Now let’s do a brief analysis of an imaginary corporate site, and compare and contrast to your competitor’s sites by using a plausible model, a persona, a use case to “visit” your site for the first time. This method is also termed "a cognitive walkthough." What will we learn?Our persona, John, is a bi-lingual man in his forties, with a family. He is going to serve as our virtual actor in a practice use case of visiting your site for the first time to shop for services. He speaks both English and Spanish and has some college education, with a moderate amount of technical skills. John wears glasses. He has queried on Yahoo and Google to find a local service, and may be interested in other services. He likes bills to be in one unified place, and loves a deal. He has just come across your site through either his query results, or clicked on an ad in a local link to the right.
What the End User Finds
The first thing John noticed was the company logo, which he likes, it’s friendly and happy. After that your potential customer isn’t sure where to begin. The site lacks any visually compelling instruments – the text is mostly the same size and weight and the images are not the highest caliber – there is no clear personality.
All the information on the main page has the same visual weight with the exception of a central ad. Since he isn’t interested in ads, but in information, he avoids looking at them.[1] This is unfortunate but typical behavior because the information presented in the large central advertisements is exactly what he needs to know.
The fonts are generally the same, and the presentation style does not include indents and other visual direction to lead his eyes. John is used to the Web 2.0 look and feel so this site looks old fashioned, very dated to him. He isn’t quite sure which services the site or the company offers. He skips over anything which resembles an ad, and over much of the red text because it reminds him of an onscreen error or warning. At first he just wants to poke around a little to get a feel, before making a decision.
John clicks a link and then sees a form, so he clicks the browser back and selects another link. No matter what he clicks all link to the same form. He is frustrated because he just wants to browse and get a little more information before typing in any personally identifiable information.
What he notices are several things which stand out for no particularly good reason – they do not direct him to take action. John also notices for the first time that there is no option to turn on Spanish for the site, or to increase the font size so he may read it without glasses. He wonders why so much of the text is bright red when it is not urgent and he hasn’t yet clicked on it yet.[2]
His time is up on this site. John is disappointed, because the site is not fun, upbeat or modern. It does not function as he expected. He cannot find stuff, because he doesn’t want to look any more.This potential customer has not understood how great the prices are because he didn’t actually perceive them. John did not find the information he was seeking about a unified bill because that key information was buried below the fold and between too many other things of the same scale. As Dr. Jakob Nielsen put it, as information foragers:
“people like to get maximum benefit for minimum effort ... Progress must seem rapid enough to be worth the predicted effort required to reach the destination … your content [should] look like a nutritious meal and signal that it's an easy catch.”
John has not been converted to your services, and will be lead away by the ease of using search. He immediately searches again for a local service and discovers another company.[3]
John happens to notice the competitor’s site can be displayed in Spanish, which is great because his wife prefers reading sites in her first language Spanish. In the large central graphic he notices the link for the exact product he is looking for, which combined with the picture, makes him eager to click on it.
He is very pleased to see that he can get something he considers expensive for free on the site, so he clicks on the big image of it which reminds him that summer is coming. It makes him feel good. The options are well laid out and he actually wants one product because it is cutting edge– so he selects it and adds it to the shopping cart, even though he came to the site expressly to obtain other services for their new house.
John decides to read the top questions online for advice of how to optimize his budget and just get one bill with all the services they need. The help file answers almost every question he has. Returning to the main page he obtains service costs and other information by choosing a link that was mentioned in the self-service online help file.
Now he decides to comparison shop with competitor, which also turned up in his Google search.
This is the end of our visit with the persona John as a use case of visiting these sites for the first time. So where do we go from here? Back to information management, and analyzing what we have already seen.
Next time: How do we chunk together the data in a meaningful way, that makes it information?
[1] Jakob Nielsen, Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design 7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html/ accessed March 3, 2008
[2] Jakob Nielsen, Fancy Formatting, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fancy-formatting.html/ accessed March 3, 2008
[3] Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, June 30, 2003: Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030630.html/accessed March 3, 2008
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