Internet Marketing Blog

Short Takes on Improving Interaction Design

September 16, 2008 – 12:16 pm

Interaction design is a living breathing asset that represents all the content on your site. It represents an opportunity to reach a helping hand out to your first time visitors and longtime customer. The first interaction anyone has with your site is grounded in design and opportunity. Colors, white space, focal points and navigation all lead towards a mutual goal of interaction between your company / brand and a human. The message below is general in scope and probably best consumed as a reminder.

Focus on the visitor. Visitors have specific needs. Depending on how they heard about and landed on your site, they have different perceptions of what might be of value to them. Visitors will tell you what they find valuable if you listen. Listening requires you to get to know your visitors even if all you have is log file or an analytics account. Log files reveal time on site, time on page, paths visitors take and exit pages. You can quickly learn which pages are popular and which pages rarely get visited. Your log files are the feedback when you have no feedback. Use Google Website Optimizer to further test your pages. Also read our earlier post on A/B testing for more insight.

Focus on the user. In this case, a “user” refers to a visitor that has already been to your site. They have found something useful and they want to use it a second time. A user may visit your site relatively often and may only use a specific feature or perform a specific task. Listen and you’ll find what a user finds most valuable. Try to ask your users how they would improve your site or application. Engaging users through comments and surveys can reveal opportunities you never knew existed.

So what does this really have to do with “interaction design?” Everything. Visitors and Users are the reason you make things interactive. Otherwise, you would be printing a book and you would have readers. Or, you would have a linear presentation or video, in which you case you would have viewers. Visitors that visit more than one page require a good interaction design to become users. Visitors require a solid interaction design to become regular “Users.”

Focusing on the people you are designing for is step one. When more than half your visitors leave before viewing a second page, you have a need.

Use graphical elements such as buttons, colors, tabs (also study modal vs. non-modal) and use text for navigation. Google generally likes to index pages with only one link to content but you can add the “no-follow” attribute to your graphical buttons while preserving your original intent to provide text for the Google-bot. This is important to interaction design because your homepage may not be the first interaction your visitors have with your information. Many website visits start with a major search engine which requires special attention to landing pages.

Improve your landing pages and your visitors may generate a more favorable first impression before they ever start to use your navigation. If they don’t find what they need on your site, they’ll probably just go back to the search engine. You may or may not get a second chance at creating an interaction with a visitor.

Keep in mind that users have special interaction design needs. They may be trying to accomplish a specific task. Shortening those steps for return visitors provides value. While making similar steps more obvious for first time users provides similar value.

Visitors might just be checking out your brand, learning what you have to offer and may only want to interact with your brand to learn your value proposition. They may not have any specific task in mind and providing them with options might be helpful. “Visitors,” especially first-timers give you the opportunity as an interaction designer to strut your skills while providing measured results.

Try and develop a metric that can be regularly and easily measured to help you see changes in visitor paths (called funnels in Analytics) and user habits when you make interaction design changes.

Employ several feedback mechanisms to make it easy for your visitors and users to give you insight about they way they want to interact with the site. Combine all feedback to create a listen, design, develop and release loop. Often it’s not a single amazing interaction design that wins. It’s most often a designer’s ability to listen and make small adjustments over time that is the single most important critical success factor in any interactive design.