Archive for November 16th, 2008

Make your call to actions clear, obvious and in your face

I live what’s turning into a Verizon FIOS neighborhood, and for the unitiated, FIOS is fiber into the home: blazing fast speed that will eventually displace cable modems as the fastest cars on the web access market. Verizon is the leader in the space, and they have a website that illustrates the service.

We know it’s fast. We know it’s digital, How do we check if we can get it?

Their call to action is in the lower right corner of the page, barely obvious enough to actually do something. I highlighted it in yellow because I didn’t think anyone would find it.

A lot of us don’t have Verizon so we have to enter an address on a separate screen. Never mind that when you enter your address, there’s an error page that says the address check isn’t working, but that’s a separate usability issue.

If there’s a call to action for your website — and most of them have one — make it obvious, because that’s your conversion point. Small type isn’t obvious, no headline isn’t obvious, a single red button with some text entry fields isn’t obvious. It should be absolutely clear the user knows where to go. Here, it isn’t.

A good test is to stand about five to seven feet away from the screen: if you can spot the call to action from there, it’ll work for end users.

How many of us have been there?