We’ve just opened up ClickTale’s Research Hub, customized to meet all your ebusiness needs. Here, you can gain free access to our latest reference guides, whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, and much more to keep your website customer experience current and converting.

Popular content featured in our Research Hub includes:

• In-depth Industry Whitepapers

• Master Class Webinar Series

• Comprehensive Case Studies

• Expert Q&A Sessions

• And much more!

Discover unique approaches and useful insights to get ahead of your online optimization process. This includes everything from web analytics and emarketing, to usability and design.

This past holiday season, Cyber Monday became the single top spending day in history, raking in an impressive $1.25 billion. Little by little ebusinesses are doing their homework, getting a deeper look into the online customer experience, improving site navigation, optimizing online forms, and paying attention to usability and optimal design. Round of applause, please.

Yes, yes, this is all very well and good. But, each new year triggers new web standards and design trends, and 2012 is no different.

Over the past year, ClickTale has worked with and helped an elite group of etravel heavy weights, to get ready for the influx of holiday travel visitor traffic. After gathering over 23 million visitor recordings of data during this time, we have documented, defined, and now we deliver a powerful knowledge base of actionable steps to improve your own site’s performance for 2012 in our Online Travel Best Practices Whitepaper.

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Creating new technology and offering updated products/features is exciting for any business. After all, we techies know what we’ve got is great and ultimately easy to use, but now we are stuck with the challenge of communicating our (modest) genius to a diverse web of users. So, the question is, how do we overcome this challenge?

Introducing a New Feature or Product

As we profess over and over, all visitors are not created equal. Therefore, not only the way visitors use your site, but also the way they acknowledge and handle website changes differs as well. It is for this reason that modifications or updates made to your system/technology need to be subtly, but clearly explained. And the way you do this depends on your own visitors’ behavioral preferences.

Remember, we are all creatures of habit, and even slight positive changes can be a big deal to your users. So be patient with your visitors and they’ll be patient with you.

Learning through Example

Recently Gmail revamped their UI making their many web page components user friendly with a cleaner layout and some guiding instruction to introduce new features.

In order to help gmail users become aware of the new changes and options, they have included education tabs on new features and customizable settings.

Pull down menu education is a great way to teach about new updates, giving users the the option to have the explanation as part of their ui.

As you can see here above, the pull down designs are great for introducing new features, as they allow each individual user the option to display instructions or not. Depending on whether your visitor is a new user, a returning customer, or simply a customer who wants to learn more, the way in which they want to see and experience the UI on your website may differ.

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ClickTale is going global over the next two months, meeting and greeting both current and potential customers at 7 major conferences, in 5 major cities, all over the world! We’d love to see you, so have a look below for our anticipated appearances!

UXI Live Conference, Israel, September 7-8

For the first leg of our global tour, ClickTale is sponsoring and attending the UX Israel Live Conference, an intensive two day lecture series, featuring valuable workshops and excellent networking opportunities amongst the top usability experts in the area. Let us know in the comments below if you’ll be there and want to set up a one on one meeting.

Shop.org Annual Summit, Boston, September 12-14th

Then we’re off to Boston, USA, where we join the Shop.org Summit at the start of September. If you have anything to do with ecommerce, this is the THE event to check out! The list of keynotes includes speakers from Facebook, Groupon, Southwest Airlines, and Forrester Research, just to name a few.

What’s more, we’re giving away FREE EXPO Hall Passes to ALL ClickTale customers AND a 10% discount off full conference passes. So if you’re interested in going, just let us know in the comments below before September 7th and we’ll be happy to hook you up

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Do you know what content and exactly how much content should be on your webpages? I know, tough question. You can drive traffic from any number of search engines, lead generators, campaigns etc. However, once visitors arrive to your site, engaging them and keeping them wanting more – that’s the tricky part.

Page length is one of those determining factors that can either engage your visitors or drive them away.

How do you determine the different lengths of a page?

Short Pages = All content is generally located above the fold.

Medium Sized Pages = Need to scroll down below the fold 2-3 times using the scroll wheel on your mouse to see all content.

Long Pages = Need to scroll down below the fold 3+ times using the scroll wheel on your mouse to see all content.

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The online super giants, leaders of their own respective industries weren’t always on top. Before Google, there was Yahoo. Back in 2006, before Facebook conquered the online world with its current 750 million users, Myspace was the social network leader. So, why the sudden transfer of power? How did Google overtake Yahoo and Facebook persevere over MySpace?

Answer: UX Design. Here we take a closer look at the design history of these social network powerhouses and their effect on web user engagement.

Google's Logo Evolution

Google’s Rule

Google understands what its users want: a place to search, that’s it. They have, therefore, structured their design accordingly. Google personalizes their site by:

• Clean, structured, and simple layout.
• Fun colorful logo. This not only makes Google’s page stand out, but also makes it a brand to remember. Highlighting and emphasizing the most important aspects of your site can work in your favor.

• Search box location smack in the middle of the page. It may not have much but it’s aesthetically pleasing to look at and is the focal point of page, where the mouse cursor is automatically set to start typing.

Have a look at some of Google Webmaster, Dennis Hwang’s popular doodles that have given the search giant its fun and creative reputation.

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Time on Page

Time on page, engagement time, and loading time…three important online metrics that e-businesses often tend to miscalculate or misinterpret. Make sure your analytics solution clearly breaks down these three metrics for you so you’re not stuck designing your website with inaccurate data.

Time on Page – The Overestimated Metric

Time on Page: Traditional Analytics will often measure the amount of time it takes for a visitor to go from one page to another. However, the calculated time on page does not always accurately describe the actual amount of time a visitor spent on a page, rather the amount of time between pages.

From the time a page is opened, a visitor could get up, go to the bathroom, have lunch, run a 5K, take a shower and only then navigate to another page. In addition, if there was only one page view, time on page would be calculated as 0 seconds since there would be no other page to subtract and calculate the time difference. Needless to say, this is extremely inaccurate.

Time on Page is a particularly dangerous metric for the multiple tab browser as well as the multitask user, always leaving one page open and on to engage with another. So, when you look at this metric, bear in mind its limitations. A good way to address these issues is by looking at other metrics that may be more reliable and provide a better insight, such as the ones listed below.

Engagement Time: The metric you really need

Engagement Time^TM: This is the amount of time visitors are actually interacting with your webpage, whether it be scrolling, clicking, moving the mouse, or typing. The longer the engagement time, the more interest visitors have in your page and your website. Engagement time refers to the amount of time visitors really engage with the page, and not just have the browser open on that page. Engagement time can be considered a micro conversion for some websites, and is generally considered a good step towards an overall “macro” conversion.

On a single visit, a visitor kept a particular webpage open for 1.11 hrs. However, the amount of time that the visitor was actually interacting with the page was only 53 sec...quite a time difference.

Page Load Time: The Need for Speed

Loading Time: This is the amount of time it takes for a single page of your website to fully load on your visitor’s browser. While your aim for Engagement Time is to increase the length of time a visitor engages with the page, the aim for Page Loading time is to minimize it. The internet is meant to save us time and frustration, not cause more. Therefore, the more time your pages take to load, the more likely visitors are to abandon your page and navigate to another site. It is also well known that page load time is one of the parameters Google checks for its Page Rank, so slow loading pages may harm your site in this regard as well.

As original and show stopping we might wish to make our landing page, if it’s too flashy (huge videos, images, Flash based, or any other reason the page would take ages to load), it may actually end up hindering your site performance, rather than enhancing it.

Visitors should be spending their time interacting with your webpages, not waiting for them to load. Therefore, in order to increase visitors’ engagement time and your chances for more conversions, optimizing page load time is a quick easy fix that can make a huge difference on your bottom-line.

About the Author

Hadas Sheinfeld is the Director of Product at ClickTale, in charge of the ClickTale Product Roadmap and all new features. Her main concern is making ClickTale the best Customer Experience Analytics tool available, combining top notch functionality with fantastic user experience to create a product people love using. Hadas holds an M.Sc. in Occupational Psychology from the University of London.

May Marketing Madness Usability Week, Post #31

By, Todd Follansbee
President, Web Marketing Resources

Understanding how the brain works helps in building a great web user experience.

Distracting, no? Your brain doesn't like it when things don't appear as they should.

One of our goals as user eXperience (UX) consultants is to make it easy for visitors’ brains to form “mental models” of a website. Put another way, we understand that the brain is trying to predict how a site will behave and if we fail to meet those expectations, confusion results.

The brain can only hold 7 + 2 random pieces of information in short-term memory at one time. Yet, it has an incredible ability to process volumes of information if it can fit it into a pattern. The brain’s skill at finding patterns also makes it excellent at recognizing when something is outside the norm.

For example, something simple like a piece of spinach on a friends tooth can be so distracting that we often must concentrate hard to hear what they are saying over the “noise” our brains are making about the spinach.

Simply put, the brain doesn’t like things that don’t fit right. More accurately, it doesn’t like things that don’t fit the way it expects them to fit.

One basic example of why pattern recognition matters

When a visitor lands on your homepage, his brain is looking for clues to patterns it recognizes. Often the first thing to look for is a hyperlink, the basic key to web information. If hyperlinks aren’t obvious or don’t consistently fit a recognized pattern because one is blue and another is green, flags go up. The brain keeps trying to make sense but when things are too random, the visitor is soon too distracted to focus on content.

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May Marketing Madness Usability Week, Post #30

By Conversion Rate Experts

Turning visitors into customers can be hard. It’s even harder if you don’t know exactly what they want or how to convince them to take action.

In this article, we’ve listed nine common reasons why visitors don’t convert and some tools to help you find out why.

Reason 1: You’re Ignoring The Mud Tracks on Your Website

For a long time, visitors to New York’s Central Park were taking shortcuts across the grassy areas, leaving ugly, well-worn mud tracks across them. The park’s planners took an unusual decision: instead of trying to prevent people from taking these routes, they encouraged them to do so by paving them. The planners acknowledged that the routes revealed the ideal placement of the tracks. These dirt tracks were an example of what designers called desire paths. Desire paths are clues as to how users would like to behave.

For Central Park’s planners, it was easy to see the desire paths’ grass turns brown when walked upon. However, many of the desire paths on your website can only be seen using technology. Here are some tools for making them visible:

Tools

• You can use 4Q to find out why visitors failed to convert

• By installing Kampyle or Opinion Lab onto your site, you can gather feedback from customers, so you can hear their suggestions.

• ClickTale’s Mouse Click Heatmaps can be used to identify if users are clicking on unclickable images

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May Marketing Madness Usability Week, Post #29

By Michele Hinojosa
Director of Digital Analytics, Red Door Interactive

In the traditional world, we talk about the importance of being “above the fold”: appearing in the top half of the front page of a newspaper. However, on the web the picture is a little murkier. Website visitors will use different screen resolutions, browsers, window sizes and toolbars, essentially leading to a different “fold” line for every user.

Add in the proliferation of devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone) and the challenges are further compounded. So is there even the same impact of content being above or below the fold for online users as there is in the traditional world? Might this impact vary by user, by site, or by page?

Staying Above or Scrolling Below the Fold?

On pages such as a home page, the location of content above or below the fold may have a greater impact. After all, when a visitor arrives to a site, they need to figure out what content or products to dive deeper into. In this case, products or content areas highlighted in the top area of the page may receive higher engagement, simply due to the higher number of “eyeballs” on it during an evaluation phase.

However, the same may not hold true for deeper pages within the site, or for all-in-one landing pages. On a product detail page, where reviewing the content on the page may be crucial for making a decision to proceed to the next step, the click-through rate for a call to action at the bottom of the page could potentially be higher than a call to action at the top of the page.

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