Community and Conversation

This isn’t really an on-topic post, but the lesson learned can easily apply to community sites and social media properties:

Recently, QlikView 9 was launched, along with a new section of the website devoted to highlighting the new features and functionality of the release. Like most companies, we created detailed PDFs for our customers and prospects to download and read later or pass to their colleagues.  To call attention to them, we added them to section on the right side of the page named “Learn how easy it is…”  See the image below to see what it used to look like:

The "Before" Shot of the PDF Downloads

Not bad…if you glanced at this while reading the page in depth, you could probably discern that these were downloads of some sort, designed to give you more information about the product.  The problem is: Visitors do not read.  They skim. QlikView’s target audience is decision-makers in mid-size to enterprise level companies; not a group known for slowing down to read entire pages consisting of lengthy passages of text!

A few weeks after this page launched, an individual posted on our Facebook wall that he was looking for more information on QlikView 9 for his company, and wanted to know if anyone had “takeaways” for him to download.  As the manager for this property, I was eager to answer:  This is a guy who comes to OUR site, and is ASKING us for marketing materials!  I begin constructing a response, and it went something like this:

“Check out the QlikView 9 section of our website, look on the right side of the page, then the section called ‘Learn how easy it is:’, and those are PDFs, even though they don’t look like it…”

The finished product.

As you can guess, I did NOT post that.  Instead, a couple of us stepped back and asked a basic usability question: What do visitors to this page want? It became obvious: users need to know that these documents are here for them to download.  We quickly decided to make a very simple change to the section and add PDF icons next to the title of each download, as the Adobe PDF icon has become the ubiquitous symbol for  “this file can be downloaded, emailed, printed, and shared much easier than a website can.”

We stared at this page for weeks before it went live, but this was one of those little touches that skips through the design process, and by the time the page goes live, we were so ingrained with its elements that we thought “there’s no way a user could misinterpret the purpose of this section!”

Well, we made the change, and it’s been 5 weeks since we did.  Here is the data in a QlikView chart:

We made the change in Week 38; you probably guessed that.

We have seen a 41% increase in downloads since we made the change (with only a 21% increase in traffic), and it has remained consistent for the last five weeks. The lessons to take away from this are:

• Know what your users want: Often pages are designed with tons of text, pictures, charts etc. that come from a copy writer or stakeholder/department of the company.  While that will most likely never change (your website may be SNOWED), you should always think of a visitor’s motivations and needs when they visit a page.  Most likely, the target audience will not read a page full of content, but if they can get a data sheet and a couple of testimonials to go, then it’s our job to get out of the way and…
• Give it to them! Especially with small changes like this, move as quickly as possible.  It’s a good idea to do extensive testing with big changes, but for small changes like this, I say “go for it” and do your testing as you go; there’s little downside (PDF icons are pretty inconsequential) and a chance for a great upside (41% increase, anyone?).
• Measure, measure, measure: I had almost forgotten we had made this change until I went back into Google Analytics for another reason and remembered this project.  When you make subtle usability changes, make sure to establish a baseline and then see where it goes…you might be as pleasantly surprised as I was!