Managing expectation
Just before Christmas the prolific Blogstorm wrote a post on what a week’s vacation taught him about web design. I was reminded of his post whilst I was away over Christmas and perhaps inevitably I’ve ended up with my own set of comparisons specifically regarding managing visitor’s expectations.
I firmly believe that specifically managing visitor and customer expectations is one of the most important things that can and should be done with a site. Here are 4 basic and probably rather obvious observations on managing expectation.
1. Do what you say you will do
After taking off from Lisbon to Maputo we had to turn back because the wing flaps weren’t working properly. Sitting on the tarmac in Lisbon an announcement advised us that we would have to disembark. We waited and after a while another announcement informed us that we should remain seated with belts undone whilst the pane re-fuelled; still not sure what the problem was and if we would still have to disembark at some point. Eventually we took off again rendering the first announcement redundant.
Meeting expectations of visitors to your site is critically important. In part this can be measured using the Bounce Rate metric. This flagship metric demonstrates how good a particular entry page is at meeting the expectations of visitors arriving from specific sources. However meeting expectation goes further than this. At every step in the visitor’s journey through a site there should never be a corner around which the visitor finds something that wasn’t expected. Don’t leave them guessing.
2. Avoid dead ends and information black holes.
As a result of our delay in Lisbon we were re-routed to Johannesburg before going to Maputo in Mozambique - our final destination but we weren’t told about that until we were over half way to J’burg. The flight was supposed to make those stops in the reverse order. I asked how long we’d be in J’burg and was told 25 minutes. That’s how long the stopover would be if it was scheduled, in fact we were there for nearer 4 hours but we only knew that after the boarding announcement came in Johannesburg.
Every page on a site should have a purpose, if it doesn’t then you have to ask why its there. Try and empathise with visitors to your site and ask what they would want to know as they reach each page or type of page. Then make sure the information is readily available to them in a clearly identifiable format - clever (Web 2.0) technology is not always the solution here.
Some people will look at exit pages to understand if a page has fulfilled its role, this can be misleading as all visitors have to exit a site from somewhere, but knowing the 2 or 3 pages that were viewed immediately before the exit page may help shed further light.
3. Provide relevant information before it has to be asked for.
As already mentioned, on arrival in Johannesburg there was no indication of how long the stop over would be. Additionally there was nobody in the TAP office to answer questions. We simply had to wander around and wait. All the time we were cursing TAP for being so useless.
When a visitor or customer completes an important action such as registering for an email or buying a product or service be sure to tell them know what will happen next and what they should do. Remember that visitors to your site will not necessarily (probably not) read the fine print so you need to make important information stand out, this in itself is not as easy as one might think.
4. Don’t over complicate
There’s no holiday related comparison for this one.
Design your site for your grandmother. Clever technologies are only good if they actually make life easier. If a potential customer has to spend more than a few minutes trying to figure out how to access a piece of content that will show off the product in all its unfettered glory then, unless you are offering a financial incentive, the opportunity is lost to all but the most determined.
Finally I should add that despite my experiences flying with TAP which prompted the above comparisons my thoughts are also, in part, backed up by a piece of work I did for a client just before Christmas in which we provided a link on the category and product pages to a simple piece of content which served to provide additional reassurance to the customer during the research and purchasing process. Prior to the link being there very little traffic had been reaching the content in question. Once the link was installed traffic to that area shot up, visitors were reassured and relative performance improved.