Online Insight - A view from an expert

Surprisingly Poor User Experience

2012-02-08T14:14:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago I signed upto attend a LinkedIn webinar to learn aboutall of the new features available to premium users, which took place thismorning. Prior to attendance the follow-up was excellent, two e-mailsreminding me of the date and time of the webinar.

The webinar itself wasexcellent - broken into 4 subject areas with excellent examples in each area,hands on practical and worth the hour investment. However, as soon as itwas finished, I found an e-mail from the vendors providing the webinar sayingthat they were sorry that I was unable to attend, but not to worry I couldsign-up by following a hypertext link included. Less than minute later Ireceived a second e-mail thanking me for my attendance. Annoyed I sent anote back mentioning that I had attended the webinar, and that they should beaware of that fact as I had to sign in, and reconfirm my e-mail twice.

I wasn't expecting aresponse, so was surprised when an hour later I received a third e-mail, whosecontent is shown below:

As you can see, not anapology, but a second e-mail, an exact replica of the first, telling me not toworry that I had missed the webinar.

What type of user experienceam I expecting from LinkedIn? As a premiere social media sight whoengages in these types of webinars almost daily, not this. Whether or notsent by LinkedIn themselves or the vendor that they use to run the webinarseries, this is not the standard that one expects from a top notchorganization.

Planned or not, the impactmakes the user question the credibility or reliability of other servicesprovided. How do I know when I send out a job application via LinkedInthat it was managed properly? That only a single message was sentto the employer, or perhaps there were several with different messages? Iappreciate that it is unlikely, but it does sow the kernel of unnecessarydoubt.

Inactivity, that can't be a good thing...

2012-02-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

I been in the web environment since it's inception, and have written and spoken about best practice in the environment for over a decade - and yet, have seemingly forgotten how to put into practice what I preach.

Online is all about user engagement, you don't have to take a web 101 course to figure that out..so how does a two year hiatus equate to engagement - quite frankly it doesn't, but sometimes day to day life intervenes, and the challenges of extracurricular activities of two very active children took precedence - well no more! It's time to push back and demonstrate that it is possible to do multiple things at the same time.

So here's to a future of more frequent posts, sharing some of the great insight that I have gained over the last couple of years working in the media industry, in a small, family owned operation.

Real estate sites are not user friendly

2009-11-10T12:42:00.000-08:00

Recently I have been thinking about moving, and not just around the corner, but literally about half way round the world, from London (51°0’0’’, 0°7’0’’) to North Central Washington (47°25’24’’,-120°,18’37’’)

Click for Aardvark Map

To aide in the process I have been looking at real estate websites, and as a general rule it is an salient example of a cottage industry of poor site design.

I am convinced, that site owners that believe that they have a captive audience – realtors, job boards, some municipal sites are all good examples of sites that do not spend enough time designing with the user experience front of mind. From their perspective, they know their industry, and believe that they can push their users from one page to the next as they desperately search for the information that they are seeking – where else could they possibly go?

After all, most users will go to extraordinary measures to find the information that they seek on these sites, because they are unaware that there are other options on the horizon. The thought of designing land pages within the site, and aggregating content in more consumable formats is completely foreign to cottage industry designers, even when most web site traffic today enters on a page other than the home page. The statistics differ, but anywhere from 50% to over 80% of traffic on a well-designed site will arrive on a sub-page.

A number of disruptors like Google real estate, other content aggregators, and Facebook marketplace which all have user experience higher on their design checklist may create the disruption required to up the quality of sites within the cottage industry - but it is very early days and it is hard to know whether users will find these new features in volumes and migrate to the improved experience or not.

I guess I will stand by my principles of not using a site that is poorly designed and go homeless instead of bowing to the cottage industry czars. Any ideas, homeless in winter is not my idea of a good time?

Are the halcyon days of investigative reporting gone?

2009-10-29T07:47:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks I have taken a deep dive into the world of online publishing – and have been surprised by the results. Back in the dark ages of the internet, ok maybe just over a decade ago, I was asked by my company to set up a B2B portal to “make money while you sleep”. In publishing terms this was equivalent to setting up a paywall, and asking clients and targets to register and pay for online services, a significant proportion of which was well written content on technical issues.

Not surprisingly, within 12 months, and aligned with most of the content publishers, the paywall was gone, and while registration remained in my case, to better target information, the community slowly continued to grow and evolve until a decade later, it is a vibrant community with a comprehensive multi-media driven content strategy – no real surprise. There has never been a reliance on ad supported revenue or customer generation, in my model.

Most content publishers, have adopted a different model, and removed the registration barrier entirely to increase customer volume and as a direct corollary ad sales as they were paid based on a CPM model. There have been two big problems with this model – there content has been available for content aggregators to sweep up and use for free, and the ad sellers have stopped going directly to content publishers to set deals relying instead on a volume trading market. The end result is the content publishers have been hit with declining revenues and audiences.

So here’s the 64k dollar question – can consumers really buy into a model that eradicates investigative reporting? As a well-educated reader of top quality journalism, who enjoys reading well written thought provoking commentary, I certainly hope not. However, it is clear that there is a lot of turmoil in this arena, and it will require that content publishers ban together to create a new business model, or face a bleak future. I for one am ready to take up that challenge, to ensure high quality journalism in the future, are you?

Autumn, my favorite time of year – emulate nature

2009-10-18T19:15:00.000-07:00

I love this time of year – as the leaves change colours and the bright hues of oranges, yellows, and reds surround us and remind us that it’s that time of year again – to pause and enjoy nature’s beauty.

The temperature has dropped, there is a slight frost in the air and very soon those leaves will fall to the ground in the annual renewal process that repeats every year and frankly is awesome (that is of course until you spend hours raking them all up and moving the leaves to the compost pile). Every year nature slows, down reviews its inventory, pulls back necessary resources, and lets the redundant parts fall to the ground.

We could do well, to replicate the same process on all of our online properties – by taking time to review our resources and renew, reduce, revive, and refresh them removing the redundant pages and content. How long has it been since you’ve reviewed your site?

Here is a quick checklist:

· Is the content still fresh and relevant?
· Are the links still working properly?
· Are the images and graphics tagged properly?
· Are the pages properly tagged, and are your search engine rankings working?
· Is your site design uncluttered and easy to use?
· If you are using a content management system, are the pages publishing properly?

For just a moment, think of your site as a tree – do the annual maintenance, that occurs naturally with the change of season, and you will be doing both yourself and customers a real service. The best part is – there is no raking required!

Social media and spaghetti - which one sticks longer?

2009-10-09T07:40:00.000-07:00

I was talking with a friend this week about how many companies are approaching the use of social media and comparing it to spaghetti. That’s right spaghetti! Some of you may recall when you had children, or perhaps when you were a child yourself, sitting in a highchair, the best thing ever was getting a nice big bowl of spaghetti and throwing it everywhere, and testing the “stickability” factor. The spaghetti that held on to the wall the longest, therefore the one with the highest “stickability” won.

That seems to be a popular approach with social media these days, everybody wants to do it, and so like spaghetti, ideas are often thrown against a virtual wall and see which ones stick. I am all into experimentation, but it needs to be more scientific with built in measurement to be of real value. The problem is that often times it would appear that instead of taking the time to segment out market groups, understand behaviour and buying patterns, and the impact of using the social medium, the campaigns are launched in isolation without clear targets or performance indicators. Not surprisingly, it can be difficult post launch to quantify or measure how successful the activity was.

More notably, like my spaghetti analogy, social media campaigns are often times left out their abandoned or at least disconnected from the main corporate brand untended and unkempt. I can’t tell you the number of abandoned or little used fan pages, YouTube videos, and microsites that I have seen, particularly those advertising events that already passed, countless opportunities lost to keep a closer connection to a vibrant user population post event or product launch.

The question that I would pose to everyone, if you are experimenting with social media, are you maximizing the full opportunity available to you, or are you using the spaghetti approach – the choice is yours.

Do you get a perfect score?

2009-10-01T20:19:00.000-07:00

This week I met with an old friend and colleague to look at her company’s website to see if there were some simple things that could be done at little or no cost to improve the overall experience of the site and attract new users.

I took out my trusty review list:

Does the home page pass the stickability test? In others words, will a casual visitor find things that attract them immediately so that they begin engaging with the site?
Is the site properly search engine optimized so that it is easy to find?
Once on the site is the information easy to find? Remember users navigate in many different ways, some use context, others navigation, and others use search. Good sites accommodate all styles of navigation.
Does the site use multiple types and styles of content to help users with different learning styles?
Does each page on the site act as a landing page?
Does the site invite interaction, or is it static?
Will all visitors have the knowledge required to use the site, or does the site assume a high level of specialist knowledge without expressly stating the requirement?

A well designed site will score 7 out of 7. However, most sites fall well short. In my friend’s case, her site fell way below the optimal score, but then again most sites do. In my experience the average score is 4 or less.

The good news, that most of the faults are fairly easily remedied, it just requires a different focus. It is all about customer centric design, focusing on the user’s needs and usage preferences from the onset.

What does your site score?

Case Study for Poor Usability - Can McAfee afford it?

2009-09-22T20:40:00.000-07:00

This week the whole household ran out of annual support from McAfee, and I have learned quite a bit through the process – but most importantly the importance of good site design, something that I have discussed for years.

Installing a new version of an existing application should be easy right? Something a six year old should be able to do. Not so in this case.

Purchasing the new license was very straight forward, clearly they’ve worked on their site design here, ensuring that potential customers have a simple, straightforward path to the purchase basket and payment. Too bad, the same usability principle weren’t used for the actual installation. Two days later, after two hour long calls with service support, tier 2 no less, I have managed to successfully install their new product – and I am computer literate!

Why does quality site design stop at completion of the payment process?

I suppose in part because any usability challenges here will result in clients clicking out and purchasing alternatives. Application designers should really spend as much time delighting customers through to the completion of the transaction, in this case successfully installing the new version, as they do in making sure we can pay for the product – because it is overall user experience that drives loyalty and re-purchase.

Some of the challenges that I encountered included:

poor screen layout – not easy to find obvious cues like My Account, Help, Next Steps

broken processes - installation requested deletion of files that were not in the application register, and no help available remotely to remedy problem

multiple downloads – when installation failed user was required to we download software to start installation process

I was promised that I would receive a survey to rate customer service after finally completing the task – and no surprise, it still hasn’t arrived ten hours later. I have already begun investigating alternatives to purchase when this license expires.

Virtual Conferences – What’s the point, in attending you say?

2009-09-16T20:47:00.000-07:00

If you’re a crusty online veteran, and I know some of you, like me, are, you attended Web 1.0 virtual conferences almost a decade ago and in the best description of those in a word – painful. Slowly watching your screen refresh; the sound hopelessly out of synch with the movement on screen - reminiscent of watching paint dry, without the smell. Even the first few attempts using virtual conferences with SecondLife, although better, were soulless and a poor replica of a conference experience.

So I attended the Marketing Profs virtual conference today with trepidation, but a willingness to be surprised… and boy was I. Virtual conferencing has definitely come of age. The conference was nothing short of excellent with multiple levels of interaction – not quite as good as being there face to face, but considering the volume of registrants, 11,000 pre-registered, it was amazing.

The entire experience was superb. The quality of the streaming of the presentations , the ability to synchronously download content, the facilitated question and answer sessions with each session, the auditorium with virtual vendors – complete with avatars to answer questions, to the research centre, and the facilitated discussion forums – absolutely top-notch all round!

The conference organizers monitored all forms of social media, in particular Twitter, as well as providing high quality help, throughout the conference, making changes on the fly to improve the user experience. For example, the crowd noise in the auditorium drowned out the speakers when attendees chose to multi-task, so a button was added to remove the noise in the auditorium. A fantastic experience that has converted this crusty online veteran to want more and I can hardly wait until the next one.

How to make content more visual - it's important

2009-09-14T20:47:00.001-07:00

When a user visits your site for the first time you have milliseconds to engage that user. If you don't they will click out and move on.

If your site has a lot of content, as many do, one of the ways that you can engage your user is by using tag clouds, or other forms of data visualizations. You can do this dynamically, which means that as new content is added the tag clouds are refreshed to reflect the impact of the new content. Alternatively, the poor man's way of implementing visualizations, including tag clouds is by using a site like www.many-eyes.com where you can enter you data set directly to the site, look at the visualizations and select the one that best presents your data. Then you can go to your site, and embed the visualization directly into your screen.

In the example below, I have used on of my old time favorites, Alice in Wonderland, choosing the to display the results based on word frequency. The bigger the words, the more times they appear in the passage.

This is one of the many tools freely available for use that ensures high quality content driven sites have a visual appeal to keep first time users engaged long enough to really assess the underlying value available. Try this tool, or others like it next time you have a content heavy post.

Registration Sites - Remember the User Experience or Lose

2009-09-07T12:20:00.001-07:00

There is no doubt that businesses can derive a lot of value creating registration sites but remember you are asking the user to impart key information – personal information, the collection and retention of which is invaluable.

However, why do so many sites make it so difficult to complete the transaction.

Most web platforms these day use some type of form base tool to create the user registration process and clearly most of these tools were not designed with user experience in mind. Most forms based approaches uses system generated rules about user name and password identities which can have significant negative impact on user experience. Application developers tend to forget that when it comes to registration sites – the user is king, and simplicity is the key.

I have visited no fewer than 20 registration sites this week doing my homework for this post. In all but two cases, all the information on the submission form was lost when the password information entered did not comply to the rules, which in all but four cases where not explicitly displayed on the screen.

What user percentage is likely to click off a site when that happens? My guess is almost 100% if the user thinks they can find the information elsewhere. I know that was my inclination. If your site has a totally unique proposition, perhaps posting job openings, they may well go through the pain of re-entry at least once. But let’s face it most sites aren’t exclusive, and you will not only lose the information you are trying to collect but the user as well – simply because of poor usability.

So in my limited group of 20 sites – two were well designed, three at least provided guidance on the page but no doubt lost some users, and 15 failed the simple usability principles significantly reducing their registered population in the process. Which category does your registration site fall under?

Personal Branding - Online Matters

2009-08-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

In my experience before you can't start a marketing campaign, create a website, work through the user acquisition plans, or do any of the operational activities you really need to understand the business strategy of the organization.

Once you understand the strategy, whether it is written down or not, you can begin to build out your plan of action – with clear KPIs, identified critical success factors, stratifying your potential user base, and doing all the things that will make your project a success.

So why is it, with so many people currently looking for “new opportunities” - the current euphemism for “unemployed looking for work” do people start working on the operational plan without taking the time to understand their strategy.

I have been working with a number of people to help them work through their strategy, and then helping with their personal branding – tag lines, business cards, effective use of social networking sites, using Twitter (or not). It doesn’t take a lot of time; it’s just surprising how few people take that time.

Here’s a quick 8 step plan:
1. Write a short marketing plan – 1 or 2 pages
2. Create a tag line or slogan no more than 6 words which clearly articulates your value
3. Choose a visual identity that supports the tag line
4. Use both the tag line and the visual identity wherever possible to increase your brand
equity
5. Consider which forms of social media are appropriate for you – Twitter, Facebook,
blogs, website. If you create them you have to use and refresh them otherwise your
brand image is diminished
6. LinkedIn is not optional – make sure your profile supports your brand
7. Create a Google profile that acts as a landing page for all of your brand equity
8. Nothing beats face time – network, network, network

Usability - Is it really that important?

2009-08-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Good web site design is all about usability – can the user get to the place that they want to go on your site without thinking about how to get there? If the answer to this question is Yes then you’ve cracked the usability code. I will guarantee tee you that most sites do not receive an unqualified positive answer.
Just because you and your design team can get from point A to point B doesn’t mean that any user can and in fact all of you should be excluded from the test population. When is the last time you took the time to do some usability tests? My favorite is eyeball tracking, give a group of users a task while using a software package that watches where there eyes go on the page. The results will give you instantaneous feedback and also give you insight into just how different users approach site navigation – do they scan the page and look for hypertext links within the page or look for page layout hints like – tabs, secondary navigation etc…to find what they are looking for?
The reality is that you have to design for a full range of users because users use a variety of techniques when they are using your site and will click off your site if they get frustrated or can’t immediately go to the place that they want to go. My favorite website, from an usability perspective, and the only travel site that really understands user centric design is www.southwest.com. It is very easy to navigate, and it store pertinent information so when you decide to check different days, like extending your trip by a day you do not have to retype all of your details. Compare the experience here - http://www.aa.com or http://usairways.com. If you actually take the time to do emulate a transaction, with changes you will see a real difference between good and average site usability.

LinkedIn Answers - Keep the value

2009-07-30T21:09:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of the Answer section on LinkedIn. It’s fantastic that any member can ask a question, and by and large the answers that are provided are genuine, provided by real subject matter experts who impart knowledge and helpful information freely and thoughtfully.

I have learned quite a bit from fellow members, and confirmed my own knowledge base by participating in the dialogue that naturally takes place, as a variety of different points of view arise as a range of subject matter experts provide answers.

Just last week, however, I found the experience less than rewarding. A budding web strategist trying to create some personal brand equity asked an arcane question around the fundamentals of online strategy, referencing his own blog material as supporting collateral. This seemed disingenuous at the time, and the more that I thought about it, the more disappointed I became. He wasn’t asking a question - rather attempting to increase his personal brand equity and blog traffic.

Somehow, I feel that this type of question, took away from the wholesomeness of the LinkedIn community. As one of the more developed social networking sites, I felt that there were tacit rules of engagement – people ask real questions about subjects that they are interested in learning about – not asking questions, to further develop their own personal equity. Interestingly my view is broadly shared, as I was writing this post , and a question appeared on LinkedIn asking people how they felt about this practice – the result is fairly unanimous –disappointment. Click here to see the debate.

Using social networking tools – is the decision really that hard?

2009-07-20T05:24:00.000-07:00

The amount of money that large organizations have spent analysing and assessing whether or not they should implement some for of social networking tool is astounding – put all together it equates to the annual budget of a medium sized country.

Social networking at is core is about engagement with your user base – customers, employees, future employees creating an environment of mutual trust and respect. This type of relationship is like gold dust – the better question is why wouldn’t any organization strive to have one, particularly when the cost of entry is so low? Unlike other IT systems – like ERP solutions which were major fiscal investments, the cost of implementing social networking solutions is not high, especially if you buy existing market leading solutions instead of building your own in-house variety that will cost more and most likely be less functionally rich.

So if it isn’t price point – what is it?

It’s largely about change and change management. Effective adoption of social networking requires a new style of communication – on of openness and transparency. Some companies are afraid of brand impact, not being able to so tightly control the messaging.

My proposition is that done correctly implementation of social networking applications is brand empowering. A good example of this is the Coca Cola twitter effort; late out of the gates, see Marketing Pilgrim blog written in February 2009, but since inception has really enforced the brand – there is nothing more powerful than consumers enthusing about the product. With an increasing number of success stories, why aren’t more companies taking advantage of the opportunity?

So what are personas and why should I care?

2009-07-13T23:35:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot written about the importance of persuasive architecture – after all if your site’s landing page has milliseconds to attract and engage users, there must be something of that interests them and compels them to stay on the site. Most experts use the concept of personas in their site design to make sure they accomplish this – you can be your own judge as to whether or not the end result – keeping visiting users to their site has been accomplished.

The actual definition of persona is “mask”. In the virtual world this translates, slightly differently to fictitious profiles of the types of people that are likely to use your site. Segment out the potential audience base of your site – consider gender, demographics, age, profession, past times, size of family, their interests, where they like to shop, where they like to eat, sports that they enjoy, etc…

By taking time out to create comprehensive personas, one or two page descriptions, and the designer can then create wireframes that better meet the needs of the potential users, and are able to use the details to create a site that truly aligns to the user’s preferences. I have a strong preference to do initial wireframes using grey scale, only black and white, like original newspaper layout because it forces you to look at the site design and not get distracted from the colour and brand elements of the site to ensure that the user journeys met your criterion.
A couple of sites that do this really well are Accenture and BP. Both are very crisp, know the audience that they are attracting and make it really easy for their audience to navigate through their site. If I had a complaint about either site is that they are sticking too much to the corporate brand colour schemes of blue or green, apparently like 85% of their competitors, but that’s a topic for another day. Some sites that do it less well are Audi and Ericsson.

How do I maximize the value of each user interaction on my site?

2009-07-08T02:30:00.000-07:00

One of the best and worst aspects of the online environment is how measurable it is - all user activities can be and usually are measured.
However, one of the most common mistakes made is that not enough time is spent up front to define the key activities that you want specific target audience groups to perform while they are on your site with result being that you are swamped with data which is difficult, if not impossible, to sort through to isolate trends and decipher whether or not you are maximizing each user’s interaction with your site.

Depending on which reputable source used there are anywhere from eight to 29 different type of websites in the market place today. For most corporate environments, only a handful are applicable and fall broadly into the category of online brochure/catalogue designed to explain existing services and provide contact details.

The starting point to ensure you are maximizing the value delivered by your website is to identify the potential target audiences and stratify those audiences that you want to attract on your site, and more importantly, the activities that you want each of those segments to perform on your site.

Some questions that you need to ask yourself include:

Geographic spread – do I only want to attract local users, if not what information do I need to include to make it easier for users – phone number, email, map
Demographic spread – is my site designed for multiple generations – if so different groups consume information in very different ways, you must be prepared to support the web generation as well as those who have less experience finding information online
Visual versus structured approaches – groups of users will interpret information completely differently on the site, some will effortlessly use search, while others will use the information architecture on the page to find information.

This list is not comprehensive, but rather provides examples of some of the types of target user information that should be consider during the design phase of your site. A starting point that I often deploy is the use of personas as a way to ensure that my site design is aligned to my target audience needs. In a nutshell, create a number of specific fictitious profiles of the type of user that you anticipate will use your site. Be specific, the more specific the better – age, marital status, interests, number of kids, pastime.

Then imagine that you are that person and see if as that persona you find the information that you are looking for. Most users expect websites to be designed for them and have a very low acceptance threshold – if I can’t find the information that I am looking for by scanning a page I am likely to click away without completing the task.

Now, once you’ve done all of this planning make sure that you apply your web analytics in such a way that you capture this information and not just number of visitors, time on site, and returning visitors.

2009-07-01T05:53:00.000-07:00

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