When I was in college, I worked for a while at a wholesale liquor store. Our customers were bar and club owners and some small retail stores, and it was a great place to work. The customers loved coming there, and even the occasional individual who wandered off the street thinking we were a retail store usually had a pretty good experience out of it. Part of the reason was Carl.
Carl was the manager, and he had two things that made him exceptional. The first was that he knew absolutely everything, and the second was that he really cared about people.
While I'm visiting a Web site, I want that Web site to treat me the way that Carl would. I want the Web site to be knowledgeable, helpful, friendly, and interested in me. I want the Web site to help me achieve my objectives, just like Carl would have. Unfortunately, lots of the Web sites that I visit are the equivalent of those rude employees that all of us have experienced.
What I want to do is help me and my clients develop Web sites that treat their visitors the way Carl would. Here are the things that I want the site to do.
I want the site to be friendly and helpful.
If there's one thing that the site should be, this is it. One thing that never happened when Carl was around was making someone feel stupid. That was even if they wandered in thinking we were a bar and were looking for a drink.
Instead, Carl was always friendly, always nice, and always helpful. And because Carl was friendly and the boss, the rest of us were friendly, too. How does your Web site stack up with that?
Do you expect people to have a high level of technological sophistication? Do they need to use a particular browser? What happens if they don't? On lots of sites, you get messages that essentially tell you that if you don't have the current browser of choice, you're really kind of a lesser person. Don't let that happen on your site. Design for the lowest common denominator of people who visit you. Offer special options for those who have special technological situations, but keep it simple and keep it helpful for everybody.
One thing I never, ever saw Carl do was trot out the company brochure and read the Mission Statement. As far as I know, he never held his logo up in front of anybody either. Yet, that's what lots of sites do. Instead, Carl would help people find what they were looking for quickly.
Your site will be helpful to me if you help me get right to the information that matters to me. Make navigation easy, and intuitive. Put the most important things at the top. Save the sermons about what a fine company you are, and prove it to me instead by helping me answer my question or solve my problem.
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Carl remembered everybody. He knew who wanted their material delivered and who wanted to pick the goods up while they were there. He knew the packing idiosyncrasies the different folks demanded. He knew that some people could never remember the brands that they preferred, and so he needed to help them with that. Your site should be like Carl.
If your technology allows it, give me a personal page. And then remember what I do there.
Use the technology not just to personalize my information offerings, help me personalize my individual visitor experience, too.
Don't make me type things in more than once. Make sure that if you have a database of my prior activity you can use that to help me make decisions. And learn from how I do things.
When I go to the grocery store, there are a couple of things that I almost always buy. It would be great if those things were stacked up right at the entryway when I came in. It's the same when I go to a Web site. With each site that I visit, there are a couple of parts of the site that I almost always check out. Use software to pick out my patterns and then help me go to the parts that interest me most.
There's lots of great filtering and other technology out there to help you do this. You can compare my pattern with the patterns of others and make recommendations for me. You can compare my usage patterns and how they change and make suggestions about where to go next. You can alter my personal page based on the things I like to do most, putting the buttons that lead me there in the most visible and easy-to-use spots.
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I want the site to allow me to be human.
Humans and computers are different. Computers do lots of sorting and searching very, very fast. Humans are slow at that. But humans can make great intuitive leaps.
One thing that I remember about Carl is that no one was ever wrong when they made a choice. He often would suggest a choice that might be better, but he never, ever suggested that a customer was stupid, or less than well informed. Your site should be like Carl.
Pay particular attention to your error messages. Are you telling people that they're stupid, or unsophisticated? If you are, it won't be a good experience for them. And if it's not, they won't come back if they get another choice.
Remember, too, that humans have this really great brain that makes lots of connections. One of the reasons that the Web can be really powerful, and your Web site can be really powerful, is that your links can mimic brain-like connections.
Design your information offerings, and your site structure, so that it works naturally with the way people want to work. This is easier said than done. It's not that we don't know the things that make human beings human. It's not that we don't understand their perceptions and habits and foibles. It's not that we don't know how things such as reading are done differently on the Web from on the physical world.
No, it's a culture that says, "the designer knows best.% The designer might be a programmer, or might be a graphic artist, or might be a market researcher. But over and over again, we make decisions about how people should act. Those decisions lead us into very dangerous territory. Be very careful about using the word "should" when you're talking about your site visitors.
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Control's really important to human beings. We've got psychological studies over several years that tell us that people, for example, can bear a great deal more pain if they have a way to shut the pain off. What's interesting is that that pain tolerance goes up even if they never choose to use the button or other mechanism to shut it off. Just having the control makes a difference.
Many 12-step and recovery programs build on this. The first thing that they do is help people take control over some portion of their lives. Having control in one area helps people expand it to others.
It works the other way, too. Taking control away from people not only makes them feel helpless, it makes them angry and frustrated, too.
Your site needs to give me choices. It should give me choices about what I see, how I experience things, what information you send me.
Even if you don't have a highly technologically sophisticated site, you can do a lot of this with the way you mix your site design and e-mail.
Give me choices about the kind of e-mail I can receive. Tell me what you're going to do with my name and address. Then send me interesting e-mail in the categories I've picked.
When you do that, put more information somewhere on the site that I can come visit. If it's my personalized page, great. If you don't have the technology for that, take me directly to the part of the site that builds on what you've told me in your e-mail.
Give me control, as much as possible, about the information that I see and receive and about the way that I see and receive it. Give me control of content and context, and contact method.
All of these things are things that Carl just did naturally. He was friendly and helpful, and folks who came to the store felt good. He remembered things, and used those things to be friendlier and more helpful. He treated people like human beings, not like machines, not like sources of revenue, like human beings. And he gave people as much control as they were comfortable in having.
If you want your site to be like Carl, you need to do the same thing with your design, your feature set, and your programming. It's not easy, but the rewards are great.
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