The life, work and thoughts of Bence Kucsan - There are 0 new posts and 0 new comments since Your last visit
It’s no secret, one of the big hopes of running a blog kind of site is to create a cool community, sharing thoughts. To achieve communication instead of speaking, some basic rules might be worth to think about.
I would like to start with the optimal scenario, you have a well designed site, interesting content, and all you need to think about is how to make the process of commenting easier and more attractive.
Comments are always there
Take a second and think about how this process might look like. The visitor is reading an entry, and somewhere the article makes him start thinking. This is constant, because you can’t read something without having thoughts on it. If we accept that, the core of the response is every time generated automatically during the reading phase. Now the big task for every interaction designer is to make the visitor actually grab the keyboard and put that thoughts in words, and hit the “post” button.
№1 Rule - Make it as easy, as it can just get
Time plays a big role in the success of making the visitors leave a few lines. It’s often the case that at the point your visitor reaches actually the most important input box, the “Your comment” labeled one, the original thoughts or some parts of it are forgotten, because he/she starts thinking what name should be entered, and the “Oh, if I enter my e-mail address, I could get tons of spam...” fear makes him/her think about, which e-mail address should be typed. As this whole “commenting on a blog entry” has the importance of 2 on the scale from 1 to 10, in 90% of the cases the visitor won’t read trough the article again to collect thoughts again.
My advice goes like this: Make the process as easy, as it can just get, re-order the fields don’t ask for registration, spam comments are your problem, don’t hand it on to your visitors making it complicated to post a comment.
You can easily solve the just mentioned “remembering” issue with the simple re-ordering of the input fields. Start with the most important one, in this case the “Your comment”, then can the name and the e-mail address be asked. As long though you don’t need e-mail addresses for a specific reason, I wouldn’t make the field marked as required, because this scares a notable percentage of the readers away from commenting.
Of course as everything on the site, comments should be presented in a nice way, and prominent enough to make leaving them attractive.
Your thoughts are welcome!
Make your voice heard, fill out the comment form below and don't be shy to hit that big blue button.
I like the idea of putting the comment field first. Maybe the other 3 fields should be right next to it under an “optional” heading?
One thing I know I personally like, is the option to be notified of followups to your comment.
I have a hard time remembering to check back, especially since I’ve randomly stumbled across the website most of the time.
@ Luke and Edward - Thanks for the kind words on the design!
@ Kenny - Your point with the follow up comments notification is totally legitimated, actually so much that I tweaked the comment fields a bit and added the 2 new option, one for remembering your personal info and the wanted follow up comments notification.
Thanks for bringing that in buddy!
@ GaBuBu - Although being off-topic, sure not going to be moderated, can’t be mad at all! Exactly my kind of off-topic comment, thanks!
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