Show Notes - Spoolcast: Q&A Follow-up from the Galleries Virtual Seminar. Corresponding podcast: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2008/08/22/spoolcast-galleries-followup/ Corresponding Virtual Seminar: http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/gallery/ Brian Christiansen: Welcome Everyone to another edition of the SpoolCast, I'm Brian Christiansen. We recently presented our Virtual Seminar entitled "Galleries, The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site", as part of our series about designing for scent. As has become customary, we're doing a follow-up podcast to answer some of the excellent questions we fielded from the audience, but didn't have time to get to during the session. If you didn't attend the session, this podcast should have enough context so that you can still enjoy it, but if you'd like to hear the original presentation, (which was pretty good, I think,) the Seminar is still available on our web site. Just visit UIE.com slash events and click on "Virtual Seminars." For those people who couldn't make the original broadcast of the virtual seminar Jared, can you remind us what a gallery page is? Jared Spool: Sure! A gallery is one type of page that users encounter. Other types include content pages, the home page, store pages, and department pages. We talked about these in an earlier seminar, called The Scent of a Web page. What makes gallery pages special is they are the pages we think do all the heavy lifting. They contain the links that directly point to the content the user is seeking -- the last link in the chain, so to speak. So, they're the last point of failure and determine whether the user is successful or not. BC: Excellent, with that taken care of, let's dive in to the questions we received. Jared, during the seminar, Danny asked "isn't every page really a gallery?" and Nancy had two related questions: How is a department page different from a gallery? Where should the user's selection happen? JS: Danny's and Nancy's questions are good ones. The content page (which has what the user is seeking) isn't a gallery. And the page that leads to the gallery (which is usually what we call a department page) isn't a gallery. Gallery pages are about making a selection—picking the item that the user wants. For large sites, the user will initially go through a process of winnowing—eliminating the obvious poor choices from the selection. And on really large sites, they'll need to isolate the candidates because there's too much. Take a site that sells electronic equipment. If the user is searching for a digital camera, there's a very small chance they'll be featuring just the camera they want on the home page. It's possible, but not likely. Instead, the user will likely first choose "Cameras and Camcorders", which brings them to the store page for that part of the offerings. By doing this they've isolated the choices to only that product set. Then they'll probably choose one of the types of cameras their interested in, say SLRs. There now on the department page. From here, they need to get to the specific cameras to choose, let's say those under $800. That brings up a gallery page. If done well, they've got enough information at this point to choose the camera we want. Once they choose it, they go into the individual product page to ensure they're in the right place. The big difference is how the user approaches the page. On department pages, they're thinking about winnowing down the selection set. On gallery pages, they're thinking about selecting a single item from the available candidates. The pages could look the same, but the user's immediate approach varies considerably. BC: Our friends at Discount Tire wanted to know, how does the concept of gallery pages apply to Intranet environments? It's the same. The only difference is the user is looking at the standard intranet content. Let's say an employee wants to find out what the policy is for education reimbursement. Typically, an intranet has a home page, which many refer to as the "portal". From there, it might have a link that says HR or Human Resources. That would be the store page. On the Human Resources page, there might be a link that says Benefits -- a department page. In that page, there might be a link that says, Educational Benefits, which is the gallery. That page will contain all the different links to the variety of topics, such as what's covered, how to apply, how reimbursement works, what a manager should say to the employee about the benefit, where the various forms are, and so on. My guess is that any reasonable-sized company will have dozens, if not hundreds, of gallery pages. BC: Alright, so if we're advocating for more information on the gallery page to assist the user in the winnowing process, we had two questions about just that. First, the folks at QVC wanted to know what information "makes the cut", so to speak, how do you choose the most vital information to show on the gallery, and what should be left for the content page? JS: The most vital information is going to be the criteria that the user is using for choosing. When choosing flights for a business trip, it might be price. But it also could be duration, the cities for a stopover (seasoned travelers know to avoid O'Hare and Dallas-Fort Worth because of frequent delays and missed connections), the arrival time, or whether first class seats are available on the flight. The best way to learn what's important is to spend time with the users. A site like QVC has huge challenges (as I'm sure their team is well aware) because the way someone chooses jewelry is very different from the way they choose a digital camera or kitchen implements, all of which the site features. If they want to create a single page template for everything to use, it's going to be hard to make that work across all the products they sell. But, the challenge then becomes creating individual templates for each of the types of products, since each template would need to be designed to feature those elements that are going to make a difference in the selection. It's possible to do, but there's a ton of work involved. BC: Along the same lines, the second question was from Francoise, who wants to know how much is too much? Can too much info on the gallery overwhelm the user? JS: Good question. I think you have to be careful and choose the way you display the information appropriately. This is where good information design skills will really come in handy. Keep in mind that when the information is all meaningful and relevant for the user, they can handle a lot of it. In our experience, users only complain about things being cluttered when there's information they think is unrelated to the task at hand. If the information is all relevant, and organized well, they never use "cluttered" to describe it. (We've had users compare two designs, one sparse but with non-relevant information and the other much denser with only relevant information, and the users told us the sparse one was more cluttered than the dense one.) BC: Along these very lines, a lot of of the audience really was affected by your thoughts on the "Learn More" text often found in galleries. They want to know, if you take away "Learn More" what are we left with? JS: Right. So, during the seminar I showed a page from the Eastern Bank site that talks about their checking account offerings. Each offering had a paragraph of dense text followed by the link "Learn More". I suggested nuking the term "Learn More" since it wasn't offering any advantage, claiming these are noise words. After all, the only reason a user would click on any link on that page was to 'learn more' about the offerings. Brian, it's funny, but people get really uncomfortable when I start suggesting that "learn more" isn't adding any value. It's like I've just told them that they should smother a kitten or something. There's a ton of alternatives to "learn more". Let's say your gallery page describes three courses you offer, one in Photoshop, one in Illustrator, and one in Dreamweaver. So, the links could read "Our Photoshop Course" or "Details on the full-day Photoshop course". You could also say make the link "We've outlined all the things you'll learn in this course". As a last resort, you could say, "Learn more about what we'll cover in our Photoshop course." Yes, that has "learn more" in it, but it also has the essentials of what makes that link worth clicking. (As an exercise, you can initially write is as "Learn more about..." and then take out those three words. I'm going to bet that the sentence without the three words is just as valuable as the one with the three words, only it's three words less.) BC: Jared, Nancy asked: Is it true that most customers come to an e-commerce site knowing what they want to buy?  How about 'window shopping'?  Don't a lot of online users just 'browse'? JS: Nancy, that's a great question and one we've spent a lot of time researching. Our findings are that, almost always, they come to an e-commerce site with a specific objective. However, only some of that time the objective is about buying a specific item. For example, someone could come to the site knowing they want the Canon SD IS 890 camera, but only if it's under a certain price (because they can get it cheaper elsewhere). Someone else may know they want a good digital camera and that they are thinking they'd like a Canon because they've had good luck with Canons. Someone else might know they want to find a graduation gift for their niece and maybe they'll start by looking at the available cameras. And someone else may want to get a graduation gift for their niece, but have no idea what makes a good present and wants ideas. In our research, all of these are specific goals for buying a camera, but the specifics vary from one goal to the next. We define browsing to be the serendipitous exploration of the site without a specific objective. None of these goals are without an objective, so none of them are browsing. It's very rare that someone would show up at an electronics e-commerce site just to kill time. Window shopping -- the act of moving down the street just looking in the store windows -- is very unusual online. Given that, one could imagine a design of an e-commerce site for the person who doesn't really know what makes a great gift for a girl graduating high school. In fact, many sites do an excellent job for that type of scenario, creating department, gallery, and product pages aimed at that specific goal. BC: Jared, during the seminar you described faceted navigation, which is a winnowing technique where users select categories. The folks at QVC said they've have found that users who use faceted navigation have better results, but that only a small amount of users will use these tools. Any thoughts on how to drive more people to these tools? JS: I think this is the big challenge for faceted navigation, also called guided navigation. it's not something folks are familiar with and so most just "don't get it." I think, over time, we'll probably see some improvement, but teams can accelerate that with experimentation and exploration. BC: You said that the order for most lists of links should be started with the most likely, then go down to the least likely. The team at Discount Tire asked: After listing the top 10, how do you organize the rest of the items? JS: If you start with the 10 most likely that the user will choose, then you just continue down the list. If you have more than 10 items, and they are all independent of each other, then the last item will be the least likely of all the choices. However, with more than 10 items, in most lists, they will start to have a natural grouping. So, you'll probably want to bunch the groups together and list the groups in order of most important to least important. BC: Great, Jared. You know, I'm betting at least a few of our listeners out there wouldn't mind you just having a look at their site, and getting your advice directly. Ever had anyone ask for that? JS: More or less constantly. But since I can't look at everyone's site, I've decided we should gather a few of our customer's sites and run a critique for our next Virtual Seminar. Critiqueing skills are learned, just like any other skill. We thought it would be fun to talk about those skills while we're practicing them. So, we're asking people to send us sites that have interesting approaches or challenges with their site navigation, then we'll pick four to critique. Everyone will have a chance to review the sites in advance and we'll show how it's done in such a way that everyone feels good about the comments and people get to talk about the important issues. This has always been a popular part of our live session. We're excited to be bringing it to the Virtual Seminar program next month. I hope everyone will join us. BC: If you'd like more information on our next Virtual Seminar, Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation on September 24 and how you can have your site participate in the critique, visit UIE.com/events and click Virtual Seminars. It should be a good time. That's all for this week, thanks Jared. JS: Good bye.