Giraffe Forum

Links cause most problems when they overlap and audience based links are particularly problematic.

Some years ago we worked with an educational website. They had links such as Teachers, Students, etc. All seemed very logical and reasonable. Until we started testing tasks.

We gave teachers tasks about putting together some sort of classroom exercise. We expected them to click on Teachers but they kept clicking on Students. Why? Because even though they were teachers they were using the website from a task point of view. They were putting together a student exercise and clicked on Students. With audience-based navigation you’re not sure if the link is FOR the audience or ABOUT the audience.

We have found that where audience-based navigation works well is where the audiences are totally separate, meaning that they have totally different tasks. So, there might be logic to audience navigation on a council website for Business and Citizens. It might also work on a tax website for Individuals and Business.

We worked with one government website that had links such as Seniors, Women, Disabled, Minorities. What if I’m an older woman who is disabled and part of a minority group? I saw an agriculture website that had links Farmers, Exporters, Researchers. What if I’m a farmer who exports and want to do research?

Dell is company that continues to feel like it has lost its way. There are many excellent aspects to the Dell website, but its core navigation is anti-customer.

When I go to the Dell website I want to buy a laptop. What I’m forced to do first is choose For Home or For Small and Medium Business, etc. I don’t want to do that. In tests, I have found that 90% of people don’t want to do that. Not alone is this audience-based navigation irritating; It reduces trust. I’m thinking: ‘If I choose Home, will I get a worse price than if I choose Business?’

Why does Dell do this? Because that’s how it’s organized internally. It forces its internal organization structure onto its customers. In an age of the empowered customer that doesn’t work well.

One of the most irritating things about audience-based websites is that you click down several levels reading bland marketing content only to reach, for example, a generic price list that is for everybody.

For example, when I click on the Schools section of the Dell website I get a whole load of generic content, including the following: “Dell is focused on a complete range of solutions that helps enterprise customers reach TCO and ROI goals.” What has that got to do with Schools?

If you’re considering audience-based navigation, ask yourself these questions:
Are my audiences totally distinct and separate from each other?
Are their tasks totally different?
Do I have the budget and resources to build and maintain unique content for my audiences?

Start with the link, not the sentence. Often, all you need is a nice clear link. No summary text. The link should be the first thing you think about. You should only add surrounding text if absolutely necessary.

Write links like you would write a heading. Use 8 words or less. Write the link as if it is all the customer will see. You must deliver everything they need in a maximum of eight words.

Avoid a link that describes the format. Links that state Video, PDF, Blog are rarely useful. Describe the task or benefit of the video. Why do organizations link to formats? Because it’s easier. It’s easier to keep all videos together. Blogs are usually managed using a different piece of software than the other website content

Have unique beginnings for all your links. The first 3-4 words are so incredibly important on the Web. If you have a guide on how to install a router, write the link: “Installation instructions”. Don’t write “How to install this router”. Otherwise you’ll have lots of links beginning with “How to”. Lead with the need.

A link is a promise from you to your customer. It is a signpost. You are giving directions. Let’s say you’re a tourist in Ireland and you want to visit Middleton in Cork. You see a sign labeled “Frequently Visited Towns”. Should you follow it?

The Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) link is a very poor one. The FAQ is a classic example of organization-centric thinking. The organization knows which questions are frequently asked or not. But how can the customer know? Much, much better to use links such as Buy, Install, Troubleshoot, Fees, Specifications, Programs, Contact.

Treat links as steps in a task. Thinking linking is about thinking task completion. A customer clicks on a link as part of a journey to complete a task. Only if they complete their task does everything work. So make sure all the links in the task path work well.

On any particular page every single link should be unique, independent, distinct, separate. Links create tremendous confusion when they overlap. On the homepage of Vodafone Ireland support pages the first two major links are: “Phones & plans” and “Smartphones & apps”. That’s confusing. Because a smartphone is still a phone.

Ideally, group all related navigation links together on a particular page. So, if you’re on a page for a particular product, don’t have some of the links for this product in the left column and some in the right and some in the center. The customer won’t know where to look.

Do not use Infinity and Beyond links such as Resources and Tools. These are like websites within websites. When you need to book a flight are you looking for a tool? Many British government websites use “Do It Online” as a way to organize links. What exactly does that mean?

Avoid audience-based linking where possible. Only use audience-based navigation where the audiences have totally different tasks.

Never use Quick Links. What exactly does that mean? Are the other links Slow Links? And if you have Useful Links do you also have Useless links?

If you can master linking you can master the Web.

Linking is the essence of the Web. Web professionals must focus primarily on links, rather than the content or technology.

If you’re trained as a content professional then you’re trained to think about documents, manuals, articles, brochures. You’re focused on sentences and paragraphs.

One of the latest crazes on the web is “curation,” which seems to be about assembling your list of favorite links. This, of course, is not new. That’s how Yahoo started out in the early Nineties, and Google is essentially a list of links.

Creating new content through linking to and organizing other content is far from being a new human activity. A lot of rap music is about sampling other music and integrating it into a new form. Folk and Blues music is often a pastiche of borrowed lines and melodies.

The Web is a perfect platform for linking and connecting. It is a skill that needs to be developed much more by web professionals because the number one reason websites fail is confusing menus and links.

Jared Spool is touring a a talk at the moment called ‘The Secret Life of Links’. He makes the point that when it comes to websites everything hinges on the link. Jared also discusses how on many sites there is an inverse relationship between the importance of the link to the customer and the amount of space allocated to it by the organization.

He uses the Walgreens site as an example. There are 5 links on the page that account for 59% of traffic. These 5 links are allocated 3.8% of the homepage. This is quite common. Organizations are forever pushing stuff that customers don’t want. Most organizational homepages are a mixture of brochure and highway billboard design.

I was recently looking at the Vodafone Ireland support site. It’s getting better but there is still room for improvement. For example, when I go to the Apple 4S support section, it tells me: “View guides and download manuals specifically for your phone.” For starters, I don’t want to view “guides or download manuals”. I want to solve a problem. And assuming I will find the answer to my problem in these guides and manuals, I don’t want to read that statement, I want to act.

“View guides and download manuals specifically for your phone” is classic print thinking. Quality web links would say ‘Troubleshoot, Install, Configure, Accessories’. At minimum, it should be a link that says “download user manual” rather than telling me I can download the manual and then forcing me to go search for the download link.

Remember: web content should not be a murder mystery. The invention of links eliminates the need to make statements such as: “On this page you will find information on.” We need to delete text that describes the activity ahead and instead present the activity through a link or some other active element. People want to act immediately on the Web. They want to get moving. The mouse is always hovering, hungry to click.

Jared Spool: The Secret Lives of Links

You are what you curate: Why Pinterest is hawt

The Internet is helping us move towards a more educated, prosperous, healthy and wealthy world.

Imagine for a moment a terrible virus was unleashed on the world that caused babies to die at birth. Imagine that this virus had been raging for 12 months and that during this period every baby in the world died at birth. Now imagine that one morning a baby is born and doesn’t die immediately. That would be news, wouldn’t it?

So many people I meet today are pessimistic. I was talking to a bunch of Irish teenagers and they told me that all their friends are really pessimistic. And yet, despite the recent downturn, Ireland has never been more prosperous.

“The life expectancy of Irish people has seen a rapid and unprecedented increase in the past 10 years, according to a new Department of Health report,” states irishhealth.com. How does the Irish media respond to such stories? Either by ignoring them or accentuating the negative with headlines like: “Population over 65 to double in 30 years?.”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in working with websites since 1994 it is: do NOT trust your instincts. Human instincts are incredibly poorly equipped to deal with a modern, complex world.

We may have a financial crisis in Europe today but it is not even remotely comparable to crises that have hit Europe down through the centuries. Globally, the world has never been more peaceful or prosperous.

Most people I tell this to think I’m mad. “Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth,” Steven Pinker writes in The History of Violence.

But look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria. True, but look at the global reaction to Syria, for example. Today, it is much less acceptable for the Syrian government to kill innocent civilians. 40 years ago they would have killed 10 times more people and nobody would have known or cared.

In his new book, “Too Big to Know,” David Weinberger writes about how the Internet is the most amazing source of knowledge and collective intelligence the world has ever known. It would not be the first time the availability of recorded knowledge drove progress. The printing press was a truly revolutionary object.

I certainly feel very lucky to be alive today. There has never been a better time to educate yourself. We are not nearly as dependent on ‘experts’. In fact, what we are finding out now is that many experts are not that expert at all. That is not to say that we do not need genuine experts but even those must collaborate today with others in order to address our ever complex world.

“In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire,” Steven Pinker writes. The crowds absolutely loved it.

Irrational exuberance is certainly not good but pathological pessimism solves nothing. We should learn from our mistakes and feel lucky to be alive during this greatest period in human history.

Irish life expectancy increasing

A History of Violence

Are we on information overload?

SurveyMonkey is a great web brand because it is both very reliable and extremely easy to use.

Over the years I have designed hundreds and hundreds of surveys. I have looked at a lot of survey tools. Some were terrible, many were okay, but SurveyMonkey is by far the best. In fact, SurveyMonkey is one of the best things I have ever found on the Web.

As 2011 comes to a close, SurveyMonkey is valued at $1 billion; it’s worth every cent. It is literally a joy to use. During my career I have worked with many people in designing surveys. I don’t think there has ever been an occasion when I had to train someone on SurveyMonkey. People just figured it out for themselves. It just worked.

I have also recently bought an iPhone. While I do not subscribe to the Cult of Steve Jobs, I must say it is a beautiful device. Using it is a delight, whereas my Nokia smartphone was such a chore.

Steve Jobs could often be heard to say: “It just works.” Think about that statement for a moment. Imagine if a car company used it. “Our cars just work.” Wow! That would be a big selling point. Or a TV manufacturer. “Our TVs just work.”

In the world of the Web and the world of technology in general, something that just works is still big news. Something to tell your friends about. Because it’s still a relative rarity to find things that just work, that are easy to use.

Easy to use is a tsunami that is ripping across the world. We customers expect that it will just work. And if it doesn’t we get very annoyed. Great web brands understand that.

I buy quite a bit of music stuff from Thomann. Excellent service. Great prices. Easy to use. After you submit your order you get a nice page explaining exactly what happens next. Here’s a sample of what it says: “If additional items cross your mind which you would like to add to your order, you can submit another order. We will add the new items to your existing order, as long as it has not yet been shipped. We’re always anxious to help you avoid additional shipping costs.” That’s customer service.

Thomann gets my business, just like Amazon. I buy a lot from Amazon. A couple of weeks ago I sent them a query. Within 10 minutes they had replied. Anytime I have ever contacted Amazon they responded quickly and professionally. What more can you ask for?

I use Go To Meeting for online meetings and webinars. Great service, easy to use, value for money. A while ago I had a problem. It was complicated. The support person said to me: “No rush. I’m going to stay on this problem until you’re completely satisfied.” Am I loyal to Go To Meeting? Absolutely.

Great web brands are all about ease of use and service and support. They are run by people with service hearts. They make your day that little bit easier and in small but important ways add to quality of life.