How Website Usability Changed Digital Marketing in 1999
In 1999, e-commerce traffic finally forced marketers to treat usability as a revenue issue instead of a design afterthought.
For most of the 1990s, usability was a topic for interface designers and academics. In 1999 it became a marketing problem, and the shift happened fast enough that a lot of businesses were caught flat-footed.
The trigger was e-commerce. Amazon, eBay and a wave of new online retailers were pulling in real holiday shopping traffic, and for the first time a confusing checkout page had an obvious, measurable cost: an abandoned cart instead of a sale. Marketers who had spent the year buying banner ads and driving visitors to a site suddenly cared a great deal about what happened after the click.
The Nielsen effect
Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column, which he had been publishing since 1995, was required reading in web circles by 1999. His research, along with the consulting practice he and Don Norman had formalized as the Nielsen Norman Group in 1998, gave usability a vocabulary that non-designers could use: “don’t make me think,” minimize clicks to purchase, don’t hide navigation. Marketing teams started quoting Nielsen the way they quoted ad agencies.
That mattered because it reframed usability as something with business consequences, not just aesthetic preference. A site that violated Nielsen’s guidance wasn’t just unfashionable, it was leaving money on the table, and marketers who controlled budgets started asking design teams to justify choices in those terms.
The Flash backlash
1999 was also the year the tension between flashy and usable came to a head. Macromedia’s Flash 4, released that year, made animated intros and all-Flash navigation easy to build, and a lot of companies used it to make an impressive splash page. Nielsen famously called Flash “99% bad” the following year, but the complaints were already building through 1999: slow load times over dial-up connections, broken back buttons and “skip intro” links that visitors had to hunt for before they could get to the actual site.
For marketers running paid campaigns, this was a direct hit on conversion. Every second a visitor spent waiting for an intro animation was a second closer to hitting the back button, and agencies started measuring drop-off at the splash page the same way they measured it anywhere else in the funnel.
Cross-browser reality
The other force pushing usability into marketing meetings was the ongoing Netscape-versus-Internet-Explorer split. Sites built and tested only in one browser routinely broke in the other, and with both browsers holding meaningful market share, a broken layout meant losing a real slice of an ad campaign’s traffic to a page that simply didn’t render. Testing across both browsers stopped being an engineering nicety and became part of any serious campaign checklist.
What changed for good
None of this made usability a solved problem in 1999, but it did move the conversation. Before this year, usability lived mostly in design departments. After it, marketing teams were asking usability questions before a campaign even launched: will this page load fast enough for a dial-up visitor, will it render the same in both major browsers and does it get someone from click to purchase in as few steps as possible.
That shift in ownership, from a design concern to a shared marketing and design concern, is the lasting change from 1999. The specific complaints (dial-up speed, Flash intros, browser incompatibility) have long since faded, but the underlying habit of treating the post-click experience as part of the campaign has stuck around ever since.
See more from Marketing Analytics, browse everything published in 1999 or check the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
