“Next Best Action” — a simple way to ensure user engagement

This is going to seem incredibly basic, but if everyone were doing it, the world would be a much better… user experience.

I was standing in an <unspecified> client’s office, looking at a wall of design work. They were redesigning their website.

They had a wall of design inspiration, a wall of printed out, finished UI screens and a several freelancers sitting in front of huge screens cranking out Things in Sketch.

They walked me through the work on the wall.

Here is the sign up screen…

and here is the home screen…

and here is a content page…

This went on for some time (and I bit my tongue and didn’t point out that the whole thing was inaccessible) until finally I asked —

So what does the user do here?

Silence.

So if they click this, where do they go?

Silence.

So what if they leave at this point because there’s no clear CTA?

Pause…

Oh, we haven’t though that through yet.

Funnily enough, I wasn’t invited back. Also the website failed post-launch.

So what was the…