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It's an algorithmic world and we're just living in it. David Erickson examines how digital platforms' algorithms influence and effect how our reputations as individuals and as organizations are perceived.

How Design Choices Prompt Reputational Signals

When design defeats utility.

David Erickson

Feb 24, 2023

A colleague recently forwarded me an email about Axios’ 2023 What’s Next summit for consideration of having my digital marketing team at Tunheim attend.

I’m a fan of Axios’ newsletters generally, so of course I clicked to learn more.

Do me a favor. Watch this video of the Axios 2023 What’s Next summit landing page and as you watch it, think about where on this landing page you would click.

This landing page has a lot going on, doesn’t it?

There’s the blinking cursor after the word Summit
There’s the cascading stepping of the numbers 2-0-2-3
There are the dropping black lines on the upper right of the screen
There’s the red, rotating half circle
There’s the bouncing white vertical lines that look like they might be a Pause button
There’s the big Roy Lichtensteinesque triangle
And there’s the looping row of blue right-pointing triangles

Sensory overload, right?

All of that motion creates anxiety and stress; not in and of itself but in the context of a landing page where the user knows they need to take an action.

So what am I supposed to do?

What did you think we’re supposed to click on?

If you’re like me, I would be clicking on the row of blue triangles because they are pointing, presumably to the destination the landing page wants me to visit.

Now, watch this video of the very same landing page:

As we Minnesotans would say: Ope!

There actually is a call to action button but you would never know it because this monstrosity of design encompasses the entire screen with no instructions to scroll down.

I’d love to see an eye-tracking study for this page. I imagine the gaze plot would show visitors eyes bouncing all over the place with all that simultaneous motion taking place.

But I am dying to see the analytics for the performance of this page.

Failing that, though, here’s what I imagine users are doing on the page and what signals that behavior is prompting.

First and foremost, I imagine most of the clicks will occur on the row of blue triangles because they visually imply a destination. I also imagine a significant number of clicks are executed on the vertical white bars because they kinda look like a Pause button.

Clicking on those elements does nothing, of course. But because users believe they should result in an action, they will click repeatedly under the false assumption that either they misclicked or that the page is slow to respond.

Animated gif of an angry cartoon character blowing his top

Microsoft Clarity has a name for this behavior: Rage Clicks. Multiple clicks on the same area of a page is a metric that measures frustration and a poor user experience.

Another probable behavior is that users will just leave the page in frustration. Page abandonment will generate a low time-on-page metric and a low or zero scroll depth, depending on how the site has configured their scroll depth tracking.

Both of these metrics—low time-on-page and zero scroll depth—are indicators of a poor user experience.

Finally, if users abandon the page or do not scroll, the most important action indicating the value of the page is not taken: Clicks on the Registration button.

That’s your conversion metric.

I imagine the conversion rate (divide the total number of users by the number of Registration button clicks) for this page is low.

All of these metrics are signals that measure the reputation of the landing page (frustrating, broken) and by extension, the reputation of the organization providing such a frustrating user experience.

Which is ironic, because Axios has earned a reputation as being great at user experience with its easily digestible newsletters.

Looks like a great summit, though.

Welcome Spoutizens!

My post about Spoutible has really taken off and is driving a lot of new subscriptions to this newsletter.

Welcome to The Reputation Algorithm and thank you for subscribing!

The success of the post is really an example of taking advantage of scarcity. Since Spoutible is still new and hasn’t yet earned a lot of media coverage, my post was the first (as far as I can tell) in-depth article about the new platform.

Search Google for “spoutible twitter alternative” and you’ll see it ranked highly and that prominence in Google search results is driving traffic to this newsletter and prompting people to subscribe.

At some point I’ll write a post about exactly how this worked.

One Year Later

Today marks the one year anniversary of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine. It has been a year of both horror at Putin’s unprovoked brutality and inspiration and admiration of the spirit of the Ukrainian people’s defense of their democracy and freedom writ large.

It has also been a year of fascination with the remarkable success President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had at securing and maintaining the support of the US and European democracies…to the point where a Czech friend of mine—a lifelong pacifist—felt compelled to raise money to pay for arms for Ukrainian defense forces.

In March of last year, I wrote about Zelenskyy’s leadership and the huge role that storytelling has played in marshalling and keeping global support for Ukraine.