A few days ago I wrote about a new feature I added to my passive income business, UniversityTutor.com: map based searching.

I got some really great feedback from a Breaking Free reader by the name of Tylor who said:

Looks good! If you wanted a little user interaction feedback: my first intention, immediately upon landing on the page, was to start double clicking on my state and zoom into my area. I didn’t see any people and just thought that there weren’t any tutors. It wasn’t until I read the sidebar (which obviously was a last resort) that I saw that I needed to search first.

I just thought it might be helpful for you. It looks great.

I think Tylor’s comment was spot on. Another person who I saw use the site had the exact same reaction. I also received a similar email from, of all people, MY MOTHER making the same suggestion.

Old Homepage:

New Homepage:

I think the change was a good one. The empty map took up so much screen real estate on the old home page that people’s eyes were naturally drawn to it. This is a huge realization I came to about a year ago: you need to be thinking about people’s first impressions of a web page and WHERE THEIR EYES WILL GO.

In the new homepage, the image is more clearly a screen shot (not something to be clicked) and the orange button draws more attention which is what I really want people to be doing (filling out those two fields and clicking the orange button).

If you aren’t deliberately having your user’s eyes move from one place to the next to the next, then you are losing people. Dan Kennedy also described this as a “well oiled chute” where there is only a single path that your prospect can do down. Read more about eye tracking studies to get a taste of this.

One benefit of these screen shots is that it allows your to “zoom out” and see where you eye might naturally go. There is no reason you can’t do this just by standing back from your monitor and getting the same effect. It’s a worthwhile exercise. Is there a clear path to take on your website even while standing back to the point where you can’t read the text?

Anyway, these sorts of incremental improvements can have a big effect over time. Watching users interact with your site can be a fascinating experience because they often don’t act how you’d assume. Google is great at this by the way and I personally believe it’s a big reason for their success: they do extensive and regular user studies where they just sit back and silently watch people use their software.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong