Users Focus on Actions — Not on You

All the effort your team puts into planning and creating digital product content may feel like a waste of time and a major disappointment if you don’t get the engagement you were hoping for. You start asking yourself, “How can I get users to care about my content?”

The short answer is blunt: you can’t. People visiting your site or using your app usually have a task in mind, and that is the only thing that matters to them. While you can’t force them to care about your content, you can avoid wasting time on the things they will never care about.

Things People Ignore

No matter how brilliant your content may be, users just don’t care about these things.

“About” Content

We often see lengthy About sections that rehash the organization’s history, leadership, mission, values, and so on. It never fails that these sections/pages get the least amount of traffic or activity.

Why Users are Indifferent

Nine times out of ten, an About section will have nothing to do with your users’ tasks. Very few people want to learn more about the inner workings or your organization. On the rare occasion when someone is interested, they’ll likely get what they need from a search rather than your site.

What To Do Instead

Create content around user actions and tasks first. Only offer content about yourself if it reinforces those tasks or truly sets you apart in a way that motivates people to choose you.

If you really need people to understand what makes you tick, create bite-sized, contextual content that can be placed throughout your site or app. Users likely won’t go to a dedicated About section, but they may glean information about you as they go about their tasks. And if a client or stakeholder demands useless content? Toss it in the “About” section where you know no one will see it. For more about creating useful content, read Taking the "You" Out of User Experience.

Navel-Gazing Newsletter Marketing

Stories about your achievements or new hires deter people from interacting with or subscribing to your content.

Why Users Tune You Out

Users go to great lengths to keep unwanted newsletters from landing in their inbox, especially those that don’t give them anything valuable. Company updates or news articles are useless. We repeat: users do not care about you.

What To Do Instead

Share valuable content. Help your users. We send out a newsletter regularly, freely sharing practical UX advice. No one cares about our office pets or our three-tiered vision. We almost never talk about ourselves. Our readers want to improve their digital products.

What do your users need? Find out and focus your newsletter on this. Share content that helps them solve problems or gives them information they care about. If you’re not sure what your users want, ask them.

Convoluted Internal Jargon

Many digital products are full of jargon that most users don’t understand. It can confuse and discourage them.

Why Users are Uninterested

Most people are not privy to your corporate jargon, and they don’t care to speak your language. Using internal buzzwords on a public facing site or app is discourteous at best. It shows you care more about sounding lofty than about user needs.

What To Do Instead

Speak plainly and clearly. Use everyday words. When in doubt, keep content short. Most people in the United States can’t read higher than a 6th grade level. So keep your content simple and focus on being understood. Succinctly explain what you do and how you can help. Speaking of which...

Unhelpful Help

People are bound to get stuck every now and again. Courteous companies provide guidance. The only downfall? Users often despise the help you provide.

Why Users Avoid Help

Users want rapid, simple answers. But they are more likely to encounter prefabricated FAQs, dense help sections, poor search, frustrating automated phone trees (IVRs), or annoying chat bots. They don’t want to bother with any of it.

What To Do Instead

No amount of help can make up for poor user experience. First, do everything possible to make your product easy to use. Then concentrate on help. Research the problems your users encounter and what content or tools help them the most.

Here are a few rules of thumb for making help helpful:

• Direct Contact — Most people simply want to contact you directly. Let them.
• Clear Placement — Place contact information in prominent, clear places.
• Multiple Methods — Allow for multiple contact methods (phone, email, social, or form). A simple form done right can go a long way.
• Context — Consider offering brief help content contextually, right where users need it.
• Brevity — Avoid long help sections. It is an admission of poor product quality.
• Effective FAQs — Don’t us FAQs as a crutch. Rather, like all content, keep answers brief. Prioritize the problems that cause the most trouble.
• Test AI Assistants — Don’t assume AI will miraculously solve everything. Test rigorously and only enable an AI assistant if you are entirely sure it won’t be a frustrating dead end.
• Support — Only offer contact options that you are fully willing to staff and support.

Spend Time Where It Matters Most

It might sound harsh, but users don’t care about anything that doesn’t have to do with their needs. They come to your digital product with an express purpose. Nothing else matters to them, so nothing else should matter to you. Spending time on anything else wastes your money and energy.

Focus on what matters most to your users. You’ll be rewarded with happy users and will be more likely to achieve your goals. And if you don’t know what users want, then spend time with them. Nothing ever goes to waste when you learn from your users.