Posts Tagged "website experience"

…ask the major search engines

A client recently asked Umlungu to help them understand how visitors experienced a couple of websites. Even we were somewhat surprised at the results.

We’re not saying it, they are

Real people who live in the real world visit websites. We wanted to make sure our findings represented their experiences. So we designed the tasks to be as close as possible to how people use the web.

For example, when asked to find a person’s contact details, we asked them to do the task once by starting at Google, and once again at one of the websites under review.

What the tests told us

Search engines can:

• Be an efficient way for people to locate content on a website.
• Also be a very confusing way of navigating a website.
• Expose visitors to some relevant alternatives, for example visitors can see better prices, better quality, greater convenience and much more at a single glance.

In a nutshell, if there is some dirt (or polish) on a business, search engines will lay it out for all to see.

Need proof? Try this

• Choose a company that you have an account with. For example a clothing store, supermarket or cellphone company.
• Pretend (if you have to) that you have just received a ridiculously large invoice.
• Insert personal choice of expletive and reach for your preferred contact method. (Okay, okay, we know it’s the phone, but let’s pretend it’s the internet.)
• Fire up your favourite browser and look for the contact details of the company’s accounts department.

And experience it first hand

See what you got by following the steps above? Instead of (hopefully) finding the accounts department’s contact details, chances are you will also find:

• The odd press release
• Opinions from customers with similar issues
• The odd offer from competing companies
• A myriad of other results that may have a lot (or nothing) to do with what you were looking for

Following these links could take you to the right page on the right website, a wrong page on the right website or an entirely different website altogether.

Now contrast this with a situation where a visitor lands on the home page of a website and then tries to get hold of the accounts department.

A company’s ability to influence the experience of its website visitors depends heavily on how they enter the website.

How you can make sure Google works with you, not against you

Well for starters, do you know how much of your website traffic comes from search engines? Once you know this you can decide on how much emphasis you need to place on designing different paths through your website.

If you feel these paths are important then:

• Ensure you cater for many entry points to your website, and not just the home page.
• Do good search engine optimisation on these additional entry points, because you need the search engines to know they exist (talk to us about our search engine optimisation services).
• Optimise the communication, design and processes that flow from these pages.
• Monitor the pages and refine them over time.

Even if you don’t receive a lot of traffic from search engines, it may be valuable to stop thinking of your website as a self-contained whole, but rather as part of the deliciously entangled World Wide Web.

Get to know your website’s visitors. Talk to Umlungu.