Lennair Homes wants you to buy their homes, but doesn't explain why

The Internet has been around for a couple of years now. And just as a readers of books don’t need instructions about how to turn a page, your web site doesn’t need to tell visitors how to navigate. People know what to do. Your content and the context of what you are writing should make it clear to the visitor why they need to do.

This unfortunate technique is still widely used across the Internet, even on the web sites of Fortune 500 companies.

Way back in 1999, the W3C developed content recommendations that set the standard. Gheckpoint 13.1 states:

Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context—either on its own or as part of a sequence of links. Link text should also be terse. For example, in HTML, write “Information about version 4.3″ instead of “click here”. In addition to clear link text, content developers may further clarify the target of a link with an informative link title (e.g., in HTML, the “title” attribute).

It’s sometimes challenging to write meaningful link text. Here are some guidelines that may help.

Create meaningful link text

Avoid generic link test like, “If you would like to pay your bill, click here.” Instead, tell the user what the action means, as in, “For complete details, read the API Reference.”

Use text links instead of naked URLs

A web address URL, like those in the address bar of any browser, are machine-, not human-friendly. They rarely provide customers with useful information about the content they will get, nor persuade them why they should follow the link.

Instead, use text to label the link in a way persuades the user that the link is worth following and that matches the heading and page name of the content that will be delivered.

© 2012, Brian Phelps. All rights reserved.

In real life, voice and tone are easily identified. The business owner hopes employees always greet customers in a friendly voice and with a smile. But they may have just broke up with their girl friend, or had a disagreement with the boss. They may be quiet and distracted or the could be indifferent in tone and body language. How do you communicate voice and tone in the digital world?

About tone and voice

On the web, voice represents the personality of the business, while tone represents the mood or attitude of the business. It may be easier to understand by looking at a few examples. Compare The Guardian to The Sun. The New York Times to the New York Post. Or think of the different ways you might write an academic paper, an informative blog entry, or an e-mail to a friend.

Your company’s voice

Your company’s personality is expressed through your voice and tone.  Your voice expresses your basic personality – confident, practical, trustworthy, etc. Your tone can change depending on what we’re writing about. Tone expresses the mood or feeling of the voice – it can be friendly, reassuring, excited, etc.

You can use your voice and tone to differentiate your company from your competitors and personalize the customer’s experience. Everyone who writes for your company needs to keep your voice and tone in mind so that your messaging is consistent.

Keep customers’ attention

Keep your voice consistent. Use active voice and short sentences. Create a sense of vigor and action.

Your customers

You need to identify your user audience and understand what they want from you. Generally, most users are task-oriented. They’re looking for specific information.

Encourage action

Each area of content should encourage the user to do more by providing links to relevant, but possibly tangential, content.

© 2012, Brian Phelps. All rights reserved.

Be concise

Write tersely. To the point. Focused. Simply. Forget the froo-fra, the “marketese”, the exclamation points, the long-introductions, the obvious. Restrain yourself from writing “Welcome to our web site,” “This is going to be a great year for our club!”, “The links below will give you more information,” and so forth.

When browsing the web, research has shown the people like to scan. They rarely read until they find the particular kernal of information they seek.. They scan for the keyword or phrase of interest. They are trying to follow the “scent of information.” Write concisely, clearly, descriptively, declaratively, factually, and informatively. “Chunk” your text as much as possible. Use sub-headers whenever possible to indicate what the content is about. Break up very long pages into several shorter pages if feasible. Group like information on the same page.

Write simply

Use terms that are clear and readily understandable by all audiences. Avoid culture-specific idioms and academic jargon.

Use a consistent voice

Write using a plain, simple style that individuals with an eighth grade education can understand. Use a consistent “voice” when writing to help your user audiences feel comfortable and to make your information more accessible to your web site visitors.

Active voice

Avoid using passive tense, where the subject performing the action is ambiguous. Put the subject in front of the action. For example:

Don’t Use

SAT scores of 700 or better were achieved by one-third of the entering freshman.

Use

Over one-third of the entering freshman achieved SAT scores of 700 or better.

For more information on active and passive voice, see Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

© 2012, Brian Phelps. All rights reserved.

Why FAQs Fail

There are a number of serious disadvantages to FAQs.

• FAQs are usually a mish-mash of different topics. Architecting different kinds of information on the same page is very difficult.
• Since FAQs are a conglomeration of different topics, the customer is forced to read every single FAQ or try to scan for keywords amidst the text. People do not like to read, they like to scan the subheads, or for bolded topics.  The nature of FAQs makes it less likely that the customer will find the information they seek.
• Since FAQs are usually “tacked on” after the fact, that is, after the primary content has been written and the site architected, they usually get added on and tucked in somewhere somewhat obscure. Customers do not know where to reliable look for FAQs.
• Since FAQs contain a lot of different topics, they do not lend themselves to search engine optimization, meaning customers will not readily find them when searching using either internal or external search tools.
• Creating useful navigation on a FAQ page is a challenge. FAQs are usually long lists of questions with links to anchors down the page where the answer can be found. Unfortunately, these pages are so long the customer has now lost the page navigation. They have to scroll back up to the top. Optimally, the answer should expand and appear immediately after the FAQ. With Web 2.0 technologies, that is more easily accomplished. This solution does not remove the other issues previously identified.
• Customers only read FAQs as a last resort, when they have failed to find the information  they seek elsewhere.

All of this tells us  that the reason customers contact customer service, and the reason that FAQs come into existence, is that the customer cannot find information where they expect to find it.

FAQs are usually created for two reasons.

Someone didn’t think

Developing content is more complicated than getting grammar and spelling right. It’s more than organizing ideas into chapter and verse.  The other half is thinking about the content from the customer’s point of view. The next half is architecting the overall  information schema in a way that’s accessible to your customers. The last half is, when the customers finally land on the right page, chunking the information in  a cogent, concise,  meaningful fashion so it leaps off the page at them. FAQs never do that. When FAQs are built-in to a web site’s architecture, someone is using the FAQ as an excuse not to think.

Content in whatever form—web pages, getting started guides, marketing collaterals, developer’s guides, proposals, reference manuals, online help—is successful when the information consumer can quickly and seamlessly find what they seek. The content developer had to do the heavy lifting—the analysis, research, synthesis, editing, and integration—to make the information accessible to the consumer where they expect to find it the first time.

If a customer is frustrated by their experience finding the information they need to make a purchase decision, we’ve just shot ourselves in the foot.

Customer Service complains

It inevitably happens:  customer service finds among their metrics a series of questions that get asked over and over again. They send an email over to the  content team, usually including their cryptic, scripted responses, and plead for a web page that customers will find before calling support, or that they can refer customers to. Because Customer Service wants to spend their time more profitably responding to complex questions that can’t be resolved so easily.

As a consequence, FAQ s  tend to be workarounds. Rather than undertake the brain-crushing task of actually thinking through where a particular kernel of information belongs, the FAQs get dumped as a group onto a web page. They are a quick, convenient and cheap way to add content that ought to have been present in the first place.

Once completed, everyone gets to happily announce, “We did it. We gave the customers the information they needed!” Sorry, nope, wrong, FAILURE.

Brilliantly and informatively labeled “Frequently Asked Questions”, now the company can say the customer knows where to find the information.  The poor customer is left to paw through the mess.

They are usually a patchwork response to the top items that customer service is getting queries about, which is good. We do want to answer those questions.

Leave the customer smiling

So the optimal solution is meet the customer at their level of need: add the content where the customer expects to find it in the first place. Leave them happy after reading your content and they will be super-charged and full of superior expectations about all the rest of your products as well.

© 2011 – 2012, Brian Phelps. All rights reserved.

Linking to PDF or Word files in many instances is a lame effort to avoid investing the time required to make the same content available as HTML. By linking to non-HTML documents, such as PDF, PowerPoint, or Word, you may create significant usability problems. You could very well not only prevent your visitors from accessing the very information you want them to get, you may be frustrating them in the same moment. Virtually everyone has unwittingly clicked on a link, unaware it was to a PDF file, and immediately regretted the action, because you aren’t ready to take the time to search through a PDF file.

You ought to avoid linking to these kinds of documents whenever possible.

Usability issues

There are several usability challenges with linking to non-HTML content. Chief among the sources of problem are PDF documents, although the same issues can be found with other non-HTML files.

Here’s why you should steer you away from linking to them:

Linking

If the link to a PDF document loads the file in the same browser window, the natural action when finished is to close the document — not click the Back button. Now your visitors just lost their place and you may have lost them. If the link is to a new window, the user’s browser settings may download the file instead of open it. Now the user must completely stop what they are doing, find the downloaded file, open it, and resume searching for that kernel of information they seek. A substantial pain in the rear.

Navigation

Non-HTML documents abandon the hypertext world of the web. For example, to find anything in a PDF document, your visitors must adopt a different, typically linear, navigational mode. This may considerably slow their ability to find what they seek.

Crashes

While less prevalent in newer versions of PDF documents, I still experience frozen browser sessions and locked up tabs where I can’t do anything until the (usually mysteriously) large PDF finishes loading. Some visitors may be running older versions of a PDF reader that is incompatible with the document version, preventing them from accessing your document.

Exceptions

Exceptions include PDF renderings of technical reference manuals, legal forms, and other documents that needed to be rendered in a format suitable for printing. Some content management systems make it possible to dynamically create and download a PDF of an existing HTML page, which may have advantages in specific circumstances.

Link if you must

At least make it obvious

If you must link to these kinds of documents, you can reduce your visitor’s challenges with a few simple steps.

Using standardized icons along with text links. Combining text links and icons reaps the benefits of each link type. Text links provide clues about the content of the link. Industry standardized icons, those associated with a specific document type, quickly identify the type of file associated with the link. Neither type of link can do both alone. For example:

For a printable, off-line copy, download the API Reference (24MB).

To simplify the effort required, it’s possible to use CSS to conditionally append links with an icon, as in the following example:

a[href $='.pdf'] {
padding-right: 18px;
background: transparent url(ico_pdf.gif) no-repeat center right;
}

Use the ALT tag. To comply with accessibility standards and to help visitors understand your content, use the ALT attribute for the <img alt=”" /> tag to indicate its purpose. When used in conjunction with the icon, the ALT tag improves accessibility for some web users.

Indicate file size If you must link to non-HTML documents, help the user to make an informed decision about whether he wants to initiate the download by indicating the file size. Individuals connecting from overseas or with slow dial-up connections may not want to download large files.

Link to a new browser window To avoid locking the current browser window as the file is downloaded, open a new browser window by using the “TARGET” attribute of the HREF tag.

Keep the icon close. Keep the link and the icon next to each other, so that the icon visually informs and cues the visitor about the text link.

Make the icon active. Make sure that the icon itself is also a hyperlink, as users tend to try to click on the icon to accomplish the action. Make sure this is a separate hyperlink from the text, otherwise the space between the word and the icon may not format correctly.

© 2010, Brian Phelps. All rights reserved.

• Is focused on a specific task, for example, seeking a specific piece of information like the correct part number, or identifying the most appropriate product for their needs.
• Is busy and solution focused. They are seeking a specific kernel of information. The path to information should be as readily apparent as possible.
• Do not assume they will take any one path to find information, and provide alternative means to find information objects. This means that internal search, browsing, and navigation should all work together to enrich the scent of information they seek.
• Is not interested in marketing fluff or on being sold on your products. They want facts that persuade them to engage with you.
• Does not want to be talked down to nor buttered up. They appreciate a straight-forward presentation of information.
• Are not limited to a single gender. Language should be gender-neutral. The tone should not be masculine nor feminine, merely professional and competent.

Follow these basic steps and your visitors will show their appreciation by sticking around.

© 2010 – 2012, Brian Phelps. All rights reserved.