What Am I Missing?
Written March 5th, 2008 by Neal LinkonI am sure that many of you can relate to my frustration over the seemingly increasing number of people who complain that certain pages of our Web site are hard to find. In the last two weeks alone, I’ve had six requests to add links to various pages or sections to the home page. Two of them were already on the home page. And in every case, the individual looked one place, didn’t find what they were looking for, and gave up.
My point is not to vent, although I’d sure love to do that. My question is whether anybody has managed to avoid these situations through some unique or especially excellent navigation scheme or design?
I believe that for a large site, it’s simply impossible to make everything anybody would ever want to find so easy to find that nobody will ever struggle to find it. Put another way, each of the pages or sections I was told was “hard to find” got visits numbering in the high hundreds to low thousands last month. Somebody is obviously able to find them. But not the individuals who contacted me, complaining that the Web site isn’t “user friendly” or “intuitive.”
Throughout my career in this business I’ve tried to live with those complaints, while trying to be objective enough on each one to improve things where it makes sense. But I have this nagging sense that there’s a better way out there somewhere, and I just haven’t found it.
Anybody care to share, or just commiserate?
March 5th, 2008 at 10:31 am
I agree- you can’t please everyone and accomplish everything on the home page. I think the best you can do is to prioritize what is quick to access on the homepage based on:
1) site traffic
2) focus groups & user testing
3) marketing goals
Then you can at least use that to back up your responses to the “little fish” that want a homepage button. Then use user testing and best practices documentation (Nielson, etc.) to prevent the homepage from becoming a huge index of links.
Having a small area where you can swap out content from week to week can also alleviate pressure – you can offer to link something for “a while”, which can be surprisingly satisfying to many clients.
March 5th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I feel your pain on the issue. I second Bart’s comment — we did an in-house usability test last year and chose 10 patient-oriented tasks for the study (we were able to get a nice mix of willing testers from our hospital’s Volunteer department). It really helped us measure whether or not people were able to find the important stuff that is on the site.
For the next set of usability tests (after a redesign, which is slated for this year), we will create a second set geared towards doctors/health care professionals as well.
We have a lot of content, and I’m sure some of it is buried, if you don’t know what you are looking for. For the next version of the site, we were thinking of using entry gateways from the homepage – having distinct home pages for 1) Patients/Consumers, 2) Docs/Health care Pros, (and maybe) 3) Donors. There would also probably be text links available on the main home page for Careers, Media, Site Search.
Is anyone on the forum doing anything like this on their site currently? As long as you cover all of your audiences (which I would think patients/consumers & docs covers the majority), it would help with presenting all the pertinent information depending on who you are.
March 5th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
[...] has not been updated for a long time. Hopefully this will help alleviate any issues of people calling you up and asking why they can’t find what they want on your site. You can just tell them that it is [...]
March 5th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
We have options for content by audience, and will be doing more with that. They get some use and mixed reviews, but it’s one more way to organize content. But even then, the people I’m talking about looked in one place and then gave up. Is that a new phenomenon?
March 9th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
It seems users have become very inpatient with sites the last 5 years when it comes to finding what they want. The Web has such a high signal-to-noise ratio, and users have learned to quickly filter out marking language and ads on pages, as well as quickly decide whether a site tells them what they want to know. This type of browse behavior is sort of a “worst case user” that supports the idea of prioritizing content, but you can’t please all the user all the time.
Self-selecting audience pages used to be discouraged by usability experts, but I haven’t read anything on that lately.
March 21st, 2008 at 10:48 am
Here is a funny (well, it wasn’t at the time) story that happened just yesterday:
Someone came up to me and said that the site doesn’t give users options to look up a doctor or make an appointment. I had the site up and pointed out that our templates ALL have those two options available as quick links on the right nav. for every page. “Oh,” she says. “Can you put it on the left, too?” Seriously! I then pointed out that we did user testing and a very high percentage of users were able to complete those tasks in mere seconds … “I still think it makes sense to include it on the left. It’s just not intuitive on the right.” Well, with my user testing as backup, I won the battle, but the war is never over.