There is a tacit understanding among experienced web designers, user-experience designers, and even web developers, that the functional, navigatable core of any website should always be focused, direct, and as simple as possible to interperate. And while web designers, in general, have become more proficient at injecting clarity and vision into their aesthetic and visual design, the conversation up until now has always centered more on usability and less on directability. Understanding this slight but very important distinction can be the difference in having a website that can generate an audience versus having a website that's actually capable of positively affecting the bottom line.
The Problem
When businesses try to divine a return on investment through their website, they often look at a handful of key performance indicators and the behaviors that led up to those specific events.
Did a user fill out a "request a quote" form? Did they sign-up for a newsletter? Did they purchase a product or subscription? Or did they just meander around the website for awhile and then leave? And, if they did leave, why?
In the case of the last question, I've found that it's not uncommon for otherwise "healthy" websites to under-perform sales-wise, even though the websites in question could very well have thousands of attentive, well-engaged visitors browsing through them on a daily basis. In the case of those sites, it always came down to a subtle design problem that made the final decision-making process more difficult than it had to be.
The Bigger Picture
Studies have shown that the decision-making process is highly malleable, and that a person's preferences are never as concrete or as stead-fast as we'd like to believe. In fact, more often than not, decision outcomes are greatly affected by the context in which a decision was made. When we look at this in terms of web design, this has major implications on not only the usability of a site, but also on our ability to influence our users in making critical, nascent decisions that can potentially lead to measurable actions like generating a sale or producing a lead.
Salience On Ecommerce Sites
The simpliest way to distill down this new problem is to use the eComm experience as our baseline. A fairly well -understood dynamic of eComm is that online marketplaces are saturated with products. If a price-sensitive consumer can find an item somewhere else for less money, they'll have no reservations in going to a different website to finalize their purchase. This habit of comparison shopping is the most common method used by online consumers because it provides a reference point for gleaning new information that they'll invariably use for coming to a conclusion.Salience On Ecommerce Sites
The entire process itself occurs both within and outside of a site across a number of different touchpoints; from “related product” calls-to-action and upsells to time spent on comparison shopping engines and competitor websites. Throughout this process, each touchpoint adds a new layer of information that clarifies a consumer's course-of-action by providing sufficient context for arriving at a decision.
Salience On Lead-Generation Sites
But, if we transition our focus over to the less sophisticated but far more common B2B and B2C lead-generation sites, we find that compared to eComm setups, we typically have less information and little to no feedback that could positively influence someone at the “point-of-purchase”. When I say “less information”, I'm not speaking to the content that exists on any given site as a whole, but rather I'm referencing the lack of well-refined decision-influencing devices that can assist visitors in taking that extra step towards filling out a contact form or signing-up for a service.
It is because of this absence of information that users have little to no visibility as to why the service is valuable anymore. This is the folly of many lead-generation sites across the B2B and B2C industries, as well as across many online media outlets and large online communities; they don't effectively convey the value of their service to their audiences at the most crucial decision-making juncture.
Coming Up Next...
I'll add a second post that drills down into things like contextual data and comparative data (among other things) eventually, and will also examine other issues relating to addressing the basic cognative hang-ups that act as the basis for all of this in the first place.