Little Things Mean Much On Web Sites
Investor's Business Daily
by Jennie Phipps
August 15, 2007
Many Web sites use submit buttons, which sends in a form or an order or a reservation or what have you.
Sounds simple, but maybe not.
“We think of submit buttons as the Rodney Dangerfield of the Internet,” said Mark Wachen, co-founder and CEO of Optimost.
The company was hired to help improve the Delta Air Lines (DAL) Web site. (Related Story)
Wachen says many Web site owners don't give submit buttons the respect they deserve, in that they don't make the process clear enough.
Some users might not know just what is being submitted, or when to submit. Any uncertainty is deadly for an e-commerce site.
“People want to be clever with them (submit buttons),” he said. “And 95% of the time, users will figure it out. But 5% of the time they don't. And at the Delta.com site, a 5% improvement is a $10 million increase in revenue.”
Wachen gives these other guidelines to correct some other common mistakes made by Web site owners and designers:
- Don't ask for a fax number. Fax numbers are fossils and the request creates a problem for people who either don't have them or don't want to give them out.
- Don't ask for a cell phone number. Instead, request an alternative number. That gives people who don't have a cell or don't want to give out that number another alternative.
- Don't ask for more information than you need. Even if you make the fields optional, there are people who will look at a long form and decide that they don't have time to fill it out.
- Three bullet points are almost always better than five bullet points. “The Internet didn't invent short attention spans, but it's the natural habitat for people who have them,” Wachen said.
- Pay attention to keywords. You can learn a lot by studying what people click on when they came to your site. The information that you give them if they typed in RCA Model No. 2254 should be different than it is if they typed in color TV.
- Don't put too much information on the billing page. By now, most people have at least a decade of online experience. They don't need a primer on how to pay. If you include a lot of verbiage, just looking at it may discourage them enough that they'll leave without buying.
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