Three Signs Your Site Design Isn’t Putting Users First
Putting users first means prioritizing user goals over short-term, sales-driven goals. Even in these three common scenarios.
User focus is more important than ever. The integrity of content, including its truthfulness and motives, has never been under more scrutiny. How and why sites collect, protect and use data is finally being considered with the gravity it deserves, by regulators and individuals.
It seems, though, that instead of maximizing the value they provide to users, so many digital products subvert their experience and actually exploit or manipulate users. The irony, of course, is that no matter the business model, satisfied, repeat users are central to success and profit.
For ad-supported properties, reach, made up of new and repeat users, is key.
For apps and premium products, scale is key, also made up of new and repeat users.
And of course for platforms looking for investment, MAU (monthly average users) is key. More new and repeat users.
So why don’t we focus on providing seamless user experiences that build loyalty? The truth is, there are many reasons — and most of them are not nefarious or due to a lack of intent. We could fill several articles with those reasons.
But by far the most common is prioritizing interactions that drive a short-term business goal over those that enable efficient attainment of user goals. So many site owners forget this fundamental as they build out their products in a KPI mindset: attaining long-term business strength is achieved by earning satisfaction and loyalty, not by achieving KPIs. A KPI is intended to measure progress towards business strength, not to be an end unto itself — remember, the term is “key performance indicators.”
Again, most digital owners don’t mean to bake poor user experiences into their product. But nonetheless, there are real implications for users.
Here are three signs your site or app might be doing exactly this. They’re all either seemingly minor or seemingly necessary. But they actually work counter to user expectations and counter to your business.
1. You double-dip with your paying users
Double-dipping is when you serve interruptive ads (getting paid once by the advertiser) to users who are paying for your premium content (getting paid a second time by the user, who is a subscriber).
This is actually a pretty unethical thing to do, because not only are you charging your users twice (once in dollars and once in attention), but you’re selling the data they provided for targeting and advertising purposes. Services that do this make it clear that they prioritize incremental revenue — made off of you — over your experience using that service.
Here’s an example: The New York Times runs pre-roll ads on featured, above-the-fold video on their home page. I’m sympathetic to how difficult it is for journalism to thrive in a digital world. In fact, I’m a big believer that we should pay for quality journalism and content; content does not want to be free as the popular internet age adage goes, it is people who want content to be free. But when I click to watch a video of a debate recap or breaking news of a crisis or of a Supreme Court decision, I do not expect to have to sit through a pre-roll advertisement. I’ve paid for this content, and so my access to it shouldn’t be sponsored, or interrupted.
Another example, also from The Times, is pushing gift subscriptions on logged-in subscribers. These ads are ubiquitous during certain gifting seasons and create noisy ad stripes everywhere.
One could argue that The Times is just continuing a tried-and-true model from the offline world: advertisers pay for placements in printed newspapers that people buy pay to receive either on their doorstep as a subscriber or by purchasing from a newsstand. But there’s a key difference. Digital advertising is interruptive. While physical newspaper readers can just choose not to look at print ads, digital ads come in the form of video pre-rolls (and their evil-er cousin, the mid-roll) that postpone your content consumption, “expandables” and persistent videos that move users’ target content around, and “interstitials” or “roadblocks” that appear before taking the user to the page they actually clicked on. And let’s not forget the classic “popup” or “popover.” All of these are impossible to ignore and a user can’t just choose not to look at them.
A better metaphor for paid digital content products is premium cable TV, like HBO, rather than traditional print newspapers. In both, users pay for unfettered access to the best content, and expect to consume it either streaming or as a broadcast, without interruption. Imagine paying $20–30 per month for HBO and then having to watch two minutes of ads for every 8 minutes of Game of Thrones. You’d cancel.
So if your site is double-dipping, chances are you’re serving your weekly or monthly revenue targets instead of serving your user satisfaction and loyalty metrics. Again, the rub is that with this approach, you’ll eventually miss both those targets, as users abandon your site for better user experiences.
2. You use newsletter data-collection popups
Someone, somewhere must have convinced a whole lot of marketers that an email list is the most valuable thing you can have. Granted, a properly designed CRM program that tailors to a user’s needs can be very effective and generate ROI, and capturing an email address is central to that. However, popping up (or, in euphemistic parlance that describes using layers or “lightboxes” instead of new browser windows, “popping-over”) a subscribe window and blocking the users intended path is a huge experience fail. Not only does it squander one of the most valuable things a site can have — an inbound user with intent, i.e., they came to the site with a task in hand — it redirects the attention of that inbound user to another task: opting in. This immediately erodes trust, as asking for data before either a literal transaction (ecommerce) or an information transaction (content) upends the natural value exchange flow. The result is frustration, and usually distraction.
Perhaps worse, it clouds the entire ROI calculation on any inbound traffic drivers that may have been involved in the user journey — including both the ad someone may click on to land at the site and the sponsored social post the user may have seen two weeks ago that predisposed them to the brand. All of this is being measured, yet the site itself jumped in and detoured the user from their intent-laden journey. The value of those inbound and brand drivers are now in question. They, after all, did their job. But conversion was blocked by an email newsletter pitch, of all things!
This is a particularly egregious fail when done on a mobile device. Unfortunately, given the twin upticks in direct-to-consumer brands and influencer-driven commerce, it is a relatively common occurrence.
I did not have to look far for a great example of this one. While taking a break from writing this post, believe it or not, I ran into this exact problem. Admittedly, I like sneakers. While not a sneakerhead, Facebook knows this about me and served me an ad for new Adidas NMD colorways that had dropped (left in the image below). Actually, I’d seen this ad a few times, and while enjoying my lunch, I succumbed and clicked through.
Instead of hitting the product page for the shoe I clicked on, I was served an NMD product search results page, obscured with an email subscription registration popover (right in the image). The registration offered a 15% off promo, which, for a pair of NMDs could be $20+. But that’s not the point. My journey ended there. I was on the hook, and might have bought the colorway as advertised, but I got distracted and I bailed.
Interrupting a high-value user flow certainly indicates that growing a marketing database is more important than serving a potential customer. Also, by the way, a consumer’s data privacy, which is cumulatively eroded and compromised by these opt-ins, is worth more than 20 bucks.
Here’s a bonus UX violation that I observed in this example as well. This opt-in form actually has another UX problem, one that is frequently overlooked. It is dismissed as simple, straightforward and necessary, but actually is insensitive and discriminatory.
The form asks the user to declare a gender. Though it is not a required field, it denies a user who does not identify in a cisnormative or binary way (since the choices are male or female) of a personalization feature and of a level of service from Adidas. Continually being asked to self-identify can be difficult for trans or nonbinary individuals and potentially for LGBTQIA people, and can be seen as yet another reminder that they are not considered the norm. They should not have to go through this process in an interruptive email opt-in form they never asked for on a sneaker website.
I don’t want to dismiss the data and system complexity this issue represents for a retailer, as the entire production, supply, wholesale and retail chain for garments has long been organized along a binary identification schema. But a progressive, culturally-sensitive brand like Adidas should lead here, or at least avoid making sweeping generalizations in its marketing program.
And while complex, a solve is not impossible. Instead of asking the question, Adidas could use a quick preference survey, rapidly showing the user different shoe designs for them to select, inferring a set of style preferences for future use. Or they could have simply omitted the question, which would also have been a better design choice.
3. Your page hierarchy does not prioritize target content
The situation in web design has become something of a crisis: page design has become nearly indecipherable, especially on content publishing sites. The amount of “other stuff” on our pages is crowding out the content a user actually came for, and our designs are prioritizing this other stuff regularly.
It is kind of hard to believe this has to be said in 2019, but it is clearly necessary: when a page loads, the user needs to understand that, yes, this is the page they wanted when they clicked the link on the previous page — and seeing the headline and a critical mass of content that relates to that clicked link is critical to confirming they landed in the right place. It is pretty simple.
There are a number of things that cause this not to happen, one of which is something I call “big monitor syndrome.” This happens because many pages are actually designed and built on big, beautiful, high-resolution monitors. Then, actual users experience them on small, often-cheap, often old, lower-resolution laptop monitors. This means a lot of what was intended for users to see is nowhere in sight on the laptop screen. In many cases, the proportion of “other stuff” to desired stuff, and their layout, likely looks fine on these big beautiful monitors, so no problem is anticipated at all.
But the real issue here is shown in the examples below. And that issue is advertising space. Ad sizes and capabilities, driven by bandwidth and technology advancements, have ballooned over time. Meanwhile, viewability, defined as an ad that is being served actually being able to be seen by a user, often translates to “above the fold” and is something publishers and ad-serving companies pay more for. Unsurprisingly, then, publishers cram as much ad inventory as possible in that first user view. When you add on the “value adds,” or incremental placements ad salespeople “throw in,” and custom advertising deals that involve huge amounts of money for hugely visible, large placements, there is a lot of page real estate to account for.
Some of this is to be expected. It is understandable for a portion of the user’s initial attention to be directed at something that could be monetized (although, if we’re talking about a pay site, please see scenario number 1, above). But it should be within reason, and never at the expense of delivering the value promised to the user — the target content.
Here are some examples, and they speak for themselves. By the way, these are all real screenshots of real pages in 2019. These images were screen captures were made with a maximized browser window and only the browser bezel was cropped out. Nothing has been added except a slight shadow to show the edges.
Again, it is completely understandable that the bills need to be paid, and viewability pays a premium. Nonetheless, experiences where users have to play “find the content” shouldn’t be the outcome. And while we can blame a little bit of this on the limited size of some screens on smaller laptops, it seems to be common enough with larger viewports too, as the taller examples above, captured on my secondary monitor, attest.
What to Do
Everybody claims they want to provide a great user experience. But that isn’t really good enough. Real relationships, real trust and real loyalty are earned through an aggregate of many consistently positive experiences a person has with a brand across the organization — retail, product, support, and digital user experience, which can frequently be the first experience.
Digital owners have to look hard at their experiences. Start with the three scenarios I outline above — are these poor user experiences that you’ve implemented? If so, you should fix them. All of these examples are easily-made tradeoffs or concessions that can lead to quick, monetary wins. But to seriously scale the value of your digital properties, you need to make the long-term customer value arguments that need to be made so that your organization shifts priorities away from quick-win, incremental sales-driven tactics.
It won’t be easy, and you might see a short-term decline in some KPIs. But those will be superficial losses. If the rest of your experience is primed and optimized, the long-term value to your brand and the loyalty of your audience will be worth it, spurring the growth drivers of word-of-mouth and repeat purchases.
Then find other anti-user experiences. Testing is an easy way to shake them out. And fix those too, because you can’t ask users to believe in your brand and products if your website doesn’t show your commitment to those users. Do it right, and both your long-term and short-term KPIs will pay off.
