Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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Techies forget how something as trivial as downloading and running a file can be a huge deal for the average user.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

I actually wanted to hire someone to do this for BCC but shot the downloadable version of the product in the head instead, which largely solved this problem.

Another example:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/instructions.htm

This page was written back in ~2006. It has probably consumed five hours of my life since then, answering just one particular query. The customer complaint was "I can't find the Purchase Now! menu that you tell me to click on." Guess why.

ROT13:

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Spoiler:

"On macs the menu bar is at the top of the screen, not in the application window, like it is in screenshots of Windows applications. Many people cannot abstractly reason that if they are looking for a menu bar and menu bars are on the top of the screen in macs then the thing they are looking for should be at the top of the screen. They also routinely do not understand that either a) they are looking at a Windows application (you do, but you're freakish in your ability to understand that the consistent UI guidelines give you important hints like the window control buttons) or b) Windows and Macs are not the same or c) Windows and Macs exist."

One thing I noticed about your page is that its SEO optimized -- with the "Bingo Card" keyword to be exact -- rather than being user friendly. I think this is also another dilemma we are facing. We can put nice graphics with less text to our landing pages which will be very user friendly but it would also suffer lower SERP because of low keyword recurrence.

Kinda tangential, but since I want to help people do better at SEO: That page is not SEO optimized -- it isn't even designed to be accessible to crawlers. It is only linked to from post-purchase emails and me when answering customer support requests. No page on my site other than the front page would ever rank for [bingo cards], certainly not on the strength of on-page optimizations.

If a consulting client told me they were worried about poor rankings because of low keyword recurrence on their landing pages I'd tell them that on-page factors wouldn't make a difference for head-of-the-distribution terms either way and you don't need re-occurrence to rank for tail terms, so that is probably not a terribly big worry. Having insufficient text on a page to rank for anything is a bit of a worry. If you're trying to satisfy the competing imperatives "Conversion rate/user happiness goes up when we take text off" and "Rankings go up when we add text" the solution I'd recommend pretty quickly is "Put the text below the fold, where only Googlebot and the sliver of humans who actually enjoy reading will see it."

This is a great example of why there's no such thing as a completely intuitive interface, especially out of the gate. There is such a wide range of possible experiences, contexts and willingness to learn/find out that people, your possible customers, have. The best way to attack it is iteratively, build in some metrics, A/B test, try as best you can to gather feedback, be helpful to those with problems, and try to understand their perspective and context so the interface can be refined in a meaningful way over time.

User experience testing can go a long way, but a lot of things are not going to be evident until it's been field tested, especially since the people working on it have been staring at it for months (I'm thinking of the classic "Why do I select 'start' to shutdown the computer?" story, for which a link evades me at this moment). The best thing to do here is not be married to your design or flow and know that you're going to have to tweak or refactor it, and do so purposefully.

Something tells me people using Bingo Card Creator aren't the most technical people and these little download screenshots would make much more beneficial there than on the Dropbox page ;)

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