Are your users understanding what your website is for? Tag lines, short sentences placed very closed to a website’s logo, are usually in charge of telling users in a very fast way what they can do in the website they are currently visiting. I explain here why the already standard tag line is not enough.

“The Free Encyclopedia” is Wikipedia’s tag line.

User test results

I was recently testing my client’s website, Testfieber, a German company putting together product expert reviews. They have a good tag line, quite clear: “The big directory for expert reviews.” That’s what they do and users were getting the idea fast.

The problem was that users where not understanding the value of a big expert review directory, they were not understanding that the website was processing a lot of information in the background to get the best independent product reviews.

“The big directory for expert reviews.”

Communicating value

To educate new users about the value of the website we took several actions. The most important one was to place the link “How does it work?” in many pages across the website, specially in top landing ones. We didn’t want to overwhelm users by putting a lot of information, so we used an overflow pop-up that would immediately disappear as soon as the user takes the mouse away from the link.

An overflow pop-up to quickly communicate the value of Testfieber

Understanding users’ information needs

Testfieber users are people looking for serious product reviews and for many of them it is really important to clearly know how the website recommends the best products. For them it was necessary to place a “learn more” link in the pop-up to take them to another page containing much more information about the algorithm.

To check

Is it very important to check that users quickly understand what they can do in the website but also the value they get from it.

Related read: The Benefits of Mixing Branding and Usability in a Design