Cloggage, A
Posted on May 16th, 2008
Every website has a purpose; a raison d’etre. Every user experience has a start point and and end point. On a website you have a landing page (start point) and a page at which a transaction has been completed or (one of) the websites objectives has been fullfilled (the end point). Somewhere inbetween there are a lot of opportunities for ‘cloggages’ to occur stopping that desired end point from being reached.
Cloggages come in all shapes and sizes
A cloggage can be clearly defined and very specific to a small area of a page, or it can be spread through the process and more general; much like a clogged drain. Cloggages also have variable permeability and a tendency to clog some demographics more than others. For these reasons a web marketer would only stand up and shout “I’VE IDENTIFIED A CLOGGAGE IN THE SYSTEM CAPTAIN” accross the office in a Scottish accent when a specific and highly impermeable cloggage becomes apparent.
This makes life easier for the other workers as they will instantly know what the destressed employee is referring to.
Don’t plough traffic through a clogged system
You could send a lot of valuable traffic into a process only to find that an unnaturally high proportion of it is leaving at a specific point. A close analytical analysis of the analytics may help you establish where this cloggage is occuring but testing in it’s various forms is really the best method.
By changing various aspects of the page in a long and painstaking process of experimentation one can identify and remove cloggages or increase their permeability if they are necessary aspects of the web page.
Remember though, perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, it is when there is nothing left to take away. In other words, the less potential cloggages the better.
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