Counter arguments to homepage advertising

It is a commercial reality that online advertising is a necessity for many organisations. As any digital marketeer will tell you, the click-through rate on online advertising is staggeringly low (think of a low number, add a decimal place and a few 00’s kind of low). To counter the low click-through rates in most situations marketeers play the numbers game and place dominant advertising on pages which attract the biggest number of visitors, typically the website homepage. The result is yet more visual clutter on a page that is typically fairly cluttered to begin with.

All fine and good eh, the organisation derives maximum profit from advertising?

I am convinced that there is a compelling commercial argument to not having advertising on pages, such as the homepage, where people need to be able to navigate clearly. Here are a couple of counter arguments…

What is the impact of advertising on the 99.99% of us that don’t click on the ad?

Homepage drop-out rates are a big issue on many websites. Now I don’t want to blame this entirely on advertising, but certainly dominant advertising doesn’t help people complete the task that brought them to the site in the first place.

Adverts frequently employ highly distracting tactics, such as animation, which make it very difficult for a person to focus on the rest of the site for a sufficient time to click on the best link to help them nearer towards their task. During usability testing I have frequently heard people say that they’d click on something quickly just to get off a page with overwhelming adverting.

The upshot of this is that people end up at the wrong parts of the website where they can’t complete their task. This results in people either turning to alternate service channels that are more expensive for the organisation, such as call centres, or worse still, people giving up and seeking out a competitors site to satisfy their needs.

What is the cost of this to the organisation? It is a complicated calculation, but my feeling is that it certainly cuts into a significant slice of whatever revenue is derived from homepage advertising.

Wouldn’t click-through %’s be higher with more targeted advertising?

Why not place adverts in places where you know more about why a person is visiting your site, i.e. anywhere other than the homepage? Better still, place the advertising on pages after the person has completed their reason for visiting the site. This is when people are more susceptible to distractions.

Sites with sophisticed approaches to monitoring web metrics, such as Amazon, target these seducible moments to great effect. For example, on Amazon directly after adding an item to my shopping basket I am taken to a page that provides me with recommendations based on the item I’ve just added to my shopping basket.

Applying the principle of seducible moments to a site such as News.com.au would mean uncluttering the homepage with take-over advertising and instead placing adverts for things such as credit cards in the Money area of the site, or alongside news articles about financial related topics.

Silverback – where’s the catch?

I finally got around to installing and testing out Silverback tonight. Silverback is a nifty Mac gadget that does picture-in-picture screen capture, i.e. exactly the application you want for your guerilla usability testing lab.

What I don’t understand is why I haven’t heard people raving about this. There is the obvious drawback that it only works on a Mac with built in iSight, but we’re not too small a percentage of the broader design community. Is it just that people don’t know about this product, or is there some catch I haven’t yet experienced?

Don’t listen to what people say

I am finally getting around to reading Barry Schwartz’s much recommended The paradox of choice.

The booked is filled with great stories to support his tenet that “the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction”.

I was particularly struck by a paragraph around the problems we have around deciding and choosing:

So it seems that neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we did feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel while the experience is occuring. And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices.

(his italics)

The quote has strong echoes of Neilsen’s first rule of usability:

To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.

Schwartz is preaching to the converted with me, but it is great to have more anecdotes to tell to support your beliefs.

If you don’t own a copy, go order yourself one!

Context is everything

Harry Brignull’s post (Why you shouldn’t rush into a solution too quickly) about my OZIA presentation reminds me that I promised to extract a few of the key messages from the presentation and blog about them myself.

The key message of the presentation was Iterative design alone can’t save us.

As you can probably guess from the main theme, my argument was that we must ground our work in a rich understanding of the context of use, or else we run the risk of creating well meaning rubbish.

I argued that although an essential ingredient in good user centred design, iterative design alone can’t stop us from creating bad products.

To make my point, I cited the highly iterative, but decidedly non-contextual development of the UK Government’s SA80 rifle. The rifle was developed over a number of years and involved much testing at firing ranges.

The problem was that the testing was conducted under far too controlled conditions. The rifles were carefully caried out to the firing range, rather than being dragged around in the real conditions in which they would need to operate. The result being that when the product was ‘launched’ it still had major (**major**) issues. Such as:

• Couldn’t be fired from the left shoulder
• It went off when dropped
• Safety catch would break if the trigger was pulled hard
• Plastic would swell in rain and jam the safety switch on/off
• When running a heavy ammunition magazine would fall out

My argument being if we only conduct iterative design in controlled usability testing labs, using pre-defined tasks then what is to stop our projects going the same way as the SA80?

My full presentation is fairly visual rather than textual, so it may not make sense out of context (chortle).

The information about the SA80 project comes from James Meek’s excellent article, Off target, from a few years back in the Guardian.

Office and the beast

The recent post by Phil Barrett, Using the Microsoft Ribbon without anyone getting hurt, reminded me of my first experience using Microsoft Office 2007.

I was in remote New South Wales conducting field research (almost literally!) and had been given a laptop on which to conduct the research. It is always a joy not using your own equipment, but I was running usability tests on a working prototype and needed a machine with a server in a hurry, so I was given “the beast”!

The beast

The beast doesn’t look quite so beast-like in this thumbnail, but let me explain…

The beast is an Acer Aspire Gemstone Blue 8930G. It has the byline “Wider than Wide!”, a more accurate description of the product would be “Heavy as Hell”. Light it isn’t.

(it feels like quite a liberty to call something with a 18.6″ screen and that is difficult/impossible to find computer bags for a laptop – maybe if I was a giant it would be both portable and fit on my lap!)

Besides the weight, there are a couple of other issues with the product (this is even before I got to using MS Office 2007):

1. The laptop has a bizarre trackpad that provides no tactile feedback as to the edge of the trackpad area. This meant that my fingers kept on brushing the fingertip recognition scanner that is oh so handily placed just beside the trackpad. Brushing the scanner causes a “fingertip recognition has not been set up on this machine” message to come up every time – quite disrupting when you’re touch typing – grrr!
2. Every second time I started the machine rather than the Windows environment I was placed in some Acer multimedia environment that enabled me to select between the different modes the machine can operate in. Unfortunately there was no obvious way (not to me anytime) of exiting the environment and booting into Windows – so I invariably ended up rebooting the machine and hoping that it would just magically boot into Windows rather than the multimedia environment (never will anyone have been so pleased to see Vista starting up!).

So to MS Office 2007…

Where did Save As go?

As the above description of the machine I was using suggests, I wasn’t exactly working at maximum speed anyway, but then I started using MS Office 2007.

I understand (or at least think I understand) the supposed logic of the MS Ribbon, i.e. exposing the most likely functions a user may require based on the task they are undertaking. But for a product like MS Word with such a variety of tasks is it really possible to do this? Can you really second-guess all the things a user may want to do at any point in time? It certainly failed me.

The task: I was updating my “on the road” notes and wanted to save the document I was working on with a new name, i.e. Save As.

Where has the File menu gone? It took over 10 minutes before I managed to locate the feature (clue: you find it by clicking on the circular Office logo in the top left corner – intuitive eh!).

The combination of the Acer laptop and MS Word 2007 reduced my productivity considerably. What should have taken me 15 minutes, ended up taking around 45 and included much, much frustration.

I like Phil’s note that there are products you can buy that remove the Ribbon, personally I’ll be sticking to Word 2003.

Iterative design alone can’t save us!

This was the subject of my slightly controversial presentation of this year’s OZ-IA conference. My talk wasn’t against iterative design, but definitely in favour of early stage contextual research to fully understand the user landscape in which you’re creating a solution for.

I am sure I’ll blog around many of the topics from the presentation in the coming weeks, but in the meantime my slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/iain.barker/context-is-everything-from-ozia-2008-presentation.

There is also a streaming video of the presentation. The visual quality isn’t the greatest (I’m the dot on the stage). But the mixture of slideshare and the video will make it like you were there yourself!

Video can be found at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oz-ia2008 – you’ll have to dig around a bit, I can’t give a direct URL, but I’m far the right of the second row of videos.

Mozilla Firefox 3: Upside-down tabs

I just installed Mozilla Firefox 3. Rather than all the excellent new features, the thing that really struck me was that the tabs were upside-down.

I wonder why they did it that way? I can see that the tabs have a relationship to the things above and below the tab area, but them being upside-down (and thus non-conventional) makes me stop and think about the tabs rather than doing what I was already doing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting this is going to cause “real users” usability issues. Rather I think this is something that us in the usability design community will get deeply analytical about.

Amazon: a messy alternative to tabs

It feels like a momentous occasion in Internet terms – and long overdue in my opinion. Amazon’s latest redesign has got rid of those tabs!

As acknowledged by Amazon themselves in their explanation of the redesign, the expansion of their product range made it difficult for navigation tabs to support the breadth of their product range.

Despite applauding their move away from tabs, I am less than impressed by the navigation solution they’ve ended up with. The expanding navigation requires mouse dexterity that will leave many users frustrated, and this is further compounded by the fact that the department headings are not themselves links.

It is fine to use expanding navigation, it enables users to get greater context of the contents of an area before clicking, but you should always make the navigation label a link. This enables less dexterous users to progress without having to perform mouse gymnastics.

Amazon say the redesign is a result of much customer consultation, I only hope they get some usability testing done with users with average to poor mouse skills sooner rather than later.

Tobii eye tracking

I was given a demo of the Tobii T60 eye tracking software by James Breeze last week. Eye tracking software has come a long way since the last time I investigated it. In laymans terms, the T60 is a clever monitor that has uses beams/sensors to monitor where on the page you are looking. There is absolutely no funny head-gear required!

Although a very slick and impressive presentation, I was left with many questions and concerns about using this for usability testing.

It only works when the participant is close to the monitor

The T60 relies on you being within a specific distance of the monitor. Although vastly superior to old-school eye tracking, this felt awkward when I used the product and certainly restricts the use of the product to “lean forward” interaction experiences (despite what they may say about using it for “sit back” experiences such as watching videos, etc).

A colleague mentioned that other eye tracking products, such as faceLAB, are far less restrictive in terms of movement and proximity to the sensors.

I can imagine that this distance limitation could be problematic and require the facilitator to constantly remind the participant to “move closer”.

The heatmap produced by the product is misleading

The heatmap produced by the product was, in my opinion, very misleading. I am not sure if this is a deficiency in eye tracking heatmaps in general, but a colleague spent approximately 2 minutes attempting to complete a task. He gazed nearly all over the webpage until, after around 1:45 minutes, he fixed on the correct area of the screen. He then spent approximately 15 seconds gazing at the correct area of the screen before being confident enough to click.

My laymans interpretation of observing this interaction was that the website failed my colleague, yet the heatmap produced by this interaction showed the correct area of the page as single biggest area of the user’s attention. The suggestion of the heatmap was that the website succeeded.

(This observation is likely to be directed at heatmaps in general rather than the Tobii T60’s heatmaps in particular)

The “think-aloud” protocol interferes with accurate eye tracking data

James mentioned that pure eye tracking should be conducted without interrupting the participant, i.e. without using the “think-aloud” protocol. Apparently use of “think-aloud” protocol has been shown to interfere with the results produced from eye tracking. So to get accurate results from eye tracking you require a sterile test environment.

As someone who has conducted usability testing for many years, I would be highly reluctant to lose the valuable insights that come from using the “think-aloud” protocol. Even though the product enables you to quickly review the video footage so the participant can reflect upon what they did and why, after the event reflection is highly likely to miss out on many valuable insights and lead to the user blaming themselves as they watch video of them failing a task. Also this requires people to watch themselves, something I have found research participants almost universally unhappy about.

If I had to pick just one research technique…

As any good research consultant will tell you, to get accurate insights you should use a variety of research techniques. But the reality is that few clients have the budget or time to allow for multiple research techniques to be used.

This means that during a particular research project I will get to use one or two different techniques if I’m lucky. Given that reality, I am not sure whether the gloss and glamour of the data and videos produced by eye tracking is enough to make me want to lose the valuable insights offered by techniques such as “think-aloud” usability testing. I appreciate that it doesn’t need to be either/or, but the grim reality of many commercial projects is that you don’t get the opportunity to do both.

That together with the cost of the product ($$$), my conclusion is that there is still some way to go before I’ll be recommending eye tracking for anything other than clients with plenty of spare cash.

Leopard: the way upgrades should be

I finally got around to upgrading to Leopard, Apple’s latest operating system.

I disbelieved the sales rep in the Apple store when he told me that anyone could do the upgrade and it would take around 45 minutes, but after going through the installation I truly believe anyone (just about anyone) could do it.

It kind of worked the way it should work, i.e. not the way that any previous upgrade of an operating system has ever worked for me.

Typically upgrading your operating system means handing your computer over to some highly trained, but socially inadequate individual for a couple of days, but with the Leopard upgrade I just inserted the DVD and following 2 (or was it 3) pages of simple instructions and then it went and did its thing for 45 minutes (plus another 1hr).

So hey I was lied to about how long it takes, but the seamless way in which it kept everything I had on my computer yet made it snazzier and zappier really impressed me.

But it is never 100% right!

The only slight criticism I have is that the instruction that you need 9Gb of space for the installation is too late in the process. Something as significant as this should be clearly stated on an entry page before the computer restarts.