Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category
Posted on October 25, 2011 by Travis Loncar
I think you’ll agree that an ever-changing search algorithm is dynamic in its engineers’ consistent efforts towards development, refinement, and ultimately, improvement. The end goal of any algorithm update, however large or small, is certainly not detraction from quality. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. An update is made, we can assume, to improve upon the quality of the results – no matter how insignificant-seeming the percentage of results affected. When I search “all about poodles,” I want to learn all about poodles – not play minesweeper with pop up and banner ads. Mind you, overall improvement does not necessarily translate to individual ranking increases; we know this all too well. With positive change comes almost certain hardship for those that are oppositely negative. Fortune favors the brave – yes. Similarly, though, misfortune handpicks the irresponsibly audacious. Just ask BMW or J.C. Penney – both of which have suffered the unrelenting punitive blows of Google’s “manual action.”
An algorithm update, in some sense, is the addition of an automation process to carry out an action that was previously executable only by handpicking or “manual action.” As you can imagine, penalizing (or rewarding) sites on a case to case basis is both laughably uneconomical and far too permissive of subjective, human analysis. It’s fairly intuitive, then, that the more frequently a particular rule needs applied, the more likely it is that that rule will become an integral part of the algorithm. For instance, when I search to learn more about our fluffy, white friends, the results at the top of the SERPs are largely informative and (more importantly) exactly what I’m looking for. Before Panda (which came with harsh penalties for websites with thin content), I might not have been so lucky. Anyways, that’s for another day. For now, we’ll focus on sentiment in search. Where is it going? Where has it been? And can its analysis be translated effectively and efficiently into the current search algorithm? Let’s have at it!
The Current State of Sentiment in Search
First off, let’s define the “sentiment” of an online vote (be it a link, review, service testimonial, etc.) as the connotation (positive, negative, or neutral) with which said vote is casted. While the link is traditionally recognized as the primary vote metric, developments in social technology and online listing review systems have broadened the user’s ability to convey relative, measurable sentiment within minutes (or even seconds). If you liked Christina’s recent blog post on ‘keyword not provided‘ or tweeted about Jim’s take on flow visualization in GA, you’ve engaged socially in conveying positive sentiment, or casting a positive vote for the respective post. On the other hand, if you found such disfavor in the stale-tasting coffee at the local donut shoppe that you felt obligated to share that negative experience with potential customers online (perhaps through a Google Places listing review), you’ve conveyed negative sentiment, or casted a negative vote for that business.
While we can’t be sure how these signals are weighted in the current algorithm, we can certainly infer that the integration process is well under way. With Google’s release of the +1 button and specific markup for reviews and rich snippets, it’s a reasonable assumption to make that the link is no longer the lone indicator of online sentiment. Notice, though, that the majority of these indicators are geared towards users sharing positive experiences (perhaps with exception to negative reviews). Although many custom blog platforms allow users to cast a negative vote for a given post with a thumbs-down, major social platforms (from which search engines actually collect data) like Facebook have yet to implement such an option. How, then, without clear-cut social signals, do we derive negative sentiment from a given comment or review? And perhaps more importantly, how do we go about deriving negative sentiment from the original vote metric – the link?
Sentiment Analysis – A Work in Progress
To preface this section, I’d like to recommend some light reading – a New York Times article (which Robbin suggested to me) that inspired this post (as it probably has many of the more recent debates on sentiment in search). The article details the much-chagrined success story (and subsequent fall) of an online eye glasses vendor who utilized the power of negative votes (provided by intentionally provoked customers) to leverage his company’s organic search presence. I’d like to spare you another poodle analogy, but honestly, I can’t resist. This should paint a fairly representative picture of the article (for those of you who are saving it for a rainy day).
If a fictitious John from John’s Poodle Emporium trains his dogs to be utterly disobedient to their renters, there’s a good chance that John’s business is going to receive plenty of negative reviews online. With no sentiment analysis, though, a review is a review and a link is a link. Online poodle forums and blogs are abuzz with horror stories about John’s Poodle Emporium (occasionally even linking to his site). Little do they know, they’re fueling the very fire that they seek to put out – sending link juice from relevant websites onto John’s site. John punks his Poodle-loving patrons and moves onto the next group of clients the town over (who haven’t bothered to check out some online reviews). All the while, his rankings are shooting through the roof, providing him with a healthy influx of new customers to mistreat intentionally.
Okay, back to reality. That was bad, but you get the idea. While Google affirms that the the real vendor’s rankings should be attributed to link juice from high authority news outlets (like the New York Times), citing the presence of the rel=”nofollow” link attribute on many of the negative review sites, the causation is there, nonetheless. Be it direct or indirect, in this case, negative sentiment yielded positive results.
How Do We Combat This?
Needless to say, the article prompted almost immediate action from Google. After doing their due diligence, they found that cases similar to that in the New York Times article were not as uncommon as they had originally thought. As we discussed earlier, a high volume of problematic, penalty-deserving websites can often complicate manual action. However, when all of these websites are linked by a common infraction, the likelihood that the penalties can be distributed algorithmically is much higher. In this case, the search engineers at Google were able to implement a quick, algorithm-intensive fix that penalizes online vendors who treat their customers poorly or unfairly. While we can’t be sure that this solution is completely free of sentiment consideration, we can be sure that sentiment analysis is not the foundation of the underlying framework. In fact, Google has admitted that although they have a “world-class sentiment analysis system,” they’ve yet to find a way to effectively implement that system within the current algorithm.
The Way of the Future?
It seems simple, doesn’t it? Just introduce an algorithm update that mandates that all crawls take into account the sentiment of the text surrounding a given link. If the connotation of the “context clues” is primarily positive, treat the link as a positive vote. If negative, weight the link with a negative value. Simple enough, right? Actually . . . not so much. We could pick the simplicity of this solution apart all day, so I’ll spare you the countless refutations in place of one (for which I’ll pose a rhetorical question). Aren’t some of the most important modern issues also the most polarizing issues? And, in our context, should a website pertaining to one of these issues be devalued because the negative sentiment nearly washes the positive? Hardly, in my opinion. A vote, whether positive or negative, is still an indication of care. As long as people care about a given issue or web page (and are willing to pay testament to their sentiments), as things stand, the results that they see will be based on sheer popularity.
With all that we’ve considered, many points remain mute. Incorporating user sentiment in search, whether socially, through review aggregators, or by sentiment analysis, is a tricky little game. Considering the tremendously impactful implications that a major sentiment-related algorithm change could have, it’s a game that needs to be played with the utmost tact and care. That said, I’m rather confident that user reviews, testimonials, social votes, context clues surrounding links, and even the sentiment of anchor text will continue to play larger roles in both organic and local rankings. Undoubtedly, the technology behind these metrics (and consequently, their popularity among users) will continue to develop in the future. This puts further onus on coinciding algorithmic development targeting search sentiment. Again, the end goal is better results for the user – or better information about poodles for curious dog lovers. If, by implementing a functional, discriminatory sentiment analysis system in the search algorithm, we’re able to achieve this, then I’m all for it. Personalized search is the way of the future. Sentiment analysis is just another step in the right direction . . . well, at least on the timeline.
What are your thoughts on sentiment in search? Are all votes created equal, or should positive and negative sentiment play a role in valuing a link? Have you observed any noticeable ranking changes since you’ve enabled social “voting” on your pages? Share your thoughts and experiences!
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Search Engine Optimization, Usability
Posted on February 16, 2011 by Jonathan Weber
The Google Analytics dashboard doesn’t give you a lot of options. You click the “Add to Dashboard” button in a report and you get what you get: depending on the report, it might be a pie chart, or a graph of the metric over time, or the top 5 rows of the report. It’s OK for a quick snapshot, but it’s not very customizable. In fact, there are lots of third-party tools to build a better dashboard.
But the GA dashboard just might be better than you think. A few of us were sitting around the table at LunaMetrics yesterday and the topic came up, and we made a few observations of how useful the dashboard can be.
1. Save a filter
You already know you can navigate to any of the reports and add them to your Dashboard, rearrange them, and get rid of the ones you don’t want.
But did you realize that if you filter the report (using the containing/excluding filter at the bottom of a report, or the Advanced Filter), when you add that report to the Dashboard, that filter is saved? For example, if I filter the Keywords report to exclude “luna” (to show just our non-branded keywords) and then add the report to the Dashboard, I see just the non-branded keywords.
This means, for example, that you can have multiple Top Content reports in your Dashboard, each filtered for different sets of pages. Or multiple Keywords reports, each filtered for different keywords.
The not-so-nice part is, the label of the report doesn’t say anything about that, just “Keywords” for all of them. See #4 below for a trick to help in this department.
2. Drill down
If my business is selling widgets in a storefront in Schenectady, I probably don’t need the world map from the Map Overlay report on my Dashboard.
But fortunately, I can drill down at whatever level I like — continent, country, state, city — and add the drilled down report to the dashboard.
This works for any report: drill down to a specific traffic source, a specific page, whatever you like.
3. It’s a permalink to the report
The really nice thing about #1 and #2 is not just that you get the report on the Dashboard. It’s that “View Report” link at the bottom of the widget, which takes you directly to the report. It’s a good way of saving reports you go back to over and over. Instead of taking 5 clicks to navigate there and apply a filter or drill down, you get there in 1 click straight from the Dashboard.
4. Name reports better with Custom Reports (kudos to John Henson for pointing this one out)
Using a Custom Report allows you to change the name of the report so that instead of seeing “Top Content” for multiple reports, you could see “Articles by Tim”, “Articles by Tom”, etc.
By simply recreating the report you are interested in as a Custom Report, you can name it whatever you want. For example, you could create a Custom Report named “Articles by Tim”, filter that report to only show Tim’s articles, then add it to the Dashboard. Then create another Custom Report (which may well be exactly the same except for the name and filter) named “Articles by Tom”, filter that report to only show Tom’s articles, and add that to the Dashboard as well.
What you end up with is a much easier to read Dashboard report. The titles are much more descriptive and easier to identify.
5. Apply an Advanced Segment across lots of reports at once (kudos to Dorcas Alexander for this one)
Advanced Segments are great for looking at just the audience that you’re interested in, and especially useful because you can use them across almost all the reports in Google Analytics to see just that audience. But if I want a summary of information, I might be stuck applying that Advanced segment and compiling data from several different reports.
You can also apply Advanced Segments from the Dashboard to see a quick view of all the reports segmented at once. This can make getting the picture of what your segment is doing that much quicker and easier.
6. Export and email the Dashboard
Instead of maintaining emails for multiple reports (even with the “Add to Existing” feature, this can sometimes be a pain), you can also just choose to email the Dashboard report, and you get an attachment with data from all the reports you’ve added to the Dashboard. Now, if you want to add a report to your scheduled email, just add it to the Dashboard and you’re done.
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Usability
Posted on January 11, 2011 by Christina Keffer
The other day, I was hunting on the internet for lunch and I stumbled onto a restaurant I hadn’t ordered from in a long time. It turns out that they had added an “order online option” which automatically gave them the edge on all the other Pizza mongers in Pittsburgh (with the exception of Dominos, who has one of the best order online setups I have EVER seen. Unfortunately, I’m not the biggest fan of Dominos pizza.)
The checkout process was like a cheap date: not pretty, but super easy. And at the very end, the best part: A tip calculator!
Now let me momentarily digress. My ability to do math in my head is probably rivaled by that of – oh I don’t know- a crack addicted chihuahua. Because of this handicap, I have a pretty odd method of tip-leaving that is based more on the type of service that I’m tipping for than the actual percentage of whatever I paid for in the first place.
Usually (always….) this really works out well for whoever I’m tipping. For instance. Bartenders get $1 and whatever change I get for every drink, even if it’s just Coke. (If I don’t have a tab. If I have a tab, the tips probably average way more per drink since by that point I’m a drunk crack addicted chihuahua.)
For dinners, it’s typically between $10 and $20 depending on how often my water glass gets filled up, regardless of whether I’m at Tom’s Diner or Bravo’s. If I’m eating at a really nice place, it’s likely that the Boy is paying, and I needn’t bother about such things at tips. For delivery drivers, it’s usually at least $3 if not $5, depending on the weather, the challenges my location poses, the length of time they have to drive etc.
Now back to the story at hand. This awesome tip calculator not only calculated my tip based on percentage of what I paid for my pasta, but also allowed me to simply click on the right number. In this case, 20% was all of $2.90. 20% is also, well, a fair tip for someone who just had to cross a bridge to get to me on a relatively nice day. So that is what I left them.
Had this nifty tip calculation feature not existed, that driver would have gotten a much higher tip. This got the hamsters in my carb-starved mind sluggishly running in their wheels. This poor low-tipped driver might only be an example of a greater issue. As website usability testers (as well as SEOs and analysts) we deal with usability every day, and the general rule is: the more usable the better. But is this really true? Might occasionally limiting a user’s possible actions actually result in MORE money? Well, probably, yes. In some cases. Like the following:
The Pros And Cons of a Really User Friendly Website
Sometimes, the very things that may make a site super-usable can also have some unforeseen and unwanted repercussions. However, it’s a thin and wavering gray line. Lots of usability experts/the books of information they publish preach that we should include easy, intuitive navigation, lots of leading information etc. and they are totally right. Except when they’re wrong. Look and PPC landing pages for instance. You (usually) don’t want a full horizontal and vertical navigation with bread crumbs and everything else included on the landing page. That would make it super usable, but it might also lead the targeted traffic to pages less suited to actual conversion. They might like what they see, but offering them more choices at that point might lose you the revenue. That is a great example of how usability best practices can lose you money. Here are a few more:
Decision Paralysis
Have you ever been faced with so many options that you decide not to pick anything? I have. Recently. I usually find myself making a midnight run to the nearest Walmart the day before any given holiday to scrape up last gems in the picked over card racks. It normally takes me 10 minutes, because there are a limited amount of cards that don’t have moving parts or sound effects left. It makes my decision easy. Two days ago, I was being completely, uncharacteristically, ridiculously forward-thinking and found myself looking at Valentine’s day cards.
Faced with an entire AISLE full of cards, I found myself completely incapable of making a decision. They were grouped together, but only by relationship (daughter to mother, husband to wife, child to parent etc.) It would have been way more useful if they had been subdivided further into genre (daughter to mother/funny or husband to wife/ risque) That would have limited the quantity of cards that I would have seen initially, but would have made the entire process more manageable, and I would have walked out of there with a girlfriend to boyfriend/funny card and no problem.
There’s a very fine line between too many easily accessible options and not enough as any medium to large sized e-commerce site webmaster will tell you.
Lower Average Conversion Value
This idea of usability adversely affecting conversion value brings us back to the thing I noticed with the tip calculator, but there are many other cases where additional choices may lead to lower conversion size. Here are some possibilities:
- Service Package Size: Many different packages of services. Lots of SAAS companies have this problem. They have the “Deluxe” package, followed by the Really Deluxe, Super Deluxe, Awesome Deluxe, Super Awesome Deluxe, Giant Enterprise Deluxe with a Cookie, and maybe some more after that. One one hand, breaking out services in this way creates more customized packages that are likely to be attractive to almost every conceivable type of client. On the other hand, offering too many graded choices will often cause clients that would potentially want the Awesome Deluxe package to choose the Super Deluxe one instead because they want to save that extra $50 a month. Users typically choose the middle of 3 packages. You can lump your services together however you want behind the scenes, but don’t sacrifice order size just to try to reach everyone at once on the conversion page of your site.
- Shipping Options: Offering a half dozen shipping and insurance options and carriers is often unnecessary and may cost you revenue, even if the process of choosing these is dead easy and intuitive on the website. Better by far to include insurance (if necessary) in a flat rate shipping cost and add one other rush option at a premium (or a similar two choice process.) If the user made it all the way to the shipment selection portion of the checkout, they’re rather invested and as long as the cost isn’t way outside of their expectations (which you can manage along the way), they will happily pay. You don’t WANT them opting out of an option that can make you money, and by providing those options you’re inviting them to do that.
- Loss leaders: A website is not a restaurant, and the happy hour model is not always effective. Faced with the choice between an inexpensive single product and a higher-priced gift basket containing that product on the same page, there is a much lower likelihood that the user will choose the more expensive gift basket. Giving them a lower cost alternative in the menu might be a reasonable alternative.
Information Overload
Everyone knows copy is really important to a website. From an SEO perspective, it gives the search engines something to index. From a usability perspective, it gives the user needed information to encourage them through the buying funnel. From a… well you get the point. You need copy. Arguably, on a truly nice and usable site, the copy will be formatted in a way that is not overwhelming (broken up by pictures, bullet points, ordered lists etc.) However, sometimes, the sheer volume of product description can actually turn users off. Make sure that you’re taking all phases of the buying funnel into consideration when designing how massive copy will appear on the site. Take care of your impulsive, ready-to-buy clients up top and then let the other information settle into tabs or at least below your strong calls to action. Otherwise, you risk overwhelming your user.
Hopefully this post was somewhat helpful. Even though the common sense, often repeated maxims are present, I thought it was interesting to look at how, even if you do everything right, you might still lose money. I think it’s helpful to occasionally remember that there are two sides to a usable site. You want to make sure that you have a site that CONVERTS.
In other news, I had a hard time finding good, general examples. Anyone know of any sites that are so usable you want to hit them with your keyboard? Thanks!
View Comments (7 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
Posted on October 11, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Last week, I was at Big Picture Communications , a marketing and research agency here in Pittsburgh. We talked about their Google Analytics, their SEO and their website in general. And then I showed them one of my favorite tools, usertesting.com.
They *loved* it. (And who wouldn’t?) Fast, inexpensive, great results if you ask great questions. The Big Picture Communications thought process, though, was so interesting.
Thought #1: “We could do this for our own site.”
Thought #2: “We could do this for customer sites.”
Thought #3: “We could do this for our (and our customers’) competitors’ sites.”
That last thought is so powerful. SEOs are so smart about gleaning insight into their craft from competitive sites, I wonder why conversion artists don’t do the same? (OK, you do. So go ahead and comment. Would love to hear from you.) Instead of listening to real users say, “I love that widget,” or, “I’ll click, but that’s way too expensive for me,” we rely on our instincts.
Wouldn’t it be great to write a protocol for the target demographic that asks questions like,
- “What are the three things you love most about this [competitor's] site and why?”
- “What are the three aspects of this [competitor's] site that you dislike the most or that you found the most difficult to use?”
- “Would you recommend this site to your friends/colleagues, why or why not?”
Then, instead of Competitor Copy Condition, we’ll have something to test. We might even become Compassionate Contenders, as we learn that users don’t quite love the competition’s site.
Robbin
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
Posted on May 24, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Our old website had one of the worst bounce rates I ever see. (And the design was so 1999….)
Nevertheless, I put up with it for a long time, because who has time to write and design a new site? That is, until I tried usertesting.com, a story I wrote about last summer. (The short version: it was one thing to see the bounce rate in GA and know in your heart of hearts that you have to fix it. It was quite another to hear people tell me that the only site we were neglecting, our own, was significantly less than wonderful.)
The redesign took almost an entire year. Let’s face it, customers came first. But as we did the redesign, we listened very closely to the things that we heard in our first set of user tests. The most important lessons they taught us were the same ones we try to teach our customers:
- They wanted to understand what we did immediately (i.e. within five seconds)
- They wanted text they could skim
- They wanted to see pricing
- They wanted to know more About Us
So we worked it (and it was hard — we wanted to create text that customers could scan, but not lose rankings. We wanted to talk About Us but not be All About Us.)
At this point, we have only a week of data. Not exactly statistically significant, but I can see that our bounce rate for the site (i.e. not including our blog) went from somewhere in the high 60′s to somewhere in the low 40′s. (I highlighted the comparisons in the two screen shots.) We did the identical user tests as before, and while we still got some criticism, we also got a lot of compliments.
More later, when we have more data. I am especially looking forward to see if/why/whether the decrease in bounce rate on blog pages keeps up too.
Robbin
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Google Analytics, Usability
Posted on April 2, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
April Fool’s Day is over and life on the interwebz has gone back to normal. We can go back to reading blog posts without questioning their validity. We can click on links without fear of being Rickrolled (go ahead – click on it, I dare you).
Our post from yesterday was fun, short, and completely 100% false. But it did give us a chance to do some testing (what kind of web analysts would we be if we didn’t throw in a bit of research?). In our Fool’s Day post, we linked to the Rick Astley music video – “Never Gonna Give You Up” – masking it as a link to an announcement from Google about things that would get your site banned. We linked to it in three places – the first paragraph, second paragraph and in the last sentence.
Side note: I thought it was bad when “The Wheels on the Bus” song got stuck in my head for a week. That was nothing compared to 2 days of Astley.
We tagged each link with an onclick event to see how many of you took the bait, and which bait you took. Here are the numbers:
Pageviews – 255
Unique pageviews – 171
Link 1 – 54 clicks
(anchor text: “Read the full announcement here”)
Link 2 – 23 clicks
(anchor text: “specific features listed”)
Link 3 – 19 clicks
(anchor text: “the announcement”)
Not surprisingly, the first link got the lion’s share of clicks. This is a good reminder for your next newsletter, press release, e-mail or blog post: put the important information (and links) at the top.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Blog Analytics, Usability
Posted on March 3, 2010 by Robbin Steif
It is amazing what our visitors know and don’t tell us. That’s why we have to keep asking them, and surveying, and looking at our analytics
A couple days ago, I was working with a customer on his website, and saw that as soon as the visitor chose to put something into the shopping cart, she would be confronted with a sign-in requirement. There wasn’t even an option to proceed as a guest.
“Well, that must be a real turn-off,” I said — too quickly, it turns out. Because, the very next thing we did was go look at his Google Analytics. We saw that less than 10% of the visits that got to that page exited.
“Well,” I continued, sure that I knew his customers and visitors better than they knew themselves, “Let’s see what it says for new visitors only. I’ll bet that new visitors, who don’t already have sign-ins, exit in droves.” And you guessed it, we saw that less than 10% of the visits that got to that page exited.
So we get back to the need for analytics, user testing and multivariate testing, because we never know what our visitors really want.
Robbin
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: A/B and MVT, Conversion Science, Surveys, Usability, Web Analytics
Posted on February 23, 2010 by Christina Keffer
If you own a nail factory, your competitors are other people who make nails right? They make nails to build buildings with and supply contractors who build houses. And they also sell five different shades of green metallic polish and have more sizes of acrylic applications than you. Oh, and how could I forget hoof nippers? How many hoof nippers for farriers do you have, Nail Factory Owner Guy(or Girl)? Did that stop making sense to you? To clarify the issue, here’s the Google search result page for the key phrase “Nail Supplier”
Clearly, the owners of that nail factory had no idea what they were up against online. If they came to me and asked me to tell them why they weren’t ranking higher than their industry competitors even though their websites stunk, I would tell them that their competitor for that term is really EZNails Beauty Supply. After they finished laughing at me, I would try to explain that it’s true because — wait for it — online competitors are not always industry competitors!
But Beauty Supplies? Really?
Yes, really. Online competition transcends the boundaries of industry competition and falls messily into the world of words. Online, a nail factory is not competing against EZnails for market share… they’re not even competing with them for customers. A contractor looking for wholesale 10 penny nails is not going to spend his money buying 10 inch long acrylic claws instead. He’s going to take one look at that results page, sigh in resignation, and refine his search using industry specific terms. What that nail company is REALLY competing for is high rankings for the key phrase “Nail Supplier.” (Incidentally, here is the search results page for the keyphrse “10 penny nail supplier.” Way more reasonable.)
There are other less hilarious instances of industries competing with sites that do not belong to industry competitors. It happens in the medical industry all the time. In a search for “Pediatricians, PA” there is not a single actual pediatric practice until the very bottom of the page.
Pediatricians are competing with these directories for the attention of potential patients. Several of these directories have paid ads so they even make money off the leads.
Now that I know who my online competitors are, what do I do?
There are two options here.
- Beat these sites at their own game. Now that you know what you’re up against, it might be the time for that redesign, or forking over the money for SEO.
- The other, less costly, less time intensive solution is to redefine your online competitive space. Remember that contractor who sighed in disgust and searched for a more industry-specific term? Find those long-tail terms and optimize for them instead of bashing your head against a wall of acrylic nail-selling beauty supply stores.
Both of these solutions involve redefining your web presence to a certain extent. Look at it this way. If you were a mom and pop cake bakery in Pittsburgh and there was another cake bakery across the street, wouldn’t you constantly strive to outstrip them by making sure your window display was better, more artistic, and with more icing in hopes of catching that fickle bridezilla’s attention? Though you’re competing for (and with) words in the online arena, the idea is the same.
Polish your content the way you would polish the glass windows of your store front, since it’s through these portals that your potential customers see who you really are and what you have to offer.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Usability, Writing for the web
Posted on February 2, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Looking at a website written in a foreign language is incredibly insightful. You may not get the immediate gratification of being able to easily find the location of a particular Prada shoe store, but you’ll find out a lot about yourself and how you use the site.
Let me preface this post by giving you all a little background about my recent activities. I recently went on a 10 day trip to Rome, Italy to visit my mother who has an apartment there for a month.
Rome, with its seemingly never-ending wealth of culture, beauty and delicious, delicious gelato and amazing boots kept me completely occupied about 16 hours of the day. But at the end of the day as it got dark and cold and damp, I would come home and indulge in a tiny cup of espresso and my internet addiction.
Though I was under strict orders from Robbin to avoid work at all costs, I still found myself dabbling around the web looking at where clients ranked in Google from Italy and paying attention to the differences in the types of results that came up when searching in Italy (for instance, the local 7 pack wasn’t as prevalent there even if I did searches for local shoe stores etc.) I must admit, I was also researching where to get fur/leather/boots and all the other things I’d made up my mind to purchase while in Rome.
I should also mention that I do not speak Italian at all. I took some Latin in high school, but that’s about as close to Italian as I’ve ever come. This profound lack of literacy made wandering around on Italian websites a somewhat confusing venture. It was only after three days of searching around for various things that I realized that what I was actually doing was usability testing.
Interesting Insights
It occurred to me that, in the nanoseconds of time that users give websites to prove their worth, the actual words on the page matter slightly less than the overall composition and clarity of the webpage. I realized what a unique experience it was to have to translate meaning from colors and shapes rather than actual words on the site.
Since all (yes all) of the Italian the shoe store sites I drooled over were flash sites I won’t use them for this usability blog post. However, I was on a few Italian travel sites trying to find good prices for tickets for inter-European travel (for funsies…I was just curious about how much Italians paid for their vacations) and quickly just how difficult it is to use the Italian versions of Orbitz, and Priceline. Then I stumbled upon Edenviaggi and was immediately impressed.
The first thing that struck me about this site was its clarity. I felt that my eye could rest somewhere and, before I even knew what the words on the page meant, I felt like I could stop there and figure it out. It lacked the overwhelming info-packed clutter that plague so many other travel sites. The call to action is clear and was visible even on my tiny little netbook. The form was quick and easy to fill out and the resulting information was exactly what I wanted. It was the perfect research site, and I could immediately understand it without knowing a single word of Italian.
Translate Your Own Site
Now, if you really want to screw with your head, take a look at your own baby: the website whose content you crafted so carefully and whose design you agonized over. Go to translate.google.com and enter in the URL. Make sure you’re translating into a language you don’t know. Then take some time to click around your site, or a competitor’s site. Without text to guide you, can you figure out what to do? Is the website set up in such a way that you intuitively know how to get where you’re going?
It’s likely that without directions and prompts it’s going to be really hard to figure out where to go and what to do. Try checking out or filling out a contact form. Ask yourself how you could make that process more intuitive
In conclusion, I want to make a few clarifications. I’m not trying to imply that if you can’t get through your site in another language you (and your site) fail. The actual words on the site are integral to the user, and can’t be discounted.
I guess I’m just offering a bit of a unique perspective here. It’s sort of like how some famous artist (I wish I could remember who!) used to draw faces from the bottom up instead of the top down in order to free himself from the preconceptions inherent in doing something in an entrenched pattern. By removing one part of the website, you can gain insights into how you view other things and maybe some flaws will jump out at you.
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Usability
Posted on January 11, 2010 by Christina Keffer
There are a lot of ways one can make their website into a conversion driving machine. Site design tweaks, endless A/B and multivariate testing, exit surveys (gasp!) are some of the hardest to pull off. However, some of the most obvious usability issues often get ignored. There have been countless roundups of these issues, and a lot of them are really technical in nature.
I’m going to keep this one really simple and try to make these tips as actionable and specific as possible. That might mean that they don’t apply to a specific kind of site, but there’s something here for everyone.
Usability Issue #1: Browser Size and Your Call to Action
Just because you (or your web designer) has a 40 inch wrap-around monitor does not mean that your users do. Making sure that your primary call to action is included at the very top of the page. If you have a variable width website, great. If not, make sure that button/request/link/etc. is close to the top left hand corner. Everyone sees that corner. Additionally, frontload your keywords in your content. The sooner they see the words on the page that likely brought them there, the better.
Usability Issue #2: Where’s the form? You mean I have to do all that?
One of the most important types of conversion for most websites is data gathering. Therefore, one of the most popular soft conversion goals is to have the user fill out an information request form. Whether its demographic information that you’re after or email addresses for your newsletter, you want people to fill out this form.
To encourage users to fill out this form, webmasters are usually willing to jump through some hoops. Maybe they require a form to be filled out to access parts of the site or tantalize users with premium membership perks. However, everyone knows that requiring users to fill out forms is just another barrier surrounding the sale. Added to that, Most of the time, the form is buried more than three pages in the site and is hard to find, and a lot of the time, the form is lengthy and takes lots of time to fill out completely.
This is the point in time when priorities need to be set. What is the the MOST important piece of information that the website it supposed to garner through the form. If it’s the email address (and it usually is) put a simple, three line form on every page of the site. First Name. Last Name. Email Address. That’s it. It’s visible and it’s so brief that filling it out won’t interrupt the user’s experience enough to prohibit them from doing it. If you want age, street address, phone number etc. by all means create that form and bury it wherever you want. But make an abridged version available as many places on the site as possible.
Usability Issue #3: Information Overload
Deciding how to present necessary information in a user-friendly way is a challenge for every website in every industry. It’s usually really hard for webmasters to decide what the most important information is and where to place it. Figuring out the overall purpose of the webpage in question is a good first step.
If the home page is supposed to introduce the company in question and showcase a specific product, limit the information to these two tasks. Keep in mind that your navigation bar will take up space and attention. Keep the copy as sparse and concise as possible and get to the point right away.
Avoid overloading every page with extraneous elements like rotating testimonials, banners and the like. There are specific places for such things, where they won’t detract from your focal elemetns.
Usability Issue #4: Sense of “Place”
Many times, especially with large, multilayer, thousand page sites, the user looses track of where they are and how to get back to something else they were looking at. This problem is not limited to huge sites though, it occurs on the smallest of blogs as well. There are many ways to create a sense of “place” for your user. In my opinion, the most overlooked tool is breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs (horizontal navigation links) are a great, noninvasive way to give customers a sense of place when they’re 8 levels deep on a specific product page or feature list. Breadcrumbs don’t clutter a page up, they don’t eat up a lot of real estate and they provide the added bonus of more anchor text rich links to other pages on your site (if you use them the right way.)
NewEgg.com uses breadcrumbs incredibly effectively, allowing me to navigate from a very specific product page to a more general category page quickly instead of having to find the category all over again in the side nav bar.
Usability Issue #5: Cross Browser Compatibility
If I had a dollar for every site I work on that has elements that work in Internet Explorer but not Firefox or Safari, I’d buy myself some over the knee Prada Boots. If I had a dollar for every site I come across (searching for boots?) that works in Internet Explorer but not Firefox or Chrome, I’d probably be wealthy enough to start my own fashion footware company.
It’s a sad fact that browsers interpret code differently,but that doesn’t change things. Just because you see your site one way doesn’t mean everyone does, and if your navigation is broken or your CSS has text all over the place in one browser or another, you’re limiting your audience drastically and creating a bad name for yourself. Take the time to test the look and functionality of your site across all browsers.
View Comments (16 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability, Writing for the web
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