Somewhere in Fundraising Land right now there’s a meeting where folks are debating colors, content, navigation and other visible elements of their website.

Unfortunately, few are paying serious attention to spotting and fixing what matters most: the invisible and frustrating traps that visitors and donors will encounter on that website.

Neuromarketing guru Roger Dooley calls these hidden traps “land mines, or CX [customer experience] bombs”, because they are sure fire ways to drive customers and donors away and into the arms of the competition.

In a post titled Is Your Web Developer Planting Hidden Customer Landmines? Roger lists and illustrates a few visitor experience land mines he’s encountered, along with some comments on parallels in Fundraising Land:

• Disabled Form Fields

You’d expect, given today’s technology and consumers’ expectations, that every website would make the form-filling process as low friction as possible. After all, the form is a barrier to a contribution, an inquiry, or some other desirable result.

Roger notes that he’s encountered multiple sites that specifically disable prefilled content. “Why? I have no idea. These weren’t high-security sites like, say, online banking properties. But nevertheless they forced the visitor to manually type in their name, their address, their phone, and so on – all of which may have been stored in the user’s browser for one-click entry.”

The more needless and frustrating work you make the donor perform the greater the chance she/he will abandon the task at hand. This is particularly true for donate pages (a horror show on which a book should be written; and probably has) and ‘look-up’ pages where donors can find the nearest nature preserve, clinic, food bank or other close location, but now has to manually type in the zip code because the autofill function has been disabled.

• Needlessly Strong Passwords

As Roger says, “Yes, sites get hacked. Blogs get hacked, and so do big company sites like Adobe and LinkedIn. So, in an abundance of caution, many sites are now demanding that users employ strong passwords. The Apple store, last time I checked, wanted a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers. Other sites will throw in the requirement of at least one special character, like a punctuation mark. Repeated or sequential numbers and letters may be prohibited. This is excellent security practice, but it is an inconvenience for customers and may result in them not logging in at all.”

This land mine is particularly problematic for mobile users – of growing importance as The Agitator has repeated reported. And in the reality of Fundraising Land most nonprofit sites have no reason to guard content with complex passwords that include numbers, letters and special characters, let alone complex passwords that expire periodically.

• Unique, Weird Email Addresses

Does your website or any section of it contain any of these landmines as reported by Roger? “I just signed up with a new wireless company. They exhibited multiple examples of bad behavior, including not accepting my autofilled credit card number and forcing me to dig into my wallet to “verify” it. But the most blatant problem was their use of a different and unique email addresses for five different communications in the space of five minutes. Each address looked the same but included a unique ten-digit numeric code.”

“Every one of those emails ended up being routed to my spam folder.

“Could I set up a rule to keep emails from this company out of my spam folder? Sure. Will I? Nope. I don’t have the time to set up rules for every business that sends me stuff. If you email me using one address, though, I will take a second to click ‘Add To Contacts’.”

I haven’t seen any nonprofits that engage in this level of security. However for those whose sites include personal donor accounts I’m pretty sure they exist. And I’m positive that out there is a webmaster who’s spending lunch hours dreaming up multiple levels of security to reveal and recommend at the next team meeting

• Short Session Time-outs

Roger reports that lately “I’ve encountered a few sites that terminate your session after a few minutes of inactivity. As a multi-tasker, this can be exceptionally annoying, particularly if I have to navigate through several screens to get back to where I was working before the phone rang.

“I understand that some sites need to take this precaution. A banking site, for example, might not want an account holder to go to lunch after logging in and have a co-worker transfer funds to her account in the Cayman Islands. But not all sites are subject to the same risk.

“I spend a lot more money at Amazon.com than I do with my phone company, but Amazon never logs me out. Why would they? I might buy something!”

Roger recommends: “If your IT people are enforcing a session time-out protocol, have them provide you with analytics on customer behavior. If you find customers initiating multiple sessions within a few minutes of each other, they have almost certainly been logged out while they were still using the site. If a time-out protocol is really necessary to prevent fraud or abuse, consider extending the inactivity period to reduce the inconvenience to multi-tasking customers.”

• Forgotten Logins

This customer and donor inconvenience is related to the one above, but is a bit different. User-focused sites keep you logged in as long as you don’t log out or delete cookies. This is a very customer- and member-friendly approach used by Amazon, online communities, and many other kinds of sites. When you return, you are able to use the site immediately.

Roger warns that if your site forces donors or returning visitors to login every time they visit the site and also combine this with the blocking of autofill by the browser, then the visitor is forced to re-enter everything manually. “Some returning visitors won’t remember their login and, rather than looking it up or guessing, will move on to another site.”

• A Friendly Note from “NO REPLY”

Roger and I both share the same sense of amazement at how many businesses and nonprofts send emails using the name “No Reply.” This has to be the best customer- or donor-friendly way to let the person at the other end know that ‘we really don’t care what you think’!

“I can hear the developer protests. ‘We used to put the company name there, but our stupid customers kept hitting ‘reply’ even though we told them not to in big letters!’ Did it occur to those decision-makers that perhaps customers replied to the email because it was their preferred method of communicating? Or that it was easier than navigating to a website and logging in (using the password they already forgot), just to tell the company it was OK to ship a partial order?

• Bad Error Messages

One of the places bad customer and donor experience can hide is when something goes wrong. “Perhaps visitors click on a browser bookmark that leads to a page that’s no longer on your site. Or, some kind of site malfunction sends them to an error page. These often don’t get checked in site reviews, and they may leave a visitor puzzled or frustrated.”

And heaven only knows most server error messages aren’t user friendly – they may show the user something like, “502 Bad Gateway.” Not helpful, and a bit scary. Have you checked your sight for the quality, helpfulness –and friendliness of Error Messages?

Roger’s recommendation: “The proper approach is to customize all error messages and be sure they are part of the site review process. Bad page requests should offer the visitor some search and navigation options. Server errors should be a message reassuring customers that a technical issue exists but is being addressed. If some parts of the site remain functional, visitors can be directed there. And if the entire site is down, a protocol should exist for routing all requests to a reassuring message promising prompt restoration of service.”

Be sure to read Is Your Web Developer Planting Hidden Customer Landmines? in its entirety and study the illustrations. And while you’re at it, take a tip from The Agitator and subscribe free to Roger Dooley’s Neuromarketing blog.

How many of these landmines of donor frustration are on your website? And what other landmines have you found on others’?

Roger

P.S. It’s very easy to get direct feedback on key website functions from visitors and donors at no cost. Take a look at The Agitator’s post Are You Missing Out?. Then go to The Agitator Toolbox, which you’ll find right in the center of our homepage and sign up for the Donor Feedback widget. It’s Free. Forever Free. And it’s quick and easy to put in place on your site.