LESS Carousels

I mean fewer carousels, of course. But you know, it's not "Fewer Content. More Strategy."

Anyway, Peep Laja (@peeplaja) recently wrote an interesting article outlining all the reasons you're not going to see good ROI on those rotating spotlights you see all over the place these days. 

In all the testing I have done, home page carousels are completely ineffective.For one, anything beyond the initial view has a huge decrease in visitor interaction. And two, the chances that the information being displayed in the carousel matches what the visitor is looking for is slim. So in that case the carousel becomes a very large banner that gets ignored. In test after test the first thing the visitor does when coming to a page with a large carousel is scroll right past it and start looking for triggers that will move them forward with their task. (quote from Craig Kistler)

http://conversionxl.com/dont-use-automatic-image-sliders-or-carousels-ignore-the-fad/

Note that he covers both "Less Content" (getting rid of the carousels) AND "More Strategy" (focusing your message). And if he doesn't quite convince you, consider that he doesn't even mention the effort involved in creating them, the hours spent around a conference table arguing about who gets a piece of this treasured real estate, or the issues they cause for users with disabilities. 

Nice job, Peep.

Ticketmaster loses CAPTCHA!

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/captcha-22-when-online-security-hurts-sales

Yep! LOVE to see a major e-retailer getting on board with this!  (They're not tossing the concept entirely - just replacing the useless "type these unrecognizable characters" with a much-easier-to-solve puzzle or question.

As with any content, there are costs and benefits to having a CAPTCHA. The main benefit, of course, is keeping bots away from your transactions. (Though they can be hacked, so that benefit isn't as absolute as one might think.) The cost is in paying for the service itself (probably not much) and in risking alienating actual paying customers who get frustrated when they can't figure out the CAPTCHA.

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Image via http://blog.formstack.com/2012/10/18/good-bad-captcha-guest-post/.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Maybe your paying customers are SO motivated that they will go through 1,000 CAPTCHAS if that's what it takes to buy something from you. (But probably not.) Maybe you are such a hacker target that you really really need a reverse Turing test, even if it's flawed and alienates some customers. (But probably not.)

While I'll concede there are absolutely legitimate uses for reverse Turing tests, there are better ways than CAPTCHA to handle the spam/bot problem. 

Computerworld says "LESS!"

In a mobile application, it is better to cleanly provide the 20 most important pieces of information than force people to navigate through 100 that they might never use.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9235552/Tech_hotshots_The_rise_of_the_UX_expert

LOVE the start to this article! Though, naturally, I would go even further and suggest those other 80 items may not just be irrelevant for mobile. Most are probably not really relevant at all, or at least don't provide enough benefit to justify the cost of producing and maintaining them. 

The rest of the article is interesting in its own right, though it's not really about reducing content. Enjoy!

4 out of 5 Content Strategists agree...

Lots of good stuff here, but definitely check out Ken Yau's segment (starts at 00:38).

There should be justification for things existing. (1:04)

Practical content strategy tips from the experts at Content Strategy Applied 2011 conference (and beyond). Here's the blog post to go with it: http://fionacullinan.com/2011/01/content-strategy-18-practical-tips-in-8-minutes/ And the conference website: http://contentstrategyapplied.eu/

Thanks to Fiona Cullinan for putting it together. (And to Sulman Mirza for tweeting about it! I missed this when it first went out.)

http://fionacullinan.com/2011/01/content-strategy-18-practical-tips-in-8-minutes/