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!
