Marketing Psychology

Are You Forcing Your Users to Superfluously Click?

Unnecessary clicks really put the "super" in "superfluous," yet we run into them all the time. Whether they're the fancy yet impractical creation by a site designer, a lazy workaround courtesy of an apathetic developer, or a misguided "I've been trying to architect this site for two months now and I can no longer see straight" decision by an SEO, these seemingly innocent clicks can have a negative impact on conversion rates or, simply put, they can irritate users. Below are a few examples of some clicks that cause me to grit my teeth and shake my fist.

Links Should Really Look Like Links

As there haven't been any posts in the usability category of youmoz since March, I thought I write a short usability entry. You SEOs out there certainly know how a link should look like for search engines. But do you also know how they should look like for real people, I mean the ones visiting your page and spending money on your products?1. Links onlineLinks ...

The Benefits And Pitfalls of URL Shorteners

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Why Don't We Read (and How Much Do We Read) on the Web?

This short post looks at a Jakob Nielsen alertbox column entitled, How Little Do Users Read? Why a short post? Well, it would appear that we don't read long posts, so why bother? Nielsen examines a study from the ...

RSS Feeds - Right and Wrong

Who Makes an Effort? Well, it turns out that it depends on what make means:42 SEO Feeds, 126 posts reviewed: 0% mangled text, 65% of posts had a graphic or something visual55 News Feeds, 165 posts reviewed: 10% mangled text, 0% grapics (excepting posted videos)25 Political News Feeds, 75 posts reviewed: 25% mangled text, 0% graphics (excepting...

Your Users Aren't Intuitive, Which is Why Your Forms Need to Be

For SEM Tuesday I'm cheating a little and talking about forms and usability; however, if you have a sign up form or some sort of registration on your landing pages, this is sound advice that ties in well. In an attempt to be hardcore in 2008, I decided, at Christine's insistence, to sign up for the New Balance Half I...

Soft Cloaking: META Tags, Robots.txt & Sitemaps

It's no mystery that people in the SEO world have strong feelings about cloaking. The very mention of an off-white hat tactic in one of my YouMOZ posts earned me multiple thumbs down and accusations of cloaking. One comment in particular interested me, though: someone suggested that they consider cloaking to be virtually any tactic that treats search engines differently from end-users. As...

How to put Google custom site search into your current website design

A few years ago a webmaster did not have many choices available to have a search solution for their websites. That has changed dramatically, but up to last year or so ago the free site searches provided by Yahoo and Google were less than ideal. They interrupted your visitors experience by taking them to a search results page that looked entirely different than the page they were on. ...

New Research in Form Creation

Via UXMatters, apparently, this is the best way to structure a form for usability: It includes: NOT using "bolded" labels Using labels on top o...