This is from Nathan Smith, a User Experience Developer in Dallas, Texas.

Asking for information that a user might not have on-hand kills site conversion. I was consulting for a large e-commerce site, and one of the questions they asked potential international travelers was the social security number of those in their traveling party.

When it came to the spouse’s SSN question, we saw a steep drop-off between the hours of 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., outside of which completion was in the high 90 percent range.

Every once in a while, I throw a question out to LinkedIn, and publish the answers here. I’ll probably be compiling the “best of” in a final post.

Tracy Hartlzer is a product manager type just recently with PayPal, and is a real standup guy; I’d hire him in a second.

From Tracy:

My experience a the product manager proved to me that visitors will become customers when:

• They have no compelling reason to use a competitor
• The value to them specifically is crystal clear
• You have made it easy for them to do so

I just purchased an iPhone a month ago and after a month, I understand why they’re calling it the crackPhone: it’s addictive, much too easy to spend too much time with it. It’s really easy to use, and after a few modifications find it a device that I’m using in the way some people use personal organizers.

The best of it is buying the applications. No matter where you’re at — in an airport, in Canada, on the road — you can go through the purchase process for applications with the greatest of ease.

This is a screen shot from the iTunes store (because I’m too lazy to get it from the phone). All they ask for is the password, using a credit card that you have stored on file. For the purposes of limiting fraud, Apple actually errors on the side of not working about charge backs because the purchases are so small, and I imagine they have some kind of limits in place if you go past a certain number of purchases or a certain amount.

For the purposes of purchases, you can actually argue there’s probably more security in place here than at the supermarket, because there is a password involved.

The phone is even easier: all they ask is for your password.

If you have an application or website that has a significant ecommerce component, look at how often the user has to make a purchase; if it’s repetitive, consider this approach because six form entry fields is much more troublesome than one, and all it takes is security on your server.

Make it easy, and watch revenues go up!

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.

One of my pet peeves is when I click on a link, I get sent to page that asks me to sign in. Some sites require it, which I understand, but if they do require it, they should make the process as painless and obvious as possible. Digg.com requires a sign in when you submit a new link for obvious reasons: to validate you are an actual user, and to limit spam.

Keep the options in your face

The vast majority of people that come to the page are new users, but I would guess a good percentage are returning users without the cookie saved. Why ask them to go above when sign in can be placed in line right here? It would take up 50, maybe 60 pixels of vertical space, tops, which is more important than losing a user.

Keep the options obvious and limited

Additionally, where it says Top In All Topics, that encourages leakage, meaning users are going to click there when they can’t figure out how to sign in. Just about every usability test I’ve seen regarding web forms is that the more places the user has to click, the more places they are going to click. there are metrics that show the number of people leaving a page were directly related to the number of links on that page.

Keep the forms simple

This registration form requires 12 pieces of information.

Twelve.

That’s great, if you are marketing cars, but this is an internet news site.

This is way too long, especially when the target audience is bloggers, most of whom don’t want to give up this much information. At the very most, digg should only be asking for the user name, email address, a password, and the CAPTCHA. Everything short of the gender and birthday could be assumed from the IP address to a certain amount of accuracy, and if the users really want to add those two, they can do that later or on a second screen.

When the user signs in or registers, return them to the page they were expecting

When I signed in, was I returned to a page where I could enter information about the article?

No.

I was returned to the home page. I have to return to the blog so auto-capture the article information. Not only does this irritate the user who clicked on the link to Digg, but it also irritates the blog owner (me), because I took the time to place a link on the article to promote my blog.

With some of the people I work with, they think I come up with some of the designs and user interface components out of thin air. What I really do is look for patterns and best practices at other websites, and use them over and over again i.e. design patterns.

Smashing Magazine has a great (but lengthy) article about a topic dear to me — web forms. Web forms are the most important aspect of what we do because they usually lead to conversions, yet we spend so little time on designing them.