Website Usability

About Us. FAQ. Customer Service. Contact Us.

Odds are you have these pages on your website. Last week I raised a question about the value of site if your products disappeared. But here’s another consideration, what if the above pages disappeared?

If your About Us page was gone, would customers still be able to learn about your company, your beliefs, your values, your unique offering, throughout your site? Or is the About Page the only place you communicate who you really are.

What about an FAQ page? Is this the only place you answer common questions? If they’re really so “common”, why not answer them in context instead? In other words, it doesn’t make sense to answer common questions about your shipping policy on an entirely separate page, it makes sense to answer them with a popup box or mouseover in your shopping cart when people are actually choosing their shipping option.

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These are all worthy causes. I’m going to suggest to you however that they aren’t the most fruitful pursuits. I’m going to suggest to you that we often bypass the quick-wins in favour of sexier options that we’re more familiar with.

If your email marketing program is entirely focused on determining that right moment to send an email for maximum impact, you’re wasting your time. Not because optimizing open-rates is stupid, but rather you should be asking, “what makes people want to open in the first place?)Similarly, you could endlessly test colours, wording, and placement of your add to cart button in your shopping cart. You’ll probably inch up a bit in conversion. Yet fundamentally you haven’t added any value to the customer experience.

Resources are limited in every organization. Therefore we must always ask whether our optimization efforts are worth their opportunity cost. What else can we be doing that more effective?

I was recently reminded of this. For years, customers have been telling us to show the pictures of clothing on real people, rather than mannequins. For years we ignored the advice due to the impractical task of always having models on stand-bye when new products arrive. In the meantime we optimized the heck out of everything we knew how. We starting hitting the point of diminishing returns. All those a/b tests weren’t as effective as they used to be.

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