Usable Words

As anyone who works on the web will tell you, there are two kinds of business website:

1. Websites built for their owners
2. Websites built for their customers

The first kind of website – the kind that goes on and on about how wonderful the business is, how revolutionary its products are, how many combined years of experience its partners have, how its showroom is the biggest in the Southern hemisphere, and how if that’s not impressive enough they also have this expensive piece of Flash animation to look at – is what Gerry McGovern calls “organisation-centric”. Absolutely everybody in the web industry thinks organisation-centric websites are bad. (Mysteriously, that hasn’t stopped them being built.)

We all agree, then, that the second kind of website – what McGovern calls “customer-centric” – is the good kind. Of course, it’s no surprise that usability experts like McGovern want websites to be customer-centric. But so, nowadays, do web marketers, designers, developers and copywriters.

So that’s that, then. We can get on with our jobs, confident that we all think our websites should be built to please customers, not owners. Who’s for a quick chorus of “Kumbayah”?

If only it were that simple.

There’s customer-centric and there’s customer-centric…

The thing is, saying a website should be “built for customers” can itself mean two different things:

1. The site should persuade customers to do what we want them to do.
2. The site should help customers to do what they came to do.

The first position is commonly held by sales and marketing professionals, the second by usability experts. Now, I don’t believe that either position is inherently right or wrong: the point is, they’re different.

Of course, “different” doesn’t always mean “incompatible”. In some cases, a sales or marketing objective can dovetail perfectly with a usability objective. Example: you visit Amazon to buy a book. The shopping cart makes it easy to do what you came to do. But at the same time, you’re fulfilling Amazon’s sales objective by handing over your credit card details. Bring out the guitars, it’s “Kumbayah” time!

But it’s not always that easy: sometimes, sales or marketing objectives and usability objectives interfere with each other.

When marketing and usability collide

Here’s an example: a bank wants to make it easy for customers to use its website for internet banking. But it also wants to “cross-sell” other products to those customers. It’s very, very hard to do the cross-selling without interfering with the usability of the internet banking. In the long term, the bank’s best bet – even from a marketing point of view – is to avoid annoying its customers at all costs. But because marketing tends to be driven by short-term objectives and measurable conversions, all too often the loyal customer will end up getting bombarded by pop-up ads.

Another example: as a professional gardener, you have some really valuable expert knowledge to offer website visitors. From a usability perspective, the best thing to do would be to just give all that knowledge away, no sign-ups, no hoops to jump through. But from a marketing perspective, you’re not a charity: at some point you want to make people subscribe to your newsletter before you give them any more goodies. This is a situation where it’s probably right to compromise usability for marketing reasons. (Naturally, you should still make the newsletter signup process as usable as possible.)

Find a balance

Every good website has a different balance between marketing and usability. The key point: don’t assume that just because your website is “customer-centric”, you’ll never have to choose between conflicting priorities. Finding the right balance only becomes easy when you’ve worked out what “customer-centric” means for you.

My credit union (which, by the way, is a terrific organisation that employs excellent customer service staff) has recently launched a fancy new website that’s mostly very pleasant to use. But there’s one thing I think they’re doing very wrong: using modal windows to advertise their products.

It’s been a much-discussed trend in web interface design lately, littering sites with these windows that require users to take some action before they can get on with what they came to do. They do look pretty nifty and have their uses – they can work really well for quickly displaying full-sized versions of thumbnail images, for instance. In fact, I’m planning to have a (user-initiated) modal on my website, so I’m certainly not against them in principle.

But when they’re used for advertising, they really do suck – it’s the ultimate form of “interruption marketing” because users can’t get on with anything else until they’ve interacted with the ad in some way. On a banking site, which existing customers use on a daily basis to accomplish specific tasks, that’s an even bigger sin.

When my credit union started using modals to advertise credit cards a couple of months ago, I wrote to them with a polite objection. They sent me a prompt reply, which was great, but they didn’t really seem to be taking in what I was saying. They pointed out that there was a cookie preventing anyone seeing the ad more than once (fair enough, but some people disable cookies, and maybe once is one too many). And they went on to tell me again how wonderful the credit card was. So I guess they think it’s OK to interrupt people if the product you’re selling is good.

This week I see the modal ads are back, this time advertising mortgages. What do you think – am I being a drama queen, or do you agree that this is really not on for a financial institution?

Photo credit: House of Sims

(This is the first in a series of posts about how people use the words on your website.)

Here’s something about writing for the web that’s totally unique. On the web, whether people can find you or not depends (in part) on the words you write. To be exact, it depends on how the words you write relate to the words they type into a search box.

As a word geek, I find this fascinating. The ancient art of rhetoric – to which every copywriter owes his or her livelihood – is about using words based on how you think people will behave. You predict that pressing certain verbal buttons will trigger the behaviour you want. So you could say that all of us in the word business use language in predictive ways.

But I can’t think of any other word-based activity that’s so specifically, mechanically predictive about human behaviour as writing search engine optimised (SEO) content. (SEO is about a lot more than content, actually, but content is a good place to start.) read more >

My friends at Acorn Web Studio recently posted a plea to anyone thinking of using “click here” to indicate a link on their website:

Times have moved on now. The web is literally an everyday tool for everyday people. The ‘click here’ is now implicit. So why do so many people continue to use it in their hyperlinks and their calls to action?…There are better ways to do things.

I agree, of course, but I also think there are even worse ways of pointing to a link than “click here”! What about “To contact us, click ‘contact us’ at the bottom of the page”? “To see a list of our New Zealand offices, click the map of New Zealand on the left”? Or worst of all, “To submit an order, click ’shop’ on the menu bar, then click ‘online shopping’ and then ‘new customer’ or ‘returning customer’ as appropriate”?! You get the idea.

Why do people insist on referring to a link somewhere else on the page (or on some other page that first has to be navigated to) rather than just doing the sensible thing and re-linking? I think it has something to do with a fear of redundancy, of providing the same information more than once. This might be a carry-over from books: we “navigate” books by referring to a Table of Contents, one entry per section, so people think we ought to navigate websites the same way.

But when it comes to web navigation, redundancy is often a good thing. True, people like to be able to build a “mental map” of your site, so your navigation should be clean enough that it’s not confusing. But having a link in your menu bar that’s reiterated in your body text isn’t confusing, it’s helpful, and increasingly people expect it. (If we could, we’d do it in books too!)