Sitegeist Blog - Beitrags-Archiv für die Kategory 'User focus'

A couple of weekends ago I was given the wonderful opportunity to run a 2-day training session for Editors Victoria.

The Redact event is held every 2 years, and offers the opportunity for working editors to engage in professional development, and a fair bit of networking, in the gorgeous surrounds of Hepburn Springs, outside Melbourne.

There were 3 streams this year: mine was ‘Editing digital content’, which comprised 7 sessions over the 2 days. The other 2 streams were ‘Supercharging your business’, presented by business coach Ilona Way, and ‘Manuscript assessment’, run by the formidable Nadine Davidoff.

Throughout the 2 days, I took 9 experienced, eager editors through the ins and outs of digital content, with a focus on advocating for users and working closely with UX practitioners.

Preparing the 7 sessions took many days of work, crystallising my thoughts, documenting my approach, and treading the tightrope between keeping it fun and upbeat and communicating an enormous amount of professional knowledge and experience.

I had a ball, and the feedback from participants was great too. Huge thanks to organiser Liz Steele, and to the participants who made it such a great event.

I recently completed a 3-year (part time) stint at Medibank – Australia’s largest private health insurance fund. I helped out on the Medibank and ahm brands with content strategy and copywriting.

Before my time at Medibank, the topic of health insurance wouldn’t have thrilled me at all. And, in fact, having worked on it for so long, I can safely claim that nothing has changed.
But what kept me interested and engaged over the journey was the daily challenge of trying to sell a product to people who:

• didn’t understand it
• didn’t want to understand it, and
• thought they were being tricked into buying it.

In short, health insurance is a grudge purchase.

Shared approach
Every day I worked with the product teams, marketing department, developers and – crucially – user experience and design practitioners. The close relationship I developed with UXers was particularly important in our work to improve the experience of users and improve online conversion.

They also understood that the products were complicated and that customers purchased mostly unwillingly. And this understanding was vital when we were designing pages and flows.

So how do you sell to someone who doesn’t want to buy?
Simple: respect the user and their time.

Don’t promote or advertise to them. And definitely don’t thrust campaigns at them. They’ve already arrived. The marketers have done their job. Pat on the back. Now get in the back seat.

In May, Gerry McGovern wrote:

“Let us not focus on engaging but rather on informing. Let us not focus on getting people to spend time with our content but rather on seeing how we can save them time.
“Let’s go on a relentless pursuit of the absolute minimum amount of content that is needed to allow people to complete their tasks. Let us hone, test, refine and constantly focus on and think about our customers.”

This appeal neatly encapsulates my approach at Medibank. We got to the point. We used clear language (not persuasive language). Our customers were rightly annoyed – the government makes it essentially compulsory for many people to purchase private health cover. So our job was to present the products and design a flow that allowed them to purchase as quickly as possible.

Like most organisations with large sites, there was to-and-fro. Not everyone was comfortable with our approach. Sometimes we weren’t able to deliver, as people with more traditional marketing ideas intervened.

But over and over we saw the merit in our approach. And, if online sales were anything to go by, so did our customers.

Websites need quality content – and a clear content strategy – more than ever, after Google announced a change to its algorithm that will benefit original, quality content over hack SEO-driven copy.

Better rankings for better content
Tired of getting low-quality search engine results from sites like eHow? Well, so is Google. Big-wigs at the search giant Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts announced a few days ago a “pretty big” improvement to results, based on providing “better rankings for high-quality sites – sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

In Google’s sights are “content farms” run by organisations such as Demand Media (eHow, Livestrong, Cracked and more). Demand Media pay freelancers (poorly) to create content on long-tail search engine terms. They have one goal in mind, and it’s not to educate or inform web users.

Gaming the SERPs
While not every eHow article is useless, quality is certainly secondary to keyword optimisation. Content farms are all about ranking highly in search engine results pages (SERP). But because of the sheer weight of numbers and a clever approach to SEO and SEM, eHow is all over your Google results.

Only a few days before the most recent announcement, Google released an extension for its Chrome browser that allows users to blacklist sites they don’t want in their results. While it might be fun to block your competitors and see yourself soar, it seemed like another example of Google admitting that it was failing to keep up with SEO spammers (read my previous post about how SEO tricks Google). Why not fix search instead of making users hack results?

The right direction
The latest announcement is a far more positive step for Google. Users need search engines to deliver the best and most appropriate results. Google’s job is to deliver the best algorithm, and any result page that prioritises quality, original content over $5 articles paid for by word count is OK with me.

So get your content on
Now there are two great reasons for businesses to boost their content stocks with professionally-written, high-quality, useful content:

1. There’s a gap emerging in the market, as eHow slips down the ladder
2. Google are on the lookout for the best original content out there.

Take advantage. Hire a web copywriter today.

At a rate of around once a fortnight, I find myself trying to convince clients, friends or people I’ve just met on a bus that FAQs (frequently asked questions) on websites are BAD and WRONG.

I’m not alone in thinking this. Earlier this year, R. Stephen Gracey wrote a great piece about FAQs for A List Apart. And he was following on from stalwart Jakob Nielsen who talked about “infrequently asked questions” in an end-of-year summary of web mistakes on useit.com.

Both Nielsen and Gracey reflect on big problems with FAQs, but both also concede that they’re sometimes necessary. I’m not convinced. I think they’re a scourge.

So why are FAQs bad?
As a content strategist, a hefty part of my day is spent thinking about content. Not content floating on its own in the ether in a writerly, poetical kinda way. Content in situ.

Good website content (and, indeed, good content anywhere) is best when it fits (space, tone, context) and when it’s found (i.e. it is where you either expect it or need it to be).

Sitemaps, page structure, design and words…all of these things should combine online to create an intuitive, comprehensible experience for website visitors. Content should be structured (and labelled) in a way that enables visitors to see it, and to click with confidence. This is the fundamental job of content strategy and user experience folks.

FAQs = fail. They’re a generic spot where businesses and site writers lump stuff, out of context. Any stat you have that shows a user moving from any other page of your site into your FAQs is a mark of failure.

Content should be clear and in context. No room for it on the page where a user might expect to see it? Make room!

Questions are OK….sometimes
I’m not saying that question-and-answer sections are, in themselves, bad. Usually they are, but sometimes they’re the best way to communicate information, and have the advantage of forcing site writers to actually try to think like a site visitor.

If I’m selling t-shirts, it makes great sense to have a “Questions about our t-shirts” area, where I might pre-empt queries such as:

• How do I choose the right size?
• Are there special washing instructions?
• Where are the t-shirts made?
• What if my t-shirt doesn’t fit?

If I’m feeling radical, I might even keep track of questions people actually do ask, and use these on the site. Crazy, sure. But it might be just crazy enough to work.

I could link to these questions from every specific t-shirt product page (actually, I’d probably recommend listing the questions on each of these pages and linking to answers or showing them in hover windows).

I might also have a section containing info about shipping and returns. And I’d call it “Shipping and returns”. If I wanted, I could present these as a Q&A. But what’s the benefit? Might as well present my information clearly under friendly, easy-to-scan headings such as:

• Shipping options and costs
• Tracking and delivery times
• Customs
• Multiple items
• T-shirt returns

…and anything else I needed to tell people about the fine art of mailing a t-shirt to someone.

In both of these examples, it would be a mistake – a terrible, lazy mistake – to put this important info into a generic FAQ.

Why?

When did you last look at FAQs? Was it up-front when you first arrived on a new site? Did you load the site thinking, “Oh golly, I just can’t wait to feast my eyes on them FAQs!”?

Probably not.

Most likely, you were looking for information that you couldn’t find elsewhere. Your search around the site probably wasn’t exhaustive, but you figured, well, there’s the FAQs in the navigation. Maybe I’ll take a look there.

And did you find what you needed?

Probably not.

Terrible.

(As others have pointed out, FAQs are rarely actually questions people ask frequently. They’re more likely to be details the site owners want to tell people, but they couldn’t think of a better place to put them.)

Or maybe you landed in the FAQs from a search of the site. Good news – you probably got the information you needed. Shame it wasn’t placed in its logical site context, where you probably would have found it without needing to search.

Lazy.

Content strategy is about putting the right content in the right place at the right time. It’s about creating positive experiences for users. It’s about making sure the content is there when and where they need it.

FAQs fail every one of these objectives. Site designers, UX practitioners and lovers of content need to work harder. FAQs must die!

It’s the same online and offline. If you want people to help you out with market research or insights, you’ll get more (and more engaged) responses if you offer them something of real value.

Cheap as chips
I recently visited a website and was interrupted by a pop-up asking if I wanted to take part in a 10-minute survey. I’d go in a draw to win an iPod.

No. I don’t really.

First – of course – I probably wouldn’t win the iPod. Second, I actually own an mp3 player. You can buy them now for about $10. And third, what a bunch of cheapskates! [I did appreciate being told up-front that it would take 10 minutes, though. Points for that, at least.]

I might have done the survey if they’d offered a night away as their prize. Or a car.

Real rewards
A couple of months ago, I got a survey enclosed in my electricity bill. 5 questions. If I answered them and sent it back inside a fortnight, they’d knock $10 off my next bill.

Did I do the survey? You bet I did. Took a minute. There was a postage-paid reply envelope. Too easy. Happy to help.

Money for nothing?
So whether you’re offering a prize or an up-front reward, make sure you’re not just taking your web visitors (or real-world visitors) for granted. Doing real market research costs money. If you want to involve your users or community, don’t take the piss. You can still get a cheap deal, but offering the slimmest of chances of winning a $150 music player doesn’t really cut it.

Got an in-store competition? That’s great! But the same rules apply. Make the prize worth it.

Not like this in-store window display that I saw recently… Is there anything sadder than a sad bear offered as a prize to kids with lice and nits?