.
• User Segmentation: Segment users into groups by behavior with the option of re-orienting the site with specific navigation and emphasis for each group.

Web analytics provide you with powerful tools to systematically improve online results and analyze user behavior.

Another great tool to utilize is a heat map, which can be viewed on a page or site level. Heat maps are fantastic for the instant view of your site content visits or of clicks on a page – it’s like looking at a satellite image of where the most snow will fall - with the red areas (highly visited content) morphing into oranges, greens and finally blues (very low visits).

When you look at a heat map for a page, it is immediately obvious what users selected and which links or calls to provide the most click throughs – and if there an image with no link but a ton of clicks – maybe it should be a link!

A terrific resource for a page level heat map can be found at www.crazyegg.com.