[theme-reviewers] Feature slider default links

[Emil Uzelac]

About 6+ months ago, I've released my second public Theme called
Responsive. This month Theme will "close" 200,000 downloads and "you" would
say wait! this is definitely more than enough to learn what users do,
gather some GA intelligence and voila. But no it takes much more than that.

Majority of users that I interact with are "newbies" and not only to
WordPress. Users get confused extremely often and I "blame"
that strictly on documentation and the way we interact with them (*this is
me, talking about me* :) . But also, I am very pleased how quickly majority
of them learn stuff as well and I would rather have 10 newbies than one dev
any time, but that's just me.

There was the reason why PayPal was simple for so many years and why they
didn't change their design, even the links from (sim·ple·ton) blue, very
similar goes for eBay etc.

Did anyone had a chance to see or even watch Matt live in San Francisco
this year? Well we all* did!

Well he kind of touched this area as well, with the welcome screen,
how successful that was and for what type of users the screen was designed
on the first place, maybe instead of redirecting our users to Theme
Options, More Themes etc, we should try that with the welcome screen of our
own, simple A/B testing just to see how that turns out. From that section
we can see what users click and where they're coming from. One Theme can
have welcome screen while you can keep whatever you currently have in
another one and...

Create GA funnel and goals and in short period of time you will be
surprised how much of extra data "rolls" in.

P.S. This message is a general response and my 2¢ :)

Emil




On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 6:21 PM, Bryan Hadaway <bhadaway at gmail.com> wrote:

> *Just want to interject real quick*, because the last point actually
> makes sense to me. I've looked at theme demos on WP before and clicked on
> links to see how a feature was intended to work and have been taken to all
> sorts of URLs.
>
> And that's me, a tech-savvy who's aware of the grand scheme of things of
> placeholders and dummy content. But, putting myself in the shoes of the
> average WP user who's tech knowledge ends at 1-click WP installations I'd
> be pretty confused clicking on something and being taken to example.comwhich actually redirects to a real site or to the WP homepage etc.
>
> This isn't speculation either. I've worked with hundreds of clients and
> consulted or provided customer support to thousands of others. You would be
> amazed at the crazy things people come up with and the way they look at
> things when they're clueless if you don't explicitly define things in
> human-readable terms. To the normal person this stuff is Japanese really. I
> have the marketing psychology down, it's drilled into my mushy mind.
>
> So when you say:
>
>
> "*For what purpose would anyone attempt to click-through a link on a
> wp.org Theme demo?*"
>
> You're saying that as a rational tech-savvy, not the 90% of people that
> will be looking at demos and YES definitely clicking on things, for what
> purpose who knows - we'll kill brain cells thinking about it.
>
> I see just two options:
>
> *1*. Just use *#* for example URLs - this goes for all example URLs in
> any theme. And risk support time on people asking what is *#* - what does
> that do, can I put a link there to pictures of my puppies? Trust me, it'll
> happen.
>
> OR
>
> *2*. Link to a pertinent page that actually explains the feature like:
>
> http://themedevsite.com/docs/custom-slider-links/ - and then have content
> on that page explaining like so:
>
> Hey! You must have been checking out the demo. The feature you just
> clicked on is the blah blah blah...
>
> So either use # which essentially disables the link or link to an
> educational page. Those seem like the only two logical options to me.
>
> End of interjection. :)
>
>
> Bryan Phillip Hadaway
>
>
> Web & Graphic Designer
> calmestghost.com
> bhadaway at gmail.com
>
>
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>
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