It’s that time of year when families who own recreational vehicles (RV’s) and camping equipment begin to book their camping trips for the summer. Holiday camping has to be done well in advance. Before the snow has melted in most parts of the USA, families are dreaming of lakes and fishing, hiking, fairs, camping on the beach and nights by the fire, staring at the stars in the night time sky.

The Internet has made searching for and contacting campgrounds easy, with some campgrounds even experimenting with online booking. The Internet experience for web site users wanting to book a campground is similar to booking hotel rooms. Prospective guests are excited and hoping for a pleasant stay. Any information a web site offers to help them make choices and imagine themselves snuggled in sleeping bags increases the likelihood that they’ll call.

Thoughtful Design Pays Off

Online booking applications should work flawlessly. Poorly functioning site search or booking systems lead to web site abandonment. Photos should accurately portray the size of living space and what comes with it. In the case of a campground, that includes pull-through spots, fire pit and picnic table. Guests want to know what the camp store and swimming pool look like and whether or not they’re well maintained and staffed.

Many camp grounds are family run and privately owned. A budget for their web site may not exist. Some campground web sites are little more than print brochures adapted to the web with little understanding that a web site requires a new approach because it’s used differently. Try to invest in someone with experience in web design and travel oriented web sites.

The network of KOA (Kampgrounds of America) campgrounds use the same yellow and black color scheme and share resources such as maps, directories and booking applications. The similarity between KOA camping sites is helpful for KOA members who only book with these campgrounds because they get a discount.

Sadly, some of the worst web sites in the travel industry come from campgrounds. This includes state parks that have camping facilities. However, there are exceptions. Some campground businesses invest heavily in photos of their grounds and some offer videos of events they hold or on-site attractions.

Usability can’t be underestimated for campground web sites because their demographics are quite wide in scope. For example, there are retirees who travel from campground to campground. Some of them have cognitive (memory) issues with varying degrees of severity. Complicated navigation is aggravating when the navigation moves around from page to page or suddenly disappears altogether. Their hands may not be as steady, making some drop down navigation menus difficult for them to use. Eye sight problems for them include requiring reading glasses. If your web page font sizes can’t be increased in their browser, they will be frustrated. If they can increase the font size and your layout changes as a result, they may not be able to use the site.

Will these retired folks be using the Internet? You bet! Many of them stay in touch with their families and grand kids via email and cell phones and use the latest GPS gadgets, Google maps and the latest gizmos in their big rigs such as automatic levelers.

Families who book campgrounds will have interests that may surprise you. Their kids have iPods and video games. Some family members will want to bring their laptop. Most will have cell phones. If you’ve ever looked inside a family motor home of a tech bunch, it’s a mass of dangling cell phone chargers and cables. Campgrounds that offer wireless access, TV cable hookup and electric may want to promote this information on their homepage as a value proposition right away rather than tucking it inside an “Amenities” page.

Campgrounds that put their tent people away from noisier motor home guests may wish to note this on their web site.

To make your campground web site user friendly, try adding the following:

1. Make sure your site shows the area site map, with all the buildings, roads, camp sites, showers, etc. Offer a choice in how to access it online by letting visitors download it as a PDF or printing an image or sketch.
2. For campers who can not see, can’t download PDF’s or have images turned off because they’re on dialup, an audio description of the grounds would be helpful.
3. Be consistent with your colors, page layout and navigation.
4. Put your phone number at the top and bottom of every page and make it large enough to find quickly.
5. Watch your contrasts. Many camping sites have colored backgrounds with colored text, which make them hard to read. Text that’s all in boldface is difficult to read online.
6. Keep your copyright year up to date. Otherwise it may appear as though you’re no longer in business.
7. Communicate anything and everything that’s customer service oriented. Sometimes what you offer is the difference between someone booking your campground or the one nearby.
8. Make it easy for out of towners to make arrangements by posting links and/or phone numbers to car rental offices, vets, pet boarding facilities, beach tourist information such as beach passes, discount retail shops, camping supply stores, service stations that can handle RV’s (must have lifts for them), organic food and health centers.
9. Put testimonials on your camping site from previous guests.
10. Describe a typical day at your campground. This gives site visitors an idea of the environment, which helps them make educated choices.
11. Place all “call to action” prompts in highly visible spots like above the page fold and make them stand out. For example, a button for “Book Here” or “Reserve Now” and underlined embedded links within text that reads, “Stop by our calendar of events.” Avoid animation and blinking text.
12. Promote extra touches like your dog walk area, handicapped accessible camp store, locally made gifts, bait and tackle shop and dumping station on the premises.
13. Offer a way to stay in touch such as an email list or newsletter for regulars. Include coupons for return visitors to use, such as one free child admission or free pile of wood.
14. Place any sales or limited specials on the homepage. While your rates will likely not change much, there may be incentives to offer such as lower gas prices in the area, biodiesel, merchandise specials from the camp store, and fireworks for sale.
15. Display photos of staff and owners, a welcome message from the owners and office hours for reservations. Make sure emergency contact numbers are easy to find for guests who may run into trouble on their way there and need to alert you of any delays in their arrival time.

A user friendly, descriptive, customer experience oriented, persuasive web site will increase camping reservations. They’re a tool that many potential guests rely on, but they may not answer every possible question someone may have.

Once I booked a trip for my family looking for a peaceful weekend getaway and I chose a new campground based on their web site and its ease of use. However, we later learned that this particular campground has speakers set up all around the camping area and the owners made very loud announcements every few hours, starting at 8am in the morning. One day everyone in the campground was scolded for not putting their trash out properly.

There are some things even a web site can’t help us with.

My approach to web site usability goes far beyond what you see on a web page. The lines between the Internet experience and off-line experience are blurred more and more as we adapt our lives to the technology we have available to us.

The user experience, both on and off-line, sometimes blend together. This is usually overlooked by web site designers who haven’t had the experiences or training to understand the ramifications of every element they put on a page. Every step, every instruction, every link to somewhere, every link label, every error message, every task that can’t be conducted or understood is a usability concern.

Sometimes the very decision to conduct tasks online becomes an issue.

Forcing Online Contact

I live in a state that attempts to force families to seek college financial aid assistance online. As a newbie parent to the world of college finances, I began the process when my daughter was accepted by one. The next step is to figure out how to pay for it.

I went online and the instructions suggested online filing for financial aid or coming into the college itself to get the paperwork. Because you must enter all of your private information, from social security numbers to tax records on the application, I didn’t want to feed that online to the state. It’s a personal preference.

In addition, as a user, my daughter has divorced parents who live in separate homes and don’t share personal information like finances, bank records, etc. with each other anymore. I thought I could fill out my part and there’d be a separate form for her Dad. Boy, was I ever stupid!

I went to the college to get the state’s paperwork, only to be told they don’t give it out. You HAVE to file for assistance online. I got into a fight with the receptionist over this because the web site said I could get the paperwork there. She didn’t believe me, so she called a superior, who had no idea what I was talking about.

The woman, thankfully (likely to shut me up), asked to see what I was referring to. She showed me her computer screen and together, I showed her the page and their web site’s instructions that I could come in and get the paperwork. She was stunned and apologized and then told me she had none to give me. The state, she said, insists it be done online.

Still miffed, I asked her what divorced families do and she sighed and told me that “Pennsylvania doesn’t care” about that.

Doesn’t care about the user experience? Doesn’t care?

In my case, I get along famously with my “ex” and we have few secrets, but sharing financial information, including credit card debts, our spouses salaries, etc. is a bit unrealistic. We could do that damned form together online and swallow our issues because we love our daughter. But what insane person came up with the cruel idea of forcing families to file online for college financial aid?

How many college students get caught up in their parents’ issues? This is already a stressful time. Usability includes the emotional state of web site visitors and again, this is commonly ignored in the design of sites and forms.

Communication

The first problem in my experience was instructions on a web page that offered incorrect information, and it was compounded by an off-line experience of additional lack of communication. College staff weren’t aware of what their web site even said.

Their content writer wasn’t informed of proper procedures.

Their instructions about filing online should have clearly stated there’s no option and offered a way to contact someone who has issues with that. Is the form accessible? Was it ever tested? Is it a PDF? What if someone has no computer? What about privacy and security concerns? What about parents who don’t get along? Can you get separate passwords and log in so that information is hidden?

My questions were endless and the college web page, the very institution that wants my money, offers no guidance.

Web site usability is not a one way street. It’s not limited to color choices and organized navigation.

Try not to put something on there without first considering who is going to use it, why they may want to and why they can’t. Working web site usability is about a coherent user experience in some cases where the on and off-line tasks are connected by links and written communication.

Forcing a task to be performed in one way, with no alternatives, indicates poor end user research or worse, a complete and total turning of your back on their needs.

I’ve been tracking recent news and following discussions pertaining to web site planning, user experience design, and usability testing that are good reminders that there’s no such thing as a cozy, orderly, agreed upon approach to any of those things. Not only this, there are grumblings about why user centered design is probable at all.

Pure Baloney

Conglomerate Tests? offers one man’s opinions that usability testing is a crap shoot.

To his way of thinking, the only way to get accurate results in user testing is to test everybody, not 5, 10, 20, or 100 people. User personas are a joke. Methodology is too, because usability testing is performed in various ways. He feels there is no way we can justify a set of usability guidelines for such a gigantic vast of user circumstances.

He writes,

Well… the question remains… why aren’t we, as a body of businesses, not getting together to carry out an independent set of survey’s and test cases and sharing the results? How about it?

A whole bunch of tests devised to handle the numerous color usage, text size, screen resolution, ages, readability, scroll-size, font-faces, preferred navigation, location of XYZ, wording of ABC etc. We could punch huge wholes in numerous “common beliefs” or provide data to reinforce them.

I wrote,

It’s not a matter of throwing together a bunch of test plans and creating guidelines on a wide cross section of users because each site being tested has its own business and functional requirements. What is desired for one type of site or application is not desired for another.

This is why test plans and test cases are based on requirements gathering.

He didn’t want to consider that. He’d like a wide angle lens focused on a planet sized set of web site users that will give us precisely the kind of information we need to make web sites that work for everyone, because everybody has been asked what they want.

Would this work? Several days later, he holds onto this idea and believes it to be so.

Who Cares What They Need?

Cre8asiteforums has had an ongoing discussion of interest called Site Aesthetics Vs. Customer Involvement: How perceived risk relates to usability. Today, someone wrote about a situation many of you are familiar with.

When an executive gets a bug in their ear to make a pretty picture, it’s hard to derail that movement with logic or experimentation. It’s like a drug. All reason gets lost. You’ll spend your food budget even as you starve.

The analytics guy/gal are a threat to their idea. Nobody wants to hear things like “analytics are the voice of customers.” Analytics are boring. Testing is for propeller heads. Go away while I look at my design.

Even when broken down in a simple, side-by-side chart showing before/after effects, I’ve seen “marketing vps” say something like “but the staff likes this one better” - as if that should be the end of the story.

In a conference call I was on yesterday, I guided the company president into considerations for potential customers that went beyond what he or his team may have been considering. I wanted to be sure they weren’t approaching a redesign with rose colored lenses.

Though intelligent enough to get usability consulting to make sure they are being objective, I know they’ll have to do ongoing testing. They’re redesigning because they face a fierce competitor. To increase their conversions and perform better in search engine results means combining what they presently know about their customers and adapting to changing customers’ needs.

The one thing we can always count on is that people change their minds. What they wouldn’t or couldn’t tolerate a few months ago on the Internet may not be an issue anymore. User habits change too. Something as simple as how we look for things on web pages changes as we learn and unlearn browsing habits.

Do We Really Know What We Think We Know?

From the site aesthetics discussion someone felt:

Evidence doesn’t matter when the politics of power is all that matters. The only evidence that matters in such situations is the number of times the decision maker can say “black is white” and have others agree — whatever the consequence for the long term viability of the business.

In such cultures the only customer experience is “the willing suspension of disbelief” a.k.a the reality distortion field. My experience is that computers are great primary enablers of reality distortion fields.

Indeed, there are those who aren’t satisfied to accept the current reality of user centered, human oriented design and what we think we know so far. HFI’s Chief Scientist, Kath Straub, PhD, CUA, wrote in Meta-Usability: When the method is not the message:

Practitioners want research to solve a problem, or justify a specific design or business decision.

The paper’s theme looks at the difference between what researchers study and what practitioners want, as well as what practitioners present and what clients want to hear.

Is it all for nothing? Don Norman’s latest thoughts on innovation and product development, Filling Much Needed Holes, didn’t beat around the bush.

Ethnographic research is fun. You get to go out into the world and watch, take pictures, satisfy your curiosity and inherent nosiness. Back at the office it is great fun to scribble notes, to post them on walls and rearrange them to form patterns. Then we can create personas, colorful little artificial people with cute, interesting lives, or maybe overstressed, over-busy lives. We delight at personas, at prototyping, at watching people go through their paces. New products galore. Innovation is the new hot topic. But does all of this activity lead to actual success in the marketplace? I fear not.

Is there something in the air?

We Always Want What We Can’t Have

And usability people will make sure we give it to you.

For search engine marketers, the year has been difficult due to search engines cracking down on what they’ll accept, whether it be web pages or web links. There are new rules for SEO’s and web designers to follow. Add to this increasing demands by site users with specific needs, disabled persons and accessibility laws and standards. Web site competition for conversions, brand, rank and reputation is pushing user experience design and usability practices into the web site planning playbook.

Social networking is connecting people in new ways and the lessons are coming in fast and furious. Facebook, for example, discovered user testing can come in the form of petitions when they launch something members can’t stand.

Despite everything, there are more and more groups branching off and doing their thing because they see where they fit and where they can help. Organizations continue to pop up, like The Interaction Design Association, whose purpose is “user experience design that defines the structure and behavior of interactive products and services.”

It isn’t so much that designers and developers have no idea what they’re doing. It’s more like there’s so many people involved in the creation and usage of something that global satisfaction or acceptance may never be possible. Nevertheless, there will always be those driven to achieve the Wow factor. Nothing intends on sitting still.

And neither will the growth of usability oriented design.

When I decided to teach myself HTML in 1995, I did what many others did back then. We studied source code by copying and dismantling what someone else did. In those days, there was only one background color - gray. Creativity felt limited, but that didn’t last long.

Today, there’s no end to what web designers can do. If you can imagine it, someone is inventing a way to do it. The pace is fast. We call it things like Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. What excites me is that the quiet pioneers in emotional design (captology) are more visible these days. I’ve long felt we can do more than static, one dimensional web pages. Internet users rely on the ‘Net for so much that usage is an extension of our selves. Many people need the ‘Net and demand it to enrich their lives.

More and more people approach web sites expecting to feel something from the experience. This is where we’re going. This is what’s next with software application design and web page presentations.

Social media plays a part in our expectations and our interest in experiences that touch us. Video games, online video sharing and virtual Internet worlds also opened our eyes not only to what we can do to satisfy ourselves, but made us want more. Whether you noticed it or not, what you feel while using a web site matters. How you respond to it matters. You can vote. You can comment. You can recommend. You may find yourself loyal to certain web sites because of how you feel when you’re interacting with them. They may make you feel content. Happy. Safe. Included.

I think Flash is going to find itself in more and more web sites, and developers who teach themselves how to make Flash pages and scripts accessible will be setting the stage for greater adaptation of web site usage by a wider range of people. Personalization is going to become specialized and eventually, individualized based on, again, how we feel about our experience.

As content producers, some companies will want to cause experiences. They’ll learn to create reaction.

Influencing the customer experience through the internet by Mona Patel, executive director at Human Factors International, discusses emotion and trust, and how these influence our decisions and choices on the Web. She writes,

Whatever a site’s conversion goal, it is now more about people than product or services.

How do you design to reach out and touch someone? How do you test to see if you have done so? What types of web sites may want to explore emotional connections and trigger reactions that convert?

Health care sites, beauty (hair, skin, weight), dating, clothing, jewelry, non-profit charity organizations…are just a few. I like to take the ideas and apply them to harder situations, such as furniture sites, educational institutions or food. Anything we search for in a search engine can be found. But getting us to choose, commit, try, buy, recommend, or get in the car and drive to the store takes more than playing with color contrasts, table-less CSS and long shopping cart processes.

Do you make purchase decisions based on a certain “something” that’s kind of undefined but you know it when you feel it?

That’s what fascinates me. Designers and developers are learning how to inspire us.

Here’s another article that may inspire you…

Monday Inspiration: User Experience Of The Future

Below we present some of the outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but they are reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous over the next years.

It’s been reported that Jakob Nielson spoke about SEO and Usability in his keynote speech at the User Experience 2007 conference in Barcelona. Known to have a strong interest in search engine development, he sometimes gets on the nerves of search engine marketers.

According to Jakob Nielson sees parallels between ethical SEO and usability,

With Web 2.0 still a buzz word and Web 3.0 or even 4.0 on the horizon, Nielson predicts a ‘back to basics approach’ as website owners realise that simplification and resolution of basic problems is the key to a positive user experience, rather than the bells and whistles that come with participation innovations.

Ultimately, Nielsen’s keynote address poses an important question: should we look to trends in search engine development and SEO techniques to persuade web owners that simplest is best for website usability and ‘findability’?

My instinctive reaction to that question is “NO!”. Designing and marketing for the lowest common denominator isn’t challenging, creative or even practical. Twice this week I addressed this in Are We Designing For The Human Experience? and the one my husband felt might ruffle the feathers of SEO’s, Customer Experience, Loyalty and Search Engine Marketing Without Understanding Either of These.

To look at search engines as the holy grail of web design practices?

It’s not that search engines aren’t making an effort to go out and try on every human. It’s that not every human uses search engines, so why base web design on what they’re doing?

User Personas Are Us

The topic, Is It Worth Creating User Personas? took a little turn when 37 Signals wrote in Ask 37signals: Personas? that “We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.”

As my friend, Adrian Lee, said when I pointed out the 37 Signals post in our Cre8asiteforums thread, Thinking About User Personas,

Heh, well yes, if you’re building something to fix your own problem, then there doesn’t seem much need for personas. But if you’re trying to solve someone else’s problems, what do you do then?

Ecommerce site owners may want to consider the many points in Persona-lizing a site from Internet Retailer.

For example, a project for Home Depot uncovered two very different customers who might have identical demographic profiles—the do-it-yourselfer who wants to pick out all the cabinets and appliances and the customer who wants a kitchen designer to do it all.

The article also describes how FutureNow took a web site’s conversion rate from less than 1% to average 4%, and the return on pay-per-click is consistently 2 to 1.

From My Messy Inbox (Not to be confused with my messy desk)

User testing? Morae is on sale until December!. Go ahead. Spend now.

I really liked this article because it provides case studies and other resources: 30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of.

Another case study…Landing Page Optimization: Improving Conversion 50-60% by Applying Continuity and Congruence

Laura Milligan wrote The Del.icio.us Toolbox: 50+ Del.icio.us-related Scripts, Tools, and Tutorials. Did you know they’re changing their domain to “delicious.com”? I use this site and had no idea there were so many things you could do with it. This article has them all. Love the “Lazy Sheep”. It’s perfect for me.

If you haven’t been there yet, go now to the newly redesigned and updated Small Business Brief. There’s no slowing these people down!

And finally, SEOMoz has launched the Marketplace. It’s free to everyone to use or submit to. The application itself is just out of BETA and having pounded on it myself as a tester, I found it to be one of the smoothest user experiences I’ve ever had with an Internet application. It’s sleek. Simple. Useful. Attractive. Functions well. If your company handles web development, Internet marketing, usability or Internet software development, the Marketplace is a place to list your services. If you’re job hunting, you can submit your resume too.