Does Your Web Site Need Help?

摘要

How could your Web site need Help? You've got three-click-or-so navigation to most content. Your graphic design is professional. The QA group assures that every link is active and points to the right place. You've got simple and advanced search. And your Web server is integrated with back-end databases 24/7, providing and collecting information dynamically on dozens of Web pages. Well, all that could be true and yet you might still have a silent majority of frustrated Web visitors. To illustrate, I recently changed health insurance providers. While waiting for my member card to arrive, I went to the company's site to print a temporary card. I hope I'm not sounding like Andy Rooney here, but after many frustrating clicks and searches yielding dozens of irrelevant results, I stumbled across a link named "View Instant Eligibility." I clicked and printed my temporary card. Intuitive? No! Common Internet experience? Increasingly. Most sites have a FAQ section and (buried somewhere) a "Contact Us" link, as did this insurer's site, but FAQs usually only scratch the surface of site navigation (and were of no help to me here). As for contacting the insurer, the last thing I wanted was an auto-response to my email promising that they'd get right back to me, or an equally frustrating phone voice-prompt menu to nowhere. My need here was simple. Had I been trying to solve a complex problem, I'd have been completely out of luck.