Using links to improve user experiences

Quick gripe for Monday. Noticed today that BigMouthMedia have a Tumblr page these days – only noticed because it links to a post I did previously. Anyway from this I found my way to their Twitter page and from here to their new homepage with updated flash movie.

So here I am with a wee flash movie telling me about the PDFs I’d blogged about a wee while ago. But the flash movie aint a link! Yep when you click it nothing happens. Its telling me specifically about something which isn’t contained within the content of the page and its not a link.

Its not a unique thing to the BMM site all over the Internet people are making websites with nice images and flash movies that dont have links on them. I did some work last year for a hotel website where I found that over 40% of the inactive clicks, clicks occuring by people clicking on non-linking areas of the webpage, were on images. So the picture of the wedding was being assumed by people to be a link to the wedding section. By updating the CMS to get these images to be links we increased conversion by more than 10%. By not having these links functioning properly they were losing sales!

To find out how people are really using your website – and where they are clicking and expecting responses from the website have a look at installing Crazy Egg or Click Density. I prefer Click Density but that because I like to do sitewide tests rather than testing just one page at a time – giving better overall understanding of how the website is being used.

Please note that tracking of flash objects is a bit dodgy at times – with clicks not being effectively tracked. so remember to cross reference all your click data with your analytics click path data to get a better picture of how visitors are using/trying to use your website.