A year ago I was recruited to test a digital kiosk application my agency had created for a major telecom client.  (I guess the team wanted to test usability on a lug-headed Boomer.) I went through the stages of touching elements on the screen to learn more about the client’s offerings until I came to a screen with four pictures in four quadrants.  That’s where I stopped.

“What would you do next?” asked my young host.

“I’d walk away” I replied.

“Wouldn’t you touch one of the images in the quadrants?” he inquired.

“Why should I?  I just see four pictures, and nothing is telling me what to do!” I explained.

I suggested that they put messages in each quadrant telling people to “touch here to learn about XYZ”.  That comment earned me a which told me I was not cool enough for the technology…and I got a lecture about how “all that type would destroy the integrity of the images and make the screen ugly and cluttered”.

I’m not sure what they ended up doing.  I’ll admit that the images were nice.  But if it were my decision, I’d risk being a little ugly and cluttered in order to facilitate further engagement with the kiosk.

Don’t assume your screen viewers, or site visitors, or email readers automatically know what to want them to do. You have to lead eyeballs to action.

And it’s not because some of us grew up in a generation where the pinnacle of interactive home technology was the landline phone.   It’s because, by and large, most people don’t care all that much about your advertising.  In the half-conscious stupor in which we peruse your online ad messages, please, give us some direction, or at least provide some visual cues to get us to do what you want us to do.  If you make us work too hard, we’ll just walk away.

Don’t underestimate the laziness of the audience.  Make it easy for people to take action…and more will.

I learned this lesson first hand in my early days in a direct response agency.  I couldn’t understand why our ads always had to have coupon bordered with dashed lines in the bottom right corner of the page.  And why did we need a “please detach and send” heading over the coupon?  (What else do you do with a coupon?)

So we experimented with coupon placement and different border treatments.  And we did away with the “detach and send” message.  Guess what?  Response suffered when compared to the old school techniques.

Dashed border coupons at the bottom right corner of the ad worked better nearly every time.  The simple “detach and mail” message showed a measurable lift in results.  And, though I cringe to admit it, showing a little line-drawn scissors cutting the border of the coupon actually helped boost response.

Maybe consumers have grown smarter since those analog days.  But I don’t think they’re any more eager to engage with advertising messages, online or otherwise.  Audiences are still lazy — and time pressed as well.   If we want people to take action, we’ve got to lead their eyeballs.

(In Part 2 we’ll discuss some techniques that effectively lead eyeballs to action.)