The Importance of Making Things Easy
I’ve seen it happen very often. Companies enter the internet market and want another way to get the most of their marketing dollars by getting as much information as they can from site visitors and potential customers. Not only does this provide a good deal of information for future marketing efforts, it also gives you viable measurements to know where your company is going. This seems like a good idea and seems to make sense.
There is a big problem with this though. People feel lazy about surfing on the internet. They want things as quickly as possible and are probably already suffering from information overload. They have other places to go and people to see. The more you make them click and fill in forms, the faster they will leave. Some of the biggest examples of this are making people search too hard to find what they are looking for, making them register with their personal details to buy something, or making them register to leave a comment on your article.
Anything you might want people to find on your site should never be more than 4 clicks away, not including filling out forms and try to adhere to that. It doesn’t matter if site visitors are going through the shopping cart process or trying to contact you. Make it as easy as you can. I’m sure you’ve heard of the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) principle. That applies here.
Since the web is such an open format, make yourself available as well. Let people leave comments on your site if you have a blog and make it easy to find and contact you. Leave a simple form and phone number. Don’t make them register just because you want their info. This will scare your visitors away quicker than you can blink an eye. If you do manage to get some data from them, 9 times out of 10 it’s probably bogus anyway. If you are making people register in order to avoid spam comments, forget about it. The amount of people you push away from your site is not worth deleting a few spam comments a day.
As an example I will use nytimes.com. I know that they have good and informative articles and I love their new redesign. I also know that registering to read some of the archives on their site is "free and easy", but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I’ve been visiting their site for years and still haven’t registerd. Every time I get to a page that asks me to register or buy something, I get frustrated and run away. I am just so wasted of sites asking for my personal details every time I turn around. I have so many different passwords and usernames that I don’t even have a way to track them all.
Isn’t there another way to please your company and advertisers? Instead of trying to get everything we can from our clients and visitors just because we can, why don’t we accept and embrace the open nature of the internet? Provide an easy way to search on your site so that people can find what they are looking for fast, keep everything important in an easy place to find, and above all, give them the power to choose what they need and what actions they would like to perform. Our philosophy on the net is about being clear about our intentions and not treating people like sheep. All you need to do is make it as easy as possible. If you are working with a good designer, let them do this for you. Simple, isn’t it?
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