Sifting through the Webreep Data over the past 12 months, I was looking for evidence of “super no-dealers”, or elements when present on a website are certain to cause morbid dissatisfaction. After quite a bit of analysis (including structural equation modelling and means testing), I discovered what I consider to be the top three elements. We define morbid dissatisfaction as meaning a state of mind whereby a person will cease loyalty (defect to a competitor or alternate), and engage in no or negative word-of-mouth. This dataset includes 26,562 responses.

1. 1. Human Stock Photos.Stock photos are those images that have been professionally staged. Human Stock Photos (HSP’s) are those that are staged and include models, such as a picture of a woman with a telephone headset on, or a man shaking hands with a client. Websites might use these images in various places on their website, including home page, contact us page, or even about us pages. You might have gotten away with it last decade (non-verifiable because I don’t have the data), but our data is showing that nowadays you might actually be causing damage using HSP’s. The problem is that internet users know right away that the photo is fake. The picture of the beautiful woman with a big smile talking into the phone is not your customer service representative, it is a model. You don’t hire models to work in your organisation; you hire regular people with specific skills. When internet users see HSP’s, it evokes what we call “sinister attributions”, whereby the person detects mild hoodwinkmanship. Placing a picture of a model on your website implies you want everyone who visits your website to believe that the person is one of your staff. The internet is too personal to use HSP’s, though in traditional type advertising it is probably still fair game. Trust scores for websites that used HSPs were on average 32% lower than their industry average.

2. 2. Forced Advertisements.These are advertisements users cannot escape from watching, such as a lead-in to video footage with no “close” button, or an interstitial advertisement with no “skip” link.  Users have developed an internet browsing protection mechanism over time called “banner blindness” that protects them from discomfort when exposed to too much advertising. But by forcing people to view an advertisement, you penetrate their banner blindness shield, causing discomfort that leads to a state of morbid dissatisfaction. Always include a skip or close button when including advertising on your website. Satisfaction scores were on average 45% lower for website that included forced advertisements than their industry average.

3. Text with Poor Contrast. In addition to our data, I’ve also noticed this one myself. Website owners continue to mix background and fonts colours that have poor contrast. Even just medium contrast is unacceptable I would argue. Easiest on the eye is white text (or very light grey text) on a black background. But unless you’re running a security or file swapping site, I’d stick with very dark grey (or black) text on a white background. Websites with poor text contrast had website content quality scores 47% lower than their industry average.