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Expectations of website experience are rising all the time with the instant click deciding whether a visitor stays and converts to a user or immediately leaves. It’s becoming clear which business sites are succeeding and which are losing out.

A common cause of complaint, voiced by many site visitors, is to respond to an online marketing campaign, say clicking onto a PPC ad, or just wishing to check out a link to a promising blog or landing page from an email marketing newsletter, only to find the website is a nightmare to use!

The message appears to not be getting through to some business sectors that high Google PageRank and increased hits are worthless stats if there is a major issue with website accessibility and site navigation.

Ultimately, the desired engagement and interactivity, leading to customer conversion will not happen because visitors are unable to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for, lose patience and leave to seek elsewhere.

A usability research poll of over 1,000 visitors to an UK web consultancy site between September and December 2009 found that users are increasingly becoming more frustrated if they find a website difficult to use and its clear that some sectors are clearly performing better than others.

This could mean that those organisations not investing time and resources daily to ensure their website design is functioning at optimum will not succeed in maintaining their reputation for a positive online brand identity, see a loss of traffic and lose Google ranking, as will be reflected in the analytics.

The survey shows that the informational sites of news and media companies are really taking usability into account in their site design, and are the easiest to use. Travel websites were identified as the second easiest to use (nine per cent of the vote), followed by utility websites.

However, at the opposite end, local authority and government websites are identified as the most difficult to use – largely due to difficulties in finding information.

Financial services websites were identified as the second most difficult to use with 16 per cent of the vote, with retail and ecommerce sites coming in third most difficult with 13 per cent – a surprising result given the increasing desire shown by consumers to shop online!

Website user experience and usability is now a big issue in most market sectors. As new usability apps zoom into view in 2010, and demand for online functionality increases, it’s crucial that all business sectors invest in their websites to provide the best user experience possible – or risk losing out to their competition!