Entrance Barriers
If you had to guess at the largest entrance barrier for a website what would guess? Maybe there is a cost involved and its too high? The website design is bad? Its a complicated website and not enough instructions?
Sure the cost might be more than the market will bear. More than likely your just trying to get that initial contact, an email, newsletter sign-up, anything to get more information to a potential customer. Cost to the user, $0.00 and your still only getting a small percentage of visitors to take the next step, whatever that may be.
Is your site ugly? Maybe, an ugly site to one person is artwork to another. Do ugly sites get less use? Unless your making the visitors eyes bleed and not distracting them with flashing or scrolling text this is more than likely not the cause. Some would say Amazon is ugly or Gmail, certainly Craiglist isn’t the pinnacle of design. As long as the user can get around easily without getting a migraine this probably isn’t what is holding you back.
Maybe you just need more instructions because they get confused? Here is the truth, nobody is going to read your directions if its more than a couple sentences. You can use all caps bold flashing text to tell a user what to do and they will not read it if its too long. If you already have instructions and you think you need more detail your only making it worse.
Its all in the forms.
Well designed forms aren’t the end all metric of usability however I would argue its a majority. Its all in the little details. Here are some of the basics.
- Are required fields clearly marked?
- Are those fields really required? The longer the form the less likely it will get submitted
- If a user puts in the wrong input is it immediately obvious what went wrong?
- Did you erase the whole form on failure causing the user to start over?
- Can a user easily fill out the form by just typing and tabbing to the next field?
An example of bad form.
The federal government uses a site called My Pay. This is by far the craziest process I have ever seen to fill out a form. Recently they asked all their user’s to change log in credentials and what a nightmare.
The first thing that happens when you try to login is it opens up a new window in full screen. So if you have a large monitor your now staring at 23″ of login form. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
The complete insanity is you can’t use the keyboard. You have to actually click on each character with a Virtual Keyboard. But lets take it one step further down the crazy path. The letters an numbers are generated in random locations with each attempt.
This is for “security” purposes. I wonder why banks don’t use this practice? There is a notice message up now. They’ve disabled right click function as well … nice.
To all myPay Customers
Although most users have established their new login credentials with no trouble, some users are calling the Central Customer Support Unit for assistance. As a result, customer support is experiencing high call volume, and many customers are waiting on hold longer than usual.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We are doing everything possible to remedy this situation.
Good Form
Mint has an example of a great sign-up form. As soon as the page loads the the cursor is focused on the first field so you can start typing right away. You can tab to the next field and you’ll notice the current field is clearly highlighted. Furthermore by clicking on the label it brings the field in focus. You can click anywhere after the check-box field and it will toggle the check-box. You can actually fill out the whole form without even touching your mouse.
Usability is increased by validating on the fly. Each time you go to the next field the form will check if you have a valid entry and display the error if there is one or simply OK if there isn’t.