Daily Do’s and Don’t’s

Alas, my job doesn’t afford me too many opportunities to further myself professionally, stretch my analytic skills or otherwise tax my brainpower in any particularly useful way.

However, any given day will see me surfing through at least a dozen websites that I’ve never laid eyes on before. As a professional web surfer, I’m all business: I know what information I’m looking for before a page even loads, and I want to make a surgical strike to retrieve it in the fewest minutes and clicks possible and then be on my merry way.

So I’m probably not going to marvel at your lush graphics, and I’m certainly not going to sit through your cinematic flash intro—with its full streaming stereo sound and as many pulsing spinning things as you can cram into my browser window. Paul Boag of Boagworld.com disdains flash in general and flash intros in particular, and the more flash I see, the more I agree. “SIT STILL, DAMMIT, YOU’RE ABOUT TO HAVE A MULTIMEDIA EXPERIENCE AND YOU’RE GOING TO LIKE IT, TOO!!!”—is what most flash intros say (scream!) to me, and they tend to bias me against a website. Especially if the programmer doesn’t provide me with an immediately accessible opt-out link.

But my opinions of websites don’t begin and end with my dislike of flash: as a user, I will appreciate it if your website has things like sensible section headings, a search box, contact info, and (depending on the number of pages and type of content) maybe a calendar, a FAQ, and plenty of internal links to get me from one place on your site to another without having to retrace my steps back to your homepage every time.

I’ve been taking notes as I make my way through the bayous and back alleys of the internet these last few months, and I though I might begin to share some of them. Today’s entry was inspired by a recent quest to hunt down a particular children’s theater event at the Del E. Webb Center, a music and theatre complex in Wickenburg, Arizona. It can be found here.

Here’s the first thing you see when you hit the site:


Nice page. Pretty. All right, down to work. Now where is that darn search box….

::hunt, hunt, hunt::

Oh! Here! Wait…




Oh-ho! Masquerading as headings, are we? How clever! Splendid, well now that I’ve cleared out that confusingly bold placeholder text, I’ll just plug my SEARCH term into the search box…oops.



Now tell me: which is which? One is meant for to take an email address and the other is meant to take search text, but as you can see, they’re indistinguishable once I clear out the big, bold placeholder text. Here’s a question: why not put “Search” above one and “Mailing List” over the other? Even better, put the two boxes on different parts of the page. Best, to remove any last possible source of confusion, color the inside of the text fields white, so they don’t camouflage with the background elements quite so well.


Lesson:

1) If you’re going to use placeholder text in your site’s text fields, just go crazy and make it gray against a white background. This will help you text boxes stand out from the rest of the stuff on the page, and be less confusing in general.

2) Don’t have the placeholder text be the ONLY thing proclaiming your search box’s function. Search boxes are a critical tool—place them prominently. Certain of your visitors will use on a regular basis and almost ALL of them will expect nowadays. It may be one of the first things a new user looks for when he lands on your site (especially when you’re a site with a wealth of frequently-updated, event-specific information like Del E. Webb. People are mostly there to get specific information and get out, rather than to idly surf, read something, buy something, look at some nice pictures, appreciate your subtle synergy of fonts and shading…)

3) Separate text fields with different functions. Search boxes should have pride of place; they’re used a broad swath of the visiting public to find specific info on your site. Mailing list signup fields are only used by a small fraction of your visitors who like what you do so much that they want to be kept up to speed on everything that goes on in your little world. As much as you’d like to think that everyone who visits your site will like what you’ve got so much that they’ll want you showing up in their inbox bi-weekly…brother, it just isn’t so.

Improve Craigslist?

Almost a year ago now, I interviewed with an SEO company here in Seattle. I was excited by the prospect of getting a non-service job, and thrilled that the crash course I had given myself in SEO and ‘netspeak in the four days between sending in my resume and gaining an interview had prepared me for such questions as “What does RSS stand for?” and “what are some of the factors involved in SERP rankings?” I was confident, that is, until the interviewer threw me a subtle stunner that laid me low: “How would you improve craigslist?”

I was stumped. After a minute or so of “uh…nurr” I think I managed to squeak something out about the font. The font! Swing and a miss! I was not called back for the second round of interviews.

In the interviening time I’ve grown more and more interested in web design, usability and optimization. I’ve also (mercifully) switched jobs and now spend a good portion of my day surfing websites, exposing myself to all sorts of clever and not-so-clever layout and usability strategies. Recently, I remembered that stumper of a question from back in August. And started to look at craigslist with new eyes. Here’s some of what I came up with.

It’s a good question. Craigslist is one of those sites that most of us have used for so long that we don’t really ‘see’ it anymore. Generally we know what we’re looking for when we get there, so rather than actually reading through the page of almost-uniformly tiny text, we automatically look towards the part of the page that holds the link we want, or else we click on the purple links that indicate where we’ve been recently.

So, to start out, I should say in answering this question that I don’t particularly feel like there’s anything wrong with craigslist. It might be a little extreme to cover you entire home page head to toe with anonymous blue hyperlinks, but overall I think it’s a good strategy for what they’re trying to achieve: they need to direct you through a LOT of different content, and they want to set things up so that you can get where you’re going with the minimum number of clicks. The easiest way to do this is to avoid ‘trees’ and long hierarchies.

However, this strategy is prone to breakdown. One situation where this happens is with ‘catch-all’ catagories and ones that have an extremely high volume of content—take the “Free” section as an extreme example. Right now there are almost 300 postings for Monday alone; you have to hit the ‘next’ button twice just to get to yesterday.

This poses two problems: first, it’s hard to ‘shop’ the free section—you’re pretty much limited to browsing through whatever random items happen to be at the top of the list when you hit the page. Second, if you’re a seller (or giver in this case, I guess), any one posting will only reach a small sub-section of potential receivers. The advertisement you posted for those “free law textbooks” or “OLDER ORGAN” (two real examples from the screen in front of me) will be stale by mid-afternoon—relegated to page three, buried under a mountain of somebody else’s “free emergency rations” and “Body by Jake Bun Machine.” Reaching someone who’s willing to come and cart away your cast-offs will probably require frequent re-postings.

Sadly, there’s not a lot that craigslist can do about this phenomenon without drastically changing its interface. It’s tempting to break up catch-all categories into finer-tuned subheadings (“free-electronics” “free-perishables”), but to make any real dent in the number of postings in a high-volume category with this strategy, you’d have to multiply them all out of hand, which forces your user to squint through pages of lists to narrow things down to manageable proportions. You also multiply the necessity of posting the same item to multiple categories, which is just as labor-intensive as posting an item to the same category over and over again.

One possibility would be for craigslist to adopt poster-selected tags that could be attached to each item, a la Digg and del.ici.us. This would make it easier for users to find similar items, and also take some of the keyword guesswork out of searches.

Another Craigslist problem, one that could be fixed relatively easily, is the lack of differentiation between postings. As it is, the only way you can make your post jump out is by YELLING or Taking Up A Lot of Space So That Your Posting Title Runs All The Way To The Left Margin! (Often used in combination with yelling by those with no shame). Craigslist allows pictures, but confines them to the posting page. Why they don’t allow thumbnails on the listing page like eBay does? It sure would help break the monotony of those long blue columns.

In general, I dig the balls-out anachronism of it all. There’s even something charming about their curmudgeoney hold-out mentality and their retro late-nineties chic. But sometimes it feels like craigslist refuses to change just to remind you that they were doing user-generated content way before user-generated content was cool. But c’mon guys, we’ll give you all the kudos you want—just give us a break.