We recently reviewed Steve Krug’s Don’t make me think book on conversion rate optimisation.
There is a critical principle that Steve covers in his book that guides much of our thinking at Conversion Rate Pros. It’s a principle that we have seen to be true over and over when reviewing Google Analytics data for our clients and digging into user flow reports to try and find those conversion rate opportunities.
The principle is ‘muddling’ through.
When I first got into digital marketing, I thought people treated my website like an art gallery.
I thought my users walked through the door and with a deep breath (and perhaps wine glass in hand) slowly surveyed the gallery in slow and comfortable search of the art they were most looking for.
I thought users would enter and look at all of the options for which rooms they could visit. Perhaps they would get a good grasp on the understanding of the floor plan and slowly work out which rooms hold which art pieces before taking their first step.
Once on their way through my site, they may ‘walk’ up to each ‘exhibition’, and stop for a good amount of time to take in each art piece, nodding in appreciation and reading each plaque before continuing on.
That just isn’t how we browse the web, though.
No matter how sophisticated we think we are.
On websites we much more resemble a drunk man stumbling through a petrol station 24-hour store looking for a bag of chips.
Can you see it?
That drunk man is making decisions based more on instinct than “slow thinking”. He’s heading towards the first thing that looks like a bag of chips.
The first aisle has peanuts that look like chips.
He goes down that aisle.
Realises the mistake.
Falls back into the main aisle.
Flies past three aisles and sees the logo of something he recognises as a bag of chips.
The drunk man ‘muddles’ through the store looking for what he wants. We do the same thing on websites.
In Krug’s words: “Faced with any sort of technology, very few people take the time to read instructions. Instead, we forge ahead and muddle through, making up our own vaguely plausible stories about what we’re doing and why it works.”
In practice this means that we click the first thing that resembles the thing we’re looking for.
Why this matters for web design
Once you truly absorb this fact it truly changes the way you design your pages, structure your pages and even structure your website.
When you understand muddling you understand that you need less options, not more.
You need less eye catching things, not more.
You need simplicity.
Like a batsman facing a pace bowler in cricket (already way more analogies than I wanted) you have to use the pace of the user to aid the process and score more runs.
You have to recognise up front that your website delivers a primary thing to the user and make that primary thing the easiest thing to find, read about and ultimately buy.
Muddling cheat sheet
- Use eye tracking to see which elements of your page are drawing your users attention.
- Use user flow reports in Google Analytics to see if your users are ‘bombshelling’ into obscure corners of your site as a result of muddling.
- Use mouse movement heat maps to see click intent on your pages.
Feature image by Hal Gatewood