Summary: Jakob Nielsen is the Internet’s leading authority on website usability. Usability can double the amount of money that a website earns. This post looks at specific takeaways from Nielsen’s usability site which can improve a poker site’s usability and profits, including prominent search functionality, conducting user testing, following standard website design conventions, minimal advertising, and answering user questions.

Jakob Nielsen hasn’t (as far as I know) written any specific articles about making money from a poker website. Nielsen has written an enormous number of well-researched articles about website usability though. The intelligent poker webmaster can apply the usability knowledge from Jakob Nielsen’s articles to their efforts to make more money from their poker websites. This post provides examples of the usability lessons that can be applied to a poker website, money-making mindset.

Usability 101 and Making Money From Poker Websites

The best place to start at Nielsen’s site about usability is this article: Usability 101

When you look at his page on the basics of usability, consider two things:

1. What information he presents
2. How that information is presented

Usability 101 – Presentation

I notice a few things about the presentation of the page right away:

1. Breadcrumb navigation
2. Search functionality
3. An H1 tag clearly describing the page’s topic
4. A prominent two sentence summary of the page’s contents
5. Multiple H2 tags, bullet points, and numbered lists to make the article scannable
6. No advertising
7. No images

Usability 101 – Content

Reading what the article says, I come away with some of the following information:

• “Usability” describes how easy it is to use an interface (in this case, a website).
• Usability matters because people who can’t figure out how to use your website leave.
• Good usability can double sales on a website that sells a product.
• Improving usability starts with user testing.

Conclusions About Making Money From These Concepts

Secondary forms of navigation like breadcrumbs and search boxes are important to this usability expert. These might be useful elements to incorporate into a poker website in an attempt to make more money. For example, if a user comes to your site, and wants to find information about the best poker signup bonuses, she’s likely to type that phrase into your search box on your site. If you don’t have a search box on your site, she’ll leave your site to go to Google. She MIGHT find a text link to “best poker signup bonuses” in your main navigation, but most poker websites I know of have pretty large navigation menus. (60 or 70 navigational links on a single page is common.)

So, conclusion#1? Add a prominent search functionality to your poker website, and you’ll make more money.

I understand the reasoning behind the scannable copy and the minimal graphics, but those aren’t well-explained on this page, so I’ll wait to share any conclusions about how those can make you more money.

Looking at the content, I see the claim that good usability can double the number of sales your site makes. I’m familiar with Nielsen’s site and his reputation for testing and measuring, so I’ll take him at his word on this. Doubling sales will obviously make me more money. The other claim is that the best way to improve my site’s usability is to conduct user testing.

Conclusion #2? Usability will make more money, and an important way to improve usability is to conduct user testing.

Usability testing is a simple enough process. Just find five average users and turn them loose on your website. Give them a goal for what they want to accomplish on your site, and then watch how easily they’re able to accomplish those goals.

That’s a good start in my quest to use Jakob Nielsen’s expertise to make more money with my poker site, but it’s ONLY a start.

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design and Making More Money From Poker Websites

The next stop at Nielsen’s site is his article about the top ten mistakes in web design. These mistakes are as common (or more common) among poker websites as in any other industry. Below are insights into how some of these mistakes affect a poker site’s usability and profitability. (The website design mistakes Nielsen discusses on his page that DON’T affect poker website usability are not discussed.)

The first mistake on his list is bad search. Few poker sites have an easily found search functionality, so adding a prominent search functionality is one way most poker webmasters can immediately make more money by providing a more usable site. (We figured that out from looking at the design of Nielsen’s other page.)

Mistake #3 is not changing the color of visited links. This provides better usability because website users who can see where they’ve already been are better able to find there way to where they want to go. This is a common mistake among poker webmasters, who are too concerned with appearance. I’m concerned with profit, and usability is a route to more profits. But I have sites where I make this mistake too.

Mistake #4 is non-scannable text. “Scannable” text is easy to scan, so you can find the answers to your questions quickly, without reading the content in-depth. I’m not convinced that this is as big a problem for users as Nielsen suggests, but I tend to write scannable content anyway. It’s easy enough to do: user shorter sentences, bullet points, and headers. This is not as common a mistake on poker sites as mistake #3, but it comes up.

Mistake #7 is anything that looks like an advertisement. This is the most critical and common usability problem among poker websites. I’ve seen entire poker websites where everything on the page looks like an advertisement. How does understanding that this is a usability mistake make you money?

Once you know that users ignore obvious advertising, you can revise your ads’ presentation to make them look like something other than advertising. (Like content, for example.)

Banners, pop-ups, and animations are all obvious advertising, and users ignore these obvious ads.

A sales letter is advertising too, but a review is not advertising. Most poker webmasters are unable to tell the difference, but most users can. Most poker websites offering poker room reviews publish sales letters and call them reviews. No surer way to make less money exists than building a site that looks like an ad or a collection of ads. Except maybe writing  and publishing content that looks and reads like advertising.

Some advertising looks more like advertising than other advertising. A 468X60 or a 728X90 banner ad for PokerStars is obvious advertising. A screenshot of their cardroom client, on the other hand, is useful content that also serves an advertising purpose (assuming you link the screenshot to your affiliate URL). Users wanting to play at an online cardroom don’t care what the cardroom’s banner advertising looks like. But they do care what the cardroom itself looks like.

Animated and flashy banners are ignored by 99.5% of your users. Doesn’t it make sense to focus on different types of advertising?

Mistake #8 is violating design conventions. The article on Nielsen’s site is vague about what this means, other than saying that users spend most of their time on other sites. But I’ll give an example of a design convention violation. Suppose you decide to underline all of your H1, H2, and H3 tags. Since most sites underline text links, users will become frustrated when they try to click on your underlined H tags. The design convention is that only links should be underlined. Sounds like a minor detail, but you don’t make money when a user leaves your site because they’re frustrated. (Most of them aren’t leaving via your advertising.)

Mistake #10 is not answering user’s questions. This is a content issue. I’ve seen poker sites where pages described as “poker strategy” suggested that users visit “the following links” for more information about poker strategy. Those links had anchor text of “poker strategy”, but they pointed to affiliate URL’s for PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. How much trust will a typical user have for this kind of advertising technique? How likely will they be to sign up at a poker room instead of going back to a search engine to find the poker strategy they’re looking for?

Conclusion

Studying two pages of Jakob Nielsen’s site on usability leaves me with several ideas about how to make more money with a poker website. Since the site contains over 500 additional pages of content, I could probably mine it for more money making ideas. You can and should mine his site for ideas for how to make more money with your poker site too.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Metrics, Mistakes, Monetization, Usability . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.