First, there was Jeff Sexton’s post about asking the right Persuasion Architecture questions before redesigning, which was inspired by a Seth Godin post. Then, Jakob Nielson had some good thoughts from the Usability camp about redesigns and how radical they should be.

Mr. Nielson’s thoughts resonated with me given that our OnTarget product is generally focused on incremental improvement of clients’ existing websites. He urges readers to avoid redesigns that involve massive change to a site’s user interface.  Why?  Because users (read: customers and prospects) hate change and love the familiar, even if we as marketers are sick of how our own sites look.  It’s always good advice to “evolve a UI with gentle changes rather than offer a totally fresh design.”  He also recommends “getting the basic design right in the first place, before you launch, so that it can live several years with minor updates.”  I think that’s a key point: a good (re)design is one that can stay fresh and current for several years, and accommodate a process of continuous improvement and incremental change.

I’ve seen many gorgeous site redesigns that didn’t stand up to that criteria–they weren’t well-coded, well-documented, or maintainable.  And when it came time to start optimizing, the marketing team found many unexpected constraints that made incremental changes more expensive than they bargained for.

Another point I’d like to drive home is that redesigns should be done with ROI in mind, not because internal stakeholders are sick of the look and feel.  There should be documented goals that can be measured, for example, increasing pages per visit by 20%, and increasing conversion rate by 5%.  And flexibility should be built in, so that you can always have a “to do list” of small improvements you can implement each month to incrementally build on your successes.

Finally, if you are considering a moderate to major redesign, keep in mind that usability testing can be done on very simple prototypes before you make major investments.  And, we love giving feedback on mockups, wireframes, prototypes, etc. because it allows our clients to launch with the best possible product, after which we start the process of continuous improvement.

Sorry about the headline – the 80s flashbacks are getting to me.  Still, I really do “play stupid” as a Website optimizer and online copywriter.  Or at least I play ignorant.

Why?  Because all those terms and concepts you think everyone understands about your business and what you’re selling – well, you’re wrong about them!  Wrong about both the terms themselves and your potential audience.  If you think I’m mistaken, go back and watch the video again.

Or keep reading to see some real website examples. Either way, let me reassure you that way more of your website visitors just fundamentally don’t “get it” than you’d ever suspect.  Either those visitors:

1. have no idea what the industry standard terms you are using mean,
2. don’t really understand the finer distinctions the terms are supposed to represent, or
3. fail to draw the all-important conclusions and emotional implications that you may be basing your persuasive messaging upon.

Any one of those might be enough to kill your chances for a conversion.

And while there are some good reasons to only mention or allude to the “features” in order to hone in on the benefits, there’s also very few excuses* not to provide links, mouse-overs, and early stage content that can guide the perplexed to a better understanding of your industry and your messaging.

How an “idiot” could improve the Black Diamond Home Page

For those of you who haven’t heard of this company before, Black Diamond Equipment makes cutting edge climbing and skiing equipment.  And before we even look at one of their product pages, I suggest you just go to their website and get a feel for how user-friendly (or not) the overall design seems.  Seriously, go there right now.  I’ll wait.

Ok, now ask yourself this:

• Doesn’t it feel as if the company ONLY produces carabiners?  If you didn’t know the company produced headlamps, skis, tents, etc, would you ever think to look for those?
• Did it take you a while to figure out that the pictured carabiners could be clicked on and rotated towards you?  Or was that just intuitively obvious?  What do you think the designers felt about the “obviousness” of this design.
• If you weren’t interested in carabiners and never clicked on the “see all carabiners” link, would you ever have gotten to the pages dealing with other equipment?
• What do you think is keeping them from simply using a persistent top navigation scheme?
• Do you think “playing an idiot” for a day would help these guys out?

Idiot-Proofing Product Pages 101

Now let’s compare a product page on the Black Diamond site with one for the same product taken from backcountry.com.  We’ll start with a product page for a LED headlamp taken from the Black Diamond site:

What the heck is a “TriplePower LED”?

• Is it 3-times more powerful than a 5mm Nichia LED?
• Is it a 3-watt LED?
• Is it an LED with 3 power settings?

By using this terminology, Black Diamond has achieved the worst of both worlds, not only is the description not enough for a non-light geek to really understand, but neither is it technical enough for a light geek to feel confident in what he is buying.

How about underlining these terms and providing a mouse-over that would show comparisons of the LEDS, their real technical specs, and usage shots, so that an average user could get a sense of the light output and a techie could see the real specs?

And what about the “NRG Rechargable battery”?

• Is it a Lithium-Ion battery?
• Is it Metal Hydride?
• How much does it cost?
• Does it improve or hurt the battery life of the light?
• Can I buy the light already bundled with the battery and it’s charger, etc?

Finally, there’s the “single position switch.”  I’m guessing it’s some sort of rubberized button-looking thing and that you just have to keep clicking it to rotate through all 7 of the modes until you get the one you want.  But wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure:

• That a single position switch = clicky switch, like on a Mag-Light
• What exactly those 7 lighting modes are, and why I’d need that many modes
• Where the button is located?

From the pictures it looks like the “single position switch” might be on the bottom of the light, but assuming that’s the case, wouldn’t it be better to link the term “single position switch” to a mousover of that picture along with an explanation of how the switch functions and what the 7 modes are?

As for backcountry.com’s product page for this same headlamp, the page is too long for me to snap an encompasing screenshot and place it here, but I suggest you go to that page and take a look at all of the content rich resources that are provided, including:

• customer photos of the product in-use,
• user reviews, Q&A’s, and
• some actual, non-bullet-pointed, real copy.

But since we’re focusing on the copy, I’ve cut and pasted it below.  Read it and see how many questions this copy answers that Black Diamond’s bullet points leave unclear:

“The Black Diamond Icon Headlamp uses two different types of LED bulbs to give you ultra-bright lighting when you need it and to save battery power when you don’t. The 3-watt center bulb has three settings for light up to 80 meters. Switch to the four SuperBright LED bulbs to get a 200-hour burn time when a lot of light isn’t necessary. This combination of long-distance lighting and long burn time makes the Black Diamond Icon Headlamp a stand-out choice for everything from backpacking to climbing to night skiing. In fact, it impressed Rock and Ice so much that they gave it their Best In Gear Award.

Bottom Line: The Black Diamond Icon Headlamp provides both bright lighting and long-lasting battery life for days on the trail, the rock, and the snow.”

Even if it’s not perfect, that copy is still much clearer, isn’t it?  And understand this: the majority of what isn’t covered in this copy is covered in the user reviews, Q&A’s, etc.  In fact, I’m convinced that the persuasive power of user reviews has as much to do with previous buyers unintentionally answering other customers’ questions within the reviews as it has to do with the increased credibility of user reviews.

Also, understand that this unexplained-term phenomenon isn’t exclusive to technical products, either; it happens in product descriptions for almost everything.  I could have just as easily used tents and asked what the hell a double-wall tent is and why it should matter to me, and so on.

Reverse “The Curse” with Idiot Exercises

While “The Curse of Knowledge” can be hard to overcome, here are a few** sure-fire techniques to get you started on your journey to idiot-optimized copy:

• Do usability testing.  Get someone outside your industry (go ahead and specify minimum industry knowledge in your user request) and watch them move through your site while recording their questions, thoughts, etc.
• Highlight every industry term, phrase, or concept on your site, write them down on a piece of paper, and start interviewing random people on the street about them, just like the guy did in the video.
• Willfully play the part of a 5 year old and ask repeated why questions regarding your industry terms and concepts.  It’s best to team up with a partner/colleague on this one.  Force each other to come up with answers a 10-year old would understand.

After having done any one, or all, of the 3 strategies, go back and re-evaluate your copy.

P.S.  Hat tip to Seth Godin for finding the video and creating a great blog post around it

* Actually, there’s only one excuse: you’re purposely excluding a general audience in order to tightly focus on a hard-core group.  In that case, go ahead amd talk the lingo without apologies, letting anyone and everyone else catch up if they can.  Just realize that you WILL be alienating visitors and potential customers in order to appeal to that smaller, hard-core group.

** Of course, the best sure-fire method of escaping the curse of knowledge is simply to hire an outside copywriter/consultant/optimization specialist

[Editor’s note: the author of this blog is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com

I’m not a mind-reader, but I think it’s due in part to an all-or-nothing mentality where nothing short of a full optimization ‘project’ is worth putting effort into.  Most companies are more interested in redesigning their websites all at once instead of incrementally, even though incremental optimization is far less expensive, less risky, and more accountable!

Maybe you heard the expression – how do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time!

Sometimes, we tell our clients to redesign and optimize a small design element of their site; their call to action buttons, for example. And they seem tentative and slow to implement the recommendation.  Why?  Maybe because they think it has to be 100% optimized right away, or that it has to be perfect to be worth taking action on.

A useful model to get past this mode of thinking is to use the Hierarchy of Optimization which we’ve talked about on this blog in the past.  It’s a great mental model to show clients the roadmap of how they should be optimizing, and in what order.

Take a quick look at the hierarchy diagram, and then I’ll apply the model to real-life design elements that most sites should be taking a look at.  Note that the Hierarchy has 5 levels: the Functional, the Accessible, the Usable, the Intuitive, and the Persuasive. While you can apply the 5 levels at a “macro” level on your entire site, you can also apply them at the “micro” level on a single landing page or even small design elements.

Example 1 – Call to Action Buttons

• Persuasive – Do all the layers of the pyramid work together as a cohesive whole?  Are you actively testing your buttons?  Do all your calls to action pair an imperative verb with an implied benefit?  Do they answer WIIFM?
• Intuitive – Do your buttons look like buttons?  Do they look “clickable”?  Do they feature 3-d effects, shading, or rich surfaces?
• Usable – Are your calls to action always located in a consistent position on pages? Do they follow the prospect’s eye path as it travels down the page?  On your forms, do the buttons line up with the “scan line“?
• Accessible – Is there alt text behind your calls to action?  If you use graphics, do they load and render in all your supported OS/Browser combinations?
• Functional – Do all your pages even have a primary call to action button?  Are any of them broken?  Is anyone responsible for occasionally testing them?

Example 2 – Testimonials

• Persuasive – Are your testimonials architected to answer questions and overcome objections through out the prospect’s buying process?  Are your testimonials as ‘real’ as possible, using pictures of the customer?  How about video testimonials?  Are you constantly testing to find the right formula for your business?
• Intuitive – Do your testimonials follow common design patterns for displaying quotes?  Are relevant testimonials placed on key pages to answer your prospects’ unanswered questions? Do you attribute quotes with name, location, and other relevant information?
• Usable – Are your testimonials readable?  Are they an appropriate font size and contrast?  Do prospects have to go hunting for them, or are they spread throughout the site?
• Accessible – In this case, Accessible and Usable can be thought of as essentially the same layer of the pyramid.  See Usable.
• Functional – Do you have testimonials?  Are they legitimate?  Do you have permission to attribute the author with at least a first name and last initial?

Besides what I hope are useful questions to ask yourself, the point of all this is to encourage everyone to start today on optimization, take baby steps, and work your way up the Hierarchy.  As the old saying goes: You can’t eat an elephant in just one bite!

About a year ago, Bryan Eisenberg gave an interview talking about Maybe The Best $100 You’ve Ever Spent, essentially raving over the ridiculously cheep rates charged by UserTesting.com.  The always-astute Patrick Sullivan, Jr. of Edit Weapon picked up on this and decided to give UserTesting.com his own personal test and blog post/review.

Now, as a usability expert himself and a usability testing veteran, Edit Weapon’s initial reaction to UserTesting.com was:

“Well this will either put me out of business, cause me to cut my rates by 90%, or make my life 900% easier!“

The reasoning behind the first two reactions is obvious, but I bet me than a few viewers wondered how ultra-cheap (and effective) competition could possibly make Patrick’s life 900% easier?

Answer: because Patrick’s job isn’t primarily to provide user testing, but to help properly task the users and to expertly interpret the results of that testing.  Turns out that actually conducting the tests was just a pre-requisite to these far more important – and less easily commoditized – skills.

So offloading the pain-in-the-butt process of sourcing the testers and running the tests to UserTesting.com has made Patrick’s life a lot easier.  [Note that, in my opinion, that insight into what business Patrick is really in is worth a series of blog posts of its own, but that'll have to wait for another time...]

As Patrick put it in his blog post:

“…anyone can watch a user use a website, but *interpreting* usability tests and making recommendations is the secret sauce to being a kick ass information architect / interaction workflow designer, which of course, I am.”

Now, during that same video post, Patrick offhandedly mentioned that there were a few golden rules and guidelines to tasking users so that their test results would be optimally useful and easy to interpret, but that he’d have to cover these in a follow-up post.

Ever since hearing that I’ve been patiently waiting for Patrick to finally produce that promised follow-up post, until about a month ago when I broke down and offered to help with the post by turning it into a quasi-interview.  So here they are, the Top 6 User Testing Tips as disclosed to me by Edit Weapon:

Top 6 Don’ts for Usability Testing

(With a special thank you to Sue Fischer – Patrick’s IA/Usability/learnability mentor and a human factors consultant who taught Patrick how to task users for usability tests and how to interpret the results.)

1)    Never ask, “What do you think about this?”

First of all, most people will simply give you a polite, rather than bluntly honest answer.  Second of all, you’re not really interested in what they think of an interface/Web design/piece of software; you’re interested in how well and how easily they can USE it.  That’s why it’s called usability testing.

So you always want to put the question in the form of a goal/task.  Tell the user what they want to do with the interface/software; give them an assigned scenario.  This transforms the process into an objective exercise (rather than a subjective opinion) and allows you to watch how the testers go about using your tool.  You can then get a much better idea of how easy or intuitive your interface is, where the friction occurs, etc.

2)    Don’t feed the tester with your question.

As people learn new things they tend to be very literal – especially when it comes to tasking.  If you ask people to accomplish a task and you use the exact words or phrases that are actually ON the interface labels, you’ll wind up with a false impression of how usable your interface is.

For example, if you ask a tester to “Compose an e-mail” and the button for writing a new e-mail is actually labeled “compose e-mail,” the tester will simply match the phrases up rather than thinking organically in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish and then figuring out the interface. This is “leading the tester” by “feeding” him/her information with your questions.

So you want to ensure that you ask question using terms that are not directly on the interface labels.  Use synonyms.  Don’t make your tasks so easy that the tester simply has to match up terms.  Going a step further, if most users won’t think of a task in terms of multiple steps, but your interface requires multiple steps, don’t break your tasking down into steps to match the interface.  Write the question or task in the way that most users would think of it within a given scenario.

3)    Don’t let users be the designers.

When you get goal-oriented tasks, each user will have different levels at which they learn the interface and pick it up, and some users will do crazy things.  So some users will offer suggestions.  Don’t take those suggestions literally or at face value.  You’re looking for what users DO more than what they say.  This is similar to the rule against not asking users what they “think” of an interface.

4)    Don’t let the statistics fool you.

If you’ve done 20 tests in a row and, let’s say, 5 out of 20 were failures, but as you’ve been working on it and creating new iterations, the last 5 tests went extremely smoothly, you’ve got a good design.  You need to think of the results in terms of being 5 for 5 rather than 15 for 20.

This also applies to individual tasks within a test.  If users find some minor tasks are more difficult to accomplish than operating the really commonly-used features, don’t let those “usability problems” count anywhere near as much as your successes with the main functions of your interface.

Basically, not everything can be a big red button in the middle of the screen.  You have to balance things out and sometimes a few items are a bit more difficult to find and there’s really no perfect solution for a multiple use interface.

5)    Don’t get discouraged.

Your expectations are usually going to be high prior to the first test.  You’ll wonder how people aren’t seeing what they are supposed to see.  So user testing can be a humbling experience.

That’s why it’s usually best to test and tweak your interface in iterations.  You can’t design perfectly from the get-go because you are too much inside the bottle as the designer.  But as you alternate insight generated from testing with new and improved interface iterations, you’ll find the magic if you’re willing to hang in there.

6.    Don’t try to test too much at once.

You’ll get easier to analyze results if you limit your tasks to just 2-3.  And at UserTesting.com’s prices, it’s not a big deal if you end up running additional tests instead of adding more tasks to the same test.

But wait, there’s more… Patrick also walked me through how these principles played out when used to evaluate Jigsaw Health’s landing page for Magnesium Supplements.  Catch the walk-through on our next follow-up post.

Any tips, tricks or traps you want to share?

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]

In my last post, I made use of a brick and mortar analogy to the current online behavior of some e-commerce Websites, and even recommended the use of those analogies when analyzing online persuasion strategies.

And since at least a few readers responded positively to the idea, I thought I’d share one of Get Elastic’s videos  dramatizing exactly one of those analogies, as well as sharing a link to their whole series.

So welcome to The Crazy, Messed-up World of E-commerce!

And if you haven’t already bookmarked Get Elastic’s blog, go ahead and do that now.

Our search on Google started with the term “polo shirts” but provided us with an ad for “Polo Shirts for Man.” I guess women must never search for “polo shirts” even though LandsEnd sells women’s polo shirts on the site. The ad copy talks about the variety of fabrics and colors and LandsEnd does a good job of providing scent from the ad to the landing page.

My initial observation for this page was that people get to this page and would tend to narrow down their selection by size first. If you look closely at the main “hero” shot on the page you’ll see this blue horizontal line and inside it options to narrow down by size.

My suspicion was that most visitors were not seeing it. So the first thing I did was run a heat map on the landing page.  The results were the first sign that I may be correct about this.  Now, if I had access to the web analytics, and if those links under the “hero” shot were tagged properly, we would know for sure whether those size links were being clicked or passed over unseen as visitors eyes jump down the page toward the product photos.

The other thing the heatmap showed is the importance of testing which shirt or product on the category page placed in each of the top positions on the page.  As you can see, high-intensity colors draw the eye more effectively than desaturated colors and neutral tones.

To confirm our suspicions and heat map findings, we decided to use another important tool in our toolbox, usability testing. UserTesting.com was kind enough to provide 3 free tests for us to look at LandsEnd.com at the conference.

The first thing I needed to do was provide the task for our testing participants to complete. This is a critical piece to setup correctly in order to get maximum insight from the test. Here is the scenario as I described it to them:

Purchase 2 different polo shirts and matching pants/shorts for a trip you are taking to a hot tropical location next week. You’d prefer clothing that are low maintenance and are going to feel most comfortable in the heat.

Go through until the end of placing an order but do not submit the order. If this wasn’t a test, would you have made a purchase? Why or why not?

The link provided took them directly to the Men’s Polo Shirt landing page that the pay per click ad above did. Each usability tester recorded their thoughts out load and we were able to see their screen exactly as they did while navigating the site.

Here you can see one of the testers as she goes through making her purchase for a trip to Jamaica. If you want to see the other tests and the test participants notes you can see them on this video summary page. Analyzing her test confirmed what I had seen in the other tests as well and validated my concerns on the page.

Click here to view the embedded video.

These tests confirmed that testers were missing the sort by size links in the blue bar under the hero shot and additionally some of the same issues that we identified in part 1 of the conversion makeover.

1. Conversion Challenge: People just don’t understand some of the jargon/terms that LandsEnd uses. In terms of size what does “Big” mean? Is XL big?

I also asked the users to look for shirts that had fabrics that were good in tropical heat, and every participant went straight to cotton (because they knew that) and missed the other special fabrics (like mesh and moisture wicking fabrics) LandsEnd offers.  See a sample screen shot of the selection process below:

Recommendation: LandsEnd looks at different ways to label these terms or to explain them to make them more intuitive for their non-catalog buyers (in the catalog they explain many of these terms).

They could do this in the hero shot area using visuals as well for the sizing options.

Priority/Likely Impact: High

Resources Required to Execute:

• Fixing the wording or labels in the pull down menu will probably take 2-3 hours, with most of the time spent on coming up with and agreeing on terms.
• Providing a more intuitive understanding of the sizing categories within the hero shot, would likely take an additional 2-3 hours.
• Total time = 4-6 hours, with a possible hour or two to actually implement the changes depending on their technology and platform setup

2. Conversion Challenge: The upsells on the product pages were virtually invisible to most of the participants until they went looking for them, but even then, the recommendations still weren’t entirely relevant for what the visitors were looking for.

Recommendation: As part of the product page redesign we did in part one of our makeover the recommendations were moved to a more visible location where there would also be additional room for 3 to 4 recommendations per product.  This is an improvement, bu LandsEnd still needs to ensure that the recommendations are as relevant as possible.  I would look to have a combination of recommendations for each product; one that is a similar product in the same category, one or two complimentary products from different categories (when looking at a shirt show pants or shorts), and possibly a complimentary accessory. Occasionally you can find a product were they have this kind of combination.

Priority/Likely Impact: Medium

Resources Required to Execute: Variable depending on LandsEnd product recommendation technology, which we are not privy to.

3. Conversion Challenge: People’s momentum was broken when they went to narrow down their selection from a category page and then further complicated when they went to purchase more than 1 of the same or similar items.

Recommendation: There are two things going on here. First the current task of narrowing down one’s selection criteria from a category page could be less than intuitive.  The location of the narrow search items, the too-subtle reaction to clicking on a faceted navigation selection, and the jargon used in some of the pulldowns all conspired to confuse shoppers looking to find just the right kind of polo shirt/item.

Secondly, the ease of adding multiple items of the same product but in different colors should take fewer clicks. Right now you have to click to close the cart, click to reselect your size, and then click to select your additional color before adding the item to cart.

I would recommend taking a look at how the Gap (Banana Republic, Old Navy, etc.) websites allow visitors to more easily narrow item selections through their quick look on their category page, and also how their “virtual cart” makes adding multiple items easier once the visitor has arrived on a product page.

I would also place some or all of the narrow selection/faceted navigation pulldowns above the featured products instead of having them outside the active window, in the left hand column.  Most important is the narrow by size option.

Priority/Likely Impact: High

Resources Required to Execute: This is a highly complex change which would likely require 30 or more hours, but which would have a huge impact and ROI.

Conclusion: I love LandsEnd and their fabulous products, and despite the conversion challenges we’ve discussed, the participants in our usability tests still felt confident they would buy from LandsEnd’s website.  However, very few people only buy clothing from one manufacturer or brand, and it only takes a slight erosion or friction in the process that would cause someone to abandon and head over to their next favorite (and competing) brand.

Usability testing is just one of the arrows in our quiver that we use for our OnTarget clients but occasionally we do this type of analysis for free for teaching purposes. Would you like to suggest your website for this type of review and improvement? If so, then be prepared to have it published. Just let us know in the comments below.

P.S. If you enjoyed this post please consider Tweeting it please.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]

Tip 1: Subiminal Suggestion

Basically, make sure your design elements – and most especially your pictures – enhance your credibility and put visitors in the right emotional frame of mind to convert.

Sound advice, to be sure, but the example Website the author (Dmitry Fadeyev) provides seemed kind of lame to me.  Here’s a more-thorough 5-minute video on this principle by Dave Young:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tip 2: Prevent Choice Paralysis

Too many choices results in buyers avoiding a decision and failing to convert.  You need to make it easy for a buyer to say yes without getting too bogged down in the details.  One way to do this is to provide a recommended or “best value” option.

But here’s where I’d go a bit beyond that by looking at this through the lens of temperament:

• Spontaneous temperaments like recommended and “most popular” options.  They also ver much want to shorten the time spent shopping and setting up so they can maximize time spent actually DOING THE THING.  If your recommended option helps customers get out on the playing field quicker, then be sure to tell visitors that.
• Methodical temperaments will want to know WHY you believe this is the best value and how you can prove it.  Show your reasoning/methodology in coming to your conclusions and offer up proof of value.  This may involve linking to a mouse-over or additional page from the recommendation box.  Maybe a little link on “Why we recommend this package.”
• Competitive temperaments don’t necessarily need a recommendation, but a quick way to narrow down their choices by advanced filtering.  Or a quick way of knowing why the choice you’ve labeled as premium will give them an edge.  Keep them in control and convinced they’re getting an advantage through their purchase and they’ll convert.
• Humanistic temperaments usually want to know how easy it is to upgrade or downgrade a recommended service or swap-out a product if your recommendation ends up not quite suiting them.  They also want a sense of your motivations in recommending one product over another and possibly if they can Chat or call someone about the recommendation.

Tip 3: Show The Product

This is very similar to my post on “Show me the pics.”  People want to see what they are buying.  Not only do the pictures answer questions, but people want to imagine using the product.

What I’d add to this is that one picture often isn’t enough and that action photos are gold.  For software and services that means not only offering product tours with lots of screenshots, but also in using scenario-based product tours rather than functionality-based tours.  Walk me through doing something rather than randomly showing this or that functionality.

Tip 4: Let People Try It

Great (and self-explanatory) advice, but I was glad that Show the Product came before this.  I’ve seen a fair amount of software companies believe that visitors would just leap at a free trial in order to experience a product first hand, and that just aint how it works.

Visitors invariably want to sniff a product out BEFORE downloading it and investing time with it.  Realize that “Free” doesn’t really equate to risk free.  Dmitry writes about the positive benefits users’ emotional “sunk costs” that come with using a free piece of software – the kind of thing that leads to a paid updgrade vs. a search for a whole new product.  What he doesn’t mention is that visitors are well aware of that sunk cost and will avoid downloading software unless and until they have a decent sense that it will work well for them.

So, yes, by all means, let people try the product for free.  Just make sure you show them enough of the product and what it can do that their willing to invest the time trying it out.

Tip 5 & 7: AIDA and Next Steps

I combined these because they are intimately related and are both areas Future Now has quite thoroughly covered.  We, of course, add the “S” of Satisfaction onto the end of Attention-Interest-Desire-Action.

Also, planning persuasive momentum/next action steps should be more involved than simply ensuring visitors can find a buy button when they’re ready to buy or that you have some additional link made available to them.

Finally, you gotta love this money quote from the article:

“…you shouldn’t design a nice website first and then fill up the space with words. Instead,think about the message you want to send out, write the copy and then construct a design that delivers that.”

Amen, brother.  Amen.

Tip 6: Guide Attention

Having just finished writing about the impact of design on visitor eye tracking, I naturally found this to be the best part of the article.  Lost of great stuff on intelligent use of design to guide the eyes/attention of the visitor.

As for additional resources on the Web, check out

The Elements of Design Applied to the Web

Good Call to Action Buttons

Making Tabs Work for You

Looks can Kill Design Effectiveness

Color, Contrast, and Dimension

and Rowland Wilson on Composition

Tip 8:  The Gutenberg Rule

I really don’t have too much to say about this one, other than it’s another rule of thumb for good composition/page layout and that you should go and take a look at it for yourself.

And that’s it.  I’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, and additional resources as well.  Let me know what ya think…

Absolutely not, right?  Or at least not yet.

You came to buy a specific book.  You’ve already got a task in mind and browsing random books aint it.  You’ll likely blow past any and all call-outs, recommendations, and other assorted distractions until you’ve found the book you came to buy.

And if Amazon ends up not having the book in stock, you’ll go elsewhere.

But AFTER you’ve found the book you wanted, recommendations are welcomed. At that point you’ll actually pay attention to other books Amazon recommends and bundles with your searched-for book.   You’ll even look at what other Amazon shoppers eventually bought after viewing your friend’s book.

Task Orientation Defines Scent

This Amazon thought experiment exemplifies the task-orientation common to most online visitors.

Visitors arrive at your site with a goal in mind.  They already have a task, and your website either helps them accomplish that task or it gets dumped.  And that goes for every page on your site – either it contains the content the visitor wants, or it provides a link to it, or the visitor leaves.

But what about people just wanting to browse?

This is a question posed to me in a recent comment.  As the commenter put it:

“… when I’m browsing through Amazon – with no other goal than to pass the time – I get converted to buy stuff all the time.

‘People who bought x also bought Y’ And if the book or cd Y is something I’ve been interested in – it triggers a purchase.”

His point was that browsing is a task-less online activity that eliminates the importance of scent.

And it’s an interesting question/thought.  To answer it, I’ll first have to distinguish between early stage shopping and true browsing.

Early Stage Buying vs. True Browsing

In the early stage of the buying process, the visitor is aware of an itch he’d like to scratch, but isn’t quite sure exactly what purchase will best scratch that itch.  Let’s say our shopper is vaguely aware of wanting to get in shape, and is kind of wanting to do Yoga.  But he’s not sure if he wants to do Yoga in a dedicated studio, or take classes in a more general, multi-purpose gym, or just buy some tapes for home workouts.

This Yoga shopper is still task oriented – it’s just that the task is researching rather than buying.  And a home-workout themed website or Yoga Studio website that helped her do the research stands a far better chance of getting her business than a Website exclusively focused on late stage buyers.

This is one reason we highly recommend catering to early stage buyers and developing a content strategy for them.  And for more info on how to do that effectively, check out David Young’s excellent video series: Hunting for Early Bird Persuasion

Browsing is different.  Browsing means the shopper isn’t even clearly aware of a product desire yet. They’re not even focused on research.  If asked, the shopper couldn’t even describe the itch they’re looking to scratch.   And yet, they could buy if presented with the right product.

Browsers are still task-oriented

Despite appearances, browsing isn’t task-free.  Even though a specific object hasn’t (yet) catalyzed their free-floating desire, browsing visitors are still driven by desire.

Browsers are seeking novelty and possibility: the possibility of finding something different and better than they’d have imagined.   Browsers are as goal-oriented as any other shopper – just with different goals.

And as is true with every goal-oriented shopper, any website that fails to deliver on those goals gets dumped.  In fact, most shoppers only browse on sites that have already proved themselves capable of delivering novel products.

People browse Amazon.com not because it presents them with recommendations on the home page, but because Amazon masterfully presents them with interesting possibilities of new books that are similar to and possibly even remarkably better than books we’re already impressed with.  This is why the commenter I quoted from recalled the ‘People who bought x also bought Y’ quote rather than a “view Amazon recommendations” quote.

So how does a site plan to deliver on this search for novelty and cooler-than-expected items?

What it takes to be a browsing-friendly Website

Apart from bargain-priced rotating-inventory sites like bluefly, overstock.com or woot.com, the top three e-tailers most noted for browsing-friendly design are:

• Amazon
• Zappos
• iTunes

Here’s what they have in common:

They sell “impulse-buy-friendly” and “most-people-own-a-bunch” items.  Think about it: books, music, and shoes are all things we buy a lot of AND things we buy on impulse.  So each of these sites have a lot of repeat visits/visitors AND a fair chance at luring visitors into impulse buys.

They make it easy to sample the items in stock. iTunes lets you actually listen to the song.  Amazon lets you read the dust cover, table of contents, and a few passages from the book.  Most reviews also give you a flavor of the book.  Zappos gives you the best product photography to be found and provides expedited shipping both ways, which is a way to eliminate the pain and friction of customers trying on and “sampling” the shoes.

They routinely get new items in stock and make it a point to stock huge inventories. If browsers want novelty, it helps to be able to provide it, both with new stuff and with stuff I’ve never heard of before.  Amazon.com has all sorts of weird titles I’d never find at my local Barnes & Noble or even imagine existed.  Same thing with iTunes and Zappos.  Browsing shoppers know that novelty is only a click away.

They have solid user reviews set-up. Amazon and Zappos make up for limited sampling through user reviews, making it no coincidence that they have the best and most solidly established review communities on the Web. iTunes lags behind the others when it comes to reviews, but makes up for by better sampling, lower average price point, and better than average recommendations.

They make it easy to sort by regular categories AND by loose associations. Amazon let’s me see cool webs of connections between books, and look at user generated lists.  Zappos provides great filtered navigation options, so that I can not only sort by black men’s dress shoes, but also by black cap-toe lace up oxfords that cost between $100 and $150.  And many of the revues compare shoes, even to the point of recommending alternatives.  iTunes allows users to sort music by genre, decade, and browse with the aid of since-you-bought-that-you’ll-like-this recommendations.  For even better filtered, or faceted, sorting, check out this Get Elastic article as well as their thoughts on using user filtering and sorting preferences to personalize visitors shopping experience.

They’ve eliminated or greatly reduced buying friction. I can buy shoes on Zappos and get them next day or by 2nd day for free shipping.  With Amazon prime, I get 1-Click buying, and free 2nd-day shipping.  iTunes allows me to enjoy my music within seconds of buying.  And I know I’ll never have a problem with billing or customer service with these e-tailers.  There’s simply no friction to buying and a good bit of near-instant gratification – important factors for inspiring impulse buys.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Get Elastic’s recent post on reducing friction kicks butt – providing incredibly clear explanations of too-common Website flaws along with great examples of how to do it right.  I wish I wrote it.  Not only did the article reduced me to green-faced envy, but many of the post’s links pointed to further “must reads.”

Do yourself a favor and go read it now.

1. The Homepage Dump: You add an item to your cart and are thrown into the checkout process.  You’ve got another item on your shopping list, so you click the little link that says “Continue Shopping.”  You’re dumped on the homepage.  This is especially bad when you’ve done a lot of searching and results-filtering, and now it’s all gone.  It really does feel like you’ve just been dumped!  I can’t think of any good reason why the homepage is the proper place to land a visitor to continue shopping.
2. The Painful Multi-Item Purchase: Many shopping carts make no distinction between adding to cart and checking out.  As soon as you add to cart, the website assumes that you want to checkout and sends you down that path.  But what if you’re not ready?  We all know from the offline world that putting a bag of chips in a real shopping cart, and standing in the checkout line secretly reading tabloid headlines are two very different things, right? More robust shopping carts allow an item to be added to the cart without interrupting the browsing process.  When visitors are ready to checkout, they intuitively know how to initiate that process from any page with one click.  Threadless.com and Amazon.com both do decent jobs of this in their own unique ways.  A good test for this one is to go through a multi-item purchase on your site without using any of your cross-selling or up-selling elements.  It should still be easy to browse >> add to cart >> browse again >> add to cart again >> check out.

Hopefully, you’ve skimmed these two issues and they don’t apply.  Pat yourself on the back and maybe focus on testing and optimizing your cart instead.

Great copy that comes in dense blocks of text often never gets the chance to convert visitors because it never gets read.

Most Web pages – as well as the copy on those pages – are skimmed and scanned before they’re read. Web visitors want to make sure they are in the right place and reading the right section or content before digging in. So making a few easy formatting changes can yield some huge conversion improvements by allowing visitors to easily orient themselves to your content.

We pointed out how Amazon did this earlier this year, and now, we will give you a few other strategies and steps to optimize your pages for skimming and scanning.

• Bullets- Listing out items in bulleted lists makes it much easier for a visitor to get useful information. Bulleted lists work great for emphasizing multiple benefits, as each benefit gets sufficient space to stand out and all of the benefits can be quickly scanned by visitors wondering if a given product or service will satisfy their needs.

• Bolding- Within paragraphs of copy, it’s a good idea to bold the more critical text. Visitors’ eyes will be able to quickly latch onto those important, bolded points amidst the rest of the text. That said, use bolding sparingly as too much will simply overwhelm visitors and actually hurt your visitors’ ability to skim and scan your text.

• Hyperlinks- Hyperlinks’ contrasting blue color and underlining also grab the eye and cause hyperlinked words to pop out at visitors. But since links are clickable, those hyperlinked words and phrases can also be used to qualify visitors and move them to pages and messaging crafted to speak to and answer more specific needs and questions – stuff that may not interest everyone but that will be important to specific segments of your audience.

• Sub-headlines- Break your content up into sections and label those sections with Sub-headlines (also called subheads). Once you’ve done that, try reading just the subheads and see if you come away with the gist of page’s content. Not only will this help visitors quickly scan the page for content, but it will also allow them to skip down to the section that’s most important to them. And as an added bonus, Sub-headlines help create needed whitespace for your page layout.

• White Space- White space makes it easier for visitors to find information and focus on what they are really looking for. Ensure you leave white space by breaking up long paragraphs (consider more than 5 stacked lines to be too long), using sub-headlines and bullets, and by maintaining decent margins and line spacing. Web copy should never look intimidating or too densely packed.

• Jargon- Using highly technical words or industry jargon inhibits skimming and scanning for anyone who isn’t 100% familiar with the terminology. As a general rule, copy on a broad-audience website should be at or below a fifth grade reading level. If specific technical terms are necessary, say if they are a key search term, link them to a glossary or FAQ, or explain the terms within the text itself.

These are a just a few simple changes that can dramatically improve your Web visitors’ ability to skim and scan your text, and find the information important to them. Not only does this make visitors happier, it makes them more confident in purchasing from you. As a reminder, you should test almost any changes you make on your site, but this is a great area to get started on and can bring back some really good results.

Editor’s Note: In fact, one of Dan’s clients increased his conversion by 24% by reformatting their page for skimming and scanning.

That’s a very large price to pay for having everything at our fingertips, all the time, in any format.

Our decision-making processes can’t always keep up with our choices. The same challenge applies to website design and content. The Web is a fantastic place to shop, research, and be entertained, but sometimes when I’m online, I notice physical fatigue when I’m trying to figure out where to go next!

When I’m evaluating a vendor’s Services page, should I:

• Sign up for their newsletter?
• Read about the awards they’ve won?
• Look at a list of clients?
• Read the CEO’s blog?

When I’m shopping for a health supplement, should I:

• Read about related products?
• Read about their latest “green” program?
• View my empty shopping cart?
• Become an affiliate?

Even though we come to a website with the best intentions, we’re by nature drawn to the shiny distractions that marketers and designers put along our path. We go down rabbit holes in websites and sometimes by the time we find our way back to the trail, we’ve lost our momentum . . . or maybe we’ve been interrupted and have to go back to work

So I’m wondering: How much money is lost each year because we overload our potential customers with information on our web pages? How many visitors are driven away by cluttered designs, too many messages, too many offers, and too many choices?

Here’s the problem: Marketers naturally want to use messaging, offers, promotions and more to persuade web visitors. But in their efforts, they often contribute to information overload, which is proven to hamper the decision-making process. Also, companies tend to add more content to their websites over time and rarely retire content that’s outdated or irrelevant.

The solution: Most web pages should have only one primary goal. If there are alternate options, offers, or next steps, that’s fine. But don’t interrupt the task at hand, and don’t overload your visitors with distractions.

The one exception I can think of is the homepage, which should, at a minimum, a) communicate Unique Value Proposition, and b) route visitors.

Should you remove these secondary goals and choices? Maybe, but sometimes making them less prominent is enough to move the needle. It comes down to a business decision whether your “Sizzlin’ Hot Summer Giveaway” promotion is worth distracting a certain percentage of visitors from their primary goal.

What if you don’t know the goal of all of your site’s pages? You could start with rediscovering who your customers really are, or some analysis of your website’s “data dump,” or you could hypothesize and run some tests. Sometimes the purpose of a page is simply to present options. That’s fine, but don’t distract visitors from understanding their options and making a decision.

So let’s get practical here:

• Category page primary goal = route visitors to sub-category or product page
• Product page primary goal = persuade visitors to purchase
• In the News page primary goal = build brand credibility
• Shopping cart page primary goal = get the cash!
• General content page primary goal = build persuasive momentum

Although it seems hard at first, it’s actually pretty easy to find a single, primary goal for most pages on your site. Then you have the harder task of deciding how to do away with unnecessary distractions, get rid of design clutter, and allow visitors freedom without information overload.

Sometimes having a new pair of eyes look at your site can really speed this process up.

If you’re overloading customers with info, you’re not alone. Many world-class, million-dollar sites are guilty of information overload, and even the best online marketers need to work on it constantly.

Best of luck. To avoid information overload, let’s focus on answering the three essential questions of Persuasion Architecture:

• Who are your visitors?
• What action do you want them to take?
• What will persuade them to take that action?

. . .

About the Author: Brendan Regan is a Persuasion Analyst at FutureNow, Inc. This is his first GrokDotCom post. Welcome to the blog, Brendan!

We all take the Google homepage for granted.

It’s so remarkably simple that (unless you’re, say, a blogger for a website optimization firm) it’s unremarkable; just a text box, two call to action buttons, and a few links that most humans don’t even look at, let alone use. That’s all.

But why? Why is it that the Google homepage has barely changed in the past decade? Are they obsessed with minimalism, or is there more to the story?

From its humble origins as a research project by a couple of Stanford graduate students, Sergei Brin and Larry Page always knew that testing matters. They realized that it’s not just important to build a good online experience, but that they would need to know why it worked in order to make it better.

Take a look at Google’s 1998 homepage and see if you can guess its most innovative feature:

Got your answer? Feeling lucky (hint: that’s not it)? Great. Now hold that thought.

Speaking at the Google I/O conference last week, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, explained how the company developed a culture of testing, insisting that, “On the Web in general, [creating sites] is much more a design than an art. You can find small differences and mathematically learn which is right.”

The CNet article (also linked to above) details some of Google’s many innovations from their years of A/B split testing. Their results illustrate one of our mantras here at FutureNow: “Believe what they do, not what they say they will do.” For instance, users claimed they wanted to see more search results per page, but testing proved otherwise. You can read the article for details on that one, but I digress. The homepage example remains the most telling. Here’s how Mayer tells it:

[Our beta testers] would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…Google was perplexed.

So Mayer would eventually intervene and ask what was holding up the searchers. “I’m waiting for the rest of it,” they’d say. Clearly they expected more of the flashy ads and busy text of other search pages of the 1990s.

“The very first home page was that misunderstood. People didn’t resonate with it,” Mayer said. One woman even thought the Web site was a fake construction that was part of a psychology experiment. As a result, the company put a copyright notice at the bottom of the page. “It’s not there for legal reasons,” Mayer said. “It’s there as punctuation. That’s it. (It tells the searcher) ‘Nothing else is coming; please start searching now.’”

So here it is, the big innovation they came up with back in 1998:

Amazing. Just showing a copyright assurance is what gives us the confidence to proceed.

Mayer said a lot of insightful things in her presentation, but this quote struck me:

“The urgent can drown out the important.”

So true. With website optimization, what seems to be of urgent and of vital importance from your company’s perspective may not at all be what’s urgent and vital to your visitors. In fact, your visitors may not even know what they’d fix about your website if they could.

Who among us would have told Google back in 1998 that they should try putting a copyright symbol on the homepage? [*Hears crickets chirping in background.*] Exactly. And that’s why developing hypotheses and testing from the visitor’s perspective is a must.

. .

Editor’s Note: FutureNow is an “authorized consultant” for Google Website Optimizer. (We’re writing the book on it.) To learn about which of our optimization services will best help you boost conversion rates and other key performance metrics, please contact us for a free consultation.

All it took was few simple changes to the text on their product pages. By adjusting the size, color and font of the text and removing unnecessary words, they’ve cleaned up the product pages and made them easier to scan and skim.

Here’s what’s new:

• Font & Word Choice — Larger, color headline. Selective bolding. Price is larger. Less verbiage.

• Up-sell Area — Now shows product image. Cleaner headline matches product page headline.

Before…

This is how Amazon’s product descriptions used to look. As you can see, there’s not much differentiation in the text. Although there’s a lot of important stuff to read, it’s all in bold — which basically makes bolding meaningless (think “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”).

After…

Product Name, Price and Availability are things that all visitors want to see when they’re on a product page. With these changes, Amazon has further highlighted what’s essential — as they did by changing the size and color of the headlines — or cut the fat — as they did by editing out unnecessary words and turning bold into light gray. After all, should we be looking at the word “Price” or at the actual price?

Exactly.

So, how does Amazon know which changes will make their website more easy to use and therefore convert better? It’s not because they’re any smarter than you or your CMO (although we’re sure Amazon has some very smart people). It’s because they’ve built “a culture of website optimization.”

If you want to test strategically (like Amazon), we can help.

PayPal recently announced a streamlining of its payment flow process that doesn’t require a PayPal account to use. In other words, you can “check out” via PayPal, reap the security benefits of the merchant store not knowing your financial details, and pay for your item without having created any long-term relationship with PayPal (although they wouldn’t mind).

Adding PayPal to an e-commerce site can sometimes result in lower conversions — which makes sense because you’re being taken away from the experience you were just having at the merchant site. On the upside, some mid-sized UK merchants using this new process are reporting an increase in their monthly total payment volume, with gains of over 9% on average.

But I’ve got a different request altogether.

I use PayPal. A lot. Probably at least $500 a month of online purchases of various things that, at the time, I’m convinced I really need. It always amazes me how confusing the PayPal part of the checkout process is. First I’m on the merchant site. Then I’m off it — but not so obviously that I notice right away. It’s just a white, empty-feeling page with the merchant logo and a familiar PayPal button. Then the interface changes again to make it obvious that it’s PayPal.

In order to return to the merchant site, I have to click a small-font text link that competes with PayPal-branded buttons for my attention. At this point, I’m still not sure if the purchase “took” — that confidence doesn’t come until I return to the merchant site.

Won’t some of those e-tailers enjoying that volume increase please, please, PLEASE put just a fraction of that revenue toward hiring a bright developer to create a way to do this undercover? Its seems this could be easily resolved with a bit of (*buzzword alert*) AJAX.

Enter your PayPal user name, maybe some kind of modal lightbox pop-up to asks for my password, it goes back behind the scenes to confirm this with PayPal, then seemlessly closes the pop-up and updates my status on the merchant site to say, “Purchase completed via PayPal. Thanks for your business!”

I like using PayPal. I just don’t want to notice it. Kinda like the electricity in my home; I just want it to be there when I plug in my laptop.

What do you think?

So, let’s take a look at some of the changes to their product pages and shopping cart to get a better sense of what they’ve done a good job of so far, and share a few ideas for other changes worth testing…

Better Image Views on Product Pages

As you can see, the site allows you to easily zoom into the product you’re looking at by using your mouse as a virtual magnifying glass. This saves the visitor time by not requiring them to open a pop-up window to view the product in detail — although they provide that option as well, it’s not as helpful as this excellent zoom view. By not forcing the customer into an extra step, the zoom feature will likely reduce Bounce Rate. But more importantly, better product views make people more likely to buy.

Easy Size Adjustments + Cart View

When you add items to the cart, you’re not taken directly to the cart and away from the shopping process. Instead, they acknowledge that your items are in the cart with this mini-cart drop-down on the upper-right side of the screen. After you’ve added the item, the mini-cart retreats to a simple checkout summary (# of items in cart and total price). Of course, you still have the option to go to checkout if you’re done shopping, but they’re not in a rush — in fact, they’d like it if you bought more stuff — which should help increase Average Order Value.

Adjust Your Order Without Leaving the Cart

Once again, OldNavy.com is looking out for the customer — right in the shopping cart, this time. They make editing item details as easy as I’ve seen it on any e-commerce site. One click of the “edit” button brings up this slick tool (pictured above), which allows you to change the size and color of your items in case you have a last-minute change of heart. Now that’s a smart way to lower cart abandonment. (Here are a few more.)

Ideas Worth Testing…

• I’m not sure why they’re advertising “free returns on all womens plus styles” when all the items in my cart are menswear; nor does it make sense that they let me know they have the product “Up to XXXL” when I’ve already chosen “Large” as my size; but those are minor details that shouldn’t have much effect on the shopping process. Still, this is prime real estate they’re wasting by delivering me a message that’s meant for someone else. The OldNavy.com team should consider tailoring these messages based on what customers have already added to cart, and testing whether it improves conversion and/or average order value.

• When planning an e-commerce site, ask yourself at least this one question: “What do I hate about shopping online?” I’d be interested to hear your response in the comments section, but in the meantime, I’m sure that if I were to poll everyone at Future Now, most of us would answer, “When sites make me ‘register’ before checking out.” They should test getting rid of that immediately. If you want to a customer’s permission to be contacted when they’re not currently trying to give you money, the least you could do is ask them instead of forcing the issue. If you do ask — and you most definitely should — please do everyone (your customers and your CFO) a favor and only ask people to ‘register’ after you’ve got both their money. You’ll have their email address by then, anyway, so it’s not as big of a deal at that point.

[Editor's Note: Want more tips on how to optimize your e-commerce site? Read our free white paper on website optimization. Need specific ideas for your checkout process? We can help.]

If only they’d do a bit of testing…

The first problem appears with what seems to be a search bar near their top navigation. This is actually a Coupon Code box.

I’d like to know how many people use this box to search for movies, then violently click the “Back” button once they realize it’s a coupon box. From that number, it’s reasonable to assume that a portion of those searchers are going to a search engine and typing in movie rental coupons — and possibly being wooed to other sites like Blockbuster, where they might stay a customer for years. The lifetime value of this test cannot be taken for granted.

For my first would-be test, the coupon box would be replaced with a movie search box. This is a huge opportunity to let first-time visitor feel the power of searching through some 85,000 DVD’s. This is their unique value proposition; they have just about every DVD imaginable. The coupon box would then be moved below the fold (read: you’d have to scroll down to see it). That way, people who didn’t have a coupon would be less distracted by the possibility of not getting the best deal. Meanwhile, the visitors who do have a coupon would be compelled to find it below the fold.

Next, I would test the content just below the navigation; what we call the “active window” (example). The active window should invite the visitor to imagine themselves as an empowered member of the Netflix community. By not conveying this feeling, Netflix ignores its main benefit: their mind boggling selection of DVD’s and the spot-on relevance of Netflix-recommended movies.

Their rating system is in a league of its own. By segmenting reviews to show what people similar to you had to say about a movie, they give you trusted recommendations and opinions about each selection.

For a third test, Netflix could benefit by changing two words on this page. The “Start Now” Call to Action would be far more persuasive if it included a benefit. The cold, uninspired command to “Start Now” sounds much better when you say something like “Try it out for free”.

Finally, Netflix should test using language to attract busy people like myself; those who rarely watch-and-return the movies they rent. We save them tons of money on postage.

*Please Note: The screenshots pictured here show the homepage as seen by Netflix members. Non-members see a sign-up form instead.

These “dollar words” are truly excellent… at going over your audiences’ heads while keeping them from accomplishing their goals by taking the actions you’ve set out for them. Anyone who’s taken our Persuasive Online Copywriting course would agree; Jakob is singing our tune in his discussion of a usability test he did on the U.S. Census Bureau website:

Beyond banner blindness, the major reason this homepage failed is that it used made-up terms or branded descriptions rather than plain-spoken words. Terms like “Population Clock,” “Population Finder,” and “QuickFacts” are not as descriptive as a simple line of text that says:

Current population of the United States: 302,740,627

Once Jakob goes beyond the heatmap, things really get interesting. He uses gaze plots (click thumbnail for image) to describe 4 main classes of behavior — “search-dominant,” “navigation-dominant,” “tool-dominant,” and “successful” — and gives insightful descriptions for each. If one were so inclined to look at the same observed behavior through the lens of the personality types or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, they’d see beyond the how people clicked, and into the why they clicked. It’s how they’re wired, naturally, according to their preference, or type.

A: The Competitive type — what Jakob observed as “search-dominant user” in this study; Using the MBTI lens we’d shorten their preference to operating in “NT” (iNtuitive/Thinking) mode- working at a fast pace, with a logical bias. The Competitive quickly scans and skims everything, looking for a clue as to how to solve the puzzle. Neither Active Window [define] content nor navigation seemed to be the path of least resistance. (Notice: Competitive type didn’t even look in the right-hand column; they’ve been trained to ignore it.)

The right and left vertical lines clearly illustrate the Active Window, where a Competitive is most likely to spend time. (The same goes for all types, but the Competitive does this more often.) Once this person struck out with copy in the Active Window, they aimed for navigation and, after quickly striking out there, went to search.

As a footnote, Jakob adds, this “user” (don’t get me started) mentioned the ability to search faster for the answer… at Google.

B: The Methodical type — Jakob’s “navigation-dominant user”; “SJ” (Sensing/Judging) on the MBTI — behaves with a logical bias similar to Competitives, but with a far more deliberate pace. You know the Methodicals in your audience. They’re not easily satiated by the answers you give them. They want more. No detail’s too small. They want it all. The good news from a marketing communications perspective is they’re willing to give you their time — provided you’re willing to give them relevant content.

The Methodical approach was to look everywhere; Active Window, left navigation, right-hand column (where the answer was actually sitting, cloaked in techno-babble and jargon), above the fold, below. You name it, they saw it. They just didn’t find anything that seemed like the answer until, finally, navigation appeared “most promising”.

C: The Spontaneous type — Jakob’s “tool-dominant user”; “SP” (Sensing/Perceiving) on the MBTI; — behaves at a fast pace, with an emotional bias. They’re highly experiential by nature. (Notice how Jakob describes this type as people who “like parts of websites where they can do something”.)

The Spontaneous visitor clicked around briefly, mainly focusing on the interactive features, before most likely leaving in failure. The gaze went everywhere, without focus, until a single feature grabbed their attention — that is, until another rabbit hole appeared (on another website) that was more entertaining.

D: The Humanistic type — Jakob’s “successful user”; “NF” (iNtuitive/Feeling) on the MBTI; — behaves at a slightly less deliberate pace than the Methodical, but with an emotional bias. Testimonials were created for this type. Show them how you’ve treated other people like them, and you’ll gain their confidence.

My assumption that Plot D represents the Humanistic is based on a few observations and is a shining example of the value of optimizing your experience based on a plan, rather than some out-of-the-box analytics package or testing platform. Had we planned this experience using a customer-centric methodology like Persuasion Architecture™ [define], we would have a context in which to view this gaze; to know how far off the execution was from what we’d originally planned. That would give us an actionable approach to making website improvements.

With Plot D, I see someone who’s spent more time than the other visitors — except, of course, for the Methodical — not just scanning and skimming, but actually connecting. I also see someone whose gaze fell oddly on the right-hand column; a behavior we typically see when people are capable of scrolling with their mouse without actually looking at the gutter to find the down arrow. They intuitively know the scroll bar is there.

Each of these experiences could have been planned better to achieve the task at hand, but that’s a post for a different day. For now, simply consider that people are wired to behave according to different preferences, their behavior fueled by their own momentum.

For you to achieve your goals, your audience must first achieve theirs. That means presenting what they want, when and where they want it — even if you have to make a single product page speak to 4 different “types” of people. But that’s the beauty of the medium. Online, it’s far easier to measure and improve your plan dramatically over time.

(Author’s Note: Anyone think my headline would’ve been better if it were “What People Do on Your Site and Why”? Now do you see the power of plain-spoken language?)

[Editor's Note: Here's more on persuasive copywriting by personality type and how to make your site reader-friendly. Enjoy!]

When designing for 1024 x 768 resolution, don’t assume that the browser window is completely open.

There are a couple of easy fixes for this drop-down problem. (They should get rid of it entirely, but that may be asking too much.) At the very least, PetSmart should think about decreasing the font size or combining some of the categories to reduce visitor frustration and help good dogs get the treats and biscuits they deserve.

Kudos to Alex Harris for letting us know about the PetSmart.com relaunch.

Perhaps the grandfather of Usability, Frederick Winslow Taylor, could have called his audience such a thing — they were factory line workers, using a tool to do their job — but today’s consumers are anything but “users”. They’re volunteers, and they’re empowered; they do what they want, when they want because, most importantly, they want to. The “why” is up to them, not you.

I often challenge people to come up with positive associations with the term user. I’m still waiting for one positive response. Sure, I’ve heard “Mac user” and even that falls flat given the very real problems with technology — yes, even with Macs — that rear their ugly head at the most inopportune of times.

While at the event, my favorite Usability-pro-at-sea, Todd Follansbee, offered one of the best jokes I’ve heard in the industry about a man and woman on a first date. The punchline from the woman, upon hearing that the man was a Usability Engineer, was that she hoped he knew sometimes “task completion” and “time spent on task” weren’t the best measures of success! PG-13 material to be sure, but you can see why we like Todd so much.

I digress. Haven’t we all walked past a homeless person, panhandling for change and not reached into our pockets and given a buck or two? Perhaps in your town it’s students asking for donations for new uniforms. Surely not everyone who walks by contributes, or they wouldn’t have to stand out there for weeks on end! Is anyone willing to offer their reason for not supporting either the cause, or the homeless man’s jones for a slice of pizza — at least in NY — that they simply didn’t know how to complete the task successfully? If the task got easier, without him removing the change from your pocket himself, would the conversion rate magically go up? Of course not, because the choice not to give was explicitly made — or implicitly, but it was a decision nonetheless — and was based upon an individual’s motivations.

Contrived example? Maybe. But it’s important to note, without the desire to take action — something your audience controls 100% — it doesn’t matter how easy the task is to complete, or how efficient a process it is.

So, here’s my advice should you find yourself in the unenviable — but let’s face it, all too common — position of trying to determine the best course of action for improving your business online: Stop. Take a step back. Consider that while you want more revenue, more revenue requires more people taking action. But people only do what they want to do.

You have to give them what they want in order to get what you want. Your job is to understand what your customers truly want and help them get it. Then, and only then, does it make sense to try and smooth out the process by removing the stumbling blocks from their path. Remember, 99% of our challenges online have little to do with technology but, rather, with words on the screen before them.

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P.S. – What brought on this little rant? Our friends across the pond at E-Consultancy came up with a list of their hall of fame “User Experience gurus” based on a survey of their audience. Our esteemed founders, Jeffrey and Bryan, were selected for the list. Flattered as Jeffrey and Bryan were, those who’ve followed our work over the years know our collective disdain for the casual use of the “guru” label these days.

In case you didn’t read Robert’s post from last week, where Jeffrey suggests that we marketers need to “get over” ourselves, it should give you some context. A few days later — while, as Jeffrey put it, the woman behind the counter at his local Starbucks still didn’t know who he was despite all the publicity – another list came out with an amendment to the E-Consultancy list where both Seth Godin, and Eisenbergs were left off. This new list was created by David Armano, who runs the widely popular Logic + Emotion blog. (If you haven’t read David’s stuff, his manifesto is what converted me into a regular reader. Although I often disagree with his approach, Logic + Emotion comes highly recommended.)

David’s perspective in removing Seth, Jeffrey & Bryan was that they’re too much in the marketing camp to be considered “User Experience”. My question, though, is this: “Would you prefer to have the experience designed by a top Information Architect but never planned with a deep understanding of the audience’s needs? Or would you prefer to plan the experience according to human motivations, then adjust the architecture to match?”

I think you know my answer.

1.) eHarmony.com
2.) Evite.com
3.) Meez.com
4.) MySpace.com
5.) SecondLife.com

Although most of these are real stinkers in terms of design, usability, or both, I don’t completely agree with their thinking. Remember Boo.com?

Who do you feel should be crowned “worst site”?

The Rimm-Kaufman Group’s Larry Becker writes about a recent study suggesting that:

. . .high growth companies are not evaluating and improving their home page designs in a systematic way. By comparing the home pages of the Fortune 30 against Inc Magazine’s fastest growing companies, researchers from Minnesota State University found the Fortune 30 had a usability score over 36% higher than the fast growing companies.

Sure, the brands in question were compared on “best practices” from 2001, but it seems the bigger brands are still beating the smaller guys at the fundamentals.

How has usability–good or bad–changed your opinion of a brand? Let’s hear some stories in the comments…

Sadly, said Mr Nielsen, the rush to embrace Web 2.0 technology meant that many firms were turning their back on the basics.

“They should get the basics right first,” he said. “Sadly most websites do not have those primary things right.“

There was a risk, he said, of a return to the dotcom boom days when many sites, such as Boo.com, looked great but were terrible to use.

“That was just bad,” he said. “The idea of community, user generated content and more dynamic web pages are not inherently bad in the same way, they should be secondary to the primary things sites should get right.“

“The main criticism or problem is that I do not think these things are as useful as the primary things,” he said.

Wow. Besides that “secondary things aren’t as useful as primary things,” what exactly concrete did we learn there?

The term Web 2.0 is already burdened with Gumby-like elasticity, so it hardly needs to be the logo (pun intended) for a return to the bubble days of the late 90’s–especially, without defining what it actually is*.

Aren’t websites “more usable” today than they were then? Absolutely. So, a better question for Jakob would be, with so many of the top sites focusing on usability for so many years, why aren’t Conversion Rates any higher? According to the latest Shop.org numbers, they’re not even trending upward.

If he’s right, and the “web is a tool” users, as most usability practitioners would like to call your site’s visitors (can you think of any positive meanings to the word ‘users’?), attempt to accomplish tasks, Conversion Rates (the ratio of actions taken per total visitors) should have risen each-and-every year (until, naturally, the big-bad Web2.0 trend came to bring them crashing down ).

The web is no more a tool than a print catalog, social club, newspaper, radio, television or a brick-and-mortar storefront, but it’s far more experiential and participatory.

What’s sad about many of today’s websites is not the abstract “things” they don’t do well (nor whether these mysteries are primary or secondary); rather, that they simply haven’t taken the time to understand our [the audience's] needs and plan the experience in advance to ensure those needs are met. Instead, they’ve been retrofitting Marketing 1.0 into a new medium, just as they have done with every medium that came before it.

It doesn’t take a “guru” to know that the Internet is fundamentally different than everything that preceded it. It’s continuously evolving and is less about technology than communicating effectively.

Online planning is simple–albeit not easy–and will help you to not confuse the forest for the trees. Don’t believe me? Let the three questions be your guide, fix one scenario on your site, or let’s work on a new campaign with you and measure the results. Be sure and let us know how the experiment turns out, though!

(*Sidenote: On the design side, I came across a great style guide for designing “Web2.0″ sites, by Ben Hunt. Even though, from a conversion standpoint, I wouldn’t agree with 100% of Ben’s conclusions, any designer who exclaims “Design the content, not the page” is A-OK in my book!)

(PPS: Criticizing “Uncle Jakob” is up there with heresy in some circles, I know. Those who reside in such circles may not want to attend my talk with Todd Follansbee at the Usability Professionals Association tomorrow night in NYC.)

With “moms, dads & grads” season in full swing, e-commerce sites can use all the bright ideas they can get–and these tips, if not all new, are timeless (I especially like #15… cracked me up).

Which of these techniques have you used? Did any of them improve conversion?

Ever find yourself clicking more that once? The lazy programmer’s/designer’s way of dealing with that is to tell you not to click more than once. How well do you follow instructions?

They could have done a quick search to gray out the submit button. Once they’re done with this, you can talk to them about using the word ’submit’ on the button.

Isn’t this better? Have any other examples you could share?