Make it obvious!

It seems like everywhere I drive lately in Dallas there is construction going on. Yesterday, on my way back to the office from lunch I got some dirty looks from some construction workers as I drove by a job site. When they started yelling, I looked over and saw a worker over by the side of the road with a stop sign and I realized that they expected me to stop! Since I was already well on my way through their zone and there wasn’t anything going on that I could tell, I just kept going and cleared the way for them. I started thinking about what I did wrong and what lesson I should learn from it.

Replaying the scene, I realized that there was a normal stop sign on the corner (that I stopped at) before entering the construction zone. I did my normal looking around to make sure no one was coming and I did take note of the construction going on. I realized too late that the worker standing on the side of the road had a stop sign pointing toward me and that he expected me to heed the sign. He wasn’t in the middle of the road (but right by the curb), he wasn’t holding the sign (it was resting on the ground), he wasn’t waving the sign, and he wasn’t doing anything else to get my attention until it was too late. I understood that I really had not done anything wrong. If they really wanted me to stop, they should have taken action that caused me to notice.

After this thought process, it occurred to me that this experience had application on the Web – make it obvious. As one very good and simple book that I would recommend on Web usability states clearly in it’s title Don’t Make Me Think (by Steve Krug, currently in its second edition)! If you want me to take a specific action or do something that’s important on your site, then make it obvious and don’t make me have to scan the whole page carefully and over-analyze my options. Put a call to action in “the middle of the road” which on the Web is 1.) in the middle of the page, 2.) the upper-most section (the masthead), or 3.) the right-hand column. Also, make it clear what is needed from the user – do I need to just click, enter some information, etc.