AIMS Canada

The 7 deadly 'Contact Us' page sins

Posted by Ray Litvak from Leading Website Designs...

I recently volunteered to write a blog for AIMS on Web Design – Kathryn suggested writing about something I know and enjoy; so web design it is.  My AIM – pun intended – is to address web design elements from a usability and marketing standpoint; including the good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s review the ‘Contact Us’ section - the Rodney Dangerfield of web pages, usually getting “no respect” yet able to make or break a site.

We’ve boiled it down to 7 deadly “Contact Us’ page sins we frequently come across;

1. Who should I contact?  The prospect has found your site and wants more information, but can’t identify who – from your contact list – is responsible.  Is it Sales@yourco.com, Info@yourco.com, Service@yourco.com? Why make them think?

2. How long until someone gets back to me?  Informing prospects of business hours and when they can expect a reply, builds credibility & trust.

3. Did they get the completed form I e-mailed to them?  Auto Responders assure prospects their query was received – especially important in an emergency.

4. Why can’t I call them?  Suppose the prospect’s Visa bill arrives and Amazon charged them for the wrong item - they want to speak to someone and soon:  Amazon claims to be “committed to being Earth's most customer-centric company,” but try finding a phone number to speak to a ‘customer-centric’ person on their site.  Unfortunately, this type of frustration is not specific to Amazon:  still don’t believe me, check out the http://www.gethuman.com/earcon/standard.html project in the U.S.

5. Where’s the toll free number?  The prospect lives in Windsor and wants to buy flowers for mom on Mother’s day – May 13th. Mom’s in Toronto.  The prospect found your site and wants to call to place the order, but there’s no toll-free number.  Maybe they’ll call, maybe they won’t.  Why risk it?

6. What will they do with my “Contact Information”?  The prospect found your e-tail site via Search and wants to place an order.  With credit card in hand, they notice there is no Privacy Policy.  An online (risky) purchase just got a whole lot riskier. 

7. Why haven’t they replied to me?  The prospect completed & sent the online ‘Request for Information’ form, but was never contacted.  The prospect wonders how they’d be treated if they were an actual customer.  Unless you are selling an egg-laying long-beaked echidna - or something as rare - chances are they’ll search for it elsewhere.

Essentially, make it easy for prospects to contact you.  You’ve invested time, money and advertising to create and promote a professional web presence:  providing easy and accessible contact options and alternatives just makes good business sense. As Geico says, make it "So easy a caveman can do it." 

UsabilityCamp Toronto - In Celebration of World Usability Day

Kudos to Jyotika Malhotra and Mira Jelic for organizing Toronto's inaugural UsabilityCamp to coincide with World Usability Day. I attended the event last night and enjoyed both the presentations and conversations with fellow attendees.

In addition to co-organizing UsabilityCamp, Jyotika is a  Marketing & Communications Consultant and AIMS Correspondent. She sends in the following summary of the event...

It’s happened. They came (over 150 of them!). They listened. They used. The first official UsabilityCamp at the Gladstone Hotel has now been put comfortably to bed.

The event all started with an idea Mira Jelic had to celebrate World Usability Day here in Toronto. Mira and I met at the AIMS Geek Dinner a couple of months ago and the next thing you know, I was co-organizing this event with her.

Inspired by CaseCamp, we wanted an event about usability that would bring together the industrial & product design, new media and business communities. We wanted to engage, inspire and encourage conversations amongst you usability and designer types – whether your world revolves around consumer products, websites or the latest killer app. It was all about Canadian innovation and in keeping with the theme of WUD 2006, about making life easier.

Ilona Posner of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab kicked things off by showing us an interactive, multi-sensory experience where kids use their bodies as controllers to play. Basically, kids can experience what it’s like to be a frog or a cat using technology but they have to do it through physical activity. The next phase of the Lab’s project is cooperative design with children with physical mobility issues as active members in the testing and design process.

Sapient Canada’s Brett Maraldo spoke about the evolution of web usability. He showed examples of how far corporate sites have come in taking their users into account, by making things, well, more intuitive and usable. They jokingly referred to usability’s coming of age as Usability 2.0? Hey, I laughed.

Lynn Miller from Autodesk added some insight on user-centered design and Agile software development and the benefits of running the interaction design track concurrently with the development track. Autodesk makes 2D and 3D software tools like AutoCAD, used by many designers worldwide.

ConceptShare’s Bernie Aho wowed the crowd with a demo of their online collaboration application made for designers of all kinds. It basically allows you to mark up mock-ups and get input from design team members, located anywhere with a web connection, with everyone literally looking at the same page. Good to know that Scott Brooks and Bernie are going to call Canada home, even when they hit the big time.

The presentations were capped off by Michelle Ivankovic of Umbra. Can you say that you’ve got an innovative soap pump named after you? Go look in your kitchen or bathroom – chances are you’ve got something designed by Michelle in there. She spoke about the evolution of design and how even hugely successful products were improved upon based on user need and experience.

So the first user test results are in. We, the organizers, learned from this, too. Hold more events – got it. Do it in a bigger space with more room to walk and mingle – got it. (Who knew that 300 people would want to attend our first event? Well we do, now!) Keep the mix of design worlds going – got it.

Check www.usabilitycamp.org over the next few days for some of last night’s presentations. Look for our next event in late winter/early spring. Thanks to everyone for coming out to this one and for all the great feedback.

Usability is hot – got it.

Second Cup vs. Starbucks - The Online Experience

The Second Cup versus Starbucks debate is an ongoing discussion in my house. On taste alone Second Cup wins hands down for me. (Of course Starbucks is so readily available my husband usually just has to cross the road to get his tall Americano.)

Lately I've found myself in Starbucks way more often than usual, and definitely more often than in Second Cup. I still prefer the milder, less bitter bean at Second Cup but these days my choice of coffee shop has more to do with web experience than beverage consumed.

Why is the web experience more important than the coffee bean? Well one of the great things about working at AIMS is all the people I get to meet. I'm often getting together with members and volunteers to chat about the industry and what AIMS can/should be doing. Invariably these meetings occur in a coffee shop.

Two important pieces I'm looking for on the coffee shop website: Locate a store map and nutrition information (after all I'm drinking 3-4 latte's a week!)

Starbucks uses Microsoft MapPoint technology. I can enter Toronto, ON into the search criteria and it shows me a map with the various Starbucks locations. I can zoom, move around the city by clicking on the arrows that border the map, and get the exact address in the sidebar.

Second Cup uses MapFusion. It only lets me see 10 stores at a time. By default it seems to have selected Bloor/Yonge as the default and shows me the 10 closest stores to that area. I can zoom but I can't figure out how to move east, west, north, south to areas outside what is currently showing in the map window. Not very helpful when I'm trying to locate a store at Bloor and Jane. If I know the exact address I can enter it and the location will appear on the map. Of course if I knew the exact address I probably wouldn't be on the site using the map :)

Nutrition Information. Since I've been consuming my fair share of milky caffeineated beverages I figured I better take a look at the nutrition information. At Starbucks I'm 3 easy-to-find clicks away from the information. And the ability to customize size of beverage, type of milk, and whip or no whip makes me think Starbucks really does know what I'm looking for.

At SecondCup.com I make my way through a bunch of annoying flash about each drink until I find a note about nutrition information. I need to call or email customer care for the information. I lose interest at this point and figure it doesn't really matter since I'm drinking more latte's at Starbucks anyway.

Of course there is much more to both sites than what I've highlighted here. But I'm guessing that finding a store and nutrition information are fairly common tasks among coffee shop web visitors. I might not like the coffee as much but Starbucks is definitely providing the web experience I'm looking for and winning my business at the moment.