ISEdb.COM

Since creating a website that is “user friendly”
is often difficult and time consuming, I thought it would be fun to explore a
few ways to create a dissatisfying user experience on your website. Unlike the
dozens upon dozens of things that go into creating a website that provides a
positive visitor experience, one that creates an atmosphere of trust and is
likely to improve conversion rates, creating a dissatisfying experience can be
done fairly easily in just a few steps.

In fact, while I’m sure there are just as many things that
can derail a visitor on a website, there is no need to implement more than a
few.We have found that any one of the four
things listed below will do the trick!

Not
able to find specific information

Visitors come to your site for a reason. Maybe they are
researching a topic, seeking to gain information, or are comparing differences
between your offerings and a competitor’s. In any case, your visitors are often
searching for something specific, and maybe they even want to take action once
they have the vital pieces of information they seek. Maybe that information is
product specifications, pricing info, or perhaps just a phone or email address.
Do what you can to hide this important information. Be sure to provide only
basic, general information about your topic, product or services and avoid any
decision clinching specifics.

If you feel you absolutely must provide more information,
make sure that it is buried in the midst of a lot of text or that any links to
this information is difficult to find. Nothing says we hate you like hiding
important details or contact information!

Confusing
website

People are easily confused, which makes this an easy task to
accomplish. Don’t waste much energy thinking about things such as layout,
design or navigational consistency. When developing your content, speak in
broad vague terms and use as much industry technobabble as possible. Don’t
worry about website architecture either, that’s just a huge time-consuming task
that ultimately prevents your visitors from having to do any real work to get
the information they need. If you make it all too easy, then your visitors
won’t feel that your information is valuable.

Slow
website

If you happen to have a lightning fast server you might want
to find a new one. You’re probably paying too much for hosting anyway. But if
switching hosts is too much of a problem, and then see what you can do to slow
it down. You can do this quite easily by using poorly implemented code,
excessive code bloat or extremely large images. Add lots of flashy tools and
multimedia that must
be used such as flash based websites that have to download the full file first.

Since many metrics services look at time spent on a website
as an indicator of a site’s overall value, the more you slow things down the
better things look. Slow sites mean visitors must remain on the site longer
just to get the information they need. This can be a boon to advertising.

Broken
Links

Nothing tells your visitors that you care than handfuls of
broken links on your site. I suggest you change URLs frequently and that you don’t perform
monthly broken link checks. This is actually entertaining to your visitors
because broken links create something of a game. And who doesn’t love a good
game of hide and seek, right?

There you have it, four quick and easy ways to dissatisfy
your customers. The great thing about these is that you don’t have to think to
hard about any of them. In fact, they require hardly any thought at all. When I
think about how best to go about creating this kind of unusable environment two
words come to mind, random and haphazard. Not only are those both fun words, but
they make for a fun website.