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A website is only as good as its content and navigation. Visitors come to
a site looking for answers and should be able to quickly find the
information they need.
Anything you do to interfere with that decision-making process is going
to cause your visitor to abruptly leave the site. No business wants to
deliberately turn away customers, yet some sites are so poorly designed that
they are doomed to failure right from the beginning.
A good example of a poorly functioning site is
www.medicare.gov.
In late 2005, the U.S. government enacted legislation to offer
prescription drug coverage through its Medicare program. Unfortunately, the
program offers multiple plans that seniors must wade through to make a
decision about which coverage is best for their unique situation.
The government chose to use its
www.medicare.gov
website as the primary platform to explain the new drug benefit program and
offer help for seniors on how to choose their new prescription drug plan.
It seems a logical choice to use a website to give out information, but
in this case, the website is as difficult to figure out as the drug benefit
program, and compounds the problem.
Site is Difficult or Impossible to Use
Nearly two-thirds of Medicare beneficiaries who use the Internet report
that Medicare's Web site is difficult or impossible to use in choosing a
prescription drug plan under the new Medicare drug benefit, according to a
recent survey conducted by
ElderLawAnswers,
the Web's leading elder law site.
The Web-based survey found that 63 percent of respondents had used
Medicare's Web site (www.medicare.gov)
to compare prescription drug plans available in their area, but most did not
find the site easy to navigate.
"These findings are significant because survey respondents are already
Internet users and presumably have some proficiency in using computers and
navigating Web sites," said ElderLawAnswers president Harry S. Margolis,
Esq. "The fact that so large a share of this group is having difficulty
suggests a more widespread problem."
Analyzing a Widespread Problem
So, let’s take a look at
www.medicare.gov and find out why this website is so difficult.
Problem #1 – Overwhelmed by Choices
The website is confusing as soon as you arrive on the site. There are
so many choices; you don’t know where to begin to get the answers you
need. The site has 29 text links on the main page, 17 links on the left
side of the page and 41 subtopic links. A total of 87 choices on just
the homepage.
Each time a link is clicked it takes you deeper into the website
towards more confusion. Each page you pull up offers another multitude
of choices which lead to another page of choices. It’s like being caught
up in a never-ending phone tree where you just keep pushing buttons, but
never get connected to a human being.
Problem #2 – All Text Links
The Medicare website has taken a good idea to the extreme and turned
it into a problem. Text links are an excellent way to introduce
information that needs further explanation. You use a text link to bring
visitors to a separate page where you can be more detailed in your
communication.
However, the correct way to use a text link is to include it in a
small paragraph explaining where that link will take them. The reader
should have enough information to be able to make a decision without
clicking on the link.
Having a page full of text links with no explanation is a frustrating
experience for a website visitor. Clicking text link after text link to
find the information they want could make your visitor so lost and/or
annoyed they leave, never to return.
Problem #3 – No Graphics
A website needs to be interesting to hold a visitor’s attention, and
a site with no graphics is boring. Graphics offer a way for the eye to
relax a moment after reading text. It also helps to balance the site.
Compare reading a website to reading a magazine. Aren’t you more
interested in articles that include pictures and colorful graphics?
A site with graphics is not only visually more interesting but often
easier to understand. Why do you think we have road signs with pictures
on them? A picture is worth a thousand words; what is confusing in the
written word is easily understood with a picture or diagram.
Fixing a Widespread Problem
In order for www.medicare.gov to
function better it needs to:
- Dramatically cut back on the text links on the homepage, limiting
the choices to eight at the most.
- Create a separate site for the prescription drug plan with its own
URL.
The site is also answering Medicare questions, which just adds to the
confusion.
- Offer a small paragraph of explanation with each of the text links.
- Add graphics and/or pictures to illustrate explanations.
How impossible to navigate is YOUR website?
© 2006 Michelle Howe
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