Why You No Click Me?
You gave the users that one big, bold and beautiful button. It screams, it yells, it begs, — “Click me! Me! Me! Me!” Yet Mixpanel tells you less than 2% of your users care. Why?
This is a typical problem for startups and more prevalent than most of us would like to admit. There is however an easy solution. Let me illustrate with an example.
Above you see a big, bold and beautiful button that I got in email from Brewster yesterday. Looks straight forward enough, but was I going to click “accept”? Hell no! With all due respect to Mr. Scoble, the message just asked if I want to share contact information with him without telling me anything about the possible consequences of my action. What if “accept” means Robert will get to download all my contacts? What if Brewster would then spam them all with an invitation email?
If you don’t explain the action to your users, they may choose to avoid that action in fear that bad things would happen.
Only after pondering about this use-case had I realized what Brewster was asking to keep my address book in sync with Rober’s latest information. Well then, why not just say so?
In addition to actually telling me what they want , it would be great if I got an idea of what happens after the fact. So far, the app is asking me if I’d want to “stay up to date.” I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t say anything to me. What am I staying up to date with?
Deciphering the message further, I suspect the app will go ahead an sync Scobleizer’s contact info with the info in my address book. Will it do it just once, or is it going to sync every time Robert’s information changes [somewhere] online?
Given all I’ve just described, here’s what a better message might look like.
A good solution to my original problem — ambiguity in email, was completely non-technical and it did not require any change to the product. Simply a change in copy would have told me three things that I wanted to know:
- Exactly what the app wants to accomplish.
- How often it is going to do it.
- Whether I can choose otherwise at a later time.
Now that I understand what Brewster wants me to do, I am 100% ready to do it. What a cool idea — to always be up to date with contact info of the people I know, whenever it changes.
Look, I am not trying to point out Brewster flaws here, but I am simply pointing out a flaw that a lot of us make, every day — we forget to educate our users about the features of our applications. Trust me, I’ve made this mistake before and I am actively working on solving it.
Sometimes, when you spend your entire day using your own product, it’s really hard to remember what other users may question. To fix this, you gotta consciously remind yourself to step back and to pretend that you know nothing about the application. If you cannot do it, then go out and talk to your users, they will tell you.
Shameless promo: You could also find yourself a great designer on Scoutzie and work with them to create more meaningful, beautiful messages.
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