Our credit union offered a new product last month and I was talking to the person rolling it out. I recommended they have a simple calculator to compare products. He said they already did. Which was great. I then tried to find it. With him on the phone we went through 6 pages before we came to the calculator.
Now I'm a persistent guy, but 7 clicks? So make sure you create scenarios representing your different customers and what they may want to do. Then do it yourself and count the clicks. For all the important things they should never be more than 2 clicks away. Otherwise you will lose them.
And don't get me started on this *simple* calculator where I gave up after 6 pages of information I had to enter. But that's the subject for a future post.
I was going through a similar scenario the other day - an ad agency had recommended the company build a series of pages to get people "engaged" - about 4 pages they had to go through,reading and filling out calculators before they got to the real call to action.
People don't want to be "engaged" - they want to find information quickly - and calculators are great - but they should be RIGHT there available on the first page and ready to go.
Posted by: Mary Schmidt | 11 July 2008 at 08:23 AM