From time to time, I find myself inspired to remind a company: User Experience is the ENTIRE experience your customer has. It’s not just the clicks and pixels on your website. It’s how your customer feels that you, as a company, feel about them.
With this in mind, there are a few rules you should follow on your website, even though they might seem counter to your business needs:
1. Make sure it is easy to contact you by email and phone. Make sure this contact information is displayed on your home page at LEAST. Better is that it should be displayed on EVERY page of your website. Most users will look to the footer of your site, so you can either put the contact info right there (best) or have a “Contact Us” link (not bad).
I know that there’s an objection to this because if you give customers a way to contact you, you’ll have to pay someone to answer emails and phones. Expenses go up. However, if you do NOT give customers a way to contact you, they will choose to do business with your competitor who has a prominently displayed 1-800 number. Trust me on this.
By not giving them a way to speak to you, you are essentially saying “We don’t care what you, the customers, want or have to say.”
2. Make it easy to unsubscribe. In emails, have the word “unsubscribe” be a link to an instant unsub. Don’t use some funky sentence that beats around the bush but makes marketing people feel comfortable. Use the word “Unsubscribe”, because that is what users are looking for.
On your website, have an unsubscribe link in your megamenus or your footer. My rule of thumb is that a completely new user should be able to find the unsub link within three seconds.
The objection to this is that if you make unsubbing easy, your unsub rate will go up. I won’t lie; it might. But honestly, the RIGHT way to get unsubs down is to improve your offering. Make it better, and people won’t even look for the unsub link.
By making unsubscribe hard to find, you are trapping users into a subscription they don’t want. They will resent your company, which does harm to your brand – and they will either delete your emails without opening, or set up a filter so they never have to see them. Worst case scenario, they’ll mark you as spam.
3. Don’t make your users pay for basic support. If they paid for your product, it’s in your best interest to give them basic support for free. The more they use your product, the more they will want to buy the next version, and the more they will want to tell their friends about it. If they have a problem, and you don’t support them, then they will give up on you and tell everyone they know that your app doesn’t work. This is most especially true in the first week of a user’s acquisition.
3a. A knowledgebase is not enough support. Unless you are an open source application, then you need more than a knowledgebase. You should have some version of live chat capability, a support phone number, and a good support ticketing system. Don’t make your users rely on FAQs and poorly edited form answers to get help.
There are plenty more rules for making sure your customers have a good all-around user experience. What are some of your favorites?
Today’s Glossary Term:
Multivariate Testing – Everyone knows that A/B testing is when you show some of your audience one version of a page, and the rest of the audience another version of the page. This is great for testing drastically different designs to see which one performs better. Multivariate testing is what you use next – once you pick a design, you start to tweak things. You will run five, ten, maybe twenty MV tests at once, changing a tiny thing here, a tiny thing there. It’s a very rigorous, scientific test that allows you to learn that the combination of headline A with button color B and button placement C and image D works best for your audience.
Today’s Interesting Link:
whichtestwon.com/ is a fascinating look at A/B tests and what did better. The author of this blog has a great understanding of the fact that every audience reacts to things in a unique way, and there’s no best practice that works for everyone.
Today’s Usability Quote:“Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.” – Albert Einstein
Today’s Music To Design To:
Have you heard the TRON: Legacy soundtrack? The incomparable Daft Punk does classical. And it’s brilliant. It will totally put you in the creative mood.
Download the MP3 Album
