Show, don’t tell – better user experience from environmental content

Share Insight is the new support site for the Endis Insight platform. Because it is not a sales site, and the majority of content is generated by members (in forums) and staff (articles, guides, release notes, video), it contained little static content when I was asked to look at it.

This kind of content could be called supporting copy, creating the supporting frame for the interactions which take place upon the web site. Another term I like (and just coined I think) is environmental copy: the content which sets the environment for users to interact.

Setting the right environment for a web site where existing customers come for support demands a clear user experience and easy access to the help that they need.

Share Insight front page

On Share Insight this included items on the menu needing to be clearer and more compelling. ‘Getting started’ should have been ‘Get started’ to suggest action; ‘Documentation’ and ‘Release notes’ are developer terms – wouldn’t users prefer ‘Solutions’ and ‘New releases’? ‘FAQs’ had to go, if only because a lot of people don’t know what it stands for. ‘Help Topics’ might be longer but at least people know what it means.

I also pushed for a clearer information architecture (the Insight platform is well designed to chop and change content groups around, so it wasn’t too late to change the order).

Although scant to begin with, a lot of the environmental copy was redundant. It’s tempting to explain ‘on this page you can…’ but the golden rule is  always let the features speak for themselves. Show, don’t tell. If people can’t tell immediately that they’re looking at a forum and know how to read and post on it straight away … then it’s time to lay out the forum differently and rename the buttons. Otherwise the site will be crowded with noisy explanations and it will become too much like hard work to do anything on it.

Strap line and search box

Finally there were one or two legitimate paragraphs that needed tweaking, such as the front page tag line and strap. A sweet twist was to get the strap line to explain the site at the same time as inviting users to explore the site through the search box. It’s vital that users know what a web site is for and what to do next within seconds of first finding it.