Archive for the 'Usability and Human Interface' Category
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I thought about how ridiculous this product was. It was a good idea to get all the charge-ables together in a single place. It was not a good idea to do it all on paper and never test the feasibility. But it clearly doesn’t work in the real world. The solution? Shall we redesign it so it really works? Nahhhh…Let’s SELL IT ANYWAY!

One of the most difficult challenges is tracking paid search performance via telephone calls for the small business. While a few will spring for a new 800 number or IVR system to get some of that information and train phone staff in its use, many cannot due to the workaday reality. Often the busy office environment means metrics go out the window in favor of just getting the order out, so the company continues to guess.

This is especially true for companies who are struggling to find their sweet spot in the paid search world. During the day-to-day chaos, few are thinking about the cost of each call - they just want to answer it and do their best to change the caller into a customer. If the staff is so busy, do you really think they’ll drill down and get the “how you found us” information accurately recorded. It doesn’t happen. Pay-per-call and click-to-call offer “embedded” tracking, but are plagued with inventory and adoption challenges. My friend Christine (CC: Nice to see you at SMX!) created a great post on Offline Conversion Tracking, which covers some of the same ground, and this issue has often come up in conference sessions.

As Greg Sterling points out, the vast majority of purchases are made offline, yet the tracking solutions are only just maturing, and others have a very healthy skepticism about some of the new solutions.

The real result of this is the “leaking” of marketing budgets that happens with a lack of tracking. The dynamics of the purchase cycle are mysterious, making strategic and tactical solutions little better than guesses.

I see basically four flavors of off-line conversion tracking from pay-per-click ads, and would like to introduce a hybrid.

anecdotal
customer question at point of sale, catalog IDs, coupons, offers
poor man’s IVR (multiple phone numbers)
cookied IVR
…and a hybrid…
cookied part number modification

CLICK MORE to see the rest of this article.

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I dislike Volusion for many reasons, but this one stands out. Searching their owners manual gives results, but you must bang through each to find anything. So far, everything in Volusion takes 5x more steps than I think it should. Anyhow, no time to write that book… here’s an example of a useless SERP typical of their online help.

Useless owners manual SERPS due to poor deployment

In the past few months’ time I’ve spent more than my usual amount of time watching others surf the web. I am always astonished by how poor people are at knowing where to type searches, or web addresses, or login information. When I ask someone to go to a website, there is genuine confusion about where or how. It’s no surprise to me that a thriving sub-economy exists based on navigational searches - which I define loosely as “typing a web site URL into a search box because you want to visit it.”

Most of the time it’s user issues that causes navigational searches IMO:

• The toolbars have been dragged out of whack.
• I don’t even think about, I just type.
• Ambiguity between “search”, “find”, and “address bar” in browsers such as IE7.
• Alcohol or Drugs, Senility, or perhaps Loud Children.

Some people have real reasons for it. Here are a few:

• I don’t have to worry as much about typos.
• I sometimes want to look at the cache
• I get a quick glance at other sites referring to it (talk about ad-hoc reputation management!)
• I’m a rebel, damnit, and you ain’t gonna change me.

A terrific article on navigational searches prompted me to begin a list of good resources on this matter. I also found this terrific write up by Jeremy Crane over at compete’s blog. It was also eye-opening. (more…)

I thought I’d look at buying some shelves.  But when I looked at how many pages this site had, I was suddenly feeling pretty exhausted.    By page 16, I think I’ll need a nap. Oh, in case you’re wondering, searching didn’t help, you had to know the SKU.

Advice:

• You should improve your server performance so it can handle more products on a page, and have fewer pages.
• You should insert an intermediate grouping by “type” or “color” or “price point”… no, I don’t mean a search box.
• You should be more aware of the customer.   We are not going to spend 30m on your site.

We are all busy, but most of us love blogs. Finding, filtering, and selecting blogs is something that must be done by hand. because it requires that we personally evaluate an author’s efforts and give them enough time to show their stuff. It’s my blog audition, borne from necessity.

At one point I had 1400 blogs in Google Reader, haphazardly picked. Even with nicely developed folders, filters, and so on, I found myself wasting far too much time. So one day I got fed up. I did the equivalent of “touch bloglist.opml” and started over.

And, what evolved afterward was a very simple and effective method for narrowing down the thousands of blogs without impacting your daily flow.

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This reminds me of some websites I’ve evaluated lately.

vs. A Purposeful, Prioritized Design

photo credits: unknown. If these are your photos, contact me for attribution and a link.

According to the New York Times:

“As part of what Wal-Mart is calling its “Customer Contact Reduction” program, by next week, Walmart.com, the company’s online arm, will no longer give customers a toll-free phone number to call–or any phone number, for that matter–if they have a question.

Instead, they will have to rely solely on the Wal-Mart Web site as their guide to the solution for whatever problem they might have, whether it is a question about a credit card charge or the status of an online order.”

Now, they can move their support centers anywhere in the world without getting middle America upset.. because emails and help files have no accent. Mr. Sam Walton might frown on this. But Sam Walton knew a good deal when he saw it.

Some CRM solutions that are entirely web-based can save a company $20-25 per customer interaction. And if these people are already using the Wal-Mart website to order items, this is not a huge leap.

Postscript:

Seth Godin focuses instead on a system where efficiency (i.e. customer buy or repeat buy rate) is the reward offered to successful operators.

I’d focus on building a system that measures [sales rate before call] vs. [sales rate after call]. If the sales rate goes up, give the call center person a raise. It’s that simple.

I’m trying to envision how one could set this up for customer service organizations.  Sales call centers, yes, but service oriented businesses?  Now we’re thinking long-tail.  We’re talking relationships. You would need some rather sophisticated operators to think in terms of the long tail, but if the philosophy was drilled in from day one, you’d get service centers that acted a lot like brand welcoming committees, who are there to improve your brand BY WAY OF fixing problems.  THAT sounds good.

I loved this.

Partially because I’ve got some of these obsessive/compulsive tendencies when I see stuff like this wrong in the world, too. Partially because it is a good idea. And partially because I know companies ignore stuff like this when they should pay attention to it - in fact, this is great marketing material (e.g. “the little things that make Subway better.”)

While I was born inherently visual, I think it’s partially Donald Norman and Seth Godin’s fault, though for making it nearly impossible for me to walk out of any establishment without a mental “improvements” list I’d like to send the proprietor. I think the only places I go where such rarely happens are Disney, BMW service centers, Starbucks, and McDonalds.

Postscript:� From the lefthandedtoons.com blog, even more goodness.

1 year ago, one of the worst plane crashes in recent years happened here in Lexington. 49 people died when flight 5191 went down due a runway mix-up.

This morning, WTVQ decided to send out last year’s RSS feed headline and story again resulting in the image you see below. Did we have another crash?

It turns out the web page is showing a “one year later” discussion, but the feed itself was obviously forgotten.

Look closely at this news story’s date.

People using content management systems need to educate all users of what will go out not only on the browser, but on the RSS feed.