You don’t think like your users and you never will

If you're of a certain age, like me, your first introduction to working with HTML was probably tricking out your MySpace page when you were in middle school. It was the perfect age to get your own public space, no pun intended, that you could decorate and express yourself in however you wanted.

If you're as obsessed with the internet as I am, then building your MySpace profile was a small, first step into the larger world of a career built around websites. With that in mind, I've been working with websites for almost 20 years, which actually feels kind of wild to think about. I'm not a developer by any means, but the level of familiarity I have, feel, and express with the internet is, quite frankly, extremely uncommon in the world. Which is to say, I am almost incapable of approaching a website the same way someone who doesn’t have the same experience does.

This (old, but still relevant) post from Nielsen Norman Group highlights the problem well:

“Overall, people with strong technology skills make up a 5–8% sliver of their country’s population, whatever rich country they may be coming from. Go back to the OECD’s definition of the level-3 skills, quoted above. Consider defining your goals based on implicit criteria. Or overcoming unexpected outcomes and impasses while using the computer. Or evaluating the relevance and reliability of information in order to discard distractors. Do these sound like something you are capable of? Of course they do.

What’s important is to remember that 95% of the population in the United States (93% in Northern Europe; 92% in rich Asia) cannot do these thing.

You can do it; 92%–95% of the population can’t.”

Nielsen Norman are writing from a design-focused standpoint, and their conclusion is to keep designs simple or users won't be able to use them.

That's good and true and, in my experience, something most marketers have internalized. We talk a lot about reducing friction in conversion paths, making the CTA obvious, and overall making it _easy_ for a user to do what we want them to do on a website.

The problem isn't that we don't know to make things easy, it's that as we spend more and more time in websites (especially the specific one we're trying to optimize) and, in this way, separate ourselves from our users even more, it's very easy to lose track of what is easy for a user!

That's especially true as your target audience trends older. A perfect example comes from a CRO project I did with a health care startup whose audience tended to be 50+. On one of their LPs, there was a list of questions that their service would help users answer. They were formatted in plain text with bullet points.

To me, they were obviously not links, but when reviewing Hotjar recordings of users interacting with the page, we noticed that it was very common for people to click on those questions like they were links!

This was both validating and confounding because on one hand, we had properly identified a list of relevant questions (partly from keyword research and partly from actual conversations with community members and experts), but on the other, how were people so wildly misinterpreting the functionality of this page element?

Another example comes from a more recent project which started with an audit and strategy proposal for a B2B tech startup's website. One of their brand colors is a blue that looks very very similar to the standard blue that denotes a link in text. Text in that color was all over their site, but it was rarely, if ever, a link, even when in places where it could have very reasonably been a link to deeper content. If it was confusing to me just because I was an outsider to their organization, imagine how confusing it would be to someone with lower tech literacy, who doesn't spend all day looking at website?

Tools like Hotjar aren't always available or appropriate for every website, but it's always important to try to look at any website you're working on (in any capacity) with the eyes of your least tech literate user. It's so easy to accidentally lead users astray because they don't look at things the same way we do.

Getting out of your own head, perspective, and paradigms isn't something that happens accidentally. It takes intention, so set aside some time (regularly, if possible) to either review recordings or just explore your website through someone else's eyes.

You will almost certainly be surprised by what you find.