One of my favorite “Flintisms” is a warning against “unsupervised thinking.”
In essence, it means that when a visitor gets to your landing page, it should be easy to find what they really want. Make sure they know they’re on the right site, and don’t obscure what they came for. Think Alice, always keeping that Brady house in order.
Simple, right?
Not so fast.
Our TSS team was recently brainstorming ways to help a partner with a very cluttered landing page, “featuring” at least twelve different, competing products, plus an extensive left nav list for a hundred product categories, a deal alert sign-up competing with a search field, warranty purchase options, shipping account logins, shopping cart item counts.
The page looked like a Moroccan bazaar.
“You have a shotgun approach on this page. It takes you everywhere,” Flint said.
Now, some folks enjoy strolling through the Internet equivalent of a Moroccan bazaar, nav’ing and clicking through pages and pages of products they didn’t necessarily come for.
It’s called shopping.
Some folks like it, and some (including me) just want to go in, get what they came for, and get out.
In my humble opinion, the current design was friction-city because of all the competing information blasting visitors.
“They’ll lose to someone with a cleaner Value Proposition,” said Flint. “Why should someone buy from this site and come back again?” AKA, no relationship was established.
Another problem was no—zero—eyepath, due to competing constituencies. It looked to me like LP turf battles had brand managers and co-op manufacturers fighting like The Brady Bunch kids (plus Alice) all trying to get in the front seat of Carol’s 1970 station wagon.
Key questions began to emerge. We needed a framework.
What new page design would result in the best “mind trail”? That is, what are people doing now; what do we want them to do; and what’s in the customer’s mind? Where do we want to send people to make the most money?
This page needed help, and that’s what we’re all about—what will get it done; for the partner, and for the customers. We’re here to eliminate that unsupervised thinking and clean up that confusing clutter.
Stay tuned to find out how we do it.
I hope you’ll be including plenty of images! Can’t wait!
I love your post today – so many of my clients struggle with this. They want to show EVERTHING as they believe they will lose money if they don’t.
“A confused mind always says NO”…this was a great reminder of that!
I like that synopsis a lot: “A confused mind always says no.” Thanks for stopping by, Kim.