 There he is Just under the wire Can you close that door? Okay, I'm supposed to get started right at five so I'm Mike Hill and I'm the director of web development for Erickson living The title of the presentation is a little misleading It's we're actually going to be talking more about baby boomers and people beyond and some of the UX issues related to them It's already been pointed out to me that the title is a little misleading. So It's five o'clock on a Wednesday evening. You got to do what you got to do. So We um we have a team of I have a team of four people one of them here with two of them actually are here with me today and we we manage our corporate site and 20 community sites within that plus a few other corporate sites that are Our responsibility now Most of the sites are droolble a few or WordPress and then there's one or two that are just random home-built kind of things When I started this job, I Can't say that the idea of going to work at what I thought was a nursing home was the most exciting Sort of step in my career, but I can tell you that having been there now for almost six years I've probably learned more about usability and how people work with websites than I've ever learned up to that point and so most of what this presentation is about is takeaways from a redesign that we did about two years ago and what we learned about the audience what we've been learning about the Audience since and how we sort of continue to try to learn and evolve what we do I'm really hoping that We never do another redesign like the one we did two years ago. It was a huge effort We basically blew the old site up and rebuilt from the ground up and I would really rather Never do that again if we can avoid it I'm hoping that from here on out. It's kind of an iterative process We take on parts of the site and revamp them in kind of an agile sprint process That's really what we're going for We'll sort of see how that works. We're a company that most of our internal clients are in the marketing department and it's an interesting sort of relationship that we have with them and It's a very collaborative back-and-forth sort of process. So we'll see but anyway Erickson has 20 communities in 11 states and growing. We're getting ready to open another community in Florida We're looking at properties in the Midwest and we're looking at locations on the West Coast Our CEO really wants to be the number one retirement living Organization in the country if I had to bet on it. I think in the next five to Certainly ten years that may very well happen We're not a nursing home. That's one of the confusions that one of the things that's confusing to a lot of people We're more like an apartment complex Honestly, the independent living side of the business, which is the largest part of the business really looks like an apartment complex Our residents lead active lives In fact, most of the people that come to live with us who've been living on their own especially if they've lost a spouse or Been living on their own for some period of time. They generally see an uptick in their health We have people get off of medications that they're on we have people that statistically we're not really allowed to say it and and marketing but On average people tend to live four to five years longer with us than they do if they live in their own homes A lot of that has to do with the socialization that they get They tend to take better care of themselves and they have other people to help them motivate themselves to take care of themselves so We still have residents that run marathons not a lot a few We have residents that actively, you know exercise We have I don't know how many clubs and organizations that they get involved in so they're a very active Group of people and part of what we'll be talking about throughout this presentation Are the ways in which they they sort of defy what we typically think of as ways that seniors interact with technology I Through this quote in because they think every quote every presentation needs some sort of grand quote to get started with But this is from Tim Berners-Lee and I really liked sort of the last part of this that the web really should accommodate people Of a diverse range of hearing movement site and cognitive ability and a lot of what we're going to talk about today really relates to Those particular issues one of the things that I really try to work hard at is to get us to forget that We're working with Seniors and just really think about them as an audience not as sort of this monolithic group of people that can't hear can't see can't you know Those things exist, but they're not they don't define them And so we're going to look at some of that and talk about how we deal with some of those issues The other question is why worry about seniors? I Talked to people all the time that think this is kind of a throwaway audience and A couple of stats that I have here. I think will help change your mind about that in 2002 27% of the population was over the age of 50 and 2020 it's going to jump to 35% And the 50-plus population is going to double in the next more than double in the next 35 years So if you market products if you market services and you ignore this audience You're you could very well be cutting yourself out of 30 to 40 percent of the market that you could be serving a Baby boomer turns 60 every 7.5 seconds. So in the hour that it takes Well slightly less than an hour that it takes to give this presentation. That's almost 480 people and that's every hour. So It's an audience that is rapidly increasing. They're now more than there are now more Americans over the age of 65 than any time In the history of the country Eight million boomers spend more than 20 hours a week online. So this audience spends a ton of time online We're going to look at more sort of examples of that in a little bit and they make up a third of the online and social media Users that are out there Think this one this group is is even maybe the most important those aged 50 and older spend nearly seven billion dollars a year online That's seven billion dollars that you have access to if you're able to connect with them effectively if you're not That's part of what you're missing out on More importantly They use the internet as their primary means of research. So any major purchase that they're going to make They tend to go online Not that they're the only people that do that, but I can tell you that and in our particular Situation we used to be more of a direct sales kind of an organization people would come into the sales office They would sit down with a counselor. They'd work through the process Come in two or three times and eventually they would either kind of decide it wasn't for them or they would decide to settle and move in What we've been seeing more and more is These people are spending their time online researching the communities that we have Deciding which one might be right for them and our competitors and then they come in pretty much the way They come into car dealerships and everything else there. They know what they want They know what they don't want they know about the communities and they're just ready to go so It's really critical that you make sure that you're set up to accommodate that research and and the things that these people are looking to learn about your company I Think this is another really important one The notion that seniors don't use smartphones or that people over the age of 70 don't use smartphones is completely false they actually They're actually One of the fastest growing audiences for those devices part of that's because they're a little bit late to the game They they started buying them a little later than other people, but they're using them as Much as any other group is and if you think about it, it's the way that they stay in touch with their kids It's the way that they see their grandkids and if you go to buy a phone now It's pretty much what's available for you to buy so these people use mobile devices and they use them frequently and they use them well, so We spend a lot of time in our own company sort of talking about this and showing stats that Indicate that they're doing that So a couple of things that you have to consider when you think about this audience Nearly one in five people in the US have a disability and those issues increase as we age The oldest age group 80 and older are eight times more likely to have a disability than the rest of the group and many seniors experience age related Impairments as they grow older, but it's important to remember that these are sort of natural processes These are not necessarily Situations where people can't do things anymore. They just have some challenges with some of these issues as they age So vision one example Contrast can be a challenge sensitivity to certain colors can be an issue Perception and color perception can change as we age and Near-focus issues can obviously be a challenge. So It doesn't mean you have to make everything three times bigger than it was but you need to think about Maybe the fonts need to be a couple point sizes bigger than you might make them otherwise personally I think most fonts online are too small to begin with anyway I really think it's important to really think about Using font sizes that aren't tied to pixels or fixed sizes We like to use rams or m's if we can it works better with responsive design And it also works better as content moves to other types of screens So it makes it a lot easier to make your content portable This just gives you I got this from the the aim website I'm going to show an example of some of the other stuff they offer in a second But it just gives you a little bit of an idea of some of the challenges that people can have as they age These are more extreme examples It's important to remember that the majority of people don't really if they aren't really impacted by any of these things they Probably have some vision Issues related just to the general process of aging but not everyone's gonna get glaucoma and everyone's gonna have Cataracts, but these are some examples of what people can be dealing with When you start talking about color One of the things that we've put a lot of focus on in the last Two years for certain is accessibility Everything that that's good for accessibility is really good for this audience and Accessibility is important anyway. If you're not sort of thinking about it or looking at it. You really should be One of the things that we took a lot of time with was After we redesigned the site and we got it launched We did our best to consider accessibility as we were building but we were on a really really tight rollout schedule So we did everything we could for the rollout and then since then we've been iteratively Kind of looping back over the site to try to address what we could and one of the first things we looked at was color contrast One of the things I'm going to show you in a second is we we worked really hard to have an action color on the website What we sort of term an action color is We'd like to build a like a visual vocabulary on the site and we'd like to have certain colors Related to activities. So in our case we used an orange for anything that you could click and go somewhere else It worked well in a couple of situations And then there's a couple of challenges that I'm actually going to show you One of the things we did was check it and we found that we weren't quite accessible with that orange. So just I guess about three weeks ago We made a change across the site to shift the orange to a more accessible color. This is a great tool It's really easy to use and it'll really give you some insights into What's working and what's not working on your site and this is one of the easier things if you built with style sheets, which It's hard to imagine you wouldn't be now But it's a really easy adjustment to make and they've got other tools that are really helpful So it's really worth checking that out Some of the issues that we see are physical. So people have in some cases tremors. Sometimes they have issues of Being able to sit for an extended period of time may have back issues and a leg issues hip issues, whatever It's really important to think about other types of navigation and again. It gets back to the accessibility thing It's really important to make sure that your keyboard navigation is good it's really important to make sure that things like voice input and And that your navigation is clear I'm going to talk a lot more about this in a couple slides, but we're looking more and more at voice UI I actually went to one of the presentations earlier and one of the really interesting stats that they shared is that by 2020 30% of the web Interactions that occur are going to happen through a voice Interface and we've already started looking at how we can use voice UI and in some of our residents apartments To allow them to request services It's particularly useful for people that have mobility issues or have other types of challenges that make it a little tougher To use a traditional interface Hearing and you don't always think about hearing as being an issue for a website But if you're using video as much as a lot of websites are if you're starting to develop podcasts If you have any sort of other audio on the site You really want to think about people that can be challenged by audio issues or hearing issues, so When it comes to video one of the things we try to be really careful about is making sure that we never Autoplay a video that you're never going to see a video start. I hope on our website by itself If we feel like it's really really important to keep the user in charge of the experience and not take over the experience and start driving for them our audience tends to be very apprehensive about interactions with websites and anything you can do to sort of Keep them in charge really helps the process as soon as you start taking that control away that apprehension turns into Skepticism and you're very likely to lose them So this one is probably the one you need to pay the most attention to cognitive issues It's a misnomer that as we age we can't remember things anymore people Certainly as they age do see memory related issues, but it is not true that everyone's going to get Alzheimer's It's not true that everyone's going to lose their memory However, there can be challenges in some cases with short-term memory So things like forms and really deep navigation structures can represent a challenge people can forget where things are They forget they know they saw something somewhere. They don't remember where they saw it So the simpler and more straightforward you can keep your navigation the more simple and straightforward You can keep your terms the better your chances of helping people sort of stay with you and keep track of what's going on Privacy is another big issue and with the recent kind of stuff that's been going on with Facebook I think we're gonna actually see more evolving out of this But they already have a skepticism about handing over their information online They have they have skepticism about handing over their information on the phone or even face-to-face So when you build forms, it's important that you're really clear about what happens when the form submits what you're doing with the data and Having a privacy policy helps, but that's not really the solution You really within the area of the form. It's really important that they get some idea of what's gonna happen to their data Once they hit that submit button and you want to keep the forms short if they get really in depth If they get really carried away, they'll bail on them. I mean, that's a common sense kind of thing I think applies to every audience, but it's particularly relevant to this one So again too many layers and terms We found that it's really important to stay away from industry centered Terms things that you know what they mean, but your audience may not It's one of the examples is a difference between careers and jobs The simpler the term the more kind of obvious the term the better It just ends up being something that they have an easier time kind of retaining and dealing with So I put this in Because I think it's important to keep in mind that older people may have some disabilities But being older in and of itself is not a disability So you shouldn't approach the audience automatically as if they're disabled and start Treating them as everything has to be bigger. Everything has to be louder. Everything has to be brighter It's about accommodation but avoiding being patronizing so That sounds like an obvious thing, but it's easy to find yourself going This is not big enough. I need to make it bigger and pretty soon the site's just screaming We know you're old everything's really big Everything's really bright and and people get offended because if you think about who this audience is at least in our case the people that we deal with are People who have been professionals. They've been judges lawyers managed large companies To take those people and then insult them with you know Patronizing interfaces is just going to drive them away. It's not going to bring them close to us It's going to push them away. So we try to spend a lot of time learning who they are Our audience tends to be more on the professional side and that particular audience spends about 90% of their time going online And 82% of them have broadband so they have the days when they have slow connections and can't handle sort of more involved interfaces are gone One thing that we found is that after about 75 it varies and honestly every year as the boomers kind of come closer to us This number creeps up but After 75 their use drops dramatically and what we see at that point is that their adult children or their Caregivers tend to fill in and do a lot of that reach with them or for them It's really starting to be more with them not for them, but We do see a shift and so I'm going to show you in a second how we try to keep track of that and stay aware of it They're online a lot 70% of them are online every day this one I think if I had had the time I would have updated this one, but Social media is very big with this group Facebook is their most used channel We've seen probably more success with Facebook in the last couple years than anything else that we've done Facebook advertising has been really successful for us Facebook itself has helped drive a lot of traffic I'm really curious to see what happens in the next few months I think a lot is going to be determined by how Facebook handles the situation. They're in right now and I'm also a little concerned about how Involved the government is going to get in sort of dictating what they can and can't do but that's another discussion for another time Usability is crucial with this group. I mean usability is crucial with every group with this one It can be the difference between you having an interaction and losing an interaction there. They're They're skeptical and they're they're nervous in a lot of cases about the web to begin with if you make it hard for them If you make it challenging for them, they'll go and they're not likely to come back. So We spend a lot of time trying to understand things about them talked about this already clarity of terms and service services, so again using terms that Relate to things they understand not terms you understand and making sure that you're really transparent in how you talk about those things And then I threw this in there Because I found myself having this conversation with people a lot at work The the discussion would sort of drift towards. Yeah, but seniors don't do that. Yeah, but seniors don't use that Yeah, but seniors don't have smartphones and I finally one day said Where do you guys think we are? the internet started in 1996 if you retired in the last seven years you spent at least ten years in the business place With where the internet was playing a major part in how business work granted It's it's much bigger now than it was in 96 But the idea that these people retired and just all of a sudden said I Gotta get involved with this internet thing. I gotta see what this is all about. I got time now. Did you know this was out there? I had no idea It's it's absurd So it's really important that that you get over this notion that this is all new That they have and and you need to go slow, you know It's just like if someone's hard of hearing and you talk louder like what do you think you're doing? I mean, it's it's it's ridiculous so I threw that one in just because I I found that to be a recurring sort of thing One of the things we spend a ton of time on before we did this last redesign Was looking at our audience. We had tons of research one of the great things about being in this company is that We have Access to a lot of research. We have access to teams that can help us do research. We do focus groups all the time we have the ability to go out and get more research done and so the next couple slides I'm going to show you we in the case of Redesign we did a lot of the research ourselves with our internal team We did some research with an external team and then we did some research with a variety of other tools Like user testing comm if you've never used it. It's great It's a little less formal a little less structured, but that's actually why we liked it and why we used it One of the things we spent a lot of time on was understanding the groups within the group So there's the the overarching group and then there's a subgroups within it in our case It's the senior prospects and these numbers these brackets are They're sort of estimates Estimates is the wrong word that 65 to 75 is the number we work with it's probably actually a little broader one way or the other But you have to sort of pick something so and then we have the adult children The adult children are becoming a much much bigger part of the process than they had been in the past So we're really looking now at how we can talk to both audiences uniquely but but In ways that sort of overlap so that one of the challenges we found is If you're the prospect and you feel like we're talking to your son or daughter and not talking to you All of a sudden there's this adversarial kind of relationship that starts to develop and we don't want that at the same time The adult children have concerns that the prospects don't have they're worried about are you taking my mother or father's? Money from them. Are you going to take care of them? Are they going to be safe or do you have reliable health care? Do you have reliable security? the prospects are worried about How far am I from the happy hours how far and I'm not joking We we had a photo shoot one time. We interrupted a happy hour almost started a riot And then there's the influencers so those are doctors therapists clergy people caregivers Attorneys friends other family members siblings We really we know that all these audiences exist and they all have different concerns We spent a lot of time trying to understand each one of them and how to relate to them and what we built Where a series of personas now? I know Recently there's been a lot of discussion about the value of personas and whether they're a waste of time and whether you should still be doing them And they're useless. I would tell you that in my experience. I Couldn't disagree more. I think that personas are invaluable. I think Doing everything based on personas is probably not the best idea I think they should inform what you do I don't think they should specifically direct what you do But without sort of going out and really getting to know the people that are in your audience I just don't know how you build a site that that meets their needs So we spent a lot of time This is sort of an example of a piece that was created by our external team by the one of our vendors and it's good we like it they spent a lot of time interviewing us they interviewed some of our prospects and Brought this back. We discussed it got it revised a couple of times But I want to show you one that we did ourselves that I actually like better And I'll kind of explain why I like it better these were all done based on Personal in face-to-face interviews with people that we identified as kind of falling in different categories With us some that were more receptive to living in one of our communities other people that literally said Unless you throw a bag over me and drag me there I will never live in one of those places and then people that were sort of in the middle and we didn't just want to know how they felt about Living in one of our communities we wanted to understand how aware are they of what we represent and This is what I like the most we spent a lot of time talking about the devices they used and we didn't speculate We asked them and we actually in some cases got them to prove it like he said Yes, I have a smartphone Can you get online with it? I have a smartphone and and then we and then and then we would say Well, so what do you do with it? I look at stuff on Facebook. I you know, do you fill out forms on it? No, I don't think I would do that and and we really got to understand how they use the devices Not just what devices do they own and then we also spent some time Getting down to what frustrates them. What do you like about websites? What don't you like about websites? And so I really even though I think the other Person as we did were good and really helped us I really thought these were actually in the long run more useful and more beneficial These are actually done by one of the people on our team And again, here's an example of some of the work we did with with the external group this one is Important because if you just talk to people that like you and are telling you what you want to hear You're gonna build the wrong website if you're not listening and talking to the people that don't like you don't Really believe in what you do and understand why it's really hard to build a site that kind of meets everybody where they want to be met and it's important to understand the realities of What are the things that you say that they don't like, you know And it's not so much so you cannot say those things It's so you can really understand what is it about us that people have an issue with and how can we help? Maybe change their their thinking what are the things that we can say to them and show to them that demonstrate that? Maybe they don't really understand who we are. So we spent a lot of time looking at those We spent a lot of time looking at the people that like us and the adult children because we really wanted to understand how to Connect with them and then one of the things that I Think for me that I spent an awful lot of time doing was digging through Google analytics And you really can't do this work without getting a really good understanding of Google analytics If you or some comparable analytics package, I'm not here to sell Google analytics But the data that you can get I'm a big believer that in not having arguments with people over things unless I have data Because it's just a waste of time because it's just your opinion against my opinion unless I can come to you and say Yeah, I understand you think that you're wrong and now I'm going to show you why you're wrong and and so for example When they said adult children don't use our website. That's the adult children segment right there That's the 65 plus segment right there. They're almost equal. In fact now the slides actually a little bit old Those bars are almost even and in some situations that it actually shifts and the adult children represent a larger population It's also important for us to not forget that someone who's when you're talking about somebody who's 85 Their kids are not 18 Their kids are in their 60s and that means they're close to being potential prospects themselves. So While we may be having a conversation that's specifically about their parent We can also be having a conversation with them because they're technically the next wave of residents and So a lot of the language and the things we talk about are very similar The other important demographic issue Women still make up the largest part of our audience women are still the people that make more of the health care decisions They're the people that do more of the research whether that's the spouse whether that's an adult child Whether it's a caregiver and so we watch that demographic pretty closely as well We spend a lot of time looking at the screens that they're using This is the thing that we've seen change the most over the last couple of months Actually less couple of years when we started desktop was probably 70% mobile was probably 25 to 30% This year we've actually hit a point where it's 50-50 and at times. It's actually skewing towards mobile We're actually seeing periods of time when we get much more mobile traffic than we get desktop or any other type of traffic And that's really important because while the site's responsive We're really starting to think more about In that mobile view, what should we be offering people? What are they looking for? What are the what are the contextual issues that we need to be thinking about that? That being in that mobile environment kind of represents Can't really see the slide really well But we spend a ton of time looking at the pages that people go to where are they spending the most time? We know what we think they want to see the most its floor plans its pictures of apartments its pricing and It's just general information about the community That's historically been the case It hasn't changed a lot in the time that I've been there, but that doesn't mean it won't change One of the things we're doing now. We recently switched to part out for our email Automation platform part out gives us a ton of analytics that we didn't have before So now when you complete a form we can see the entire path that led up to that form completion And we can start looking at what pages are referring people to that form most often and what does that tell us and again? one of the things I'm really fortunate to have is a web analyst and She's tremendous at reading kind of between the lines So one of the risks with data is you can start it kind of start flying by wire and you Looking at data that says hey this page is the most traffic page on the site and you sort of naturally go Okay, we got to really focus on that page But you really need to be paying attention as to why that's the most traffic page on the site Sometimes it's because it's the page they want to get to sometimes. It's the page you force them to get to so you really have to be kind of Looking at the numbers understanding the numbers and then trying to take the numbers apart and understand what it is They're telling you so we spend a ton of time tracking everything we do We put UTM tracking on all our email any external links have UTM tracking any Facebook advertising any ad words advertising We track everything and we look at where people came from we try to correlate Campaigns to page views. I mean we're we're constantly kind of taking things apart and putting them back together to try to get a better picture Exactly what's going on So this is our old website This is the site that we built before the one that we have now that led to our redesign And I want to kind of quickly walk through some of the things that we learned and some of the things we did This is not the worst website. I've ever seen and Now I'm going to tear it all apart So There were things about this that were that were good. It was responsive when I got there. They had just finished it It it didn't look bad. It took good advantage of our photography. We do all our own photography They did take good advantage of that in some cases. They took too much advantage of it and I'll show you in a second You know, we were speaking about things like video we had Kind of promotions internally we had a lot of links a lot of information The problem is this thing is like a solid bar It's so dense and it's so packed together that you can't you can't find anything and you can't see anything And you don't know what you're supposed to do first People never saw this navigation There were just a lot of issues. So we started kind of taking it apart and We started thinking about how do we make this better? How can we clean this up? One of the other issues we confronted was yeah, the site was responsive But in the course of making it responsive we ended up with weird problems like on the desktop You had to click any of these navigation points and then you got this menu So a couple of issues you're clicking this thinking you're going to Senior living options and now you get this menu. So you're like, oh wait a minute So now I got to read all this plus Who does that? I Mean you're used to hovering and you get a menu and if you don't then you click and you go somewhere So there were a lot of behaviors on the site that just weren't expected and and Conflicted with what people would have expected to be the case. This is one of the sub pages Again, there's a toolbar here. There's things to click here There's ad banners or social media. I mean, it's just there's just like a ton of stuff And if you think back to sort of the whole cognitive overload issue People get overwhelmed and you give them too many choices You feel like you're doing a good thing because you give them a lot of options But what you're really doing is overwhelming them and they end up not doing anything So we really worked hard to try to start taking some of this apart and this is the new site now This site is not a landmark of great web design. It's it's a contemporary looking site Our real intent was not to try to win design awards Our intent was to try to meet the needs of the audience and to try to be clear and focused and Make it easy to find the things that we thought they wanted based on what they told us so Most people that come in want to find the community. So we put this really big button up here Our action color is that orange. It's actually a little darker than that now We tried to do a lot of things to make this more intuitive. We tried to limit the choices So as you scroll, you're not looking at an overwhelming series of choices You're you're looking at limited sets of information and we tried to make it things that related To different audiences and different things at one time There's a lot that we sort of have found we could have done better that orange on white Was probably not the best decision that we made and we're rethinking that right now the way that we show video It's great that it's this big video. We felt like it could be a little more compelling and we're working on that right now we do these really big call-outs and We try to Tell people what's gonna happen when you click that stuff so that they have some expectation It's not like a like a shell game like click it and see what happens We tried to organize the footer in ways that that information was useful We get a ton of people like I'm sure all of you do coming to the site looking for careers looking for jobs So we tried to make that easier for that audience. This is one of the community Sorry, this is one of the community home pages for a lot of people once they decide which community they're interested in This really becomes their home page and they never see that corporate page again So we really wanted these to be effective as standalone pages. We tried to do things To reduce the demand on their attention So we do a lot of tabbed interfaces like this Where we can take a small space and pack a lot of content into it But do it in a way that they're not overwhelmed by what they're seeing at any given point in time We're in the process of replacing these ad banners. I talked earlier about our relationship with marketing Marketing insisted they had to have ad banners and we kept saying they don't look at the ad banners But we have to have them But they don't look at them, but we have to have them and so we went back and forth and back and forth And when I get to the testing portion here in a second, I'll show you part of how we sort of resolve some of those Debates tried to group the content in ways that made sense similar to the home page Content areas are grouped we try to group content related to audiences together so that as you sort of scroll down the page You're just naturally and counting thing encountering things that relate to you. You're not having things shoved in front of you We did some interesting things with the navigation That I think are really important that comes Here's how we use video a little more effectively We're changing these video galleries now to to make the display of these videos a little cleaner and a little more intuitive than they are now But we found videos are really effective tool with this audience. There's things that you can say with a video We're lucky to have our own video team and editing team And there's things that you can say and do with video you just can't do as well with content Other types of content. So we try to use that more and more So here's the navigation piece one of the things we Found was really important is don't take my navigation away from me. Don't move stuff around on me and don't change it So this whole header stays fixed when you scroll and this left navigation, which is a little bit of a throwback Stays in place and that left navigation Doesn't move but the content does so all of those links Give you a sort of an overview of what's on this page And as you click any of these things we scroll the content up to you So we use kind of smooth scrolling and anchor links to just bring the content to you You don't just scroll to it. We sort of bring it to you and that helps people Maintain their relationship with the content and not have to remember where something was It's an example of one of our floor plan pages This is one of the most popular pages on the site and again We try to group all the information and we try to be really transparent. So there's the pricing Here's the photos of what that apartment looks like there's the floor plan and it's all on one page And then at the bottom if that wasn't what you were looking for Here's other stuff that we think you might be looking for so you're not clicking all over the place trying to find stuff in the old site that page was probably split into Three or four pages and you'd be clicking all over the place to try to get that stuff and just based on the stats We knew people weren't doing that. So that was a that was a big kind of win for the redesign It's our new site. I'm gonna kind of step it up a little bit here, but this is our new site We revamped this when we Redid the site. We actually merge. It was a separate site. We merged it into our main site Again, try to keep the content browsable Used really big large blocks try to use headlines that that connect with people Same calls to action same large blocks same orange This is the newsletter that they did There were about eight people in the whole company that wanted to do this newsletter Nobody thought it was a good idea that newsletter now They started out the year with 250 people on their list by the end of the year they were They were pretty close to five thousand names and all they did was put a call out on the website and say would you like to get our Newsletter so now this thing goes out to five thousand people every month It drives a ton of traffic to our corporate site and we have data that shows that several people From this newsletter ended up moving into the community. So and it it cost almost nothing to do So testing challenges One of the things a lot of what you're gonna see here is Are things that you see with any group that you test but there are some issues with seniors that are a little bit unique They're less confident. It's really important to have moderated testing So you need to have somebody there with them to help them kind of With when they get stuck to ask questions to kind of interpret what's being said and sometimes just to ask questions We we did a focus group once and we had ad banners on the site and we said If you wanted to click on an ad banner on the page Where would you go and we literally watch them roll back and forth over the ad banner and We had the moderator go Are you not interested in the ad banners and I don't see the ad banners and We kind of then oh, I thought that was an image. I didn't know that that was a banner Some people wouldn't click it because they didn't want to go Wherever it was going to take them and they don't like ads to begin with so they were ignoring it That really helped us when we went back to marketing and said those ad banners you want You're the only people that want some nobody else does and so we now are in the process of Swapping out the ad banners for quick links to content that we know they're more interested in They're 45% less likely to try an alternative. So if you tell them I want you to do this And and there's another way to do it They're 45% less likely to do it They're twice as likely to abandon a task as other audiences and they give up 30 seconds sooner than other audiences do and They blame themselves 90% of the time now that sounds like a good thing because You can sit there going yeah, you don't know what you're doing. It's not my fault It is your fault, but the problem is They give up so quickly because they go you see I just can't do this and they move on That's why you have to make it easy for them because that you know that they're they kind of come to the whole process Think and they don't know how to do it. You don't want to confirm that for them 50% of them keep cheat sheets So they'll bring pads with them and they'll sit there and write down the names of the pages Okay, I mean Whatever works, but but so one of the things that told us and that we learned from that is make sure your print style sheet works Well, because this audience prints a lot of stuff. I mean we've had people come in to our communities with the entire Community website printed out and they made notes on the pages of things. They wanted to talk about so We wouldn't have found that if we hadn't done the testing They often have banner blindness. I would have said they always have banner blindness, but that's a little too absolute for people It's not a monolithic audience There's groups within the groups and you can't just test for the overall audience. You have to be thinking about the subgroups 50 to 65 they're pretty careful After 65 the challenges really start to increase and Don't forget to test the adult children So how we test we use litmus to test all of our email if you never use litmus, it's great You can AB test subject lines. You can AB test content. It's fantastic. It's a little bit expensive, but it's worth it Browser stack to test all of our pages We have to deal with so many different browsers and we have so many pages Something like that's the only way we can keep up with it We used to use aliqua and we used to AB subject test all we used to AB test all of our subject lines We since switched to pardot We're still kind of adjusting to pardot. I can't say that we've had a ton of success with it yet We've only been on it for about Not quite a month, but it provides a ton of analytics beyond what aliqua gave us So we're in the process of looking at how we can leverage more of that testing do a lot of focus groups And we don't just focus group on the website We focus group on how they use technology what technologies? What are they afraid of what aren't they afraid of how do your parents use the web? What do you do with your parents when you look at the web? We everything anything we can do and Then I really try to push for anecdotal testing I try to get people on the team and people in the company to just talk to their family members and ask them What do you think of our site? What do you like it? It's pretty random But we've gotten some really good stuff through that process That's a look at at what litmus looks like. It doesn't really help you much because it's really hard to see Optimize Lee if you've never used Optimize Lee Optimize Lee lets you do multivariate testing So you can create different views of a page in Optimize Lee you can specify how you want audiences broken out You can do it by criteria. You can just do it by percentages You can say I want half the audience to see this with the other half to see this It then does all the math for you and tells you which one was most successful and it can really help you make decisions about Different UI and different imagery and different colors and it also solves a lot of arguments because instead of debating it and arguing You just build a test run it and then you know, here's what happened. Sorry Here's some of the testing results that we did when we were early on we did envision mock-ups and we did testing with Our own internal people in blue and then we use user testing comm which was more random kind of universal Testers and we really thought we're gonna see a bigger discrepancy But we were actually pretty happy that they came up pretty even but this is just an example of some of the stuff We looked at early on the other thing. I'd like to mention I was in a presentation earlier and they said enterprise sites take two to three years We did all of this in less than a year and we built 21 sites I Don't remember that probably somewhere between 18 and 20 sites in four months with four people We were not for happy people But we But what we built it and we got it done So here's some quick takeaways almost done Know your user invest in personas invest in data and and invest in focus groups Those things don't have to cost a lot of money They can cost a lot of money if you have a lot of money and can spend it It's not a bad place to spend it, but you don't have to spend a fortune on it You just have to figure out how to do it Accommodate don't patronize so make it easier, but don't be insulting Be intentional be clear and be focused so make sure that people understand what you're trying to say and say what you're trying to say Don't equivocate don't don't you know try to trick people Limit the number of choices available at any one time Use contrast really carefully use reverse fonts really sparingly We're actually on our way to eliminating reverse fonts from the website It's gonna take us a little while to get there But it's one of the more challenging accessibility issues and we're really trying to watch the subtle color differences Watch small fonts if you have to use small fonts bold helps Watch the industry terms and acronyms Make your forms clear make sure that they know what's gonna happen when they submit it and Don't assume that because you get it they're gonna get it you build websites all the time you use websites all the time They don't and you know your industry. They don't so don't assume because it makes sense to you It's gonna make sense to them go ask them and Be willing to admit that you were wrong which is another challenge use familiar terms Keep navigation options available keep the control with the user that to me That's one of the biggest takeaways that I got from the whole process This is the other one you have to be transparent. These people come from a generation of use car salesman of door-to-door salesman of bogus infomercials of People telling you it's gonna do this and it doesn't do that and then they feel like they got taken and they carry that with Them so you've got to be clear you got to be transparent You're not You're not gonna get them to come in and ask how much something is because you didn't put the price on the website They're just gonna go to your competitors website that did put the price on there and they're gonna go talk with them What's good for accessibility is good for seniors. It's good for everyone. It's particularly good for this group SEO is really important a major part of our audience comes in from a search They start with a search So I'm not telling you anything. You don't know when I say SEO is important. It's really important with this audience Links are good as long as they're clear if you haven't read don't make me think you should go get it and read it You can read it in an afternoon. It's a great book and then the last thing these these people are doctors lawyers teachers executives parents remember it and respect them when you're building the site for them don't build a site that looks like you built it for somebody in preschool and It's built for somebody who may be used to run a multinational corporation So this last quote sort of bookended the quotes It's really important to remember that the stuff we do is Being accessed by people all the time. It's becoming the primary way people get news Information by things and if we don't build it in ways that they can all use it We're sort of disabling people's ability to function in society So it's really important to make sure we do everything we can to make these sites work for them And to make them easy to use and to make them accessible So that's it Any questions made it with five five minutes to spare. I didn't think I would do that Oh, right, and you have a team of four or five and one of those people is a web analyst Two of our developers one's a web analyst one's an intern and I'm really curious if you'd be willing to share the job Description for your web analyst because as part of the web development team that works with our internal marketing team quite a bit That feels like that's a missing piece for us. Yeah I would share it. I have to find it, but I sure okay. Yeah My emails, okay, I'll get it. You can get it from me. I'd be happy to share it with you Okay, you mentioned that you're seeing seniors Have a lot of engagement on Facebook and you mentioned you're having success with the ads on Facebook They're clicking through. Are you also seeing that they're sharing your website on Facebook and engaging with like your group? um, I Would say yes, it's anecdotal more than I don't have any direct data. We've been working on trying to figure that out Cross browser stuff still a little tricky, but we're we definitely see that they pass stuff around and we know that they You know they have friends they have neighbors, you know One of the things we see is somebody moves out of a community and That community The people in that community are starting to reach the age where this is something that they're thinking about so One neighbor comes in they tell another neighbor we do see some of that But I don't have any data really that I can specifically quote numbers from so usually when we talk about Accessibility we talk about things like screen readers or like tabbing through the page And things like that have a really high learning curve And I would imagine that there would be at least some seniors that would be a lot more hesitant to Embrace things like that and I was wondering if you had any data or thoughts or came across that or even understand what I'm trying to ask That's a really great question and no, I don't I wish I did I can tell you that we We happen to be located pretty close to the natural national federation for the blind and they have a tremendous accessibility group And I did speak with a couple people from there about some of the things that that they've learned and how we could sort of translate That's what we do But we don't we don't have it I would love to have more of that information I'm trying to get more of that information I can also tell you that while accessibility is really really important to us our site is not fully accessible yet It's on its way some where we're in pretty good shape in certain areas. There's also some pretty glaring omissions that we're trying to work through so You know usually when I do these things somebody goes well you said this and I just wondering you're saying it doesn't do that so I know Yeah, I was just Really thinking about like zooming in for example like to make the font sizes bigger. Yep Does everybody know how to zoom in? So that's a great question one of the things we did is we you can't see it in the comps But if you go to the website We have a toolbar that gives them the ability to zoom the page. So We That's a great example of yeah, you can do it From within the system if you know how to do it most people don't so we sort of put a button there You can just keep clicking in the fonts get bigger and so Yeah Two questions one the all the research you've done and obviously you've spent money on Are you willing to make that available so we can kind of see what you got out of that? Or is that for internal use only um? I'm willing to share it I'm gonna have to talk to some of my bosses and see if they're okay with you. Well, that's a little bit more immediate with your findings Scrolls versus clicks Do you see? What do you see the audience hovering towards? Are they more willing to scroll or would they rather click to get to the So we did we did we used crazy egg and a couple other things on the site to do scroll testing and We were actually surprised about Not gonna get these numbers right upwards of about 30 to 40 percent of the audience was making it to the bottom of the page even on really long pages which Honestly really surprised me Since we changed to the sort of the anchors approach and bringing the content to them It kind of skews some of those numbers because they're not scrolling the pages coming to them So it's been a little harder to get data on those but we and we also tried breaking the really big pages down into more Compact kind of centralized content. So that changed things a little bit, too But we we've seen page engagement keep going up We're I think our time on site now is once they get into the communities in some cases It's as high as three or four minutes five minutes in some cases and we've when we started When I got here, we were at about 90,000 page views a month. We just crossed 200,000 I Think last week actually and we're seeing it continue to rise. So Most of the numbers are really good our bounce rates still a little higher than I'd like it to be It's depending on which page you're on some of them are up around 30 40 percent Didn't surprise me on the corporate page on the sub pages I like to see it a little lower and it's been dropping so it's moving the right direction, but I don't know if that answers your question Hey, I'm interested in all the testing you're doing. Can you talk about how you schedule it? Do you want to do you have a map where it's like these are the tests? We're gonna run at these points or is a little bit more So this is where what I tell you is not in any way going to relate to reality We try to test as Much as we can whenever we can but we have such a small team and we're so busy that a lot of times what it comes down to is just Kind of empowering people in the team to be able to use these tools and let them go to tests sort of on their own Whenever they have time to do them we do as Part of development we try to block out time for testing before we release Sometimes we do it really really well. Sometimes we do what we can before we have to launch it and then we figure it out after Thank you Are you gonna share your slides? Yeah, yeah, I'll share the slide you post on Twitter or something. Um, I I'm not sure how Drupal Khan does it. I think I post them to Yeah, what she said I'm gonna do that and and you're welcome to get my email address and Email me and I'll send it to you if you can't get it any other way There's nothing in here. That's proprietary. So Okay, oh We We do it And we've had I would say we've had success with it. I Was a little apprehensive about it. I wanted to do it. I Was a little concerned about it freaking people out To be honest with this whole Facebook thing. I'm even more concerned about retargeting I Think it's I think it's like anything else we do. I'm open to trying anything that makes sense But I want to try to understand. Oh great. I want to understand kind of the downside and and I like us to do That kind of stuff in a limited release way so that we can sort of pilot it and see kind of how they react to it Retargeting's work. It's really expensive or at least it can be I mean we we've got decent budgets for ad buys But not enormous ones. So Try to be a little careful with that Anything else Okay, well, thanks a lot really appreciate you taking the time to come out Yes, sir