An online awards platform - Website UX review

UX Expert Paul Boag dissects Awardify (awardify.io), a customized online awards platform. He focuses on the effectiveness of the main tag line, delves into how to frame pricing to reflect relative value, and suggests techniques to highlight the ways that this product is different and how to position that as a strength.

Transcript below.

Topics covered in this video: Single page sites, Forms.

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Transcript

Hello, my name is Paul Boag. And you're watching First Impressions, a video series produced in conjunction with the lovely people at Balsamiq. They send me a link to check out that's been submitted to their website. I go and look at it, and give you my first impressions, unedited, unscripted, we just take a look at the site, give a little bit of a critique, little bit of usability testing.

So let's dive in, and see what they've sent me this time. The website they've sent through is called Awardify. Awardify.io which is a full suite, human-friendly online awards system one presumes or app. I can't say I'm overly impressed by that first strapline. Unfortunately, it is good in some ways, it says it's an online awards platform I'm guessing, but full suite, human-friendly, not quite sure what that means.

A full suite in preference to a half-assed app and human-friendly in preference to what, a robot friendly app? So I think the strapline needs a little bit of work. Sorry, I've been rude straight out of the gate. That's not very nice of me. But yeah, I mean, at least it says what it is, which is an online awards, great. Good clear call to action straight out of the gate.

The fact that the name of the product actually describes what they do is great. The fact they've got an illustration that, you know, shows someone getting an award, that's great as well. Silly little thing, but I would probably flip that image, so that he's looking into the page rather than out of the page.

It's a ridiculously small thing, but it will focus the user on to the text rather than drawing their eye off of the page because we tend to follow the eye line of figures that we see even those sort of hip ones like that. Right, let's scroll down the page, and see what we've got, flexible award structures. So it looks like it's an app.

Complete control over every category, simple, straightforward judging designed to make you shine. Mobile friendly, online payments, public voting, sponsors, and data export and personal support. Okay, so I like that, a clear set of features that it offers and associated benefits.

The only one that stands out a little bit to me is this designed to make you shine because all the rest are features, right? It offers a flexible award structure, it provides control over every category, it's straightforward to judge. It's mobile-friendly. It allows online payments, it allows public voting, it includes sponsors, and then you've got this designed to shine. I'm not quite sure what this is.

With a comprehensive admin panel, user-friendly members area for entry submissions. Right. Okay, so you probably just want to reword that something like user-friendly interface, something along those lines. Designed to shine, suddenly kind of goes into marketing speak where you've been so clear and straightforward everywhere else.

So I really like that. I'm not seeing...let's go down to...data export, personal support, human-friendly awards from $540. So then we get to pricing. I'm not seeing a demo anywhere, or any videos or anything like that. Are these clickable?

No. It's just like a single-page site, which is fine. No problem with a single-page site. But it would be good if we had some demos of some of this kind of stuff, rather than just graphics. You know, this is great because I can see how that works. I feel like I need a little bit more here to show off some of the different areas maybe some videos, maybe a slideshow.

The mobile-friendly stuff is fine, the online payment stuff is fine, public voting and maybe, you know, to see a little bit more there would be good. Sponsors, sponsors are saved as a library to reduce your set up work each year. You can add sponsors to an award season, and assign them to it. So again, I'd like to be able to see how to do that a little bit rather than just a set of, you know, logos which doesn't really help as much.

I want to see the interface. Whenever there's an application you want to see how it works, you know, and dig into it a little bit more. Or even, like, just a video, one of these short, you know, minute-and-a-half videos that runs through the product a little bit would be hugely useful.

But that said, this is a good case study of clearly showing what it is you do, set aside the strapline for a minute, you know, it clearly lays out how it works, you know, what features it offers in a very straightforward manner. And I really like that. Some of the other sites that we've reviewed in this season could really do with, you know, being that clear and concise.

Let's have a look at pricing because that's always a big one. Human-friendly awards from $540. This human-friendly thing, really don't get that. I know what they're kind of getting at, they're saying it's, you know, intuitive, easy, but then say it's intuitive and easy rather than human-friendly.

It seems a bit kind of marketing BS to me, but anyway from $540 per year. Now, as a yearly price, okay. Now instinctively, I want to kind of go 540 divided by 12. And the reason that I want to do that is because most other apps I come across have a monthly fee structure.

And so I'm trying to judge. I wonder whether they do monthly. Let's have a look. No, it's all per year pricing. So yeah, that's a little bit sneaky because, you know, not sneaky. But because I want to run an award over, you know, you have a, I don't know, X amount of time where people can submit an award, you run the award, and then that's done for a year.

So, you know, to say it's a year isn't, you know, $540 per award session, basically. So that feels quite expensive to me. And we'll come on a little bit... I think it's worth having a conversation about pricing because I think this might be the thing here. Let's look at what we get. This "from" is what always makes me nervous, you know, because actually they mean it's more than that.

So $540 a year gives you up to 50 entries. That's not that many depending on what it is you do. Unlimited categories in groups, one online payments, one free domain, awards website, customized to your brand, hosting... Oh, hosted on a private server? So does that mean I'm hosting it rather than them?

So it's not software as a service. That's a little bit buried there. So how does this work? Daily backups, ongoing platform improvement, bug fixes. This feels like it should be software as a service. I'm not quite sure why it's not. Then standard's you get everything from startup plus unlimited entries.

So really, it's $840 in most cases. I'm not sure what one awards channel is, so that's slightly confusing. I think there needs to be some explanation around that. Oh, I miss...here we go.

So there's some more pricing stuff going on here. So in some ways, this pricing looks very clear, right? And at least they're not hiding the price. I hate it. How many sites have you gone to where they actually hide the price? They don't tell you how much the flipping thing costs. So at least they've been upfront with the price which is great.

And on the surface, it looks very clear, you know, nice columns and all the rest of it. But then you know, you got some ambiguity as to what a channel involves. And then they start being a little bit sneaky. We suddenly got a onetime setup fee of $995. That's a big setup fee, which is not surprising if it's something that's going to be hosted on my own platform, right?

If that's what that means, but does a private server mean they set up a dedicated machine just for my awards, which seems like overkill? So I'm a little confused around what's going on there. And so we got another $995 on top of it for the first time you run it. So if you're talking about running a new awards that you haven't run before, this is an expensive option.

And then it looks like there's add-ons as well. Why are these not included by default? It feels like they're kind of grabbing a little bit money from me, you know. Why... Surely, public voting should be included by default, right? It seems like they're adding extras.

How would I deal with this differently? Pricing is always a tricky one to get right, right? So you've got to present it in the right light. And then there are probably damn good reasons why they've approached pricing in the way they have, right? So I'm guessing that it kind of paints itself as a software as a service app, a little bit in the way that it's presented.

I just made that assumption. But it looks like in actual fact, if I'm reading between the lines right, it's actually a bespoke setup for every particular client, you know. So with the fact that it's hosted on their own server, gives me that impression. The fact they talk about personal support, and, you know, having a dedicated developer and all of those kinds of things, makes me think it's probably more bespoke than it's being sold as.

I've worked with clients that have got similar kind of setups before. And what I've done is I've encouraged them to turn...instead of trying to hide that potential weakness, is actually turn that weakness into a strength, okay? And I would actually double down on the fact that this isn't an off the shelf product, right?

That it's actually a bespoke, custom-tailored product to your specific organizational needs, right? So where we talk about full suite human-friendly online awards, I would be tempted to go for, you know, a bespoke online awards platform. You know, or, you know, online awards tailored to your specific requirements, something along those lines.

And then in the list of features, make it very, you know, clear. Look, this is customized and tailored to your specific requirements, all right? Because they're now not going through this going, "Well, why can't, you know, why is the price so high?"

What you're doing then is suddenly the price looks a lot cheaper, because instead of this being just another SaaS project, I'm getting a dedicated, you know, developer working on customizing my installation of this product. And suddenly it looks a lot better value. Suddenly the one-time setup fee makes a lot more sense. Yeah, you've actually emphasized a little bit the the benefits of that one-time setup, but I'm not sure you're doing it in the right place.

So look, you're talking about one-to-one dedicated developer. Yeah. Wow, that's great. That sounds great. Comprehensive training for your staff. Yeah, that's great. Personalized configuration.

All of these things I think will almost need to go up here as part of the features, all right? So it's not saying that they shouldn't be repeated when you talk about the setup fee, but, you know, double down on the fact that you're providing a bespoke solution. Because what you're doing then is you're effectively framing the product in a different way.

And in particular, you're framing the price in a different way. Because no price's got, like, an intrinsic value to it if that makes sense. So, or no product has got an intrinsic value. So if I showed you something, and you didn't know what that thing was you... It has no inherent intrinsic value, okay? Its value comes from context, right?

From what other people charge for the similar thing or how much that thing is worth to me in my situation, in my context. So how we frame our pricing is very important. One way of framing it is by saying, this is bespoke, this is tailored to you. So that immediately makes it feel more valuable.

We could also frame it in other ways, mind. We can frame it by comparing it to other things, so you could compare the price of doing this to building something from scratch yourself in-house. You could frame it by comparing it to, you know, some enterprise system that someone else is providing and that you're cheaper too.

Because at the moment, my initial reaction when I arrived, reframe everything. When I arrived, I immediately thought, this is software as a service like I don't know, Buffer, or Dropbox or something like that. So immediately that sets me looking at a monthly fee of, you know, maybe $30 to $40, right?

And then you get hit by this big one-time fee, and suddenly that's, hang on a minute. I don't have to deal with that normally, and hang on a minute, this is yearly. So how you frame it is very important. Well anyway, let's stop talking about pricing. Let's look at getting started, right? Now, I'm guessing my initial reaction when I first arrived on this site was thinking I was going to log straight into something, you know, create an account, login, start configuring, but I'm guessing that's not the case.

Now, that I understand that this is bespoke, right? Let's see what I get. Yeah, I get an, effectively a Contact Us form. Okay, so we've got name, email address, yeah, see, some of these fields are required and some aren't.

You know, don't ask people for a phone number if it's not a required field, right? Why do you need to know the organization? Why do you need to know where I'm located? You know, yes, you might need to know that information later, but come on, let's get, you know, get the contact. Remove these fields, you can ask people that later, just get the bare minimum you need to actually make contact with people.

Again, all of this, I mean, subscription level's a required field. I've got no clue what subscription level I need at this stage. Well, I can tick "not sure." Well, why ask in the first place, then? You know, I don't know what add-ons I need. Now, when can I be reached? You know what, this obviously is valuable because, you know, if we want to book in, say, maybe a call, but then we're initially probably going via email anyway.

You know what, I think what I would do actually is reposition this whole thing, okay? So instead of calling it "Get Started," I think I would instead go for referring to it as book a demo, or speak to one of our consultants or something like that, and then turn it into a meeting booking form, all right?

So what you could do is you could use a tool like Calendly, I don't know whether you're familiar with this. It allows people to see your calendar and schedule a meeting accordingly. So if we visit my own website, you can actually book in a meeting directly yourself.

So you can click on book a meeting, and it opens up in Calendly, and you can see all of my availability over the coming month. You can pick a day, you can pick a time that you want a meeting, and then you go ahead and book it in. So that way, it would give people a lot more control over their kind of schedule, and also, it kind of establishes what we're talking about here is, you know, is a bespoke tailored solution, rather than you're just signing up for another SaaS service.

So that's really about all that I think I want to say. I mean, it's only a single-page website. So there's only so much it can say, but let's briefly recap. Having a strapline that clearly defines what you're providing is incredibly important. Communicating what features you have is incredibly important, and they do that very well.

When you're talking about pricing, framing is everything. You want to make it very clear that you are, you know, what people are getting, how that compares to the competition, you want to frame it in the context of something that makes the pricing look good and positive. And don't give the impression you're something you're not, don't come across, in this case, as a SaaS app when actually, you're bespoke.

If you're a freelancer working by yourself, don't pretend to be an agency, and so it goes on. And then with your call to action, whenever you're asking people to complete a form, always make sure that form contains the minimum number of fields that is required to get you in contact with the person. So lots to learn from Awardify.

Hopefully, you found that video useful. Thanks to them for being brave enough to share it. But until next time, thanks for watching.

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