Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category
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 (17 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability, Writing for the web
Posted on October 19, 2009 by John Henson
A website test can often involve a lot of people, IT staff, Designers, Content Owners, etc. While the technicals are fairly straight-forward, the process involved to get everyone working together can be really hard. And people *will* make mistakes.
Are you going to wait to make those mistakes while everyone is focused on you for that massive Home Page test that you just barely got approval to run after months of trying ??
Why not make those mistakes before anyone cares?
Start with a test page. Have your designer create alternate content for it, your IT staff put in the code, etc. This gives you an opportunity to talk to everyone about what you’re doing and where you’re going and why it is in their best interest to get the kinks worked out beforehand. It’s not a real page on the site so if the code is put in wrong, it’s no big deal — noone cares.
Move on to an actual page on the website that is not important to anyone. This is a slightly bigger deal than the test page, but if you screw it up, noone will probably notice. Just test something minor that noone will notice. Decide on a conversion page and look at real data. Try presenting the results.
This practice is beneficial to everyone involved, so that when the real test comes around, you’ve already made your mistakes, and hopefully, worked them out. Remember that the point of the practice is to work out the process and make sure everyone looks good when it is time to do the real first test.
John
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Usability
Posted on October 12, 2009 by Robbin Steif
Everyone works hard at their sites and then throws up a form that “seems to cover it.” But shouldn’t we work harder at our forms? After all, it is the last point the potential lead has to bail out of the conversion process.
A million years ago, when I first started LunaMetrics, I felt like there were three kinds of lead generation forms:
- Very long forms. Marketing often likes to do these kinds of forms so that the sales people will feel the leads are well-qualified (and so that Marketing knows which salesperson to send them to.)
- Very short forms that result in both good leads and crummy leads.
- Plain old stupid forms (like the kind that ask for your fax number as a required field.) I won’t even write about those today.
I made a very conscious decision to go with an extremely short form on the LunaMetrics site. It was the minimum amount of information that I needed: Name, email address and an optional place to include notes. We even pointed out how short our form was. So, it was a #2, a very short form that took good leads and bad ones.
But then we did the user testing (read about our experience with usertesting.com) that was just fascinating. One of the comments we heard from a handful of people went something like this, “What kind of a ridiculous form is that? Don’t they even need my company name? It makes me think that they are going to send me spam.”
There is no time like the present to fix easy problems. So we changed our form to include Company and Phone Number. Since the change, our conversion rate for “filled out a form,” is up 10%. And on top of that, we get much better data in our forms — people give us a link to their sites (making it way easier to check them out before calling) and willingly give out their phone numbers, too. The phone number part is the one I like the best, I can pick up the phone and call the prospect.
View Comments (4 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
Posted on September 17, 2009 by Robbin Steif
Do you write and design for the search engines or for people?
This is a topic I have been thinking about a lot, as we go into our own site redesign. Our user testing results showed people wanted a lot less text … but what about the Googlebot? There are ways around that one, but I wish I didn’t have to make that tradeoff. Certainly, we learned from our Google Analytics that we did great with the search engines, but with people, not so much.
Similarly, why do people blog all the time? Who has something to say every day of the week (and has time to get their work done too)? Recently, I subscribed to a bunch of blogs that I hadn’t been following, and one of them is religious about updating their blog every day. So, I am finally going to delete it. Why, you ask? They probably blog for the search engines, but it just makes me feel like there is yet one more thing that I am not achieving. If subscribing to a blog is a conversion for them, they lost this one.
And while I am on a rant about those who communicate too much/too little, what about all those people who have nothing better to do than tweet all day long? When their tweets drown out (in terms of screen real estate) what everyone else is saying, I stop following them. Ditto on the conversion loss here. One of my friends almost won the prize for Twitter abuse for telling me that he was going to his sister’s graduation, telling me that he was sitting at his sister’s graduation, and telling me that he had gone to his sister’s graduation.
Robbin
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Google Analytics, Usability
Posted on September 11, 2009 by Robbin Steif
I have a friend who says, “Yes Robbin, I know that testing is great, but why don’t you just start with the suckometer and make sure all those bases are covered?
In fact, most of the things on the list (if you follow that suckometer link) are really intuitive and easy to agree with. No one likes broken links, for example.
But it is amazing the number of times that I’ve looked at a site and guessed at the conversion rate and gotten it really, really wrong. Either I thought it converted famously (but in fact, it did terribly, which isn’t something that happens very often), or I thought it did terribly (and it actually performed fabulously. I feel like I see this one a lot.)
I will never forget a site that I looked at about four years ago. It was all in default font (Times Roman), way too many links, and it looked like my nephew had designed it. It was a site that sold hunting equipment, and the headquarters was in NoWheresVille, PA. I must have said something about their awful conversion rate before they told me that it was converting in the double digits. And a conversion was a sale!
I wasn’t in the target audience, and I was never going to be in the target audience. For all I know, their target audience loved the site because it was so genuine, or those visitors/customers were so comfortable with the site. It wasn’t some fancy AJAX thing and clearly, they liked it enough to spend money there.
I think that as “conversion experts,” this is a lesson we have to learn over and over again. When that website owner calls and says, “Can’t you just tell me what is wrong with my site, I really don’t want to do any testing,” the need for humility is amazing. (And humility doesn’t come easily to all of us!) Yes yes, we can tell them that their links are broken, that their site loads too slowly. But we really can’t tell them that their sites are ugly and inappropriate, because we just don’t know that.
And I guess it comes back to what a big fan I am of usertesting.com. If I am not the customer, then let’s go buy some target customers.
Robbin
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
Posted on July 29, 2009 by Jim Gianoglio
Do you have a sitemap on your website? More importantly, do you need one?
Before I answer that question, let me point out that there are two types of sitemaps – HTML and XML. The first is an actual page on your website that lists all the other pages of your website – often broken into sections. For an example, check out this sitemap. This type of sitemap is intended primarily for human visitors (not robots) to your site. The second type – XML – is only seen by the search engines robots. It too is a listing of all the pages of your site, with some additional information.
HTML Sitemaps
So, what’s the point of a sitemap page? Do visitors to your site even look at it? To answer these questions, I took a quick look at the analytics for about a dozen sites (that range from 5,000 visits a month to over 100 million). What I found from this (less than scientific) analysis is that the number of pageviews of the sitemaps pages ranged from less than .01% of total pageviews to 1.24% (with the average being .26%). See the screenshots below for a better idea of the actual numbers:
Even if only a quarter of one percent of your pageviews are to the sitemap page, depending on the amount of traffic to your site, that could be a substantial number.
(As a side note, if you’re getting a significant amount of pageviews on your sitemap page, that’s a good indicator that people can’t find what they’re looking for. Perhaps you should rethink your navigation or how you present your content.)
Aside from helping that small percentage of people who actually use it, a sitemap page has other benefits. If you have pages that are buried deep within your site, a sitemap can keep them a minimum number of clicks away from the homepage. Why is that important? It helps those pages receive link juice from the home page, as well as helping the search engines find pages that they otherwise might not see.
XML Sitemaps
So what about XML sitemaps? Basically, they can be used to let the search engines know about all of your pages. Google has some helpful information about when XML sitemaps are useful, including:
- if your site has dynamic content
- if your site is new and/or has very few links pointing to it
- if you have a lot of content pages that are not well linked from other pages on your site
Additionally, XML sitemaps let you specify information about your pages that help guide the search engines, including how frequently the pages are updated, the date each page was last modified, and the relative importance of each page. This information will help the search engines decide how frequently to crawl your pages.
Additional Resources
XML-Sitemaps.com – this online tool lets you create XML and HTML sitemaps for free (up to 500 pages)
XML Sitemap format – explains the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol
Google Study Shows Use of XML Sitemaps Helps Index Fresh Content Quicker – Bill Slawski dissects a whitepaper from Google about the effectiveness of XML sitemaps
Increasing Search Indexing Coverage With an XML Sitemap – an XML sitemap Q&A from former Googler Vanessa Fox
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Usability
Posted on May 21, 2009 by Robbin Steif
I am always amazed when site owners say, “Our customers love {whatever} about our site.”
Last week, they had an SEO day here in Pittsburgh, and I spoke on the analytics panel. So I was there at lunch when the speaker from MSN/Live got up to talk about Farecast (which was purchased by MSN a while ago) and heard her seem to know what her Farecast customers love.
I have been a Farecast user for a long, long time. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it is yet another travel site, with a unique twist: for most markets, it predicts whether fares are rising, falling, etc. For example, in this screenshot, you can see the forecast (farecast) for travel from my town to NYC (Laguardia). It’s clearly advantageous to purchase now, given that I have to travel within the next couple of weeks.
But that’s not what I love about Farecast, and I was surprised she assumed that it was. In fact, the thing I love about it is something you can 
get from other sites, like Kayak — Farecast just does a better job of it. Farecast gives you the capability to do excellent filtering on your travel selection. It’s not just that they ask when during the day you want to travel — the site actually cares what you tell it, and shows you all the prices at the various times. I know that I have to leave in the morning to be in NYC and work there that afternoon, and I know that I can’t leave the following day until the entire day of Google Analytics training is done.
It really looks like that $140 block is the one that is going to meet my needs. First of all, it is not too early in the morning for departure (after all, I don’t need to be in the city until after lunch.) After having done the GA training (which will be the following day) in NYC numerous times, I know the only good flight home is the 9:25 — a little late for my taste, but better than walking out on attendees just to get to the airport on time. And while not as inexpensive as the other fares, it’s only $140.
So — to return to my original thesis — why didn’t the MSN lady even mention that Farecast has an incredible user interface and travel usability tools to die for? Maybe she has done a lot of testing and knows what all her visitors love. After all, as my friend from the WAA, April Wilson, always says, “Don’t make your decision on this focus group of one person.” But I have a sneaking suspicion that like most sites and most products, the owners overlook the simplest of features and always care about the sexy ones.
Robbin
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
Posted on April 29, 2009 by John Henson
During some troubleshooting this week, I came across something that some of you may find useful or interesting (or maybe not.)
You may already know that the pageTracker._initData() line in the GATC has been deprecated. It can still be used however, and is often in place on many websites.
But when you call pageTracker._initData() on some pages, and Don’t call it on other pages, that is when you have a problem. It seems that the cookies are written slightly differently when initData is present vs when it is absent. This causes GA to lose track of the visitor, and lose track of how they arrived at your site (Source, Medium, etc).
Make sure you are consistent throughout your site, with pageTracker._initData(), and you should be fine. Either use it everywhere, or use it nowhere.
— Update/Addition/Clarification:—
If you include initData you need to make sure it is placed after any instructions that alter the way GA writes cookies, such as _setAllowHash(false) or _setDomainName(‘none’)
Example:
Bad:
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxxx-y”);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._setDomainName(“sub.domain.com”);
pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
Okay:
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxxx-y”);
pageTracker._setDomainName(“sub.domain.com”);
pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
* Thanks to Charles at Epik One for this addition
———————————–
John
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
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