Usability: Subliminal U-Turns

"Usability has always been a term guaranteed to provoke a reaction among Web designers. Even now, when the return-on-investment argument in favour of usability has become widely accepted, some sites still fly in the face of usable design. Navigation is unclear, language appears on-screen straight from the brief, forms can�t be filled in.

So it might seem a strange time to start talking about making sites less usable; but that's one of the ideas starting to emerge from the financial services sector. The argument runs that some sites, particularly online banking sites, have become so easy to use that customers simply zip through them on auto-pilot, conducting their transactions with the minimum involvement possible before logging out. While this is ideal for busy consumers, it�s bad for the banks, which are losing the chance to sell more products to exactly those people who should be their hottest prospects - their existing customers.

So the theory is that the site owners should periodically rework their sites, changing them subtly to disrupt the user journey and force customers to pay more attention to their on-screen surroundings. As a result the users will also pay more attention to the any advertising, whether in-house or from third parties."