Description

In the moments when users first experience a new Web application, it's vital they are able to understand the purpose of the application, what they can gain from it, what to expect, whether or not they can trust it, and how long it might take to get up to speed. In this video, Robert Hoekman shows you the design elements that will help your users do exactly that.

Transcript

A friend of mine once told me about the process you have to go through to sell a product to a person, once that person has walked into your store. He basically told me that once you qualify the customer and determine that he is a real customer and not just a window shopper, and then maybe you pan them the right merchandise and maybe made a couple of up sells along the way, the next step is to ask the customer to leave his wallet on the counter on the way out the door. He said a lot of sales people fail because they don't know how to ask for that credit card, when what they need is a clear call to action statement. Online it's exactly what we want to do. I have once worked on a course finder application for an e-learning system for a major airline. They had created this whole collection of e-Learning courses to help tarmac workers and ramp workers and such to get up to speed with the latest safety procedures and company policies and things like that, and the second example, it's one to illustrate when a called to action might be more appropriate. When we first got the designs from the company, we found out that someone in the marketing department had gone through a lot of trouble to write this nice, long welcome blog, but it was couple of paragraphs long. It started out with the word welcome and it was really long written. It had a lot of great information about how the application worked, what you could do there, what you could get out of it, but of course the obvious problem here is that people don't tend to read long blocks of text online, they tend to skip right over those things. So the first thing we need to do was change the heading into a nice short, call to action statement. So when I first read the welcome blog this is what I saw. I saw a couple of major keywords that jumped out such as locate courses and course finger, but all of the rest of it, sort of just blurred into this blob of text that just said, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everything was you know, just fairly meaningless and not very useful at all. So the first thing I wanted to do was change the heading into a nice clear call to the action statement. So I scrapped the word welcome and I changed that to find the course. That tells people right in this section, right underneath this heading is where you can locate a course, you can start doing what it is you came here to do and it also gives people again that feeling that they are directing the software, this is what I want you to do or what I want the software to do. I want it to help me find the course. So after I have done that I still needed to crush down this big block of text and I realized that the marketing department had gone through a lot of trouble to write this text and again it was very well done, but it needed to go away. Because nobody was going to read it, they were just going to skip right over it. So after a little bit of convincing, I managed to talk them into crushing down that big block of text into a nice short statement that just said, locate a course then click its title to get started. Simple as that, by decreasing the word count, we actually increase the odds that someone would notice this statement and actually read it and figure out how to use the application from there. So by creating that call to action statement, we made it far more obvious to users to what they could do and I am sure here, they actually get people started with their trip itinerary sharing by instructing them to simply just forward your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. All you have to do is take your travel confirmation plans from any major travel service online and forward it to this email address. It's a short, simple, call to action statement that just tells people exactly what to do. I keep mentioning Tripit here because they just do so many things right. I am not being endorsed by them. I haven't worked for them, nothing like that. They just do a lot of things right and Tripit has the investment breakdown in place, they have a nice clear value proposition in place and with this clear call to action statement in place, they are pretty much doing everything right and that is exactly what we want to achieve.