Ever fill out a form, hit submit, and say what the heck? Did the form fail to process the data correctly? Did the database fail? Did you type the captcha letters wrong? It was none of the above. It was the design, or should I say usability.
Your secret to building a successful form for your website? Watch a few NEW users fill it out for the first time.
Not all things are intuitive, especially to new visitor. Look at this example below. Continue reading »
Time for part 3 of 35 covering my usability and design analysis, Quality of Introduction Message.
Imagine a website with a logo that has a smiling face, and underneath it is says “I Can Do It!”. Do you now know what the site is about? A returning or regular will most likely say yes, but what about a new visitor though? The answer is NO, they do not know what the site is about based on the logo and tag line. T-10 seconds till visitor blast off. You better deliver your message quick, and you better do it well or they are gone.
A high quality introduction message should be:
A clear easy to find introduction message is vital for new visitors to a website. It is the virtual opening hand leading a visitor into the right direction. If you go to the home page of this site for example, you will see that I have created an introduction box. It quickly tells new visitors what this site is about, and what they can do. I don’t waste space with words like welcome, or thank you, or how do you do. I know that I only have a few seconds to tell them what my site is about, I give them a couple of options to my primary desired visitor actions, and then simply hope they are my target audience. There is not much else you can do without blasting them with a popup or something.
If you are running Google Analytics there is a great little test you can do to see how new visitors respond to your site. Under the Content section, select your common entry page or home page to bring up its statistics, and see what it’s bounce rate is. If you use their Advanced Segments, found in top right by the date range, you can select visitor by type. So from there you can compare returning vs. new visitors. An easy guess is that your returning visitors have a much lower bounce rate. What’s your goal for you new visitors? Hopefully the same numbers as your returning visitors. That’s easier said than done though.
Screenshot of Google Analytic Tool
Comparing several of my own sites I have results varying in all sorts of ways. I have some that are doing nearly just as well, with just a 5% margin in difference, and some that are varying as much as 40%. This can happen for a number of reasons, but the source of the new visitors is the primary influence. An example would be traffic coming from StumbleUpon will have a much higher bounce than a pay per click campaign. To dig into that, you can simply use the drop down menu where it says analyze. It’s located underneath the graph. Select Entrance Sources, and then you can see what is really happening. When you have that information you can see not only how well your introduction message is working, but how well your marketing is working at each source.
Now you know what your benchmark is, try beating it!
One of the things I have been working on the past couple of days is the length of my visitors session. Overall, I am very happy with the results, and about 19% of my visitors stay at least three minutes with several page views. Over the past month I have made a few changes to the site, and comparing to the previous numbers everything has been improving. Visitors new and old are staying longer. I have one problem area though, and that is the 30-60 second visitors. This number has been increasing, and I believe it’s because my instant bouncer is staying just a little longer. So now I am looking for ways to get them to break that one minute barrier. Once they do that, my odds of having another regular just went up.
I found a site that gave me an idea that might just help me out. By Moms is a web portal for Moms and Women in general. One thing that caught my eye, and will most likely catch yours, is the main animation under their logo. What’s it for? To sell their categories, to sell their site, and to quickly sell you on reading their content.
When I say “Sell Your Content”, I don’t mean for money to an outside source. I mean sell it to your visitors. Sell the idea that this site is for them, and that they should read your content. What’s one of the best methods to selling a product online? Show a picture of it. All their categories are in the header, you don’t really need their animated menu to use the site, but that new visitor certainly needs it.
Animated menus like this get that new ten second visitor clicking a few times more than normal just to check out the images. Now that ten seconds is thirty, and what happens if they SEE something they like? Whamo, you got them. I’d love to know if this site always had the animated menu. I would also love to know if they had a big decrease in bounces when/if they added it.
It’s always a good idea to have something to draw a visitor into a second page. An example is my “Action Start Here” banner that I currently have on my home page. Using the My Moms site as an example though, you can see muliple things that can get that second page view, and use pictures to do the work. Not the right target visitor? No problem, check out this other picture.
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