What Makes Them Click

I am about to head to Portugal for a week, and I was interested in exploring different possible destinations in Portugal. I may not have much time for touring (I’m going to speak at the UXLX conference there), but if I did have time, where should I go? I have to admit to pretty much total ignorance about Portugal, the different regions, landscapes, and parts of the country, so I went to the official tourism web site for the country.

Give me a little bit at a time — The Portugal tourism site did an OK job of  what is called progressive disclosure. This is fancy term that is used in the field of psychology to refer to providing information in increasing chunks of size and complexity.

We can only handle so much — Humans can only process small amounts of information at a time (consciously that is… the estimate is that we handle 40,000,000 pieces of information every second, but only 40 of those make it to our conscious brains). One mistake that web sites make is to give too much information all at once, like this web site from the Canadian government:

There is no chunking here, there is not progressive disclosure. It’s just all the information thrown on the page all at once. The result? You don’t read it, you just leave.

Feeding bits of information – The Portugal site was just OK when it came to progressive disclosure. New Zealand does a much better job. The New Zealand tourism site has multiple levels of disclosure, feeding you the information bit by bit. Here’s the first page on the regions of New Zealand:

where I see the overall map and names of the different regions. If I hover over one of the regions in the list then I see a thumbnail of information:

Continuing on with this idea of progressive disclosure, if I click on that region then I link to a page with more pictures and little more detail:

there is a big map and there are tabs to go to for more information. If I scroll down I’ll have details on the region:

This is a great example of how to use progressive disclosure.

It’s not the clicks that count (pun intended) – One thing I’d like to point out is that progressive disclosure requires multiple clicks. Sometimes you will hear people say that websites should minimize the number of clicks that people have to make to get to the detailed information. The number of clicks is not the important criteria. People are very willing to make multiple clicks, in fact that won’t even notice they are making the clicks, if they are getting the right amount of information at each click to keep them going down the path.

Think progressive disclosure, don’t count clicks.

Should I let the web site design influence whether I book a ticket? Not this time at least. This time I’m headed for Portugal, where I plan to use the Portugal tourism site as a case study in my workshop!

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I get wonderful emails from readers of my book, Neuro Web Design: What makes them click. People write me and say how much they loved the book, etc, etc. It’s one of the benefits of writing a book!

A request from a reader – A few days ago I got one of those emails and the author asked if I had any presentations or slides that I could share with him. He was putting together a presentation for his management at work about the concepts in the book.

I procrastinate! — This is a request I get a lot, but I had never gotten around to putting together a Slideshare presentation for example, and uploading it. This is mainly because my talks and presentations are highly visual. I would have to do an audio annotation for the slides to make any sense.

I break the procrastination. On a weekend no less — When I got the email from my reader I decided that it was about time that I give it a whirl, so this weekend found me paring down my usual talk on the topic to a smaller number of slides. Then I donned a set of headphones with a microphone, and started talking.

I get it done in an hour – Slidecast (the part of slideshare where you add audio), was not the most intuitive interface, but it wasn’t too bad. I would say it took me about an hour from start to finish… from deciding on the slides, to recording the audio, and re-recording, and re-recording (in GarageBand), uploading everything and syncing up the slides with the audio (that was the klugy interface part).

See what you think, and give me feedback – It’s not perfect, but it’s a good first try. You can watch and listen below (the embed tool from Slideshare is very easy to use). It’s about 5 minutes in length. I’d love to get feedback from all of you about  this format, whether you think I should do more of these, and what topics I should talk/present about in them. So respond to me via the comments below or drop me an email at weinschenk@gmail.com. And if you don’t have the book yet, then click on one of the links in the sidebar and check it out.

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In a previous post I reviewed Steve Krug’s latest book, but recently I had the opportunity to interview Steve about the book. It’s a fun interview, and I think you’ll enjoy hearing Steve talk about:

• who he wrote the book for (not an obvious answer as I discovered)
• which part of the book he thinks makes the biggest contribution to the field of usability
• what his “parlor trick” is that he performs when he gives speeches
• the process by which he came up with the “scripts” for usability testing that are in the book
• how to locate the free video that anyone can watch whether or not they buy the book

and much much more.

The interview is 20 minutes — you can download it from the Neuro Web Design podcast link in iTunes, or click to listen to the interview with Steve.

I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed talking to Steve.

And here’s a link (affiliate) if you’d like to learn more about the book:

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I have a friend who volunteers to be on an advisory board for a land trust conservancy organization. They have been designing a web site for the land trust. But they are all volunteers, and the organization doesn’t have a budget for web site design. They have a programmer donating her time to put together the website.

Can you get user feedback when the site doesn’t even exist yet? – My friend’s background is in usability, and she was concerned that the web site that the programmer was putting together had usability problems. But the group has virtually no budget to do user centered design or get user feedback on the prototype. And all she had were some pictures of a draft of some of the pages. For example, here’s what she had for the home page:

The menus didn’t “work” because it was just a picture, so she put together this page showing what would be in the drop downs if you did click on the main navigation on the home page:

read more »

I’m amazed by the continual “bloopers” I find on websites. Maybe my expectations are too high, but I expect major companies and organizations to fix issues they have with their websites.  Here are a few of my favorites:

This blooper from Hertz has been going on for months – look at the calendar, it’s wrong… it’s got the wrong day of the week for these dates. Maybe they are using a Mayan calendar or something?

Picture of calendar at Hertz web site

Don’t know English? Then read what to do – in English! — I first saw this content from the state of California Courts website on being a juror several years ago… it’s still there (the highlighting is mine) – “If you cannot unerstand English, follow the instructions on the summons…” all written, of course, in English!:

And Verizon hasn’t tested what their website looks like — It’s looked like this for several months. There is some kind of problem here, probably a browser issue, but I guess Verizon hasn’t tested with Safari.

Do you have favorite bloopers? Send me a URL and description.

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I’ve been a fan of Steve Krug’s since his original book, Don’t Make Me Think, came out about a decade ago. (And Steve was kind enough to write an endorsement for my book, Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? when it came out last year).

Steve’s new book is all about user testing of web sites (or software or products or anything really). The premise of the book is that ANYONE can conduct a simple user test and that EVERYONE who has a website, software, or a product, should conduct user testing.

So the book is a DIY guide to simple, but effective, user testing.

Here’s my review via video, and below that I’ll summarize the take-aways:

What I like most about the book:

It’s very thorough — This really is everything you need to know to conduct an informal usability test.

Useful checklists — Chapter 7 is called “Some boring checklists” and it has great (not boring) checklists of what to do and when to do it.

All the wording and scripts you need — Chapter 8 gives you all the details you need, for example what to say as the facilitator, and what your consent form should contain. You get the actual forms and scripts.

How to interpret the data you get — Chapters 11 and 12 tell you what to do now that you’ve run the user tests and you have information.

How to think about the results — One of my favorite chapters is #10, where he walks you through how to have a meeting with your team and decide what actions to take based on the feedback you got during the test.

Link to an example video — In the book Steve gives you a URL to watch a video. The video is Steve conducting a user test with a real user. He annotates the video with some call outs so you can learn what he is doing as he goes along.

It’s a great book and I recommend it for anyone who has anything to do with designing or improving a website, or software, or technology product that people use. Whether you are new to user testing, or a pro with many years under your belt, you will find this book to be of immense value.

If you’d like to read more about it on Amazon, here’s a link (affiliate):

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Jacek Utko

Jacek Utko is a newspaper designer. He has designed/redesigned many newspapers in Central and Eastern Europe and won world awards. He believes strongly in “giving power to the designers” and that designers should embed their personal vision into the work they do, even at the expense of being a team player.

Utko’s words and work are compelling, and I especially like his 7 Steps to Success. He is talking about 7 steps to success if you are redesigning a newspaper, but when I first read the 7 steps I thought they were a good jumping off point on 7 Steps to Successful Web Site Design. So I’ve taken his 7 steps and modified them to fit the design of websites:

7 Steps To Successful Web Site Design or Redesign (concepts borrowed from Jacek Utko and modified)

1. Web Site Strategy: What is the goal? Where and how can you reach new visitors to your website? Pick one measure of success (sales, conversions registrations), pick your most important measure and ask: “How can we increase that one measure of success?”

2. Content: What content do you have that will attract new visitors and advertisers. What content should you change or add to reach and serve them better? read more »

Guest Blogger Craig Tomlin

GUEST POST: This is a guest post by Craig Tomlin

Just like human anatomy, the anatomy of a web site is composed of different user experience parts that must all work together seamlessly.  Optimizing the user experience of each part however is problematic: Where do you start?  How much user experience testing and adjusting should you do on each of your page types?  What’s critical, important or just a nice to have in terms of spending your limited user experience testing resources?

Over the past 13 or so years I’ve conduct user experience testing and optimization on hundreds of large and small web sites.  During this time, I’ve noted a pattern to the user experience of typical web site pages.  There seems to me to be what I call a “user experience page weight” and a resulting “user experience testing weight” that are fairly consistent across web sites.

In my opinion, these user experience anatomy points of a web site can be weighted, and that weighting used to help a web site owner determine what user experience importance to place on each page type.  This weighting can also help determine how much user experience testing resources should be applied to each page.

Following is my overview of an average web site user experience page weight, and user experience testing needs.

Of course, no two web sites are exactly the same, thus your web site may or may not have the same weightings as I’m indicating here.  But you can use my criteria and weights as a starting point, and adjust your web site user experience weighting to fit your site.  This provides you the benefit of having a better comprehension of the user experience needs by page type, and how much resources to spend testing and optimizing each page type.

A Few Definitions first:

User Experience Page Weight – I define this as a percentage of your total web site experience cognitive load.  Total web site experience is the average amount of cognitive load your web site visitor will typically expend on your web site during typical critical tasks.

Some pages, for example the home page and products pages, may typically experience a higher cognitive load than other pages, as your web site visitors try to determine if your site should be trusted, and if you provide the products or services the visitor is trying to find.

Many years of usability testing on large and small sites have enabled me to average a “typical” UX Page Weight, which I’ll define specifically for each page type below.  However, your web site may not have the same UX Page Weight as I am providing here – your own usability testing on your own site should be your guide.

User Experience Testing – I define this as a percentage of the resources you should expend in conducting usability testing and related user experience research (clicktrack analysis, eye-tracking, etc.) when evaluating optimizations of the user experience for that page.

It’s a rare firm that has enough UX resources to continually test and optimize all web site pages at the same time, most of us have to spread limited resources around.  This metric is my average for each page gained from years of usability testing observations of multiple kinds of web sites.  Your web site might have different UX testing weights.

User experience anatomy of a typical web site, with UX page and testing weights.

read more »

Have you been wondering where all the “stimulus” money is going that the US government is giving away to get us out of the recession? The US government has a website where you can go to look up anything and everything you want to know about the stimulus money.

I’ve created a video podcast review of the site:

Have you been to the site Recovery.Gov? Do you agree with my review?

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I love to read. I read fiction and history and psychology… I’m an avid reader. Which means when I give talks on psychology, usability, user experience, or my book, Neuro Web Design,  I often say, “Oh, there’s this great book…” and people then ask me for my “favorite books” list. I always tell them I’ll put one together, and then I never do. Well, here’s a start. Some of these are my favorites, and others I take issue with, but I still think you might want to read. I do have an Amazon affiliate account, so I’ve included a link to each book after the description if you are interested in purchasing or just getting more info.

How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer, 2009 – This is my favorite book on the topic of decision-making. It came out after I wrote my book (Neuro Web Design: What makes them click?) or I would have quoted him many times in my book. It’s a small book, and has lots of research in it, but it is quite readable. Highly recommended if you want to understand the how and why of human decision-making.

Strangers to Ourselves: The Adaptive Unconscious, by Timothy Wilson, 2004 – This is the book that actually got me started seriously on the topic of the unconscious. I had read Blink (Malcolm Gladwell) and although that was an interesting book, I wanted more depth and detail. Gladwell referenced Wilson’s book so I started reading it and light bulbs went off for me. This one is a bit more academic and psychological, especially the first few chapters, but all in all, a great book with lots of interesting insights and strong research.

Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert, 2007 – This is a fun read. I don’t think it’s really about Happiness, so I don’t totally understand the title. To me it’s mainly about memory of the past, and anticipation about the future, and the research on how accurate or inaccurate we are about both past and future. It’s full of fascinating research, but is written in a very readable way.

Neuro Marketing:  Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customer’s Brain, by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin – This book is short and easy to read. It applies some of the latest neuro psychology work specifically to marketing and sales. A good book to give to someone who wants an overview without all the research details. A nice concise and quick read that will orient you to the neuro marketing mindset, and give you some quick tips about more effective marketing and selling.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini, 2006 – This is a newer version of the original book that came out several years ago. This book is the “granddaddy” of all the other books on the topic. A very worthwhile read. Interesting too, because at the time he originally wrote this book each chapter had a section on how to RESIST the persuasive techniques. He wasn’t a proponent of using them; he wanted you to know about them so you wouldn’t fall prey. He did a turn-around on that mindset for his subsequent book that I talk about next. read more »