When it comes to websites, if you want to show how good you are then don't dwell on the issue of trying to delight everybody all of the time.
In fact, give the ADD SOBs who visit what they want, and extremely fast.
I have been experimenting with websites a lot recently. But roll back a few years and we were all told about a design nugget that suggested transactional website should be three clicks to booking.
Bizarrely, I am now often tracking an average of 20 clicks from opening site to a decision point.
Gerry McGovern picked on a recent study in the Harvard Business Review, highlighting how the best websites focus on solving customer problems, and as quickly as possible.
It ties in with my thesis that brevity beats just about everything else.
Five weeks ago I wrote a piece about usability for Tnooz – I found it a good reminder.
I have since gone back and looked at a number of my personal blog posts on the subject – in particular some studies I had observed about secret shopper behavior. In fact, some of this goes back to 2006.
In them days, delight was everything.
But now we have Google Instant and users on the web will punish those who do not feed the need for speed.
You have been officially warned. And in case you think this is a new phoenenon… here is a quotation from the Bible, no less (the phrase is part of a passage in King James version of the First Epistle of Peter), which reads:
"For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries: Wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you: Who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead."