The dichotomy of a selling or service focus?

When an ecommerce retailer creates a web site to sell product, its focus is clear cut – to sell. Make the shopping ‘experience’ easy and enjoyable to entice the consumer to part with their hard-earned disposable income.

The site development objective should be the perfect combination of information, excitement, usability, look and feel and ease of use. Get one of these wrong and there is a price to be paid. Now that is a real challenge as anyone who has read “boo hoo, a dot.com story from concept to disaster by Ernst Malmsten” can testify.

When considering Internet services such as social or business networks and communication services, we believe there is a real dichotomy when it comes to site design objectives which, if not resolved, leads to a chaotic web site.

On one hand, there needs to be a focus on explaining, marketing and selling the service in the same way as an ecommerce reseller. But on the other hand, if someone is going to be using the service on a daily basis, once they have ‘signed up’, they do not want to be faced with all clutter associated with selling the service. What they need a clean user interface that enables them to get what they want to do easily and quickly – without wasting time and getting confused by the need search though stuff that plainly distracts them from the task at hand.

With certain types of services, this separation between ‘selling’ and ‘using’ happens naturally as a user needs to download an application to run on their personal computer. In this case, the web site focuses on the marketing while the application focuses on the service. Even this natural split of focus can get obfuscated if the service provider requests you to upload information to their server so that they can provide a pure wed-based service. Address book synchronisation is a good example.

If the service does not require the installation of an application on your PC because the service is delivered only by the web site, then confusion often reigns! The web site gets cluttered with marketing material and it becomes very difficult to find the needle in the haystack – the service itself. In our user experience this applies to many social network sites, business network sites and even web based CRM services. We have found that ‘selling’ and ‘using’ just do not mix as the web site becomes just too confusing.

A web site focusing on selling needs to be designed in a completely different way to one focussing on delivering a service. A web site focussed on selling should be laid out in a manner conducive to a potential using easily finding out everything they might want to know about the service before signing up. A web site providing a service should be designed around the flow of service usage and should not contain extraneous clutter. We have found that it is not possible to mix these two design objectives as an inspection of many live Internet services sites will show.

To resolve this dichotomy, trymehere has developed two entirely separate sites. The public web site is 100% focused on “Getting to know trymehere” and enables a potential user to preview every aspect of the service including the QuickStart Wizard (Yes, we even preview the wizard!), management of your personal profile and even the Connect request process. If a potential user likes the service and goes on to sign up that’s great. However, if they take a look and feel it’s not for them, then that’s fine as well. We do not want to waste anyone’s time on principle!

The trymehere service site is entirely different from the public web site, although we follow the same look and feel. As well as being secure, its tabs are aligned to using the service.

It was just not possible or sensible to combine these entirely separate activities and the decision to separate them was one of the better decisions we made early on!

Oh no! Do we really have to provide help as well?

I don’t know about you, but I often dread using a new web service. There you are right in the middle of doing something and you don’t know what to do and you get stuck and need help. You can even have this problem with a service you have been using for years -wanting to delete your profile and not finding a way to do so is a good example.

What is the normal method for providing help? Well, it’s usually about providing a Manual [in PDF format], a Help file or an FAQ.

With trepidation and foreboding you leave what you were doing and click the link. After a delay, up pops the requisite text (Can I ever get back to where I was? Where was I?) and the challenge begins!

The usual first step is to enter the name of what you are looking for in a search box. When this fails, as it often does, you start reading the appropriate chapters and often find that what you need is not covered! C’est la vie!

There just has to be a better way than this!

Of course, if a service is SO simple then you can probably ignore providing any sort of help at all – or so a developer might think! Help, along with many other things, are often left to the end of the development phase and it often turns into an ill thought-out after-thought. However users, no matter how experienced, will always need help from time to time so the provision of help should be at the forefront of a developer’s mind from day one.

As a point of principle, we believe that help needs to be provided at the specific place it is needed. Help needs to be point focussed on the activity that a user is attempting to undertake. A user shouldn’t be taken away from their current activity. But how can this be achieved without adding bloat on the web page?

There are a tremendous number of opinions on this subject that fill web servers around the world. One of the best repositories for perspective and an in-depth discussion on web site usability issues is Jakob Nielsen’s Website. We recommend a visit to his site and his newsletter wholeheartedly.

We wanted to provide focused in-context help on trymehere and to that end we decided to use pop-up windows. Now there is a subject to discussm, but we won’t here! It used to be a sore problem due to unethical usage of such a feature, but this is largely a thing of the past. Many major sites use pop-ups in a wholly productive way.

The benefit for trymehere is that it is possible to click on a small 9 x 9 pixel graphic that looks like this .

We use it in page headings to describe a page’s function:

We use it after terms that are unfamiliar to a new user, e.g.

We place it next to data entry fields to explain what you should enter ands in what format:

When you click the button, a small window pops up that provided detailed help. Two examples are:

Yes, we even provide help about the Help button!

Notice that we even use help buttons within a help screen so that you can spend as much time clicking around in the nested help environment as you wish! To make this less boring, we have placed a small picture on each screen :>)

There is one down side to taking this approach! I have just counted the number of individual help screens and it totals over 300! Phew! No wonder we have seemed to have spent 24 hours a day editing them! If we’ve rewritten one once, we’ve rewritten it twenty of times! Maybe this has taken more time that developing the service?

Still, we think the effort was well worth while. Mind you, between you and I, I’d rather be on a beach on Barbados…

Chris

For heavens sake, all I want to do is delete my account!

Providing a facility to delete an account; it seems such a simple thing to for a web service to implement doesn’t it? The Internet is not the Wild West any more. So why is it that in 2006 this simple capability is still such a challenge for the user on many sites? It’s possible to understand and forgive this with a simple ‘Web 2.0′ service whose designers are testing a new concept and have built the site on a shoe string, but with services that have seriously backed by VCs this is just plain weird.

Is it because the whole ethos of these services was focused on building a community and adding relationships rather than worrying about how one of their users could delete their footprint and personal information from the site easily? Probably.

I’ve been user sof several business networking services and address book synchronisation services since their very early days. I’m a great fan as they enable me to maintain contact with my hard-earned business colleagues even when they change jobs on a disarmingly regular basis. A business network, like a social network, also allows me to ‘link’ to key colleagues.

What do you have to do to delete an account on an example business network service? You won’t find a delete account link on the site and you need to delve into the Customer Service / FaQ section where you find the following buried advice:

Yes, you have to contact Customer Services to delete your account! I’m not sure how you provide proof of who you are? Why can’t you do this on-line?

Personal relationships change as well don’t they? This leads to the occasional necessity of deleting a community link. This capability is hidden well away at the side of the community list. You would never find it if you needed it. Even after following the guidance in the help section it is very hard to spot.

Why is this link not placed prominently at the top of the page in plain view? Also, why do you have to go to a separate page to delete a link? Why aren’t the delete tick boxes not on the same page as the list of contacts?

Also with an address book synchronisation service, yet again you have to search the Help section to find out that you have to contact customer services to delete your account.

When you click the link, it explains that you need to delete the application on your PC but it does not mention how to delete your uploaded contact directories on their server!

Of course, some do it right! In the Account Profile of a leading social network service is a clear link (albeit small) that enables you to cancel your, or your child’s, account.

Clicking this button leads to a clear delete account form. This is excellent!

With trymehere, we have made the ability to delete your profile and community links as easy as possible. To this end we have placed a prominent Delete profile button slap bang in the middle of the home page of the service site.

If you do decide to stop using the service, you just press the button, type Yes and all your personal information and your community links are gone! We couldn’t make it easier.

On the home page of the service site, there is a tab called Manage Members which you can select and immediately delete an individual Member Community link if you wish.

 

Of course, we hope you would never need to use the delete profile capability, but if you ever decide to do so, you can do it easily without having to search to find out how to do it. Not wanting you to use the feature, is not a good reason for not providing the capability.

Chris