Month: October 2007

I loved this quote from Irish-American novelist J. P. Donleavy:

Writing is a way of turning the unhappiest moments of one's life into money.

Read other quotes from this article.

A site's download time doesn't seem to impact it's usability. Sites that are easy to use, fun and professional are perceived as being fast, whereas time stretches out like taffy when you have a painful customer experience. Source

Marketing Experiments Journal has made a number of A/B tests on landing pages. They found that landing page performance can be improved by the following principles.

First off, what is a landing page? By this, we're not talking about a 'homepage' or main product page on your web site which people may randomly navigate to. Landing pages is a special term that refers to the pages people land on after clicking ads or search result link.

Designing a winning landing page should take the following points into consideration:

One Objective

Focus on one objective for each page and drive everything on the page to that single objective -- usually an button with a clear call to action such as an "Apply Now" button.

Vertical Flow with a Single Column

Use a vertical flow through the center of the page, usually with a single column:

Sales pages should use a vertical flow through the center of the page. For commercial offer pages, vertical single-column body copy through the center of the page consistently performs better than other layouts and should always be tested. Left or right columns should be used to support movement toward the objective such as testimonials (to reduce anxiety at clicking the Order button). Source

Eliminate Distractions

You should eliminate elements that may distract eye path from the flow toward the objective. This means you should remove page elements such as photos and graphic images that do not drive the user towards the page's call to action.

Use Eye-Catching Visuals

Use visual elements to draw attention toward the call to action. Visual elements can include size, motion, color, position, and shape.

Remove Off-Page Links

Avoid use of off-page links. Why?

Once visitors have left the page, their forward momentum is interrupted and must be re-established even if they do return.

How do you get around this?

Use passive pop-ups or launch new browser windows when needed to provide details or supplemental decision information. Source

Read more about landing page design techniques at Landing Page Confusion-How Does Having More Than One Objective to a Page Affect its Performance?

In a long anticipated move, Google is now taking action to web sites who provide paid links. Google doesn't penalize the relevancy of the site in search, but rather, hits the sites in their pocketbook by penalizing their page rank. If the site has low page rank, which is generally a requirement of paid link services like PayPerPost.com, then the site starts to lose out on advertising dollars.

Danny Sullivan wrote in detail about this new development in a post at Search Engine Land, entitled Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google.

"...Overall, the move takes Google into a new era of attacking paid links, allowing it more precise weapons than it has had in the past. For example, both the Stanford Daily and New Scientist are among several prominent sites that sell links. Google has not really been able to penalize such sites as that would hurt core relevancy. People expect them to show up.

By using PageRank decreases (something Google first experimented with in the SearchKing case in 2002), Google can hurt the perceived value of buying links from a particular site without harming core relevancy."

Bottom line: if Pagerank is important to you, you need to carefully consider buying -- or selling -- paid links.

Downtime and outages are two things that -- if planned for -- can make or break a customer's respect for your company. I was on the Blockbuster site yesterday, and behold the message I got -- a generic Weblogic server error. Did this give me confidence in Blockbuster's ability to manage my account and provide the service I'm paying for? Hardly.

These system messages can be customized. Here's what I should have seen if the server had a hickup:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

’This web site is down for routine maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please try again later.’

Or better yet:

Try Again in a Bit

’Due to an overwhelming surge in the popularity of our site, we're down for just a bit. We're adding better capacity to meet your needs. Your needs are valuable to us -- just try again in a few minutes.’

Come on Blockbuster. You can do better.

On a related note, production software inevitably needs maintenance. One way to determine when and how it can be done is through analysis of prior user traffic.

Define a scheduled maintenance policy so that everyone knows when changes to a production system can be deployed.

I often send out an email to my customers a week in advance of any systems changes. The day of the change I post a message to the web site alerting users to the planned outage later in the day.

Give users adequate advance notice of scheduled downtime. Doing this sets expectations and avoids embarrassing issues of surprise software installations.

Retailers working to optimize their shopping cart process are often focused on how many visitors abandon their shopping carts. Bryan Eisenberg argues in a nice article on optimizing customer experience that persuasion, not shopping cart abandonment, is the real issue.

Eisenberg says that:

If you focus on providing relevant and persuasive content based on understanding visitor intent, easily inferred from Keywords (or ad copy, or the email they arrived from), you'll have a much higher overall conversion rate. Visitors who are thoroughly persuaded are uncannily motivated to navigate even the worst check-out process.

He advises you to focus on these three things:

1. Improve home and landing pages.
2. Improve persuasion scenarios.
3. Ensure persuasion scenarios aren't interrupted.

A related study from User Interface Engineering confirms Eisenberg's comments. The trick is to avoid 'pogo-sticking':

"...shoppers could not ascertain enough information from the product list, so they clicked back and forth between the list and multiple individual product pages... Pogo-sticking is the name we gave to this comparison-shopping technique... It's an indication that you are losing sales."

Eisenberg concluded with these comments:

Is a visitor searching for a product, or for information? If she wants information, she's not yet persuaded to buy. It's important to give her enough information to make a decision, and supply it in the right place. At the point where she wants more content, supply it. Make sure it answers all possible questions.

Don't "pogo-stick" your customers. Persuade them to buy your product by giving them a good customer experience that answers their product questions in a no-hassle buying experience.

Read more at ClickZ.