How a CAPTCHA can Kill Conversions
Conversion Optimisation
If you are a regular user of the Internet, there is no doubt you will have come across a CAPTCHA before. Simply described a CAPTCHA is a question or test used to tell if the person at the other end is a human or a computer, before allowing them to complete a certain action. The most common CAPTCHA used on websites requires the user to enter letters or numbers from a distorted image that appears on the screen.
If you understand the level of spam across the Internet you may gain an insight into why CAPTCHAs are absolutely necessary for many websites. Without a CAPTCHA a website may get automated software performing actions that were otherwise intended for humans, which in turn will degrade the quality of the service, and cause headaches for the webmasters at the same time.
Now that we know what a CAPTCHA is and why it is used, I would like to point out how a large number of them are absolutely killing conversion rates for many websites. It’s not that there is one extra question to be asked on a form, however the fact the so many of these CAPTCHAs are so badly designed. Now when you have a user on your page and you are asking them (more like pleading) to perform a certain action, you most likely already have enough unwanted anxiety and friction on the page to cause them to leave, without having one of these badly designed questions. I cannot tell you how easily I will close a browser window and leave a website if they even think of throwing one of these at me.
There are so many websites out there that are killing their conversion rates and stopping real humans from performing actions on their websites, that could be easily fixed by having a bit of common sense. One thing I would recommend having is a small feedback option for the user to leave feedback about the CAPTCHA, this way if users were having issues you would be able to find out pretty easily.
Before I go I recommend you check out this post on badly designed CAPTCHAs, wouldn’t any of these send you insane?
Tags: CAPTCHA, conversion rate
May 19th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
[...] wrote a post earlier this year regarding the use of captcha forms – my opinion was that that the majority of them on the internet are badly designed and are also [...]