Archive for the 'Usability and Human Interface' Category
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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.

(more…)

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.