Don’t Make Me Think…
By Anna Johnson on January 21st, 2010Years ago we bought Steve Krug’s great book on website usability and design, ‘Don’t Make Me Think’. It’s a great book and its central message applies to many aspects of Internet marketing. It certainly applies when it comes to trying to get prospects to take specific actions on your website, such as clicking on a link, filling in a form (including opting in to a list), commenting on an article or blog post, ordering a product or service, and so on.
Essentially, the less you make people think before they take the action you want them to take, the more likely they will take the action.
You can see this phenomenon in everyday life, not just on the Internet. Observe other people. Observe yourself. In a world where we face a constant barrage of information and choices to make, it’s just natural for us to look for the path of least resistance in any given situation. We will even choose the path of least resistance when it’s NOT to our long-term advantage. (Well, of course we will – just consider how many people choose fast food over a home-cooked meal or watching TV over getting fit!)
Since thinking – i.e. the kind that involves analyzing information and making a decision – also requires effort, the path of least resistance is often that course of action that doesn’t require us to do much or any thinking.
That’s why, when it comes to the Internet, people abandon surveys, shopping carts and ‘busy’ web pages. Give people too much information to process or too many things to consider, and many, if not most, people will choose the easier, non-thinking path of leaving your site over the harder, thinking path of having to work out what to do.
Now, this doesn’t mean you should dumb-down your site or even that you should cater to the majority of visitors. You need to balance the desire of most people not to think, with the desire of that smaller number of hot prospects who WANT to consume your content, want different options, and are the ones who will actually pay for what you have to offer.
At the same time, however, you definitely want to remove any obstacles that are hampering your hot prospects from doing what you want them to do. As a rule of thumb, anything that requires a hot prospect to think before they take a desired action is an obstacle that you should consider removing.
