An interesting study from ClickTale gives detailed behavioral patterns related to scrolling. Some takeaways:

When did above-the-fold design become important?

Web designers and usability professionals have debated the topic of web page scrolling since 1994. At the early days of the web, most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling and it was not a natural thing for them to do. As a result, web designers would design web pages so that all the important content would be “Above the fold” or even worse, squeeze the entire page into the initial screen area. This practice of “squeezing” continues even today.

Nowadays, scrolling has become a natural practice in surfing the web. Scrolling is also associated with web 2.0 design because big, clear text and “spacious”, “clean” content implies longer web pages. Source

ClickTales’s research was based on data that collected from a subset of about 120,000 page-views dated November 2006 to December 2006 to analyze vertical scrolling behavior. General findings were:

• 91% of pages are long enough to require scrolling.
• The average location for the fold is between 430 and 860 pixels down on the page.
• 76% of people will scroll below the fold.
• 15-22% of people will reach the bottom of the page.

Based on this and other studies, ClickTale gave the following recommendations:

• Don’t try to squeeze your web page and make it more compact. There is little benefit in “squeezing” your pages since many visitors will scroll down below the fold to see your entire page.
• Since visitors will scroll all the way to the bottom of your web page, make life easier for them and divide your layout into sections for easy scanning.
• Minimize your written text and maximize images, visitors usually don’t read text - they scan web pages.
• Encourage your visitors to scroll down by using a “cut-off” layout. Source

Another article commenting on the ClickTale data had this to say:

As the ClickTale article suggests, people are scanning and skimming a page’s content regardless of its size. Web developers should back away from trying to squeeze content toward the top of a page in order to supposedly make it easy to scan. Using proper amounts of white space, headers and sub-headers, along with bolded text and bullet points increases a page’s scannability for all personality types.

When it comes to critical elements, like calls to action, you don’t want 5% of visitors not seeing it. Pages have more power when they stick to one main idea per page. And remember, copy should be long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to be interesting. A site will generally get better search rankings by having highly relevant links from page-to-page. So, there are advantages to leaning toward shorter pages, but don’t sacrifice clear page design and layout to squeeze a few pixels off of a page’s length.

So was there any difference at all? Yes:

But keep in mind, shorter pages did perform slightly better. “Almost identical percentages of page views (15%-20%) reach the page bottom regardless of page height.” While the data was fairly similar regardless of the page length, shorter pages were closer to the 20% range. source

Based on this, one might conclude that an all-above-the-fold page would perform 5% higher than a similar, have-to-scroll page. More importantly though, the essential selling points and call-to-action should be above the fold. If you can engage the user and sell them on continuing the process (whether it is buying a product, or taking the next step in a survey, or any desired behaviou) they will continue down the page.

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.

Web Analytics Packages Compared

Not sure which web analytics package is best for you? Stone Temple Consulting has published a 55-page 2007 Web Analytics Shootout, the results of a nine-month study of seven top Web analytics packages on four different web sites. The report looks at strengths and weaknesses of Clicktracks, Google Analytics, IndexTools, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Unica Affinium NetInsight, Visual Sciences’ HBX Analytics, and WebTrends.

Read more about their 2007 Web Analytics Shootout - Final Report

I liked what the author said about this himself:

I consider myself an “Internet Marketing Coach”. I am passionate about helping people create successful online businesses. Whether it be usability (my specialty), search engine rankings, or general website marketing strategy, internet marketing is on my mind all day, every day. When I find precious few hours to sleep, I dream about internet marketing. I realize the internet is a big place, but I have this silly notion that I can make it better and more user-centric by sharing my usability knowledge through my service and my blog. Source

Well, I don’t always dream about internet marketing in my sleep, but I like to read articles by someone who does!

www.headforthetop.com is a new concept — a web site has been launched which puts a whole new angle on advertisement web sites. The ads actually compete for the prime spot on the page, right in front of the viewers eyes by playing Rock, Paper and Scissors.

Text or Image based adverts can be placed on the site, and each is placed in a box. Each advert also has a service or product description, and a link. Free boxes which just contain text can also be added which compete with the advertisements. Each box is assigned (user choice) either rock, paper or scissors. The advertisements are then launched from the bottom of the screen, and head for the top, hence the sites name. When their progress is blocked by another box, they play rock paper or scissors. The winner gets to proceed. And the looser gets relaunched if its an advertisement, or is deleted if its a free box. Its a novel idea designed to attract interest to the pixel advertising style of website. The fact that the casual user is able to play against the adverts is the clincher, because this focuses the interest on the advertisements which on most sites would be ignored. Realising the uniqueness of the idea, the designer has had the idea patented. At the moment there is a one off fee, based on size, which buys you an Advertisement lasting a year or more.

Read more at www.headforthetop.com

CrazyEgg (I think Rand already talked about it), which is simple, easy to use and cost between 0,33$ - 0,80$ / 1 000 visits. I am not sure how deep the metrics are behind it. Has any of you tried it? It is worth it?

ClickDensity is the other one I found and seemed to offer wider and more detailed statistics. Setup seems to be a breeze. Costs seem lower per 1 000’s.. They offer some nice A/B test splitting, allowing you to change snippets of html code as you like to compare conversions.

And of course, Google Analytics offers some primitive heat map capability in the form of their ’site overlay’ report (see screenshot below).

• http://www.intellicontact.com
• http://www.verticalresponse.com
• http://www.constantcontact.com

The research by Akamai reveals online users are less patient than ever. If a website takes longer than four seconds to load, users are likely to abandon it. 75% of those users would not return to websites that took more than four seconds to load. Read more

Is your page too ‘heavy’ and need help loading faster? Need to measure how your website performs? Try out NetMechanic to diagnose this and other ailments that can drag down the usability of your web site.

Also note they add this to the top of the article page. See it in action at ZDNet.