Earlier this week, I wrote that Madame Tussauds of London is the worst tourist website in England. But in fact, it is perfectly lovely and usable if you use IE.

You try it: open up a *Firefox* browser and type in the url: http://www.madame-tussauds.co.uk/, which I made into a link for the 52% of this blog’s readers newsstand readers who use Firefox. See if you can figure out how to do anything besides visit other wax museums around the world.

I couldn’t do anything with the site, because the my computer screen looked like this

There was no navigation and no mousable links except the “visit another wax museum” stuff on the right. I kept thinking, maybe they have only one page for each city, but if so, why would they write, Book Online Now, in the blue bar at the bottom of the screen shot? Eventually, I found their site map at the very bottom of the page and was amazed that an entire site was being hidden behind the home page.

But before I blogged, I opened it up in IE. Wow, I thought, I don’t remember that navigation bar being right there where you would expect it, below the top banner:

In fact, it was just a case of the navigation getting compressed in Firefox. Most sites don’t have the kind of Firefox usage that my blog does, but I hear surveys that put usage at 18% and even over 20% in Europe. (And hey, doesn’t London count as Europe?)

History has taught me a few lessons about this problem. There is the obvious one: always check to see what your site looks like in other browsers. But this wasn’t an error they would probably have caught - they would have seen the site render nicely, and would have kept on going and may never have noticed that that thin line of navigation somehow dropped off the page. So in fact, we need to get our customers and readers to use our sites in other browsers.

A second lesson I have learned is not to expect the Madame Tussaud’s people to write me a thank you note. I always think that free user testing and lousy CGM is best handled with a comment, “Thank you so much for pointing out the Firefox problem we have. We’ll get on it right away!” But I can just imagine their response, it would probably be “All our customers use IE.” They may know that all their customers don’t use IE, but they probably don’t want to admit to it in print.

I, on the other hand, love when people write me and tell me about problems with my blog and my site. One man wrote once and told me that I had committed just the flip of the error above: my blog was messed up in IE. One lady in Massachusetts wrote me and told me that for months, My Yahoo was not picking up my feed correctly (I think FeedBurner waved a magic wand to fix that one.)

Wouldn’t it be great if sites gave away awards or just honorable mentions to customrs who cared enough to tell them that their sites weren’t working properly?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I’m going to London on Thursday for five days with my teenaged daughter. We’ve been doing the research online in an effort to pick and choose among all the great things there are to do.

She insisted that we do the London Eye, so we bought tickets online. I am somewhat amazed that I succeeded in giving my money to them.

Despite the fact that they have a six page shopping cart, it wasn’t that bad until I got to the credit card page. Here’s a screen shot that shows all the things I did wrong:

After I hit “Confirm booking,” I got an error message. The shopping cart was unhappy with the telephone number because I had included dashes. Well OK, I thought, they could have told me ahead of time or better yet, teach that field to ignore dashes, but I can handle this one, I deal with that one all the time.

So I fixed it and tried to Confirm Booking for the second time. This time the error was harder and probably cultural. Notice how the credit card number field is followed by two date fields - see the green highlighting. The first one is Start Date. The first time that I filled out the form, I just began to put my expiration date there. When the years options didn’t go past 2006, I realized that something was wrong, and then saw that whatever Start Date meant, it wasn’t mandatory. (If it isn’t mandatory, and it doesn’t cut across all cultures, and this is a really touristy thing to do, why do they include it?) Anyway, the error message yelled at me for including a month and not a year, so I dealt with the drop down box to get rid of the month. [I still have no idea what Start Date means.] I tried to Confirm Booking for the third time.

The finally one was ridiculous. It is in blue highlighting, where they ask for my name again. I gave them my name, Robbin F. Steif, and the error came back disallowing special characters. In other words, I wasn’t allowed to put a period after my middle initial.

I confirmed my booking for the fourth time and finally, they took my money.

London Eye’s site, however, doesn’t win the award for the Worst London Tourist Attraction WebSite, just because they have such a crummy shopping cart. That “honor” is reserved for Madame Tussauds Wax Museum - London. More later.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Good Experience must be the classic barefoot child of a cobbler, unable to do for themselves what they do for others.

The Good Experience website says that their mission is “is to encourage the creation of good, meaningful experiences in business and life.” That says, “usability” to me, because that’s the mental slot I have to put them in.

I met the Good Experience guys back in the winter at Shop.org in Atlanta. I gave them my card and vaguely remember telling them that they could put me on their mailing list. I was very surprised to get their first mailing because it was such a bad experience. It was all text (no html) with lots of naked links, lots of hyphens used to break the text up so that they could advertise job openings — just unreadable. I wrote Mark Hurst, the CEO, after my first disappointing experience and he explained that text pulled better for them.

I never read a single issue of their newsletter, and this weekend, I finally unsubscribed. I immediately got a “personal” email from Mark. He called me by my last name and asked me if I could help explain why I was unsubscribing. (Note: I try very hard to never let someone subscribe to my email marketing with poor information. If they have signed up with their first name in all lower case, I go in and capitalize the first word so that my marketing does not come through as, “Hi jim.” Since I know that the GE people had my business card, I was surprised, again, that they hadn’t gotten this right. I don’t remember the last time someone called me “Steif,” when they weren’t writing about me in an article.)

Anyway, I wrote back and explained that it was too hard to read the newsletter, as explained above. Mark replied that I could always go read it online and provided a helpful link. So I clicked on the link in Firefox and was confronted with the tiniest type that I have ever seen online. For completeness sake, I asked Taylor, our 22-year-old analyst, to look at it, and it was way too tiny for him to read, too. Of course, we could increase the type size, but is that a good experience? Eventually we figured out that if you open it in IE, it is not bad at all. So I guess Internet Explorer Users all get a good experience once they get past the email and Good Experience’s “personal” email.

To be fair - Mark really did reply to me in person. And it really is hard to do for yourself what you do for others, often because great gets in the way of good and you end up doing … nothing. Been there, done that.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Since the whole SEO industry is still dealing with the departure of Danny Sullivan from SES etc, I won’t go there and will just complain about conversion on his new blog/podcast (well, commenting. Maybe he doesn’t define comments as a form of conversion.)

I checked out his new site today, and I was pretty surprised when I got on the site and saw post after post, with no comments. Hmm, I thought, maybe that’s because loyal Searchcast listeners are just that, listeners. And you get the subscription so you don’t need to go to the site… still and all, a little weird. And then I tried to comment (and all I want to tell the guy is, could you please read my post about 10 mistakes that podcasters make and recognize that mistakes 3-6 were inspired by you?) But I was unable to comment, and here is why.

First, I had to create a TypeKey membership. Already a stumbling block (like asking your buyers to sign in before making a purchase). Then I went back to the site and tried to comment but I wasn’t signed in. OK, I can do this, I though. So I clicked to sign in (with my shiny new sign up) and got this:

It didn’t matter which choice I made, either way, I got the same error message:

An error occurred: This weblog requires commenters to pass an email address. If you’d like to do so you may log in again, and give the authentication service permission to pass your email address.

Eventually, in the course of writing this post, I went back to my profile, changed it to pass my email address, and now I get the error message automatically. I don’t even have to make a choice.

When the data look strange (like your 3% conversion rate just dropped to .002% or you are one of the most popular podcasters around but no one sends you comments), it’s a red flag. Maybe something really is wrong.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Don’t you just hate when you forget your password? Or worse yet, you forget both your password and your user id.

If you are desperate enough, you’ll be able to retrieve them. Plenty of sites make it easy to get them again (I lost my Offermatica password twice today and both times, got a new one within minutes. But that’s because they made it easy.)

The real problem for websites is when the user really does need to sign in (think online banking or looking at frequent flyer points online, for example) and can’t, because she forgot her information. So instead, she gets her customer service the old fashioned way, which is exactly what these companies are trying to get away from.

I’m not arguing for no passwords or everyone having “weak” passwords. But why can’t sites that require a password signin remind you of their format? If the user id is an email address, always, why don’t they tell you that? There is no security issue — anyone who wants can proceed to the signup screen to learn the format. If the password must be longer than 8 characters and include at least two non-alpha characters, why don’t they tell you that after your password fails, instead of just failing? We all have a “pool” of favorite passwords so that we don’t have to remember every word in the alphabet - if you tell me what the format is, I can probably narrow it down to three passwords and possibly succeed before I have tried too many times.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I got e-consultancy’s newsletter this morning, complete with a new blog by Tom Stewart. The post was “Why asking why is never a stupid question.” I really wanted to reply to the post, but when I went to comment, it said that I had to be logged in. Well okay, I though, I have an email address and password but when I entered them, the site told me that that email address was used to register for their newsletter (true enough) and that I had to do a different kind of registration to be able to comment on Tom’s post. So I though, sure, and I clicked on the Register Now button. In order to be able to comment on Tom’s post, I had to give them my firstname, lastname, company name, phone number, country, etc. And then there were a whole other set of fields (who am I, an agency? A vendor? etc.)

I won’t be fair and say, “In fairness to eConsultancy, some of these fields were optional.” Some were optional, but I didn’t notice that until I went back to the site to write my post. I just knew that it was early in the morning, I was plowing through my email, I wanted to comment, and I didn’t want to spend 120 seconds filling out information. (And I was told that this is only page one out of two pages that you fill out to register.) I have this conversation with customers all the time. “Make it optional,” they say about extraneous info fields, not realizing that the more you ask for, the more you turn people off, even if it is optional.

If I had been allowed to comment, my question would have been, “If this is your blog, why don’t you have a feed?” In fact, Tom’s blog does have a feed (again, I learned when I went back to write this post), but you don’t see it on the permalink and it is not even in the address bar when I look at the permalink in my Firefox.

All of which proves, what you see at a glance really matters. Maybe only 5 fields were required in that form but it felt, at a glance, like 15. As far as the feed goes - I really looked for it and didn’t see it because it isn’t even there — at least not on the permalink page. (This reminds me of a post I did about not hiding conversion information. You want them to call? Put your phone number on every page. You want them to subscribe? Get your orange icon on every page….)

I hope the folks from eConsultancy comment. Maybe they will tell us that by having a long registration, they successfully weed out tirekickers from interested prospects (always an issue in lead generation.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I really want to spend more money with a pay per click engine that caters specifically to the techiest of techie markets. But I can’t (or at least, haven’t so far) because I am scared that the button I push will kill all my current work instead of letting me spend more money.

Although this isn’t Google or Yahoo or any well-known engine, it’s the same concept. So, imagine that you’ve got lots of Ad Groups and campaigns and keywords set up, you’re spending money, you’re doing well, and you want to push the envelope a little. And then the website gives you these two choices when you try to expand your campaign to areas that they suggest:

Maybe they are saying, add these new purchases to similar categories? Add them as completely new? Finally I gather up the courage to actually click on one of these buttons and sit and watch the screen do … nothing. At this point I think, Oh, it’s definitely deleting all my work, so I hit the back button and log out and at least my successful campaigns are still successful.

Sometimes, it’s really hard to spend money.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I recently had three interesting experiences, all in the area of product features that one might make an argument for withholding.

Experience One: This product is Brand New. We have a customer who writes, on some of his product detail pages, that the product is “Brand New.” So I asked, does that mean that the products without the “Brand New” descriptor are second-hand? Refurbished? In fact, he pointed out, all of their products are brand new, but some of their less trustworthy competitors sell reused products without informing the customer. So I suggested to him that he either write, “Brand New” on all products, or if he felt compelled to highlight a few, write, “Brand New, like all our products.”

Experience Two: This hotel room is air conditioned. I was booking a hotel room in Florence, Italy and as I reviewed my options, I realized that some of the rooms included air conditioning. At first I thought that was a mistake (wouldn’t all the rooms be air conditioned?) but I am thinking it is not an error. Just because every Hyatt, Holiday Inn, Marriott etc has air conditioning doesn’t mean that all rooms in a quaint little Tuscan B&B are electronically cooled. So this wasn’t a bad idea for the web site, it just proves that when you note an “expected” feature on only some of the products (or in this case, some of the rooms), you make the customer wonder about that feature’s availability where it’s not noted.

Experience Three: This software includes a graphical user interface. In this case, the website owner didn’t want to include the feature, and explained it like this: “Look,” he said, “When you buy a car, you expect it to come with four tires and a steering wheel. If the tires aren’t there, it’s a deal breaker, but it’s not a selling feature.”

All three situations were variations of the same problem. “Brand New” accidentally called into question how new the other products were. “Air Conditioned” deliberately showed off how un-air conditioned all the other rooms were. And “Includes a GUI” would have called into question how valuable all the other features were, if they had to include a feature that everyone expected.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Just yesterday, I got some email from another web analyst asking me to buy his new .pdf booklet. I was really surprised that the price wasn’t in the email. “He should know better, he’s a web analyst,” I thought. “Clicks are precious.”

So I clicked through to his landing page — and the price still wasn’t there. And then I clicked again and finally got to it.

Do people bury their prices because they are embarrassed? Or, do they think that the customer will say, “I’ve spent so much time on this site looking for the price, I’ll just buy it now that I’ve finally figured out what it costs?”

Now, it’s not always easy to show your prices. Just today, I was talking to a customer about including prices on a category page. We didn’t want to say, “Starting at $10.00″ when the prices went up to $300 (feels deceptive.) We didn’t want to say, $10-300 (seems kind of useless.) We haven’t decided how to handle it, and I only point it out to show that I, too, am a sometimes-sensitive soul who realizes that not all cases are the same. Sometimes you’ve got a complex sale and you need to build the case before the customer has a chance to calculate the damage. But if the pricing is very straightforward and competitive, why hide it?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

As website owners, we often envision paths through our site (”First they’ll start here, then they’ll click here…”) But, if we do a good job with our search engine optimization, visitors enter in strange places. Every page (with the exception of pages off limits to the search engines) has to be clearly labeled as if someone were entering the site right there.

For example, if you do a Google search on T-Mobile call Canada, you’ll probably get this page high in the SERP:

www.t-mobile.com/templates/faq.aspx?PAsset=Inl_Pop_FAQ

But when you click through, the T-Mobile page is a list of FAQs to a specific, albeit unnamed T-Mobile program. It’s ok to land on the wrong page, it happens, but maybe this was the right page ? And the customer never figured out the answer, and there was no navigation so the customer finally called the 1-800-TMobile number (just what T-Mobile doesn’t want. Conversion on a customer service site is about creating great service on the site, not about frustration ending in a phone call that costs the company money.)

All they needed to do was label the page Frequently Asked Questions: Program Name and be sure to link the Program Name (whatever it was) back to the actual program. (After all, visitors who land there have no back button to see the path T-Mobile had in mind.) Some persistent navigation would be nice, too, so that visitors can go back to the site and find what they really are looking for.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics