This post is springing out of my frustration today as I attempted to find the link to add Twitter to PocketSmith when writing my previous blog post.
I knew what the page I was searching for looked like, I knew it existed, however I simply could not find how to get to it.
This is a marketing failure for Twitter. I want to distribute the content I put through the web app on my own website, thereby spreading the word about Twitter. I wanted to promote Twitter for them. Then why should I be having such difficulty finding this link?
Because I was expecting a menu. The page that I remembered looked like a full page, separate from all of the others. I was looking for a phrase like “Pimp Out Your Tweets” or “Distribution” or even “Badges”, their current term for the function (which doesn’t sit quite right with me in itself). However the link, when I found it, was here:
Why must this be so hard to find?
So getting to the point – why is this a marketing failure? Here are a few points just off the top of my head:
- Breaking User Expectations – As the page is a complete separate page, not a bit of information in an existing page, I was expecting it to appear in a menu. Somewhere. Surely.
- Missed Promotional Opportunity – Twitter users are, generally, tech-geeks and web publishers to a certain extent. They publish on Twitter, chances are they publish elsewhere. Displaying their own content from Twitter get more eyeballs on Twitter. Making it hard to find this page reduces these eyeballs. There should be badges everywhere, with the value this adds to Twitter.
- Frustrating Users – I was extremely frustrated that I could not find the link in 30 seconds. I shook my fists. I threw my toys.
- Not Recognising Different User Paths – some people may set up their Twitter accounts to be complete from the start, following all options that are available immediately. I however, took a far more piecemeal approach. This meant that when I wanted to distribute the tweets, I didn’t bother scouring the Account Settings page – I had already filled in the required information there. I had entered the website URL already. Why would my attention be drawn to this area?
The lesson reverberating in my head here is how important the heuristic link between ‘page’ and ‘menu’ is. If I am looking for a page I know to be separate from others, I am looking at menus, not links internal to the page. But maybe I am just stupid.
Now I better just go and check that all of PocketSmith is bereft of this kind of drama… I have a feeling that our how-to video for matching transactions is a page-buried link… whoops!
I’ve had the exact same issue where I couldn’t for the life of me find the link to distribute my tweets, I followed the exact same path as you did, going to the badges page then floundered around a bit trying every page.
In the end I found what I was looking for (as demonstrated on my blog) but the trek to get there was more than un-neccesary.