Does Your Website Flunk the Mommy Test?
I've always found Jennifer Laycock's articles for Search Engine Guide to be filled with common sense, and the one published on May 6 was no exception. She addresses a particularly frustrating problem: a site that is attracting all the right traffic with the perfect keywords and killer content, but not getting conversions. If the very idea makes you want to pull your hair out, guess what? This might be what the TRAFFIC to such a site is already doing. In short, usability issues can cause this pattern.
These kinds of issues can be extremely subtle. Laycock talks about a client whose web site dynamically resized depending on the size of the user's browser window. You'd normally think of this as a great usability feature; the content of the site shrinks or stretches to handle the space it's given. That's great...unless your sign up for our newsletter or buy our product now button is located near, for example, the upper right hand corner. With a larger window, that call to action sits out of the area on which a user's eyes naturally fall. You lose conversions as the screen size goes up.
How do you catch these kinds of issues? If you don't have a massive budget to run usability tests, Laycock proposes something best termed the Mommy Test. Find the CEO's mother...or the head of accounting's mother...or the website designer's mother. It doesn't really matter whose mother you find, as long as they're over 50 and not overly web-savvy (if they make money as an SEO or website designer on the side, they're too savvy).
Now sit this woman down in front of your web site and have her try to do whatever it is you want your visitors to do: buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, make a comment, register for a service, what have you. Don't give her any other instructions; just tell her to do it. This part is very important. Then sit down, watch her, and don't say another word.
If see seems to get confused and you start squirming with the urge to shout it's right there! guess what? You've just found your problem. And don't just watch her, listen to her. If she gets to a checkout page and complains about shipping costs, you can bet other visitors found that to be an issue as well. (And no, the solution is NOT to hide the shipping costs, unless you really want to see lots of abandoned shopping carts).
Once you've found the problem, find a creative solution. It could be as simple as moving a button on a page to where it's easier to find. After you fix it, test out your solution on a different mother. The key thing to keep in mind is that your site visitors have no more clue when it comes to navigating your site than your mother does. And if your mother can't find whatever it is you want her to do, just how visitor-friendly IS your web site?
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