Striking the Balance: Perfecting Website Functionality and User Experience

Ever found yourself gritting your teeth over auto-playing video ads that throw you off your game? Exasperated by constant pop-ups that clutter your browsing experience? Well, you're not alone! On this episode of eCommerce Made Easy, we pull no punches as we bemoan these infuriating website features. We also turn our critical eye on the well-intentioned but often irksome attempts at GDPR compliance with cookie consent pop-ups.

But we're not just a pair of grumblers! We're also dishing out valuable advice on how to strike a perfect balance between functionality and user experience. We sift through the pros and cons of infinite scroll, dissect the distracting elements of auto-scrolling carousels, images, and buttons, and underline the importance of accessible contact information. Join us as we navigate this digital minefield, offering tips and tricks on creating a user-friendly website. Whether you're a seasoned eCommerce professional or a newbie, this episode is your roadmap to an uncluttered and engaging online platform. Prepare to eradicate those infuriating features and champion fantastic user experiences!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Website Features That Drive People Crazy
• 6:59 Website User Experience Improvements
• 13:58 Considerations for Website Features

Transcript

Carrie: 0:00

Like most people, you probably have some specific pet peeves about websites out there. Today, we're going to be having fun going over some common mistakes people make on their website, some of them with solutions on how to find the right balance with those mistakes and others to just simply avoid. And we want to hear from you as well. What are your website features that you absolutely hate to see on a website? What drives you crazy? Do they have something that's not on our list that drives you crazy? Make sure you email us at podcast b , as we want to hear from you.

Carrie: 0:40

Welcome to the eCommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month old. My main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the eCommerce building industry and even more than that and web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech and to easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned eCommerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place, so sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of eCommerce together.

Carrie: 1:14

Welcome back to this week's episode of eCommerce Made Easy. Today we're diving into website features that drive people crazy, including me, and some of these are on the top of my list, that's for sure. And actually let's just start right there with one of the things that's top on my list is auto-playing videos and audio, especially auto-playing videos, because usually I have my sound muted anyway. The auto-playing videos is something that drives me absolutely baddie, and if you do want to have a video on your website, and even if you do decide to have an auto-play, there needs to be a way to pause the video or close the video. And I'm talking about the ones that are also just background videos, that kind of move around and things like that. Those need to have a way to stop playing the video.

Carrie: 2:05

And here's why and I don't know if this affects you or not, but I know it affects me and other people that I know but it makes me absolutely motion sick. I can't look at the website. I can't do anything with it. There's I won't name names, but there is a semi-fast food company that their homepage has moving stuff around. It's got their food moving, you know, showing how they create it, and stuff like that drives me baddie and it makes me so sick and they have no way to stop the video. No way Other than just because I'm techie. I know how to go in the code of the website and turn it off in my browser, but there's otherwise no way for a real user to just like stop the moving video One. It's super distracting. Your eyes can't focus on the rest of the website nearly as well. You can't focus on the menu or finding what you're needing. Plus, for those who are like me, it can make them motion sick, and so it's.

Carrie: 3:09

There's two ways that this is really not a good choice for a website. Again, if it does enhance your products to have a video that plays, you can either choose to have it not autoplay or, if you want to have it autoplay, make sure you have a pause or close button so that people aren't getting motion sick or super distracted, etc. So I would highly caution you to have auto-playing videos, and obviously auto-playing audio is also a problem too, because somebody could be in a quiet place. They could maybe not want the video to interrupt their train of thought or interrupt people around them. So auto-playing audio is also not really a great idea if you can really avoid it.

Carrie: 3:59

Okay, something else that I know probably annoys most of you out, there is getting a pop-up right away when you go to a website. Now I will say that there are sometimes on a website. I don't mind the pop-up to sign up for their newsletter or something like that, but it's honestly pretty rare and I find that if you put that pop-up really quickly when somebody's not even had a chance to really judge your website and judge your company, if they're brand new and if you pop it up, that is just a great way to make them go click that X button and close your website up. So be very cautious and gentle whenever you do use pop-ups, because they can be beneficial to business owners. But definitely popping them up within the first 10 seconds, when somebody hasn't even had a chance to really look at your website, is just a great way to get them to close your website down and go somewhere else.

Carrie: 4:54

And along the lines of pop-ups, multiple pop-ups, whenever you have pop-up after pop-up, that is just a recipe for somebody feeling like your website is spam, and I don't see this one nearly as often, but it is something worth mentioning when we're already talking about pop-ups is the multiple pop-ups. So you might close one and then you might tolerate the one and you go to click around on the website more and you get another one, and I mean you're just going to annoy your people if you do that. So I don't recommend multiple pop-ups, and I ran into this one which I just couldn't believe the past few months when doing some research on maybe some vacation places that I wanted to take my family and it was the website had a banner at the top saying that I was using the wrong browser. Where are we? We're not in the 90s anymore. Please don't make your website specific to certain browsers. I was in Firefox for goodness sakes, it's one of the most popular website browsers out there and they had this huge banner that the website might not work in the browser I'm using. I need to use Chrome or Edge, I believe, with a two and maybe Safari I can't quite remember which ones. There was like two or three they mentioned, but why not Firefox? It is one of the more popular browsers out there. I was a bit shocked to see this in modern day, 2023, that a website was giving this huge banner at the top in an awful font and color. Honestly, it was yellow with black to say to use another browser. I just kind of find that a bit baffling, especially as a web developer. I can't imagine not creating a website that doesn't work in the major browsers like Firefox, chrome and Edge and Safari. It just should work for all the major browsers out there. So make sure that you don't have something like that going on in your website. I don't think most of you do, but I was just really humored by the fact that this is still existing in 2023. I just really surprised about it.

Carrie: 6:59

So next we're going to talk about something that's actually required for most websites out there and definitely for anybody that works with customers in the EU, and that is GDPR compliance, or those dreaded cookie pop-ups that I know all of us can get annoyed about, but it is a requirement for anybody who services people in the EU. Now, I have found over the many years of this being required. There are some websites that do this a lot more gracefully than others. So when you're looking to do the cookie pop-up requirement, make sure you do your research and I'm going to go into the details today in this podcast about what's actually required, because that does change frequently and I don't want to steer you astray but look at what the requirements are and try to find the most user-friendly way to do it. Some of the ones that I like generally don't use a whole lot of real estate on the website. They are typically at the bottom and kind of like out of my way when I'm first looking at the website. So really look into the options that you have for the cookie pop-ups because unfortunately they are required in certain circumstances, but you can look at doing it in a way that's less disruptive to your potential customers, alright.

Carrie: 8:17

So next I want to talk about captures and recaptures. This is something that absolutely drives me bonkers sometimes because, being a tech person, I am so fast with the computer that Google almost always thinks I'm a robot, like it legit thinks I'm a robot. Almost every time I try to submit a form, I think I just type too fast and I'm just too efficient and it thinks I'm a robot. So when you're looking at doing a capture, because they are kind of a necessary evil to help protect against spam bots there are some more advanced ones anymore, ones that you don't have to click all the fire hydrants in the image or the streetlights in the image. You guys probably know what I'm talking about and I tend to fail those I've found because I'm a bit more technically correct. So if I see a corner of a streetlight in a box, I'm going to click that box. I found out after many years of frustration to not click that box. They're looking more for the bigger version of the image in the captures there.

Carrie: 9:25

But what you can do with today's technology is there are some captures that are invisible and we actually created many years ago for the software we work with. An invisible capture is what we called it, and actually places like Google have come along that way to. There's a version three of Google's capture and it's an invisible version of it, which is great for user experience. So when you're looking to protect your forms and your add to cards and things like that, make sure you're really taking a look at the more advanced ways that you can do this so that you're not annoying your customers. Nobody wants to type random letters and characters, especially if they're shopping on their phone and get it wrong, or the ones that pop up the images that you got to match all the staircases or all the bridges or the crazy things like that. Streetlights drives me crazy as a user because I just want to use a website, I don't want to be stopped by this thing that's getting in my way of either shopping or submitting a form. So when you're looking at captures, look for those that, like I said, are an invisible capture if possible, and if you can't get that in your platform, try to find something that says user friendly, as you can, because they are necessary able to have as business owners.

Carrie: 10:47

So the next thing I'm going to talk about is content that shifts as it loads. I am sure you have been frustrated with this before, where you go to a website and you get ready to click on a link or a button and then boom, the rest of the website loads and things shift around and you click on the wrong link. This is something that actually Google, in particular, and I'm sure the other search engines, have been punishing for the past few years, and we talk about this a lot in our blog posts at bcsinjoneeringcom and we'll link to those in our show notes. But one of the things you want to make sure is that your website doesn't shift as it loads, and the best way to prevent that is to have dimensions on all your images. Typically, it's like a big banner image that there is no dimensions on, and then once the browser fully downloads that image and it figures out how big it's supposed to be, then things will shift around. But if you tell it ahead of time how big it's supposed to be, then things won't shift around. So that's something you can look for and I'll link in the show notes to a great tester tool for this. And along these same lines is a really slow website and this tester tool actually help you with that as well.

Carrie: 12:00

We want to make sure we are not frustrating with our customers with really slow websites. Now I find it's not quite as much of a problem anymore because Google and other search engines really do look for the speed anymore to increase your rankings. So if you're nice and quick and fast, you're going to get a boost in your rankings, and if you're really slow, you're going to get lower in your rankings. So a lot of people are striving to be conscious about the speed of their website too. So just make sure that you regularly check that. And that's in a previous episode where I talk about the things that we need to be doing to our website regularly, and one of them is double checking your website speed, because it can take just as simple as too large of an image that you've uploaded for a new banner for a new season. That might make your website slow down way too much.

Carrie: 12:49

Another thing that I find on websites, and that I get reports of too, are live chats that auto pop up in your face. I don't know anything more annoying than one of those live chats that pops up gets into my way. I can't click on what I want to click on without minimizing it and hopefully not accidentally starting the actual chat. And I find that the live chats are great on websites but there's no need to actually have it auto pop up. People will notice it in the corner of your website and it's typically down on the bottom right corner. And whenever you do have them auto pop up, it kind of feels like a bad salesman where they're just super pushy and want to talk to you and super over eager. It's kind of off putting. So I highly recommend, if you have a live chat feature, that you have it a nice, quiet, silent little icon on the right. I mean I've even seen some that don't auto pop up but they like slide across the bottom of the home page trying to get your attention and I just I find that's overkill and a bit too much. So let us know what you think of that as well. All right, so endless scrolling.

Carrie: 13:58

Now, a lot of people tend to like this feature that our website owners where you're scrolling and you can once you scroll down so far, you get more products and you get more products. It kind of has an advantage that there's less clicking and you're just scrolling. There are some downsides to consider on this. For one, it makes it really hard to get to those critical links that are typically at the footer of your page, so like contact links, shipping notices, return policies, things like that that we've talked about in previous podcast episodes. So when it's an infinite scroll, it's hard to get to those. It's also hard for that savvy shopper who might want to, you know, load a page at a time and be able to browse through it so they can easily get back to the same page in your category later. So if you have, you know, quite a few products and say a category, maybe you say have five pages, if you were to order, scroll that nobody can just jump right to page three if they know that their item is on page three. So it's something to consider. It could be something you might want to have on your website in the endless scroll, depending upon what you have, but I do know that the website's the eye shop that have it and, honestly, kind of irritates me a tiny bit. Not like the end of the world, but I would rather be able to page through a website and look at things that way, because I feel like it's just so long, it's hard to go back and see previous things too. Even though I could scroll up, I kind of lose track of where I am. So it's also a visual thing where I can't tell which page I went or how far up I need to go. But in paging you can click through the pages and you can remember. Oh yeah, I saw something I really liked on page three, but now I'm on page six, so I need to go back to page three. It's just kind of a bit more intuitive, I think. So consider that when you're considering the endless scrolling Also, we've talked about this in some previous episodes too.

Carrie: 15:51

And what's a must have to have on your website and a contact form or contact information that's hidden or hard to find is a super fresh thing for people, because if you are interested in that company and their products or services and you can't easily find their contact information, you're more likely to leave because you have a little bit less trust in them. If they're willing to give you their contact info and a way to contact them, then you're going to have more confidence in the website because you're going to feel like they actually care and they actually want to be able to service you whenever you do need help. So I highly recommend making sure that your contact information is very easy to find and visible. Many times people put a phone number at the top and then the full contact info in a link, say at the bottom or in another link on the website. So I totally recommend making that super easy to find and visible.

Carrie: 16:47

So kind of going back to what we talked about first in the auto-playing videos, another thing that is super distracting is the auto-playing carousels where you have images scrolling through automatically. It can be really hard to focus on the website when they auto-scroll, especially if they auto-scroll too fast. So if you do want to have the auto-scrolling, make sure you have several seconds in between, kind of play with it. You probably want maybe three to five seconds in between, depends upon your content and if you do have the auto-scrolling, make sure you have a way that the users can navigate to the banner or carousel image that they want to go to, whether it's through arrows or little circle dots at the bottom of the carousel, but some way that they can go to the banner that they're actually got interested in and that they saw on your website, because nothing's more frustrating than having to sit there and wait through five more images so you can get back to the one you actually had a question on and wanted to click through on too. So make sure you have a way to navigate any carousels and if you can't avoid scrolling them, that would be good. If you do have the scrolling, make it slow enough so it's not super distracting to the user and they can actually focus and look at the other important things on your website. Another thing that can be super frustrating is non-standard links on a website, for example, links that don't change color after they've been clicked on, so that your users don't know if they've been there before or not. Or images or buttons that aren't clear that they're images or buttons, so people don't know that they're actually links to click on. So you just want to make sure that your navigation and your links are super clear and easy to navigate and very intuitive, because nobody wants to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out your website and what it's doing.

Carrie: 18:44

Alright, so let's recap our episode this week. So some of the top things that are super annoying and that you might need to avoid or figure out a graceful way to do them are the following Auto-playing videos and auto-playing audio on a website, especially the video part. Make sure that you provide a way to be able to stop or pause the video so that you can be courteous to everybody that's watching and that might get motion sick or super distracted by moving items. Also, pop-ups too soon. You really want to gain the trust of the user before you present them a pop-up, so those pop-ups that happen way too fast, it's just going to lose the trust of the user. So highly avoid those.

Carrie: 19:27

Also, multiple pop-ups make sure you are not over popping up on the website. It's just really irritating and hard to really see what content you have. It's almost like you're trying to hide something and just get people in on your email list or things like that. Also not very common that we see it, but I still do see websites that require specific browsers to see them, which I think is absolutely absurd for 2023. It's just not something that we should be having out there. It should go across the main browsers out there. Also, the cookie pop-ups that are required if you are using, if you have users in the EU, you can find graceful ways to do this. So, when you do have to do the cookie pop-ups which is totally understandable if you do just try to find a very graceful way, so it's on an obstructive, on intrusive, but still following the current roles of GDPR, all right.

Carrie: 20:26

And then CAPTCHAs. Now, while we all need CAPTCHAs for our website, usually to prevent those awful bots from doing crazy things and really just the normal bots too from filling up your abandoned carts or filling out registration forms when you don't want them to make sure you find CAPTCHAs that are very user-friendly, and I highly recommend the invisible type of CAPTCHAs, if possible. Also, make sure your website is not slow or it doesn't have content that shifts. Both of these factors will decrease your search engine optimization ranking as well as frustrate your users. So make sure that you don't have content that shifts as it loads. So make sure all your images have dimensions defined on them and then make sure everything's optimized to the web so it doesn't make your website really slow.

Carrie: 21:17

Also, speaking of going back to popups, the chat auto popup I find completely spammy, slash, salesy and way too over the top. People will find your chat especially if you have a nice icon that's easily to recognize if they need you. And I find it's really pushy-seeming whenever somebody has the live chat popup that just auto comes open for you rather than waiting for you to be ready to chat with somebody. Also, I caution you with the endless scrolling. While it can be a great feature for some websites, it also has the downsides of not letting the user browse per page and really kind of have a good feel for where they are. It also makes it harder to find those footer links that most people expect at the bottom of your page for, like contacting us for return policies and shipping policies and more about the company, et cetera. So making sure, if you do do the endless scrolling, that there's an easy way to still see those footer links at the bottom that are very important. Also, speaking of which the hard-to-find contact information are having it missing. So we want to make sure that our contact information is really easy to find and thorough, so that we build the confidence in our customers, like we've talked about in previous podcasts episodes actually too.

Carrie: 22:38

And then the auto scrolling carousels. It kind of goes along the lines with the auto playing videos, but it's very distracting for the user's eye. They get drawn to just the auto scrolling carousel, which may or may not be something you want. You also want people to be able to focus on the rest of your website and the other parts that are very important too. So if you do have the auto scrolling, I caution you to play around with the speed of it and then also make sure there's some way to navigate through the banners or the images that are scrolling so that people can go back to the one that did catch their eye, that they want to learn more about. And then, lastly, nonstandard link behavior. It's not something we see quite as often as we used to, but sometimes people try to get really fancy and don't do the simple links colors change after you've viewed it or fancy images or buttons that don't really look like their images or button links. So make sure that you're not being too fancy and you're being very clear and concise with your website links.

Carrie: 23:40

Thank you for joining us this week on our podcast. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Ecommerce Made Easy. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening on your favorite app so that you don't miss out on any new episodes that we release, and I would be also so very, very forever grateful if you rated this on your favorite podcast app. That helps spread the word and get us out to other people who might need our help and advice, and we really, really appreciate it so that we can help other entrepreneurs and business owners and website owners in general. So I hope to see you next week and don't forget to email us at podcast@b at bcsinjoneeringcom, if you have some pet peeves that you don't like on a website that we didn't mention here. So we hope to see you next week and we will talk to you soon.