Diamond Website Conversion’s Comments (group member since Mar 18, 2010)

Diamond Website Conversion’s comments from the Conversations on Website Conversion group.

When I was in college, I took a course in basic statistics that left my head swimming. Trying to understand how percentages and data work together to communicate information can be overwhelming to those not familiar with the jargon. That’s why this chapter will undoubtedly prove to be an invaluable resource for the non-mathematically inclined.

It discusses in layman’s terms how the various reports available on Google Optimizer communicate the results of your test and how you can use those results to choose which of your variations will most likely perform the best. Not only can you view information about whole pages, but also about individual variables within those pages.

At the end of this chapter, you’ll be able to look at a previously intimidating list of percentages and immediately know which one promises the best improvement for your website. If you’re new to Google Optimizer and to statistics in general, I suggest you bookmark this chapter for easy reference.

As someone who leans more toward language arts than math, I’ll admit that I have been intimidated by the technical aspects of testing.

Some of the apprehensions listed in Chapter 2 described me perfectly, including what to test, how helpful testing will be, and what exactly is involved in running a test with Google Optimizer.

Both the step-by-step test at the beginning of the chapter and the detailed descriptions of the various kinds of testing available with Google Optimizer helped shed light on how testing works and what can be accomplished with the right kinds of tests.

Perhaps the most helpful discussion, however, dealt with how to target your testing in order to avoid being overwhelmed with details. It’s easy to dive into a project like this and burn out quickly because of the sheer volume of data. However, with targeted testing, you can determine which testing factors will bring you the most value.

Did this chapter address concerns or apprehensions you’ve had when it comes to testing?

Chapter One argues that all businesses should foster a culture of testing in order to determine what the best practices for their business will be and how they can implement incremental changes over time to give their customers the best online experience possible.

A culture of testing assumes that no single business model can provide everything a customer might need or desire online, and that the best way to give your customers what they want is by allowing their input to influence your decisions.

The authors suggest that testing should follow a slightly altered version of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as they would like done unto them.” How would adoption of this rule help foster a culture of testing, and what would that mean for your current business practices?

We will start reading "Always Be Testing" by Brian Eisenberg, et.al., sarting next week. This book focuses on testing two versions of the same web page and and determining the best converter, based on the actions of actual visitors. It is a nice complement to Steve Krug's usability testing approach.

Making your website accessible to all users may seem like a daunting task, but it is just the next logical step in assuring that it does not make people think.

A lot of accessibility and usability issues often coincide—usability issues will impact individuals with disabilities just as much (if not more) than they impact the rest of your users.

The single best way to improve your sites accessibility is to test often and make certain that it is highly usable. The easier your site is to use and understand, the more easily you will be able to make it usable for persons with disabilities. There are a lot of quick and easy things that you can do to improve the experience of individuals with disabilities using your website.

Check out the list on page 179. You can use this as both a list of things-to-do, and a benchmark to see where you’re at. How do you think your site measures up? Do you use CSS to improve the experience of those using a screen reader?

In this chapter, Krugg gives us a useful way to conceptualize how people feel about using your website. When a person begins browsing your website, they have a certain amount of goodwill that they are willing to expend. Whatever problems or confusions that they run into deplete this reservoir, until finally a person becomes so frustrated that they leave the site and try to find what they are looking for elsewhere. These reservoirs are different from person to person, and are also different for the same person in different times and circumstances. A person in a hurry will have much less goodwill than a person who is only browsing.

There are a lot of different things that can diminish a person’s goodwill, but the major mistake evident in them all is wasting time. When you waste a person’s time, you are saying to them (whether explicitly or implicitly) that their concerns are not important to you or your business. Having graphics-intensive pages that take a long time to load, poorly organized navigation, or information that is simply missing, are all time-wasting and goodwill-depleting mistakes. Fortunately, you can do a lot of things to help increase goodwill as well. A lot of the basis of this is making certain that your site is easy to use, and doesn’t require much thought or concentration from the user. You can check the list on pages 166-167 for more exact examples of ways to increase visitor goodwill.

When was the last time that you were really frustrated by a website? Do you think that your website could be frustrating? This may be evidenced by a lot of hits with low conversion rates. What can you do to put more goodwill into your visitor’s reservoirs?

The basic idea behind usability testing is to show a website to a potential user and ask them questions about what they think they’re seeing, and ask them to perform a typical task (such as locate a specific page or product).

While they try to use the page, you take note of what causes them problems, and makes them think. Then you try to eliminate ambiguities and distractions that cause problems in usability.

Although usability testing sounds like a very precise sort of science, which it can be, but you can also make it into something doable on a budget.

Krugg goes over the “half-off” style of testing in this chapter. Testing can be a lot less rigmarole and expense than you might at first expect. If you have a large family and a lot of friends, you may even be able to get away with it costing little more than your time!

Check out the side-by-side comparison chart on page 137. Which one of the elements in the chart most surprised you? Did this offer any de-mystification of usability testing for you? You can also take a peek at the chart on page 136—were you under any of those misconceptions?

There are a lot of different things to juggle while you are designing a website.

The very fact that there can only be one final product is incredibly limiting in terms of the number and sort of designs, features, and the various other bits of substance that you can string together into a cohesive design.

Aside from whatever internal dialogue you may be having about the compromises that must be made, you also must have the same discussion with all the other members of your development team. Krugg notes that these discussions can get quite heated, as they tend to involve nothing more than arguing for one’s own favorite design elements.

The idea that anyone can speak for or imagine him- or herself to be the average web user is not useful to design. There are no simple “right” and “wrong” answers about where to put things on your webpage. Things can only be better or worse, in terms of conversion.

What have been some of the hardest compromises to make in designing your website? Have you had any serious disagreements about how to proceed? And lastly, aren’t you glad to hear that testing may provide a solution to those disagreements?

The home page is arguably the most important part of your website. This can, of course, lead it to be one of the most difficult to design. Trying to accommodate all of the necessities (and keep the most important of them “above the fold”) can cause a lot of consternation. The most important task of the home page is to convey the big picture—it needs to make clear what your site is, and what visitors can do there. That clarity needs to be right on the surface, to be gained at a glance with a minimum of thought.

A simple way to begin introducing the gist of your website is in the tagline. This blurb should be located right next to your Site ID, so that a visitor knows to read it as a description of your website. A good tagline is short and sweet; it should make a clear statement about the value of your website (check out the examples on page 104). A six to eight word tagline is long enough to convey accurate information, but still short enough to be absorbed quickly by visitors.

Take a look at the example homepages on pages 113 and 114, and take special notice of the taglines. Do you think that they convey an accurate picture of what each website really is? What about your own homepage? Do you have a good tagline?

We rely heavily upon signposting in almost every aspect of our lives. From looking for the right screen at a multi-screen movie theater, to trying to find the right product in an unfamiliar grocery store, to navigating our way across cities, we rely on signs constantly.

This is no different in our usage of the internet. Self-explanatory navigation involves a lot of signposting from the “you are here” notice to signs that tell you what lies in each direction. When designing your site’s navigation it is usually best to stick with convention—it is what people expect and have already learned to deal with, so it will involve the least amount of thinking on their part.

All the pages should have a matching outside frame that includes navigation items and a Site ID. You can check out the section starting on page 60 to learn more about web conventions.

How conventional is your website? Quickly go through the quiz on pages 86-89 and check your answers. Now choose a random page off of your own (or a friend’s) website and see how it measures up to the test. What changes do you think may be beneficial?

Krugg’s third law of usability is “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.”

Most of the words on a page serve no practical purpose, and are actually detracting from the usability of the page. More words equals more noise, which is a distraction that causes people to stop and think. Nobody wants to read a stack of paragraphs, but if they are there a visitor may feel that they are missing something important by just skimming.

Imagine how frustrated they would be if they decided to read the entire thing, and it was entirely happy talk, with no real content or value. Especially while writing for the web, sentences should be short and sweet. Words, also, should not be hard to understand or decode.

As a web designer your need to work cooperatively with the people who are going to be visiting your website, and set things up in a way that will best accommodate their actual usage of your site. How would you re-write the following paragraph to be as concise as possible? How many words are in your edited version?

“A well-organized paragraph supports or develops a single controlling idea, which is expressed in a sentence called the topic sentence. A topic sentence has several important functions: it substantiates or supports an essay’s thesis statement; it unifies the content of a paragraph and directs the order of the sentences; and it advises the reader of the subject to be discussed and how the paragraph will discuss it. Readers generally look to the first few sentences in a paragraph to determine the subject and perspective of the paragraph. That’s why it’s often best to put the topic sentence at the very beginning of the paragraph. In some cases, however, it’s more effective to place another sentence before the topic sentence—for example, a sentence linking the current paragraph to the previous one, or one providing background information.”
Example taken from http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets....

This chapter begins with Krugg’s Second Law of Usability: “It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.” This is an extension of the First Law (Don’t make me think) that focuses specifically on choices that a visitor has to make while navigating your site. The main point is that a good website needs to make the choices as painless and straightforward as possible. This can start with something as simple as removing the jargon from links and buttons—links should “say what they mean, and mean what they say.” In other words, not only should the words be self-evident, but also the page any given link takes you to should match the text you clicked to get there as closely as possible.

What are some misleading links that you have clicked on lately? What do you think are some steps for making certain that the links on your website are taking visitors to what they expect?

The last sentence of chapter 2 leads straight into the content of this chapter: “If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.” Since people aren’t going to read your copy, you need to design a webpage that caters to their actual usage. The typical visitor will scan your page, so your new role is to make certain that the important elements on the page are going to stand out under that sort of scrutiny. Beginning with the most basic, a page must have a clear visual hierarchy. People are very good at perceiving order, and using this to get their bearings in an environment—physical or electronic. A page with a clear hierarchy lets people know where to look for information, just like looking at a newspaper. There are also some problems that are unique to the web medium. One particularly tricky one is making certain that links are obviously clickable. They need to stand out from what is just text. People should never have to hunt for links or wonder what they can and cannot click.

In the first book we read—Inbound Marketing by Halligan and Shah—we were warned against making a website that is merely a copy of the brochure. A brochure, however, would also follow a lot of the guidelines provided in this chapter, namely the ones regarding hierarchy and organization. What differences do you see between that sort of website and one that is designed as a billboard?

In this chapter some facts about how people actually use the internet are presented. The first fact is that most people don’t actually read web pages. Most of us are on a given web site looking for something in particular, so we don’t read (or even notice) all the details. Rather than read, most people scan a page looking for links with keywords specific to their actual interests.

The next fact continues from this premise—people are in a hurry, so rather than scanning the entire page and choosing what seems like the best option they will likely choose the first reasonable one. The last fact is that people don’t figure out how to do something (or look for instructions), we would rather muddle through. When we find a method that works, we are unlikely to change it or keep looking for a more efficient method.

These facts illustrate some imperatives for good website design. A page should not have too much text (which is unlikely to be read anyway), or too many similarly-worded links (which would lead people to click the wrong one). Also, a good page should be easy to navigate so that the muddling doesn’t take too long or get too frustrating.

Look at your homepage and get a general idea for how a first-time visitor might try to navigate from it. Is the next place to click self-evident for even the newest web users? What on your page might lead them into trouble?

We all already know Krugg’s First Law of Usability. After all, it’s the title of our book: Don’t make me think. A webpage should be intuitive, obvious, and self-explanatory for every user. The simple fact is people are busy and usually not too interested in reading everything that you have to say or figuring out a novel sort of navigation. Things that may be exciting or cute to a designer or advertising team may not come across in the same way, and can lead to confusion. Jargon and wordiness should be avoided—simple, clear, and short things are usually best. Phrases used as buttons and links should make it immediately obvious where the link is heading with as little thought or interpretation as possible. Links should also be easily identified as clickable links, and need to stand out from the page.

Take a quick look at a couple web pages. Yours, your competition’s, click “I’m feeling lucky” on Google with a couple random keywords. See how much the page makes you think. Try to approach it from a fresh perspective, and feel out the intuitiveness of the navigation and links. Does it feel simple and self-evident to you?

The Personal Biography Generator was a bit hard to find on the website. To save some people time, here are the questions to help create your own personal biography.

1. Your full name and title.

2. By what name do you like to be addressed?

3. Your company/firm name/address.

4. What year did you start/join your current company?

5. What industry are you in? How many years have you been in the industry? (Please list your previous employers as well.)

6. What do you enjoy most about your work? What do you like least about your work?

7. What is an area of your work that you feel you are uniquely qualified to perform? Why (Client meetings, delivering seminars, money manager selection, etc.)

8. What is the first thing your customers/clients should know about you

9. What do you believe is your primary responsibility in your work?

10. What do you believe is most important to your customers/clients regarding why they work with you?

11. What is your primary market niche or specialization?

12. What is your educational background? What college(s) did you graduate from? (i.e. Bachelor of Arts, Communication, Harvard)

13. What professional certifications and designations do you hold?

14. List any additional notable accomplishments both personally and professionally (i.e. awards received in the military service, community, professionally etc.)

15. How have you grown your business (i.e. seminars, referrals etc.)?

16. Personal information (please answer each separately)
a. Married (include spouse’s name if applicable)
b. Children - if so how many
c. Hobbies
d. Special Interests
e. Town/state you live in now

17. How do you normally use your personal biography (email or printed)?

We will start reading Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think starting July 19th. A real gem of a book on website usability.Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

The last couple of sections wrap the book up with a call to action. We have all now read the book, so the next step is to start taking what we have learned and apply it to our lives and businesses. Magnacca presents his 21-day Challenge as one way to help reinforce the new habits. Since you have all purchased the book, you can sign up for the 21-day Challenge at http://www.sowhatbook.com. It will send you daily reminder emails to keep you focused on changing your mindset over the next 21 days. He also forwards the idea of using the book as a guide for weekly training meetings, in much the same way that we have used it as the material for a book club.
So, what are you going to do next? How are you going to apply what you have learned by reading this book?

Every product, no matter how unique or useful, will eventually fade from the minds of consumers. This is why Magnacca advocates the use of a So What Reminder—telling customers about the benefit of your product or service often. Especially in an age where advertising is literally everywhere, people are developing ways to ignore that advertising. On page 109 of our book there is a list of things that Coca-Cola has done to become and remain a soft-drink giant. These are, of course, adaptable to your own business. First is visibility—Coca-Cola gained extreme visibility during a World War II promotion offering “every man in uniform…a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents.” Coca-Cola did this even though it often meant they were selling at a loss. What they gained was immense exposure in foreign markets. Consistency meant that a Coke was the same, no matter where in the world you got it. The same bottle shape, the same script, and of course the same taste.

The last item on the list is one of the hardest ones—repetition. This isn’t just saying the same thing over and over, that sort of repetition is a recipe for boredom and loss of consumer interest. The brand stays the same, but the tagline or advertising message needs to change over time. This will keep people interested, and keep you current and relevant to your audience.

How relevant do you think this method of advertising is to your product or situation? In what ways do you think your company can follow the Coca-Cola method for advertising?

This chapter is all about the So What Positioning Statement. This statement is a response to the question “what do you do?” that is designed to be interesting and to grab people’s attention. A positioning statement is a lot more than just a short sentence about your business or product, it is a concise answer to the “So What” question. This isn’t something that you can “wing it” with, it needs to be calculated to engage your audience and stick in their mind.

The So What Positioning Statement Generator begins on page 100. It leads you through the process of creating a compelling and memorable positioning statement that you will use. The format that this follows is “Do you know how…?, Well, what I do is…” After you have generated this you need to practice saying it in a comfortable and easy way. It is important for it to sound natural and not planned.
Use that generator and post a couple iterations of your So-What Positioning Statement. Do you think that it will be a compelling tool? Use this space for useful critique, and try to perfect your positioning statement.