It's All Geek To Me - May 18th 2005

Driving Food & Cheese Curds make Good Web Sites by Ross Lasley Recently Amy and I drove to rural western Wisconsin for a friend's memorial service – 22 hours by car from Cape Cod...and then we turned around and drove 22 hours back. We had a grand old time – stopped at an amazingly varied antique market where I purchased a giant old dictionary for $25, checked out a few fireworks stands, and had a fun time examining the wares and road side signs of a big piece of the US.

We were adventuring and traveling – except when it came to the food. When it was time to eat, we consistently made “safe” choices – never eating in the quirky restaurants we saw but choosing reliable known national chains for our meals. The last thing we wanted was some piece of bad food with days of driving ahead.

We arrived in Wisconsin and spent some time with our friend's family – when I complimented the food they casually apologized for not having Cheese Curds available as part of the spread. I made the mistake of asking “What's a Cheese Curd?” and the room got strangely silent.

In looking back on it I suppose a similar reaction could be had on Cape Cod if someone from Wisconsin asked “What's a Clam?”.

For those of you who don't know, a cheese curd is a very delicious thing, apparently quite important to the culture of Cheesehead Wisconsin. They are made on Fridays and are only “fresh” (which means they squeak when you eat them) for a day or two after that. They come in flavors and are often deep fried for a low calorie, cholesterol-free treat. The second I admitted ignorance of these facts someone was immediately dispatched to the local bar to get a heaping plate of fried cheese curds – they are really tasty and receive my official “guy with pot belly” recommendation.

As we drove away from Wisconsin and headed home to Massachusetts, we passed all the same little cheese stands we had passed on the way there – I was suddenly noticing all the big cheese curd signs we'd passed on our way in, and we stopped at several places to get our own 'bag 'o curds' as well as other treats of cheesy goodness.

By now you must be wondering what all of this has to do with selling things on web sites.

When it comes time to sell something, you don't want to be creative or quirky – as all those folks looking for the safe choice will pass right by your offer. Americans do not generally search for the very best option – they buy something that is good enough at a fair price. They are often in a hurry and want to feel reassured.

One of the most common mistakes in the area of best practices is what web developers call “mystery meat” navigation, and it refers to buttons labeled in a difficult to understand way. Some pieces of mystery meat navigation we have fixed here at KISS include:

• a hotel that had a button labeled “tariffs”, it should have been “rates”
• a store with the button “Visit Experience”, should have been “Directions”
• a consulting firm with the button labeled “Feel”, should have been “About Us”

Sometimes mystery meat is a design problem – here is a really awful one. Flash is not a bad technology, but it sure does seem to attract incompetent designers.

The other super common best practices mistake is to mess with people's shopping experience. Thanks to Amazon and sites like it, most surfers today have a very clear expectation about buying something on your site. They want to find the item by category or search, add it to their cart, keep shopping or check out, enter their info and click go – boom, they're done.

We've all visited bad cart sites that ask you to note the color of the T-shirt in the comments field of the order form and such, but often times the culprits here are the geeks. Recently the Woods Hole, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket Steamship Authority added the ability to sell tickets to their website here.

This is a horrific implementation, so bad that it is comical. When you get to the main page of this site, and if you are able to find the “buy tickets” MDR at all (don't know what an MDR is?, click here), you are presented then with something only a geek could think was ok:

To use our Online FastFerry Reservation System, you must have been assigned a FastFerry ID Number. You will need to enter either your current FastFerry ID Number or eMail Address associated with your FastFerry ID Number and your PIN.

If you do not have a FastFerry ID Number, click the Create New Profile link located below or please call 508.495.3278 during regular business hours.

So when you click on 'create new profile' all it wants is your basic name and address info, but it does continue to make it difficult with fun instructions like: “Please enter your First Name if you are not setting up a business with this profile.”

Why the heck would they do this? Because some database geek who undoubtedly has underwear in the drawer labeled for every day of the week believes those regular people who think it is a pain to setup accounts and don't want to should not be able to buy tickets at this website. (want to see a good implementation of selling tickets? Check out the Dolphin Fleet here. Nothing that magical about it - - it just follows basic common sense.)

If they removed this outrageously unusable thing from their site, sales would increase, and the database geek could be happy if after someone placed their order, they were sent an email to let them know an account had been created for them that would save time when they ordered again in the future....can you say follow-up marketing opportunity?

The point I am really making here is how important it is to think about your website and what people expect to see there. While you do want to be creative and have fun, you never want to interfere with a hurried shopper. You need to think like them and reexamine your site from their perspective.

While Amy and I ate at many restaurants in Paris on our trip there - the very first day when we were stressed from traveling, we went to McDonald's.

Is your site ready for the person that just wants a simple hamburger? It should be.