Search campaigns are great for driving traffic to a target site; if they were not great at it, pretty much everyone reading this blog would be out of a job. We have also gotten pretty good at tracking people who are coming in from search ads. While their click is greatly appreciated and all together awesome, we love to keep an eye on them until they fill out a form or hit a certain page so we can put one more tally mark in the “Conversion” column in a massive Excel spreadsheet. These conversions are the impetus for our happiness, the boss’s happiness and the clients happiness… and then our families’ happiness because, well, we get to keep our jobs because we rock at getting conversions.

While you hang out in this great little world where everyone is high on conversion counts and the happiness is so palpable in the office that even that emo kid who sits in the corner brooding all day has a smile on his face, no one can even fathom that someone could be disgruntled or dejected. But have you asked if your visitors are happy? Sure, maybe they filled out your forms and clicked your ads, but what you need to think about is whether they did this with a scowl or a smile.

It is the little things on sites that drive visitors mad or make them happy. Avoid dumb things and embrace awesome thing to maybe get people coming back:

• Use a captcha that doesn’t look like the scrambled love child of some random word string and a Jackson Pollack painting: Seriously, I would rather you ask me to do long division to prove I am human than ask me to unscramble some vocabulary vomit covered by a spirograph picture some three year old cranked out. After I fail a captcha three or four times, I start to wonder if I really am human…
• Don’t require ridiculous passwords: Unless I am registering for a NASA mission control computer or signing up for an email list that includes nuclear launch codes, anything that requires a password can be letters and numbers. I should not have to type out a password that looks like something with 4 symbols and a capital/lower-case letter mix that a 13 year old girl would send in a text message to her friends. If I have to write down my 37 character password, I think that kind of defeats the purpose of security.
• Easy unsubscribe: Technically it is not on your website, but if you are having people sign up for an email list, I should never have to click more than twice to get off your mailing list. No exceptions. Ever… No seriously, stop thinking you have a good reason for asking people 7 questions and for their login information. If someone is throwing you out of their house, you don’t ask them to fill out a complaint form do you?
• Flash intros are the worst feature ever created: Unless you are an artist or are developing some sort of interactive tool or a truly awesome user interface, Flash is overrated. In a MarketingSherpa interview back in 2003, Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering had this to say about Flash intros:
  

  “When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today…”

• ‘Welcome’ pages are terrible too: I’m looking at you Forbes.com. Your little quotes are cool and all but you don’t welcome house guests by trying to sell them car insurance so you shouldn’t try and do it to website visitors.

I’m technically not a ‘usability expert’ but I use the internet quite a bit. I like to think that I am an expert in my happiness so that makes me some sort of usability happiness expert. Conversions and clicks are great, but if you are losing people along the way, it is for a reason. Find it and fix it…just don’t use Flash.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…