The E-Business Software Weekly is a series profiling trends and developments in software and applications that support e-business, the Internet, and other electronic communication channels. Look for a new story each week in this space.
Creating a Customer-Friendly Web Environment: Part III
There is a great scene at the end of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction classic "2001: A Space Odyssey" that says more than it should about the state of many corporate Web sites today. By the end of the film, astronaut Dave Bowman, played in brilliantly stunned silence by Kier Dullea, has endured a host of interplanetary horrors. His spaceship has been hijacked by a renegade computer. His partner has died in the suffocating vacuum of space. And he himself has been cast adrift in a tiny space pod, floating toward some undefined but certain doom.
At length, after a psychedelic pinball ride along a seemingly infinite tunnel through space, astronaut Bowman finds himself in a gilded mansion that looks like a cross between an opera house and a funeral parlor. Set against the insanity-inducing chaos he has witnessed during the past few hours, this place is heaven, a welcome island of stability, a place to rest. Exploring, he walks into the vintage kitchen, opens a cabinet door, and is greeted by rows of boxes offering an array of familiar comestibles. At last, food. He opens one box, then another, and the sham of this Potemkin world is revealed: the boxes contain nothing but blue, Styrofoam-like filler.
Great design. Lousy content.
A short time later, after Bowman has aged a lifetime within only a few minutes, the momentary order of the grand mansion has been replaced again by the vast unknowability of space, and the viewer is left as confused and uncertain as Bowman himself must be, accompanied (now as the Star Child) by a mere glimmer of light, and little more.
Great Design, Great Content
Eternal quandaries and mystical messages often, as in 2001's case, make for great cinema, but they do little to create an edifying corporate or e-business Web presence. And yet this is where the greatest challenge in developing a customer-friendly Web environment may come. Even after site owners have followed the relatively well-defined rules for good design and intuitive navigation, there remains the matter of producing informative, understandable, even inspiring content--a site component that, when lacking, can make even the best-designed sites as unsatisfying as Dave Bowman's Styrofoam-filled food cartons.
Unfortunately, far too many corporate and e-business Web sites have fallen victim to the "great design, lousy content" syndrome--a malady that is often apparent from the first page. While most corporate sites meet the threshold requirement of telling their visitors what their host companies, in fact, do, a surprising number fail to pass this most basic test of clarity. Companies claim to "build e-businesses," to offer "fully hosted enterprise solutions," to serve as "one-stop integrated communications providers," without ever crossing the line of telling potential customers what their firms actually do. It's an error of omission that no amount of great content or copy on the subsequent pages is likely to remedy.
But assuming a site's owner can articulate a clear value proposition, the challenge remains of enticing potential customers to stay on the site, to explore its contents, and to return repeatedly so that the site owner can develop an ongoing relationship with the customer--in short, of offering visitors not just great design, but great content as well. The site owner's ultimate payoff: encouraging site visitors to take the actions the owner most wants them to take, whether that be making a purchase, filling out a registration form, or simply accumulating ad-revenue producing page views.
To be sure, the precise nature of a Web site's content will differ from industry to industry and from site to site: among all of the elements of a customer-friendly Web environment, content plainly will vary the most. Even so, there are some general principles that can guide the creation of content for any corporate or e-business site. Leaving aside such basic rules as writing clearly and simply, we examine in what follows five key lessons learned by some of Web's most successful (and a few lesser known) sites--guidelines from perhaps surprising sources that, we hope, can be nearly as eye-opening as Dave Bowman's final journey through space.
Lesson No. 1. Give Customers What They Want
There are many reasons why Amazon is one of the Internet's most successful e-commerce companies, but perhaps the key ingredient in Amazon's formula is that the company consistently gives customers what they most want. In studying book buyers (Amazon's initial target market), the company realized that such customers not only desire the largest selection possible from which to choose, but also want to know as much as possible about each book being offered. And so Amazon fostered an independent reviewer community that now provides more information--from more perspectives--about individual books than shoppers can obtain from any land-based book retailer. Likewise, the company put in place personalization and filtering software that recommends an almost endless array of similar book titles that helps buyers to quickly zero in on just the right book. As a result, rather than offering customers just a different, more efficient channel for book purchasing, Amazon's content literally transformed the book-buying process.
Another site that gives customers what they want is the About.com network. Unlike most general Web directories, which tend to be rather sterile, mechanical environments, the About.com network of sites is a passionate place. About's secret: several years ago, when the firm was known as The Mining Company, its executives realized that a great many Web users wanted a one-stop location on the Net where they could explore their favorite subjects in depth--the equivalent of a cable news channel devoted to sometimes the most narrow of topics. To implement this very resource-intensive approach, The Mining Company introduced the concept of contributing "human guides" who, with limited pay but with the chance to become an authority in their field, could take intellectual ownership of individual subject areas. Now, each of the network's more than 700 templatized mini-sites is directed by a dedicated editor with a deep and personal interest in the topic being covered. As a result, rather than the typical cursory examination of subjects provided by the encyclopedic Web portals, About.com's sites offer the tremendous depth and breadth of information that only a truly committed aficionado would likely have the time (and knowledge) to uncover.
Lesson learned: Determine the specific content-related attributes that most motivate your customers, then do the best job possible of delivering them.
Lesson No. 2. Don't Give Customers What They Don't Want
Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom succeeds in large part because of what it doesn't give to its customers. Long known as a customer service leader, Nordstrom's executives studied the behavior of shoppers in other retail stores, and discovered that many were increasingly offended by pushy sales clerks who would follow them around like puppy dogs, interjecting unwanted comments and generally making the shoppers so uncomfortable that they quickly fled for less stuffy climes. To avoid this problem, Nordstrom trained its sales clerks to be unobtrusively available, hovering several yards away to avoid imposing on shoppers, but near enough that they were present whenever needed.
In a similar fashion, search engine insurgent Google has specialized in not giving users what they don't want. Search engine technology may be the most valuable and yet most poorly implemented technology on the Web. Although often criticized for indexing only a fraction of the Internet, the real problem with search engines is that they index too much--or at least report results that contain far too much irrelevant information mixed in with their few gems of relevance. It didn't take much market research for the Googleites to realize that a more precise search engine could quickly win favor with information-hungry Netizens. And so Google invested millions of dollars in developing intelligent filtering software to weed out extraneous search results. The outcome: particularly within the first few dozen entries, Google delivers search results the majority of which are actually related to the topic being searched. This precision has been the main reason why Google was adopted as the search technology for Internet leader Yahoo! and why Google is now widely regarded as the most popular and most accurate search engine.
In an entirely different vein, the handheld computer maker Handspring recently offered a site that dramatically sets forth the core value proposition for the company's Visor handheld, without using a single word. Rather than going to great lengths to describe the product's light weight and thinner-than-Palm dimensions, the company's Web site present a single, vivid photograph of a black cherry red Visor--from a side view. Site visitors instantly understand how compact the product is, and the stunning photography makes the Visor a "must buy" even before one reads the product spec sheet or pricing offers--proving once again the old adage that a picture truly is worth a thousand words.
Lesson learned: Omitting content or details that are not important to your customers (no matter how important they may be to company executives) will help the content that is most relevant to these customers to stand out more vividly.
Lesson No. 3. Organize Content in an Easy-to-Use Fashion
Like its parent cable news channel, the CNN.com Web site is staid, conventional, even unexciting. It also happens to be one of the most accessible and easiest to use of all of the general news Web sites. A key reason: CNN's content is organized in predictable, easy-to-use categories that make selecting news "channels" as easy as clicking a television remote. Built in a templated format with a persistent left-hand navigation palette, the CNN.com site offers few enough items in its top-level content menu that site visitors can grasp the full range of offerings at a glance, but still provides enough depth that users can begin reviewing with a single click the content that interests them most. Indeed, what CNN.com practices best is the parsimony that has made sites like Google so successful. Each of CNN's content blocs, like its "Top News Stories" listing, contains only a few items, making the information exceptionally easy to digest.
A lesser know site (actually, a network of sites) that excels in the streamlined organization and presentation of a rich variety of content is the StartSpot Network. Currently a collection of 14 mostly consumer-oriented sites (whose topics range from books and cinema to genealogy and job-hunting), StartSpot's individual sites' links and content are organized into easily understood, multi-level categories that are likely to be at the top of site visitors' minds. For instance, in a format that is typical of each of the network's sites, the BookSpot Web site features the categories of "Must-See Sites," "Lists," "Winners," and genre and author spotlights on its main page. The page's side navigation bar additionally lists such customer-relevant topic areas as "What to Read," "Genre Corner," "Where to Buy," and "Behind the Books." Indeed, the StartSpot sites' content is even better organized than those in the About.com network, which, for all their depth, can be a bit unwieldy to use. A lagniappe: the StartSpot network's persistent drop-down menus make it easy to get to anywhere from anywhere within a site--including to other sites within the company's network.
Lesson learned: Bring the most important content front-and-center in easily digested groupings so that customers can quickly go to what interests them most.
Lesson No. 4. Make the Content Easy to Read
Perhaps it should go without saying, but reading information on a computer screen is already hard enough that Web site owners should do whatever they can to simplify the process. One site that has mastered this technique is MSNBC. Despite the sometimes frustratingly long download times for some of its front pages, the actual news pages themselves are as easy-to-read as any Net text pages. Most stories begin with a clear, simple headline and subhead (with the headline displayed in a vivid red), accompanied by an illustrative photograph that typically focuses on one large image. Next comes a first paragraph presented in large, bold type that quickly draws readers into the story. The subsequent text is aligned in columns about twice the width of those in a typical newspaper, but still narrow enough that stories are easy to scan, and text is frequently but unobtrusively broken up on the page so that the reader's eyes do not quickly tire.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from MSNBC's high-end design are two low-end government directory sites that starkly demonstrate the power of principled information architecture over graphic sophistication. Anyone who has ever visited an official U.S. state Web site knows how hard it can be to find the information one is searching for. Although most such sites are attractively designed, few make it easy to locate specific data or resources from the sites' top pages. And because the sites vary widely in format and style from one another, anyone investigating multiple state sites (as business users might have occasion to do) will have to learn multiple site architectures and layouts in order to find the information he or she wants.
Piper Resources' state and local government directories, although purely text-based, effectively use layout, color, and varying type styles to make the company's primary content--directories of government information--incredibly easy to read (much easier, in fact, than many portal information directories). And because the architecture of the directories is consistent from state to state, one need only learn one information hierarchy in order to explore all of the states. Similarly, a small Florida-based information services company, Livingston North Communications, has created a consumer-oriented site, StateInformation.com, that extracts some two dozen key services from each state site and provides easy-to-use links to that information from a single entry page. Although the site's design is relatively primitive by contemporary Web standards, the site offers one of the best uses of iconography (consistent across each state page) on the Web, employing icons that actually convey information rather than serving as mere decoration.
Lesson learned: On the Internet, where content in many ways has become a commodity, the content that is easiest to read will often deliver the most value to site visitors, and hence provide an edge in winning long-term customers.
Lesson No. 5. Make Each Site Visit an Experience
Billions of dollars have been lost trying to turn the Web into television--and not just by wild-eyed neophytes. Veterans like Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Michael Ovitz have tried and failed to win anywhere near the large and devoted audiences that they have garnered for their own or their clients' work in the offline world. In fact, the "Internet as television" goal may never be realized. As Jupiter Media Metrix researchers frequently point out, the two are fundamentally different vehicles: television operates in a "lean back" viewing mode, while computers heretofore have offered only "lean forward" viewing.
But that doesn't mean that a Web site can't offer an immersive experience. Amazon has certainly achieved this quality to a degree, but the site that has done so more than any other is eBay. The time-pressured bidding wars that eBay induces are legendary, made possible by what has to be the most responsive set of servers and Internet connections on the entire Web. But perhaps the ultimate quality that eBay's experience offers is the thrill of discovery. For people ranging from collectors scouring for the rarest of memorabilia to children (and their parents) searching for toys unavailable in local toy stores, eBay provides the excitement of an endless swap meet, without all the heat and dust. Arguably the most fundamentally brilliant of all Internet concepts to day, eBay accomplished on the Web what would have been impossible in the physical world--and created a remarkable entertainment experience in the process.
Another site that succeeds (in a much less ambitious way) of making each visit an experience is the Web site of the Internal Revenue Service. Yes, that IRS. Rather than presenting a dull, by-the-numbers Web site that is all too typical of government agencies, the IRS created an imaginary newspaper called "The Digital Daily" that presents tax information in a gee-whiz, "Back to the Future" style ("Jeepers! This Is A Life Saver!" a caricatured 1950s-vintage mother exudes of the recent tax cut) that has to elicit a smile even from the most hardened taxophobe. Avoiding the pretentious, overwrought humor of some highly acclaimed sites like "The Onion," the IRS site gently pokes fun at the agency and its starchy image while delivering information of real value to both individual and business taxpayers. Of course, all fun aside, you still have to pay your taxes.
Lesson learned: Deliver the unexpected--or deliver the expected in unexpected ways--and you'll keep your customers coming back for more.
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