I was reading a business article and on the side, an ad caught my eye. It was for an electronic device that looked quite handy and unique. So as most marketeers would like, I clicked on it and went to the website. Well much to my chagrin, you have to give your email address in order to get on this site. So, I thought to myself, let me get this straight you will not let me get into your website to give you money without my email address. Kind of foolish, as I have to give my email address at checkout time anyway. So it got me to thinking, what is the number one complaint about e-commerce sites? Simple, making the process harder than it has to be. We have long ago discovered that you need to have things like one page checkout. Having to go through multiple pages in order to checkout is a no-no, and people will abandon their orders.
So again I come back to the site I mentioned (I will not mention their name), they won’t even let me into their site. This email box slaps me in the face and basically says to me “give me your email address, I’m going to spam you otherwise we don’t want your business“. Wow, unbelievable. In this day and age where companies are fighting for the almighty dollar, this company has the nerve to require you to give your email address before even seeing their offerings. They want you to join, so they can market to you, an ill-conceived premise. After all, I can go to Amazon who has over 200 million products available.
Whatever this eCommerce company was paying for the ads I clicked on, they just threw away the money. While the product was unique they are not the only one selling it. I went to Google to search on the product and found it available on many websites. Amazon as I suspected had the item, I can purchase with one click and it’ll be at my house in two days as I have Amazon Prime.
Lesson learned: trying to be a little too cute in making people give you their email before they even see your site is a sure way to lose business and eventually put yourself out of business. Amazon has a loyal following as they realized early on, how to please customers. People will actually even pay a bit more sometimes as they know they’ll get their items in a couple of days and if they have any issues Amazon will take care of it.
Did you know: RooSites can assist you with building a customer friendly e-commerce site that won’t break the bank. Contact us for more information.
The other day I pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts Drive through lane. There it hit me. Voila, the menu was clear concise and I could immediately could find what I was looking for. I thought about it, and this is very similar to my goal when I build a navigation menu for people’s websites. Think about it, when you go to drive-through window they do a very good job of putting the things they want you to see (and order) front and center. These may be value deals and different things like that. Easy to order, and my guess is profitable for the franchise.
The reason this came into my mind was I had taken over managing the website for a company a while back. They had one of these wacky menus as I like to call them. It spanned the width of the page and had 50 sections. It took me five minutes just to find where their contact page link was! To me this is the exact opposite of what UX design [Definition] is all about. Now I have to admit, it did look pretty cool, you had pictures, different sections, separators and all kinds of cool and funky things. But what a mess from a user experience standpoint. I explained to my client, which I have preached since 1996 is to have a simple clear menu. Everything on your site should be a couple of clicks in, unless you are a big big company with thousands and thousands of webpages.
I look at it like this, the main menu buttons themselves are kind of like fast food restaurants’ value meals. These are the main sections of your website and the most important. These are your bread and butter, these are what you need people to click on to see your most valuable content. Under those, you can have various subsections of your website. But don’t go crazy. I hate when you mouse over a link and then you see another level of links and then you mouse over that and you see another level. (I am tired just writing about it) To me this gets away from good design practices. I’m not saying it’s never necessary, but my feeling is you should avoid those third and fourth level menus if at all possible.
Now that about 50% of your visitors are looking at your site on mobile, the simplification of menus has taken precedence in our user interface designs. You want to make sure that mobile menus are so simple and you’re not seeing 30 or 40 links.
Use the KISS principle when planning menus. Keep It Simple……
