29

Get Out of The Way of Your Customer!

This is a true story about a $300 million dollar button on a website. User Interface Engineering, which does usability studies on e-commerce sites, recently had a report about a client who they did some usability studies on. A major e-commerce retailer, this online store had the idea of installing a login feature just before the final step in the checkout process. After  you selected items from their store and went to checkout, you were prompted to either log into the site or register for a free account. The concept was that with an account, you could track your previous orders and make future buying easier. The web designers assumed that past customers returning to the site would know their login information, and the new users wouldn’t mind the extra steps of signing up an account, since they’d probably be returning to buy again in the future. These are very simple assumptions but wound up causing an extremely expensive mistake.

The study concluded that a substantial amount of people right on the cusp of purchasing a product declined to do so because of the registration process. In addition, many past customers had difficulty logging in as they did not remember their user names or passwords and didn’t want to wait for a response from the website telling them what it was. 45% of past customers actually had multiple logins with different passwords. While these factors were not a huge percentage of customers, it was enough to show a significant dent in the loss of business it created. For a company worth $25 billion, even a small dent in their revenues did amount to a significant amount of money? How significant? How about $300 million annually.

After doing this study, the UIE suggested replacing the mandatory registration portion of the checkout with a simple “Continue” button. They also changed the text to reflect that registration was not required but was a helpful option if you planned on returning to the site again in the future. The result? Sales went up by 45% immediately - $15 million in just the first month and $300 million in the first year, simply by adding a “continue” button.

So the lesson here is that so many times when it comes to website design we think about how it makes things more convenient for the designers and not so much for the customers. A great way around this is to have people beta test the website more effectively before having such a feature go live. I remember building a website about seven years ago. The client wanted to have the “buy now” button flash in red and yellow everywhere it appeared on the website. The thought was it would stand out and the customer would never be lost when it came time to place an order. When we beta tested the website, the testers all stated that the button was annoying and distracting when they were trying to read the product description adjacent to the flashing button. As such, they found it motivation enough to stop reading and click off the site. So a feature that was intended to get people to buy more frequently actually wound up driving them away.

So whenever working on your own website, be aware of the experience you have building it may not be the same experience your visitor has when they are on it. Sometimes we have to take off the “Designer” hat and put on the “Customer” hat when it comes to our own e-commerce website. Doing so may result in a much more positive result than you might think.

07

Say No To Flash

At least once a week I have the same conversation with one of my clients. “Adam, I really want my website to be designed in Flash because it looks so nice.” Fifteen minutes later, I always hear the same phrase…”I’m so glad you talked me out of it!” In case you didn’t get the memo, Flash is dead.

Now, it’s important to understand that there is a time and a place to use Flash components in your website. In fact, I even use Flash on my own home page. The key to understanding the importance or irrelevance of using Flash to build your website stems from several different reasons.

For starters, search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, MSN, etc., all HATE Flash. Why? Because they can’t see it. Most people never stop to think about what makes up a website page from the inside and when you have a better understanding of website construction, it starts to make more sense. A website is nothing more than a programming called “HTML” (short for Hyper Text Markeup Language) which assembles different components together of text, images, etc., into something a human being can visually see on their computer screen. If you ever want to see what an actual web page looks like, on the top menu of your browser, click on View and then Page Source. This literally all a web page actually is. When a visitor to that page views the page with a web browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, that browser decodes that mess of code by compiling the code and making into something you can see. This all happens in the blink of an eye, and yet that is the actual process that happens every time you visit a website.

When you ad a third party component to the mix, especially Flash, you had a lot of other variables to what is happening in your browser. These things require a plug-in to make that component work. Flash is an element that was created using a technology now owned by Adobe. In essence, Flash is used for a variety of purposes including animation, games, and so on. It can be interactive or it can just play a slide show of images. The software used to create a Flash component is periodically updated, and when the programmer is using a new version and saves the Flash component, it will require the user, or in this case, the visitor to your website, to update their Flash Player to see that new component. What’s interesting about this, is that a very large population of computer users don’t update their players frequently. So if they go to your website and it has an important component that is Flash based, or if the entire website is in Flash, they can’t see it! So now you are forcing your customer to go and download the latest version, install it, and come back. Ugh.

It is important to understand that visitors to your website have a shorter attention span than ever before. Current studies say it approximately nine seconds or less. NINE SECONDS! So think of this logically, as if your website were a conventional, brick-and-mortar type of store. Imagine a customer walks in the door of your bakery looking for the product you are selling and you FORCE them to watch a video and take a tour of the kitchen just to buy a loaf of bread. Assuming you make the sale at all, your customer will unlikely return again because of the hassle of the buying process. The same thing holds true for your website. Forcing visitors to sit through a lengthy animation cycle or download a plugin will likely result in the loss of a sale. Now, think long and hard about the reason you built your website. Before you answer, I can answer for you…to make money online. So why do something to get in the way of that process when you have a hot prospect wanting to give you their money? You wouldn’t do it in a brick-and-mortar business do don’t do it on your website!

This isn’t to say that having an attractive website is unimportant. It’s VERY important to keep up with the latest Internet design trends. The key is to not sell your visitor on how gorgeous your website is, rather than to sell them on the product that you are selling! Just recently I was talking with one of my business parterners, Rebecca Avalon, about just this topic. She is in the process of redoing her website and asked me for some advice. The top header of the site used a lengthy 30 second animation made in Flash. It looked really nice and on a basic level, it didn’t interfere with all of the rest of the text content on the site. The issue was that the animation looped over and over again. It had a lot of bright colors and every time you refreshed the page, you had to wait for this animation to load again. It slowed down the entire website! Not only that, but because this animation kept looping, while you were reading the text below it, it didn’t take anything more than 20 seconds before your eyes started to hurt. So, after some coaching, she understood that her banner animation time should be shorter and should end on a still frame. Also, all subsequent pages in the site don’t play the animation…they just display that last frame of the video as a graphic image. This speeds up loading times and becomes less of an annoyance. Lastly, all crutial information to the business (ad copy, bullet points of importance to the service of the business, etc.) is removed from the Flash animation. This is in case the visitor is looking at the site from an Iphone or a browser without the latest plugin, so this way they can still see all the important features the business has to offer even though they can’t see the animation on top of the home page. The only down side to this, is if a visitor can’t see that animation on top, they may conclude that something important is up there and may leave out of discouragement. Again, another reason against the use of Flash! With an attractive still image on top, you alleviate all these problems while still accomplishing the same task. Remember, when in doubt, K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)

This leads me to the next major reason not to build your website in Flash…a search engine can’t see any of it. You have to realize that when search engines like Google arrive on your website, they scan through all of your content looking for (primarily) text that they can use to rank your website. They want to know if you are selling snow mobiles or aluminum siding. When your website is constructed in Flash, especially if you have any of your website text in Flash (a MASSIVE mistake), the search engines can’t read it. Remember, this is not a human being looking at your website, it’s a computer. It can only interpret HTML code, not Flash! Flash is designed for human beings to look at…it can’t be interpreted by a computer that is looking for HTML code. It would be no different than you walking into a room expecting everyone speaking English and all they speak is Japanese. If you don’t speak Japanese, you’ll be lost in the conversation. The same thing holds true for search engines and Flash. They can’t interpret it, so, as a result, they rank your website lower. While there are tricks to getting a Flash-based website ranked higher, ultimately websites compared side-by-side with identical content, the non-Flash based site will always rank higher.

So remember, use Flash conservatively in your website. If you want to have a cool animation to drive a point home, Flash may be an alternative to a static image. Ultimatley, the use of Flash is best done when you need to make a presentation or interractive element on your website that HTML cannot handle but when you are building your entire website with it, don’t be upset when your sales drop well below expectations. FYI, approximately 10% of the clients currently on retainer with us are ones who had a Flash-based website they spent a tidy sum in constructing that looked GORGEOUS but couldn’t convert to income. They came to the Millionaire Marketing Group to redo the website in a non-Flash based environment and consistently all of their sales went through the roof.

Don’t believe me that changes like this will amount to massive revenue shifts? Keep an eye out for my next blog on the $300 million “Continue” button!