Older folk buy less?

As you get older your eyesight falters.

There are a few reasons why this is important. The most crucial is that you don’t often wear your spectacles while showering. This means that when you reach across for the Dove shampoo in the pink plastic bottle it’s very easy to confuse it with the Dove conditioner in the other, identical, pink plastic bottle.

Worse,the words “shampoo” and “conditioner” are just small enough to be unreadable. About the size of an ant’s shin, in fact. Not only that, but these words are a subtle shade of red, instead of boring black.

The bottom line is that I inevitably condition my body and soap my hair from the identically shaped pink Dove liquid soap bottle. And because the soap blinds me, I inevitably drop the shampoo bottle onto my left toe.

My wife usually yells at me at this point because I have just woken my daughter with my swearing and crying. By now you’re thinking that I am a complete cretin for buying Dove in the first place, but it truly is not my fault. My wife, who can see properly, buys it.

I mention this because I was asked to analyse a few websites this past week to see why they’re selling nothing. One of the sites had a strong green background with red text. About 10% of all men cannot see any difference between red and green. (Or struggle manfully, but soon give up.)

It occurs to me that many of them are South African taxi drivers. Wikipedia assures me this genetic deviance is more popular in some stray ethnic groups in Finland, Scotland, and Hungary. I think that South Africa might be worthy of research as so many taxi drivers face a lifetime of struggling with traffic lights.

Getting back to the point. Imagine that you’re going out on a first date with a gorgeous person who not only looks good and smells good, but also might want to share his (or her) wealth with you (in the sense of marriage). (In business we would call that person a prospect.)

You would probably brush your teeth, apply some deodorant, and dress fittingly for this person. You would do this hoping that this evening might turn into something stretching beyond breakfast.

Surely it makes sense to do the same for our business prospects? Surely it makes good sense to design our shop (or our web store) so that it is attractive? (At the very least it must be readable!) This might inspire said person to linger, browse, and finally share some money with us?

If you are not going recruit a designer, then at least buy an incredible book by Steve Krug called “Don’t make me think”? It offers a common sense approach to Web usability. Easy writing and lots of pictures mean that it is very easy to read. And it sure will help with all sorts of non-web packaging and design issues that are important to the rest of us.

You won’t become an expert, but if I buy your products to improve my morning ritual I will at least have clean body parts rather than soft body bits which shine a lot and have too much bounce.