26

Apr

Small Business SEM Tool Evaluation Stopped Short By Blinding Colors

Posted by: Jeremy Reither

In an earlier post, I mentioned a few SEM tools that I plan to evaluate. In comparing the costs of those tools, I found that Clickable is about the most reasonably priced – they target small clients and agencies with modest budgets. So, I thought I’d start with them. But don’t get too excited about an evaluation in this post. I was totally blinded by the design of the Clickable site.

I mean, from a distance, or even in this thumbnail image, it probably looks like an attractive design. But up close, as you try to read the words or interpret the graphs on the page, you’ll find your eyes squinting and your head hurting.

If you’ll read the posts on this blog, you’ll see I am a huge advocate of software/service providers who provide quality, affordable services and products to small internet businesses – so normally I wouldn’t publish a whole post about a particular drawback, but this is amazing. Amazingly hard to read.

If you click on the screenshot in this post, you’ll see I’ve outlined 3 sections of the Clickable dashboard that warrant comments (if anyone from Clickable is reading this, I did submit this feedback on your website, too.) Here are the 3 sections:

1. Account Trends Section (Dashboard Header): Blue on blue is just plain hard to read. There’s not enough contrast. And the gradient color of the blue background makes it even harder to see the data. Consider a white background, with a blue border.
2. Account Recommendations Section: Again, there is so little contrast here (between the white lettering and the yellow/orange/red background) that it’s hard to read. Consider a white background, with colored borders.
3. Metrics Section: Guess what – it’s a contrast issue. Gray on gray is not good. Even if it’s dark gray on light gray…there’s not enough difference between the colors of the background and the text, so it’s hard to read. Consider using black text if you want to have a gray background.

It all looks nice from a graphical perspective, but you have to think about your users. They probably don’t care as much about how pretty their data is as they do about how useful that data is. They just want to be able to interpret the charts and numbers easily…and if they can’t do that, it’s not very useful.

Constructive feedback aside, I did hear that Clickable offers a nice software as a service (SaaS), at an affordable price point. So, I look forward to giving it a fair evaluation on factors other than design. Stay tuned for that.