Issue #019- Usability: Are You Annoying Your Visitors?

Powerhouse Linking Seminar

Learn linking from the pros! Debra Mastaler and Eric Ward have been in the linking specialty for longer than anyone and they will share their incredibly effective strategies for link building campaigns at this 2-day session. Also featuring SEO expert Dan Thies! Charlotte, NC. Oct 27-28 Don't miss the early registration price of $1295 before Sept 30.

Written by Scottie Claiborne © 2005

Cool Look, The Right Price

There it was. At the home improvement store. On sale! The coolest little brushed nickel light fixture. It was hip and stylish with it's modern square glass design and only $18, half off of clearance price! (Now ladies, you know that is too good of a deal to pass up.)

My hallway was in desperate need of new lighting. The dorky jelly jar ceiling fixture that the builder put in years ago did nothing to highlight my gallery of black and white family photos. Without hesitating, it went into my cart and was soon on it's way home with us.

I put it up right away. It was easy to install and it looked great! Not only that, it cast a half-circle halo of light on the pictures on the opposite wall. The bright glow of the halogen bulb illuminated the pictures with dramatic shadows. Perfect! It seemed like the ideal solution.

Functionality Issues Emerge

I headed back to my desk to work. It wasn't long before I heard a loud "clunk".

"What was that?" I yelled. "Um.. sorry..." came the small reply.

I hopped up and went to look. Aha... the shoe/coat closet door was smacking into my new light fixture when fully opened. Easy enough to fix! User error; training should do the trick. "Don't do that anymore!" I instructed the kids.

Every time I heard a "clunk" I'd yell, "STOP OPENING THAT DOOR SO WIDE!" Actually, this worked for a while. I trained my users not to slam the door open and everything got along nicely. I had the look and the coolness I wanted and I'd trained my users to live with a slight functionality problem.

The Universal User Issue

What I didn't bargain on was the users that I couldn't control. A stream of neighborhood kids, nephews, nieces, and friends traverses through my house on a fairly regular basis. And they all need to put their shoes in the shoe closet.

My user training ("STOP SLAMMING THAT DOOR!") was ineffective against such an onslaught. These users didn't visit often enough to learn the functionality of my unique situation and had to be taught every time they came over. I found myself lecturing each one as they came in on how to "work the closet door". Not only was it ineffective, it was a huge waste of my time!

My first instinct was to blame the users. How hard can it be? No one needs to open the closet door all the way to the wall in order to access the closet. Why couldn't they follow instructions? Not only that, I reminded them ALL the time so they were getting negative reinforcement when they forgot.

Target Audience Defines What You Can Effectively Do With Your Site

I had failed to take my target audience into account. If my target audience were:

• Only Adults and
• Only People Who Lived in My House

I could have made the limited functionality work so that I could have the look I wanted.

Since I could not control my target audience, I needed to make this work for anyone who was in my house, and without additional training.

Site Issues

The same thing often happens with websites. Someone knows someone who can do some great flash graphics, or one of the programmers comes up with a cool javascript or the designer builds a knockout design with non-standard navigation. You think it's cool and it brands your company as cutting edge. Your office users can use it fine (with a little coaching at first.) And yet, your web results are lousy.

Low sales, low newsletter subscriptions, few leads, very little interaction. It's almost as if your site doesn't exist. However looking at the webstats, you see that users are finding your site and even hanging around a little while, but they don't engage or interact. Most likely, you have a usability issue.

Usability issues are easy to overlook because you and your staff already know how to navigate and use the site. You guys aren't the ones slamming the light fixture into the wall... it's all the people who have to learn the rules.

Often people will say, "But the instructions on how to use it are written right there," or "All they have to do is try it to see how it works," but the reality is that if your site is not intuitive to use for your target audience, they aren't likely to invest the time to learn how it's supposed to work... even if it means reading a single sentence.

Fixing the Usability Issue

The obvious solution for me would have been to remove the light fixture and put up a shorter one. That would solve the problem, but lose the look. This is the option most usability analysts will give you... functionality without form. It overlooks the reason you have the issue in the first place... because you want that element!

The option I chose was what we might call a workaround. Instead of replacing the offending element (the light), I made the other elements work with IT. I installed a pneumatic door closer on the closet door, like the ones you see on storm doors. Not only did this limit how far the door could open, it automatically closed the door, keeping me from having to close the door 12 times a day when the kids left it open. A creative solution can often solve several problems!

How do you get creative with your isssues? First, identify them. Have 5-7 people who have never used your site before attempt to do common tasks on your site. Watch to see where they stumble. Common themes are usually spotted in several users.

Then, determine what is causing the issue. The most common issues are:

• Something that can't be found
• Something that doesn't work as expected
• Something that drives users nuts, like animation, sounds, or delays

Once you've determined what the problem is, think it through. Do you need to get remove it, reorganize it, reduce it, or modify how it or other elements work?

Identifying user issues such as flash or javascript or dropdown navigation, applications that don't work in all browsers, annoying pop-ups, low contrast color schemes and more doesn't always mean you have to abandon the look or the function of that element. If you apply some creativity to solution, you can often keep your light fixture and your kids, I mean your cool site function and your usability. :-)

Scottie Claiborne is the Web Marketing Strategist for Right Click Web Consulting and the facilitator of the Successful Sites Newsletter. She is a speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and the High Rankings Seminars as well as the administrator of the High Rankings Forum. She is an avid bargain shopper who often spends way too much time making things work instead of just taking them back to the store.

High Rankings Seminar

Learn web marketing from the top experts in the industry at this two-day seminar in Philadelphia. Jill Whalen, Christine Churchill, Debra Mastaler, Karon Thackston, Matt Bailey, Dan Thies, and Scottie Claiborne teach this comprehensive course. Registration available now, get the early bird pricing of $1195!

Written by Diane Aull, © 2005

Is your web site naughty or nice?

Let’s imagine a town with two stores that sell nearly identical merchandise, for nearly identical prices. Both stores are conveniently located in the same safe neighborhood, clean, brightly lit and well-stocked.

But while the sales associates in one store are always friendly, knowledgeable and eager to help, the salespeople in the other store are consistently rude, lazy and uninformed.

Which store would you think the townspeople would be most likely to frequent?

Guess what? It’s the same for Internet consumers and web sites.

How to drive away your site visitors, fast!

In a recent survey, 70% of respondents said that they would be unlikely to purchase from a web site that annoyed them. In fact, they said they probably would never even go back to that site.

Even more people (74%, or almost ¾ of the respondents) said they would also likely unsubscribe from the company’s promotions or messages — not only will they not be back, they don’t ever want to hear from you again!

So what irritates these survey participants? Here are their seven biggest pet peeves:

1. Pop up ads (93%)
2. Being required to install extra software to view site content (89%)
3. Dead links (86%)
4. Confusing navigation (84%)
5. Required registration to access content (83%)
6. Slow-loading pages (83%)
7. Ineffective site search tools (80%)

No news is NOT good news...

I hear you say, “We must be doing okay, or maybe our customers are different — we haven’t heard many complaints at all!” Not so fast, my friend. The survey also revealed the following:

• 71% of the respondents said they would be likely to look negatively upon a company whose site annoyed them.
• Over half (55%) were likely to complain about the site to their friends and associates.
• Only 25% said they would consider complaining directly to the company.

And keep in mind, the percentage of people who consistently follow through with an actual complaint is probably much lower.

Remember how many times you’ve sworn to give somebody a piece of your mind, then just never gotten around to it? Just because you don’t hear from these folks, don’t assume they’re not out there — and don’t assume they’re not annoyed!

And just as in our fictional town with two nearly identical stores, on the Web the visitors you irritate into leaving can likely find your competitors’ sites easily. In fact, they may already have one or more of your competitors’ sites bookmarked.

Get your web site back on the straight and narrow

The sad part is that so many of these “sins” are easy to prevent or repair. For instance:

• Bury dead links. Run a link-checker at least once a month on the links from your site pages, both to other pages within your site and to external web sites. A number of alternatives are available to help you with this process. Here are two:
• W3C Link Checker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) is a free online link checker service.
• Xenu link checker software (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) is free downloadable link checking software that is often recommended.


• Check your site’s usability. This can be as simple as bringing in a few friends and relatives and giving them a simple assignment to complete using your site, then observing them (without “helping” them!) while they try to accomplish the given task. There are also many resources on the Web to help you. Two useful sites are:
• UseIt.com (http://www.useit.com/). Jakob Nielsen is well-known in usability circles. Numerous free articles here can provide a useful starting point for your own usability evaluation and testing.
• User Interface Engineering (http://www.uie.com/). Jared Spool, one of the principals of UIE, is another well-known usability guru. This site offers research papers and a free newsletter.


• Speed up your page downloads. Remember, even now not everyone has a broadband connection. Make sure your pages aren’t overloaded with superfluous graphics, Flash and scripted effects, and that the graphics and scripts you do use are optimized for web use.
  
  Rule of thumb: Your page graphics should work hard to earn their keep. If a page element is nothing but “eye candy,” particularly if it’s large or slow-loading, consider dropping it entirely. Another solution would be to offer a “low bandwidth” version of your site for visitors with slower connections.

Of course, some of the “sins” have their legitimate uses. I can hear you gasp, “Are you saying we’re doomed to failure if we commit any of these Seven Deadly Sins? We need the information we get from our visitor registration! And our pop-ups get great results!”

I’m not saying that at all! Certainly, pop-up windows are sometimes highly effective at getting people to sign up for a newsletter or take advantage of a special offer. Gathering visitor contact information — say, before allowing visitors to download a popular white paper — can be a crucial part of an effective marketing campaign.

There are two secrets to success when using techniques such as these:

Also, you should realize that even when employed with delicacy and tact these techniques will probably still alienate a portion of your site’s intended audience. Use them sparingly, and only when necessary.

Sure, you can’t please everyone, but you can make sure you’re not going out of your way to unduly irritate people. Now, go forth and sin no more!

*More about the survey: conducted in July 2005 by market research firm TNS on behalf of web site hosting provider Hostway Inc., the survey questioned 2,500 adult consumers across the United States about their Web site pet peeves.

Online Marketing Guru, Diane Aull, is a partner in Nine Yards Interactive. She practices what she preaches and she's hoping to meet Brad Pitt when the movie version of this article is made.

Wrap Up

Make Plans for a Fall Trip!

I am so excited about the first ever Powerhouse Linking Seminar in Charlotte. It's coming up at the end of October, so start making your travel plans now. Linking is critical in search marketing today, and Debra, Eric, and Dan have some creative strategies for long term success. It's well worth the investment!

Jill-the-slacker finally has her registration page up for the High Rankings Seminar, so if you need to learn all there is to know about marketing a site online, save the dates and check flight prices to Philadelphia now. Then click that link and register online!

Happy Birthday To Me!

Although I've stopped counting the exact years, Thursday was the day I came into the world many moons ago. So, I just want to say,

THANKS, MOM!

The kids are "took me" to the Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant for my birthday. We all love going there- it keeps everyone entertained and it's really yummy. And hey, nothing like letting a 3-year-old poke sharp skewers into food and stick it in boiling broth for some family birthday fun.

Fun at the In Search of Stuff Blog

Mike's had fun this week introducing the "Trapezoid Linking Metaflux" here. He's even included a chart so that you can get the maximum benefit from your link trading. (It's a satirical look at the "triangular" linking strategy some people promote these days.) It cracked me up!

Next issue, I have an article to help you determine if you are too close to your site to be objective, and whether you are letting rankings dictate your actions. Don't let the quest for search engine rankings hold back your site's potential! It's a must-read if you have good rankings but not many conversions. See ya then! -Scottie

Have a Specific Question About Today's Articles?