Giraffe Forum

Ryanair has recently been voted Britain’s worst family brand. Yet more people fly with them than any other airline in the world.

Ryanair represents the rise of the rational consumer. The rational consumer is much less open to manipulation by branding than previous generations of consumers.

What do people really want from an airline? “Affordable, safe air transport from A to B,” Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a commodity. It’s not some life-changing sexual experience, which is what the other high-fare airlines have tried to convince you that it is.”

In the past, branding has been very good at getting us to believe that taking a flight from Dublin to London is a spiritual, emotional experience. We are irrational at heart and very willing to believe such rubbish, and that allows companies to charge ridiculous prices for their products and services. It’s emotional exploitation and traditional consumers fall for it big time.

The rational consumer thinks that flying is like riding a bus. They are not shocked when they are forced to pay extra if they bring more bags. They are not disgusted if they have to pay to use the toilet on the plane. They are not outraged by the idea that buying the cheapest ticket means they might have to stand. They are rational. They weigh the cost against the benefit and make a rational decision, not an emotional one.

The emotional customer is outraged, shocked and disgusted by the very idea that you would have to pay to use the toilet on the plane. Because we all know that access to toilets is guaranteed by the UN convention of human rights. We all know that aircraft manufacturers don’t charge for the toilets on their planes and that toilet paper manufacturers are non-profit charities.

Ryanair charges you 100 Euros for the flight and one euro to use the toilet, while another airline charges you 150 Euros, but you can use the toilet as much as you want. The rational consumer chooses Ryanair.

The Web has been a major reason why Ryanair has grown from being a tiny regional airline to being the world’s largest carrier. The Web is a rational place. Many of the Web’s greatest success stories (Google, Amazon, Progressive) are built on rational propositions of value and usefulness, rather than branding propositions that emotionally manipulation the irrational consumer.

Because it sells cheap flights, Ryanair has allowed families to have more vacations. It has helped families get together more often. But because humans are deeply irrational and emotional, Ryanair has a terrible brand image.

Are you happy when, unannounced, a company you buy things from sends you a free gift? You shouldn’t be. What it in all likelihood means is that the company is price- gauging you.

The Web reflects a new era in consumer behavior. The rational consumer does more research, more comparison shopping. They are less impulsive and more considered. They place more trust in their peers than in the brands. They are increasingly skeptical and cynical. They are increasingly averse to warm, fuzzy, emotional words and images.

When you say things on your website like “we care” or “it’s simple”, the rational consumer thinks: “If you have to say you care, it’s obvious you don’t, and if you have to say it’s simple, it’s obvious it’s not.”

The importance of getting to the point

In an age when time is the most valuable resource of all, it is vital to lead with the need, to answer the question as quickly and concisely as possible.

Your laptop keeps crashing. It’s driving you insane. You’ve waited for ages on the phone for support and have given up. In desperation, you send an email. Here’s the reply you get:

Dear customer,
Thank you for your feedback. We are continuously working to improve customer satisfaction. Your feedback supports us in doing just that.

Doesn’t it make you feel good to know that the company that sold you this awful laptop is continuously working to improve customer satisfaction and that your feedback is supporting them in achieving that objective?

You’re in a hotel room. You plug in your battery charger for your cell phone. There’s a puff of smoke and you get an electric shock (at no extra charge). Shaking, you pick up the phone and ring reception.
“I think I’ve just been electrocuted!”
“Dear guest,” the receptionist begins, “Thank you for your feedback. We are continuously working to improve customer satisfaction. Your feedback supports us in doing just that.”

You’re not feeling well. You start searching the Web for a variety of symptoms. You arrive at a page on a government health website. It begins:
“Welcome to the health section. Your health is important. Good health helps you flourish as an individual, a citizen, a family member, a worker and a consumer. It’s not nice to be sick.”

You’re in Dublin’s O’Connell Street and you don’t know how to get to Grafton Street. You stop a Garda (Irish police).
“Can you please tell me the way to Grafton Street?”
“Welcome to Dublin,” the Garda begins. Why is he welcoming me to Dublin, you think? I’m already in Dublin. “It’s not nice to be lost,” continues the Garda. “And that is why as part of our duties as Garda Siochana, that’s Irish for Guardians of the Peace, just in case you didn’t know … Well as part of our duties we are trained to give directions so as to show the friendly face of law enforcement …”
“Thanks very much, Garda.”
“Don’t walk away. I haven’t told you yet about our intensive training and how we are continuously working to improve customer satisfaction …”
“I was only joking. Really, I don’t want to go to Grafton Street at all. In fact … I need a coffee. See, coffee shop right in front of me. I have to go in. Goodbye.”

Recently I was thinking of changing my mobile phone provider. I wanted to know if I could keep my number. Here’s the reply I got.

Dear Gerry,
Thank you for contacting O2 Customer Care by email. I’m delighted to hear that you have decided to move to O2, you’re only a few easy steps away from signing up as a customer. Just to advise you, you can move your existing number with your current network to O2.

It’s not easy being in customer support. We customers are demanding and highly impatient. Often, we are annoyed because something has gone wrong with a product we bought or because we can’t find the answer we need on the website. So, please get to the point.

All I needed was:
Dear Gerry,
You can move your existing number with your current network to O2.

On the Web, communicators must first and foremost help those who want to be helped, rather than trying to reach brand new audiences.

I’ve seen some powerful ads about drug use on UK television recently. They don’t pull any punches. At the end they advise you to go to a website. Do you know what that website is called? No, not “drug-abuse.co.uk”. The website is called talktofrank.com. Who is Frank?

90,500 people in the UK used Google to search for “drug abuse” in October 2009. 33,100 searched for “drug testing.” 22,200 searched for “drug treatment.” 18,100 searched for “drug rehab.” 14,800 searched for “drug free.” 6,600 searched for “drug awareness.”

In October 2009 over 200,000 people searched for help by using “drug” in their search terms. There were also a huge amount of searches for words like “cocaine” (800,000 in October) and “cannabis” (800,000 in October). The “Talk to Frank” phrase was searched for by 60,000 people which, considering the extensive TV advertising, is not very impressive. The talktofrank website does do very well for a lot of the search terms, so at least it has a quality search optimization strategy.

However, the talktofrank website and campaign reflect classic old school communications and marketing. First and foremost it is a campaign. It is about being cool and getting attention. It feels that it would be boring to call a website “cocaine.co.uk”.

The whole psychology of old school pre-Web communications and marketing is about telling you something you don’t currently know or getting you to do something you don’t really want to do. The marketer and the communicator set out with the aim of achieving the organization’s objectives, not yours.

Government says that drugs are a problem. Government comes up with a policy. Government hires an advertising agency to promote that policy. Advertising agency creates a campaign and campaign website. Campaign does well. Budget is exhausted. Campaign ends. Project complete. And another website falls into decline.

The Web is where you give attention, not get it. People on the Web are already engaged. Someone who wants to buy a Ford Mondeo does not accidentally type “drug rehab” into a search engine.

There are millions of people out there who need help with a drug problem, and they are actively searching for help. The Web communicator must be absolutely focused on those who want answers. They must ensure that those who want answers actually get them.

This is much more boring work than planning and launching a campaign or redesign. It’s about continuous improvement of a website based on the testing of top tasks with real people. It’s about grinding it out by testing a link with 10 or 100 variations of a phrase.

Think about it. There are lots of people on our website right now whose attention we already have. Will they leave satisfied? There are many more searching for things that we have. They don’t need to be convinced. They are already on a journey to complete a task that we can help them complete. Let’s help them be successful. It’s a massive opportunity.

If your customers fall in the forest of your website and you don’t hear them scream, did they really make a sound?

Yes they did. It was the sound of them clicking on the Back (I’m outta here and I won’t be back) button. I’ve been doing this web thing since 1994 and I still make this awful, most basic mistake. I forget that real people—yes, real people—actually visit and try to do things on my website.

Managing a website is like living inside a torture chamber. It is the greatest torture of all because it is an environment without empathy, without any meaningful feedback. Do you really think those crude, meaningless statistics about page impressions, visitors and hits are anything other than crude and meaningless?

Behind these cold, lifeless statistics lie the experiences of real people. Yes, real every-day people visit our websites and try to do real things. And most of us who work on the Web have absolutely no idea as to whether they’re successful or not. That’s surreal.

An attendee at one of my workshops was trying to explain what he had learned to his seven-year-old son. His son looked at him with bored eyes until he had an idea. “How do feel when you go to a website and you want to play a game on it and it asks you to sign in?”
“I don’t like it,” the son replied.
“Why?”
“Because it wastes my time!”

It wastes his time. A seven-year-old. Conscious of time. I have spent quite a bit of time watching and listening to people use websites over the last couple of months. Yesterday evening I listened as a Turkish professional told me again and again about how valuable their time was and how the website in question was wasting it.

Again and again, people talk about their time. I don’t ask them. I ask them to carry out top tasks on the website, and they just start talking about their time. They get so annoyed when they feel their time is being wasted.

When they click on a link and are brought to a page that’s different to what the link promised, that really annoys them. When they use basic search terms and get useless search results back, that really annoys them.

Watching people try to carry out top tasks is a harsh lesson. You would be amazed at the amount of times they fail or give up or get the wrong answer, thinking it’s the right one.

Nobody sets out to create a cruel and unusually punishing website. We don’t deliberately set traps in our forms so that customers trip and scream. We don’t start sentences with the sole intent of writing meaningless gibberish.

We do all these things and much worse because we don’t see our customers using our websites. We lack empathy and feeling for our customers because we’re not watching them try to do what they came to our websites to do.

Observing our customers is intrinsic to web success, and it’s so basic. We need to understand their tasks and know whether they are successful or not in completing them. What could be more basic than that?

Manage your customers’ time

The Web is not free. It charges customers their time. Successful websites deliver the most value for the least time.

Google is the benchmark for success on the Web. Google is obsessed with time. Your time. Google is all about helping you find stuff quickly. Practically everything Google does has speed as a priority.

There are now voices within Google that say that how fast a website loads should have an impact on its ranking. “Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the Web should be fast,” says Google’s Matt Cutts. “It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.”

Google’s search engine understands the web customer much better than, say, the Microsoft Bing search engine does. Who on earth in Microsoft decided that it was a good idea to have a great big ‘branding’ image on the search page? What on earth have pictures of baby whales got to do with a search for “cheap flights new york”? This is classic old-school brochure-design marketing thinking.

Old-school marketing is about getting customers to do things. Web marketing is about helping customers do things. There’s a world of a difference. There is a school of marketing that sees the customer as irrational and therefore easy to manipulate. This school is constantly trying to come up with clever ways to make more money by fooling customers.

Bernardo A. Huberman came up with one of these classic old-school marketing strategies in his book, The Laws of the Web, where he advised organizations to design a website that “changes its link structure to lengthen the path traversed by a given user, thereby making him visit many more pages. For example, if a short route (in the number of clicks) exists to a given page, one may wish to turn that off if the user is statistically likely to visit more pages in between.”

On the Web, the game has changed. The power is now with the customer, not the organization. The Web is a rational space. It is where customers go to make better decisions, get better deals, solve problems, connect with others, make their opinion heard.

Recently, I watched a branding expert practically jump up and down on stage shouting “people are irrational, people are irrational.” He was all about finding subliminal tricks to influence behavior. And he told us in hushed tones that he had come up with a brilliant idea for websites. Use sound! Yes, when someone visits your website, this branding expert would have a jingle play, with a warm, sexy voice saying “Welcome to our website.”

According to traditional branding theory you are so irrational that all a website has to do is play a sound and you will go all warm and fuzzy and buy their most expensive product. The Web is a rational space. We’re not fooled so easy. And we don’t like spending too much of our time.

To create clear menus you need to understand your customers’ top tasks and use the words they would look for as they seek to complete these tasks.

Good web navigation is unsubtle. It is clear, precise, familiar, consistent, boring, unemotional. Good navigation is ugly and functional.

You’ve just designed a new plane. It’s sleek and ergonomic, fuel efficient yet roomy. You’re now sitting with your fellow designers trying to figure out what to call the Exit sign. Why not call it Exit?

Every year a phone directory is delivered to my home and every year it’s the same. Have they no imagination in those phone companies? I mean, come on, hasn’t A-Z been done to death at this stage? Why don’t they try Z-A for a change?

Your customers do not want you to come up with a new name for the Search button. They don’t want new names for Home or About or Contact. Don’t mess with established navigation conventions. Be as familiar and consistent as possible.

Each navigation menu item should be very distinct and separate. If a customer has a task and they think there are three or four different links they could click on in order to try and complete that task, something is nearly always wrong.

Avoid audience-based navigation unless the audiences’ tasks are completely separate. We once dealt with a department of agriculture who had the following menus: Farmers, Producers, Exporters, Researchers. What if you were a farmer who was also a producer, who exported most of your produce, and who right now wanted to do some soil analysis research? Where should you click? Go task-based with your menus unless you have an exceptional reason not to.

Have a consistent place for your navigation. If you use the left column, keep it there. Don’t start shifting the navigation into the center or right columns as you go deeper into the site. This will only lead to confusion.

Avoid menu link catch-all words like “Tools, Documents, Resources.” What’s the opposite of Tools? It’s Content, isn’t it? So, if you’ve got a classification for Tools, why don’t you also have a classification for Content? And never use Quick Links.

“Come, little links, gather round,” said the designer to the links. And the little links gathered round, all happy and expectant.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” the designer said.
“Good news first,” the little links chirped.
“Well, the good news is that we think you’re very special links and because you’re so special we’re going to call you Quick Links,” said the designer.
“Quick Links!” they shouted in unison. Then a silence fell and a little voice was heard to say:
“Master designer, does that mean the other links are Slow Links?”
“Well no,” the designer replied. “It’s just that you’re special.”
“What’s the bad news, master designer?” another link asked.
“The bad news …” and the designer paused. “The bad news is that we’re putting you in the right column.
“The right column!” they said with horrified voices. A long silence.
“Bad master designer,” a disgruntled little voice said.
“Yes, bad master designer,” another said. “Nobody looks in the right column.”
“But you’re Quick Links! You’re special,” the designer said as the links began to close in.

A link is a signpost, a promise. If a customer clicks on your link they are spending their time. Don’t make them waste it.

There are two types of links: navigation links (also called classification or menu links), and the links that are part of the body text of the page.

Links should embody the action. They should be written like a heading. Ideally, all you should need to do is read the link to decide whether to click or not. People only read as much as they absolutely have to before clicking. What’s wrong with the following link?

Customer satisfaction survey: 2006

The critical year information is at the end. Many people will be looking for the 2008 survey, scan across the first three words and click. So, to avoid this sort of situation do this:

2006 customer satisfaction survey

Lead with the need. Start with the most essential information. Avoid “click here.”

When linking with a graphic make sure there is a very clear call to action and that this call to action unmistakeably looks like a button or a link (blue and underline).

Graphics as links are rarely effective either in the left or right column. (People think they’re ads.) We had a situation where a graphic link for “Apply now for your rebate”, placed in the left column of the first screen, got nine times fewer clicks than the text link “Apply now for your rebate” which was three screenfuls of content down the page, but in the center column.

A text link should look like a link. Use the standard blue and underline. Why would you do anything else? There are reasons why signposts, even across international borders, are consistent and familiar. It facilitates navigation, and the essence of a link is to help someone navigate.

John is driving down the motorway in ‘We’re-Different-Land.’ In this country the traffic lights use green for stop and red for go. They want tourists to have a unique, unforgettable experience. And their signposts are very special. Signposts are considered ugly and We’re-Different-Land is a very pretty country. So, in order for the signposts to blend in, they all have green curtains that are kept closed.

For John to know where he’s going he has to stop his car, get out and pull open the curtain. Then he knows that Cooltown is 60 kilometres away. There is a polite sign under each signpost saying: ‘When you are finished please close the curtain. Thank you.’

Crazy, right? Well, web designers do this a lot. They create links that are subtle, with no underline, that integrate well with the rest of the page’s je ne sais quoi. (That’s a French phrase.) The only way you often know a link is a link is if you hover your mouse over it and the cursor gives you the finger. Go figure that.

Place the link at the point of action. A good web writer is constantly thinking about the journey the customer is on and placing links at appropriate decision points in that journey.

What do you think of customers who have reached the bottom of one of your webpages? They’re engaged; they’re interested. I once worked with an electronics company who had a “Buy” link to the shop at the top of each product page but none at the bottom. We added a Buy link to the bottom of each product page and doubled the number of purchases.

The exact words you choose on the Web can have a huge impact on behaviour. Finding the right combination of words takes testing and a focus on the action.

Dustin Curtis creates user interfaces. He’s a creative type. I knew that as soon as I visited his website because he uses a black background. That’s very creative. It’s amazing how many creative types use the exact same black background to tell the rest of us that they are creative and have a very individual approach to design.

It’s hard to read what Dustin writes on this black background; gave me a bit of a headache actually. But that’s okay. I had a great overall experience of the page because its black background communicated an important emotional, aesthetic thing to me.

Seriously, it’s a bit of a pity Dustin makes it so hard to read his stuff because what he has to say is quite interesting. At the end of his articles, Dustin has a short, humorous bio. In this bio he has tested a variety of ways to request people to follow him on Twitter.

The first one he tested contained the following within his bio: “I’m on Twitter.” (with the “Twitter” as the link) That had a conversion rate of 4.7 percent. Then he tried: “Follow me on Twitter.” (with the Twitter as the link). This had a conversion rate of 7.3 percent. Next up was: “You should follow me on Twitter” (with “Twitter” as the link). The conversion was 10.1 percent. Next, Dustin tried the following approach (I’m showing you the whole bio).

My name is Dustin Curtis
I make user interfaces and experiences. I am 8,227 days old. You should follow me on twitter here. You can learn more about me in my about article and on my less interesting blog.

In the above approach, “here” was the link. This had a conversion rate of 12.8 percent. This is very interesting stuff and shows the benefits of testing. However, here are a few observations. I’ve found that the most effective links are written like headings, not part of sentences at all. I’ve found that putting links in sentences reduces readability and clickability. I’ve also found that using blue text and underlining the link immediately makes it obvious that it is a link.

The problem is, of course, that it’s hard to have blue and underline when you have a black background. Isn’t it amazing how many designers hate underline? They think it’s ugly, that it takes away from the look of the page.

Have you read any grey books recently? I mean, have you read any books that use grey text or that have black backgrounds? Or, for that matter, have you read any print newspapers or magazines that use grey text? It’s well documented that it’s harder to read on a screen than in print. So why do designers deliberately create webpages that make reading even harder? Simple, really. Many web designers are more concerned with how the page looks than how it reads and functions.

Strange though it may seem to some, the number one activity on the Web is reading.

A good link has no time for small talk or niceties. It acts like a signpost, like a promise. With a good link, what you see is what you get.

If most of today’s web links were married they’d be heading for divorce. Because they never keep their promises. “Darling, I’ll be home at 10.” But the cad of a link doesn’t come home until 4 in the morning.

The link says, “Launch online application form.” What’s a reasonable expectation? That if you click on the link, an online application form will be launched. So I click. Nothing launches. I just get a page of useless text telling me stuff like: “This is a secure site designed to help customers correctly complete a passport application online.” Well, fancy that.

So I scan the page for a link and I find: “Start application process.” From launch to start, am I moving forward at all? I click on that and arrive at a page whose heading is: “Before you start.” Hello? I already launched, then I started, now this page is telling me that I haven’t even started yet. What’s up?

On another website the link says “Become a member.” I click on it. The next link says, “Join.” I click on it. The next link on the next page again says, “Join”. I click on it. Another page of useless text. But I’m making progress because the current link says: “Join Now!”

This sort of thing happens all the time. Why? Because web teams manage graphics, pages, applications, text, video, animations, portals, personalization, social media, vanity, and internal politics. Most web teams think about tools and things and units of stuff and what they like and their bosses like. They don’t think about the task of the customer. They don’t feel responsible for helping the customer to easily complete a task.

I talked to a web consultant recently who had found that on one website, 50 percent of the contact requests went unanswered. “That’s not my problem,” was the web manager’s reply. “That’s the responsibility of the Help Desk.” Ah, but it is your problem, Mr Website Manager. You put up the link: “Contact Us.” You created the form to allow contact.

If your organization is unwilling to get back to people who contact you, here are some alternative ways you could name your link:
Contact Us (only joking)
Contact us if you can
Just try and contact us
Don’t contact us; we’ll contact you

It’s time to end this Pontius Pilate ‘wash my hands of responsibility’ kind of website non-management. If the website doesn’t help customers to complete tasks, it hurts the reputation of the web team and it hurts the reputation of the organization.

We click on a link because we want to complete a task. Thinking linking is thinking doing. It is thinking about the customers’ journey as they seek to complete a task. It is about making that journey as simple and fast as possible.

Stop thinking in web pages and what the organization has to do. Start thinking in tasks and what the customer has to do. Links are New Yorkers. Straight to the point. No messing around.

To make menus and links simpler you have to think like a customer. You also have to reduce the number of links and focus on the task at hand.

If you visit the BBC homepage and choose “Sport” you are brought to a page about sport. Just sport. The critical first screen is all about sport. No links to news or weather or business. Just sport. If you click on Football you arrive at a page that’s just about Football. Just Football. Not cricket. Not rugby. Not golf. Just football. If you click on “Premier League” you get to a page dedicated to the Premier League.

This is not web design. It’s web management. It’s about eliminating all choices that are not connected with the customer’s current task, which in the above example might be: Find out the latest news about the Premier League.

Some time ago, if you looked at BBC pages you would have found a common navigation going across the top of them: Home, News, Sport, Radio, etc. Not so anymore. The BBC has a clearer, simpler, more focused set of pages. Focused on the task at hand, rather than the task that might be.

Web teams are often plagued by what-if exception-based navigation design thinking. “What if the person on the Premier League page is in India and really wants to know if Drop Dead Gorgeous is on tonight?” Well, tough. They’re going to have to go back to the homepage.

Web teams need to toughen up. They need to make tough decisions. Putting every piece of content you have on your website serves nobody but confuses and annoys everybody. I’ve often heard customers say: “Yeah, it’s on the website alright. Just try finding it!” Cluttering your pages with lots and lots of links that are worded with organization-centric language (jargon, tool names, branding terms) is truly terrible design and management. Placing irrelevant or distracting cross-links sends people in the wrong direction, wastes their time and increases their frustration.

Remember the Amazon pages some years back? They had lots of links at the top of the page that followed you around the site. Links like: Kitchen, Software, Electronics. Doesn’t happen today. You just get one big link near the top right-hand corner: “Shop All Departments.” The more you drill down through the site, the more the navigation focuses. It focuses, based on the decisions you have made, to point you forward. So, if you’re in “Bathroom Accessories” the links are for: Bathroom Mirrors, Bathtub Accessories, Scales, etc.

One of the most common and most confusing forms of navigation around is the one that brings previous levels with it as you drill down. SAP is just one of the companies that uses this approach. Let’s say you click on Solutions and keep clicking down until you get to “SAP ERP Features and Functions: End-User Service Delivery.” If you scan down the left navigation, you will see a link for “Services.” If you click on that link you don’t get more on ERP-related services, but rather you get sent to the homepage for SAP overall services.

Menus and links need to be designed in the context of the task the customer is trying to complete. That means stripping away higher-level options and creating links that point forward based on the task at hand.