digital hoarding is driving away users and killing conversion
TRANSCRIPT
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Digital hoarding is driving away users and killing conversionBy Christy Deines and Kate Wehner
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
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Digital hoarding: what are the symptoms?
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Would you answer yes to any of the following?
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Have people told you that your site is hard to use?
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Have you ever gotten an email asking where something is on your site?
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Do you manage a website for each unit in your organization?
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Do you feel like you’re managing a landfill?
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Are you spending all of your time updating a site instead of more important parts of your job?
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Have you ever gotten into an argument about getting rid of stuff on your site?
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Have you ever heard (or said) the phrase, “but we might need it someday!”?
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Does the thought of managing your website make you anxious?
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Does your website have an archive of press releases, meeting minutes, or past events?
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Does your website display old photos that make you cringe?
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Does your website feature students who graduated more than five years ago?
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Does your website look the same as it did in 2006?
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Are you often asked to add new pages to your website?
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Do you have to bookmark pages on your website to find them later?
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If you’ve answered yes to any of these, you might be a digital hoarder.
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Ways digital hoarding is hurting both you and your users
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Nobody can find you.
Your site is so big, or cluttered, that the amount of information is meaningless. Which Google hates.
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The most important information is lost.
Without clear hierarchy and streamlined content, users can’t figure out what’s important and what’s trivial.
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Users can’t complete tasks.
Need users to walk through steps in a process? How about find a form to fill out? Too much or distracting content gets in the way.
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Conversion killer.
What role does your site play in recruiting students, or promoting events, research, or donations? Hoarded content will get in the way of accomplishing your goals.
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People judge you.
Your site, whether you like it or not, is a reflection of the entire organization. How do you want your users to see you? Is that what’s happening on your site?
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Management nightmare.
How many hundreds of PDFs do you have to keep track of? Are they up to date? What about staff profiles? News? Events?
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Accessibility liability.
How much of your old content can be accessed by users with hearing or vision impairments? Are those old PDFs accessible?
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The proof in the pudding
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Protect IU website redesign:
Then1254 pages68.64% bounce rate
Now302 pages50.78% bounce rate
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IU Bloomington website redesign:
Then76 pages11.1% of events led to the site’s goal conversion
Now54 pages21.05% of events lead to the site’s goal conversion
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What are some of the challenges you face?It’s confession time.(No judgement!)
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Treatment for the symptoms
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Start with a thorough content audit.
Crawl your site and determine what’s redundant, outdated, or trivial. Then decide what to keep, edit, and delete.
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Use the right platform (website, blog, social media) to deliver your content.
Not every platform is ideal for every piece of content.
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Determine what is appropriate for the web, and what can be stored elsewhere.
Use other solutions for internal-facing information. Dropbox and Box are great.Intranets work. So do network drives.
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You are not an expert in everything. And that’s okay.
Link to sites that are the subject matter experts on the issue. It’s what we call “content liability.”
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Archive.
Always be on the lookout for things that can be archived. Put that archive in a place your users can’t find.
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Put course information in a learning management system.
Course information isn’t managed well on the web, so put it in Canvas, Blackboard, or wherever your university recommends.
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Don’t duplicate content.
Having the same, or similar information, on multiple pages, brings about a multitude of issues.
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Use a content management system.
It helps with archiving and managing assets, and can alert you when content is stale or orphaned.