Nobody cares about your website
Your customers couldn’t care less about your new look, your new design or whether your dog has just had kittens.
“Hi Gerry,” the Air New Zealand marketing email started off. I remember many years ago when I was a young employee at a company that had just bought its first computer. We got this word processor with an amazing feature called mail merge. We could now send lots of automated individual letters to people who owed us money. The letters went something like this:
Dear (NAME),
You owe us (AMOUNT). Pay up by tomorrow or we’ll break your legs.
Yours sincerely
We sat around and marvelled at the ability to produce so many letters automatically and how people would feel that they were receiving individually penned missives. Those letters worked so well.
I don’t think it works quite as well today. When I receive an automated marketing email addressing me by my first name, I don’t go weak at the knees: “Oh, the software knows my first name! It knows my name!” Has anyone tested to see whether these so-called personalization techniques are more likely to alienate a customer than impress them?
Anyway, back to the Air New Zealand marketing email that I don’t remember signing up to. (I’ve had pretty good experiences flying with Air New Zealand by the way.) “Welcome to the second edition of our new look monthly email.” Two fatal mistakes in the first sentence. Welcome? Hello? What’s with the welcome? I don’t want your welcome. If I want anything from you it’s your deals, and hot deals at that. When you think of your customer, imagine Tony Soprano. Nothing personal, just business. Cut the crap. Get straight to the point.
So Air New Zealand has got a new look monthly email! Stop the presses!!! Has anyone phoned CNN? This is big news. A new look monthly email! Release the press releases! What a story. I can’t wait to tell all my friends.
“Lads, lads, listen. Have I got news for you.”
“What?”
“You won’t believe it.”
“Come on, tell us.”
“You won’t believe it.”
“Come on, come on.”
“Air New Zealand has a new look monthly email.”
“You’re not serious!”
“I am.”
“You’re joking.”
“Never been more serious in my life.”
“Nah, you’re joking.”
News like that makes our day. It really does. And you’d be amazed at the amount of websites that want to give you this sort of hard news. Why, I was at the Starwood Preferred Guest website recently wanting to check what they offered in Athens when I was confronted with content that told me that the site was “redesigned and ready to help you plan your adventures. Take a few minutes to customize your account profile to ensure you take advantage of all that our new site has to offer.”
And you know what, I didn’t take those few minutes. That sounded like a real pain to me. I just wanted to quickly check availability and see if there were any good deals. I had zero interest in designs, redesigns, bee-designs, knee-designs or we-designs. (Which are what most redesigns really are; done more because of internal egos than because of external needs.)
I just wanted the website to work. How thoughtless, cruel and uncaring of me. But then I’m only a customer.
Valeria Vernon says:
Added on August 9th, 2009 at 6:23 pmI won’t mention my website, it’s being redesigned …
I loved it all and especially this one “When you think of your customer, imagine Tony Soprano. Nothing personal, just business. Cut the crap. Get straight to the point”.
Lesley says:
Added on August 10th, 2009 at 10:06 amGerry, Gerry, Gerry,… I LOVE YOU!
Matt Visser says:
Added on August 10th, 2009 at 6:18 pmBrilliant read!
michael says:
Added on August 10th, 2009 at 6:22 pmSo… just to be clear, you’re saying that you are NOT a fan of their web site?
Eleanora says:
Added on August 10th, 2009 at 10:12 pmSadly, not enough people listen to Gerry; otherwise, the world - or at least the web - would have been a better place.
Laurie says:
Added on August 10th, 2009 at 10:36 pmI loved this post. I thought I was the only one who got pissy when companies addressed me by name. Give me the deals and cut the chit-chat!
Mike Simpson says:
Added on August 11th, 2009 at 9:39 amI try to explain to people that no-one cares about being welcomed to a website, yet still every front page begins ‘Welcome to the Department of…’. When you go into a shop or a bank, you don’t think “How rude - there’s no big sign welcoming me.”
I try to instill the maxim that ‘Anything which isn’t useful information is getting in the way of the useful information’ - and plainly ‘Welcome to…’ is not useful information. It’s a pointless sentence that the user has to get past to get where they want to be.
Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:
Added on August 11th, 2009 at 11:06 amMike, couldn’t agree more–well put!
Samara says:
Added on August 11th, 2009 at 10:04 pmYAY.
Nancy Scott says:
Added on August 11th, 2009 at 11:20 pmDear Gerry:
Say nice things about my website or I will break your legs.
Yours sincerely,
Nancy
John Gallagher says:
Added on August 29th, 2009 at 5:41 amGerry.
Bloody. Brilliant. Post.
Thinking of your users as Tony Soprano is a stroke of usability genius. I’ll never quite see them in the same way again…
Lots of software seems to forget that there’s only one reason you’re using it - to do what YOU want to do. Not to jump through some badly constructed hoops that are doused in paraffin and set alight by someone not particularly familiar with fire safety standards.
I find desktop software particularly bad for this kind of thing. Although on the upside, I don’t remember the last time desktop software bleated at me about having had a redesign…
Keep up the great work.
John
Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:
Added on August 29th, 2009 at 11:01 amJohn, thanks. Just don’t tell Tony.
Jon says:
Added on September 6th, 2009 at 3:51 pmI subscribe to the e-mail newsletter version of this blog, so I rarely comment. However I just had to chime in on this post. Of course I first read it when it hit my inbox, and I’ve been stewing over it ever since. Well it really hit home this weekend!
I’ve been developing a new website and for the very first time, I decided to really “program” the site as much as possible. This way with minimal effort I can re-use the same template over and over again on future websites I develop.
Well for the past 2-3 days, I’ve been OBSESSING over an issue where on IE there’s too much space between two DIV elements, and it looks just right on Firefox. So I change the values, and now there’s not enough space between the elements in Firefox, while it’s just right in IE.
I’ve literally felt like pulling my hair out trying to figure it out and fix it! Reading this post again made me realize… WHAT A WASTE OF MY TIME!
Seriously, we’re talking about a few pixels. Yes, it’s not perfect and yes, I’d still love to fix it. However 99.999% of my website’s visitors won’t know or care that there’s a tiny amount of extra space between the two elements.
What this issue has really done is take away the time I could have invested into creating more “people friendly” content that my visitors would find useful.
A niche website isn’t about the CSS code. To be sure, we need sites that look nice. But being honest about things, even with the space issue, the site still looks nice. (As a recent Wired article discussed, sometimes it just has to be “good enough” to win over the masses.)
So thanks Gerry for the reminder I needed to realize that my website’s design is “good enough.” It’s time to move on to much more important tasks.
Kelso says:
Added on August 5th, 2010 at 8:39 pmI disagree,
We recently updated our website and our customers have been ecstatic about it.. they’ve started tweeting and facebook posting about it.. which has been great for our traffic.