If a customer cannot complete their top tasks quickly and easily on your website, why would they trust you to help them with other tasks?

You’re in a giant shopping mall. You urgently need to go to the toilet. You go to the Information Desk. There’s a big queue. After waiting for ages your turn comes and you ask directions. You’re told to head down the hallway, take a right, go up an escalator, turn right, walk down to the end of the hall, take another escalator, turn left and walk down to the end of another hall where you will find the toilets.

You hurry towards your destination wondering why they have made it so difficult to find the toilets. When you finally get there you find to your despair that there are no toilets. You have been given bad directions. This sort of experience will color your whole view of the mall. And if you do go back a next time you’re not likely to go to the Information Desk looking for directions to other areas of the mall you’d like to visit.

There are certain basic things your website needs to do really, really well. If it doesn’t then the customer is likely to get a very negative view of the entire website. If you can’t easily book a room on a hotel website, then you don’t think much of the hotel website. For that matter, you don’t think much of the hotel either.

If you can’t quickly find contact details on a website then the brand is undermined. We need to reclaim branding. It has been hijacked by a very narrow visual interpretation, as if the essence of the brand was the logo and the graphics.

The essence of the brand is the experience customers have with a product or service. There is of course a visual component in branding but it has been vastly overemphasized. When we think of Google do we think of a colorful logo or a fast way to find stuff? Web brands, in particular, are functional. The successful ones help us do useful things.

When we arrive at a website for the first time we are impatient and highly skeptical. If we try to complete basic but important tasks on that website, and we fail, our whole impression of the website is undermined.

Every website has a small set of top tasks (usually no more than three, definitely no more than five). After getting off a plane I remember going down an escalator to the trains section of the airport. At the bottom of the escalator were three signs: Trains, Tickets, Toilets.

What are your Trains, Tickets, and Toilets? How easy is it to complete your top tasks? Branding is about how well you help people succeed. It is about how much time you can save them. It is about how easy and convenient you can make their life.

On your website there are top tasks that customers expect you to do extremely well. If you don’t perfect those tasks, you lose your customers’ trust. A brand that is not trusted is not much of a brand.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

by Mark Glaser, 11:43AM

Map of evacuation centers and routes

When Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast, the evacuation of the area went much more smoothly than during Hurricane Katrina three years ago. This time, the local, state and national agencies were more prepared for a potential disaster.

Similarly, online media outlets and volunteer efforts were also better prepared for this hurricane, having learned their lessons from the Katrina disaster, when they were scrambling to deal with the chaotic scene of widespread destruction and mass evacuation.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune’s NOLA.com website, for example, spent the past three years optimizing its site for breaking news coverage, adding blogs, increasing opportunities for citizen contributions and arming staffers with videocameras. And NPR social media strategist (and fellow PBS blogger) Andy Carvin was able to quickly mobilize volunteers online to create the Gustav Information Center hub and wiki thanks to his experience covering Katrina, the Southeast Asian tsunami and 9/11 — not to mention the wiki templates from these earlier projects.

In both cases, previous experiences helped inform a more mature response to the oncoming storm.

How Things Have Changed

In 2005, NOLA.com editor in chief Jon Donley told me in an OJR story that his staff had to radically redesign the site to effectively cover Katrina, as New Orleans became a one-story town, and the site was inundated with 30 million page views in one day.

“Our website got a complete redesign [on the fly],” Donley said. “By the time we evacuated we (had) a completely different design.”

Jon Donley

Ultimately, NOLA.com forums and blogs actually helped rescue teams find stranded people in homes, and the site helped the newspaper win a Pulitzer Prize for its Katrina coverage. Today, not just the site’s features and design, but also its editorial processes, reflect lessons learned during Katrina.

In a recent interview, Donley told me that the paper’s reporters all file stories online first; editors then decide which stories to pull and put into the print newspaper each day. This makes it much easier for print reporters to consider the web as their primary publishing platform during breaking news coverage, such as Gustav, when the newspaper couldn’t be printed because of power outages. Plus, NOLA.com staffers all carry videocameras with them around town in case they see breaking news. So it was easy for them to file video reports of damage and rescue operations as they traveled around New Orleans after Gustav hit.

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