If you think back to high school, your toughest class probably wasn’t the most academically challenging. It was the most boring. It was the one where the teacher droned on and on, never engaging or surprising you, and you had to fight to stay awake. I remember once congratulating myself for managing to take scrupulous notes even while I was nodding off in the world’s dullest math class, only to find afterward that all my notes had been written as a single dot in the middle of a page in my notebook. Now, that was a hard class.

Most e-business Web sites are at least as boring as my high school class. They make no effort to be lively. They also may teach just as little. These sites typically see their role as providing information, or executing a transaction, and don’t seem to grasp that, in many situations, people want to learn.

People don’t want just data. They want knowledge. They want help. They want new capabilities.

At a time when on-line competition is proliferating, customers desert bad sites by the busload. (Where are those truant officers when you need them?) EFunds, which manages payment systems for businesses, says many financial-services companies report that customers abandon 70% to 85% of on-line accounts because they find them hard to use.

Providing an engaging, educational experience is a great way to keep customers and stand out from the crowd. There are some very straightforward teaching techniques that can help you do that. The two main ones are simulation and interaction. A third is the use of visuals.

SIMULATION: Educators understand that people learn by doing. Some estimate that people remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and 90% of what they do. Whatever the actual numbers, it is clear that doing something has much more impact than merely reading something. Yet only a tiny fraction of Web sites offer visitors anything instructive to do.

Look at Fidelity.com, a popular financial-services Web site that is considered to be state of the art. It has articles on dozens of topics related to everything from short-term investments to buy-and-hold strategies designed for retirement accounts. The site has calculators that help visitors estimate such things as how much they need to be setting aside each month for their kids’ college education.

But the site doesn’t go far enough. It provides lots of information about investing, but it doesn’t teach people how to invest.

Imagine if the site let visitors build mock portfolios—portfauxlios, some are calling them. That way people could test investment strategies before having to actually put up any money. When the portfauxlio produced a surprising result, the site could give users feedback and suggestions, teaching them valuable lessons.

The site could do a similar thing by letting people test strategies based on what happened in the market during the prior year or two. People could see how, say, a certain mix of stocks and bonds performed. That way, people would feel more confident about plunking their money down.

A few Web sites already offer rudimentary simulations. Some retailers, for example, let customers scan in pictures of themselves, or at least type in their dimensions. Then, the customers pick pieces of clothing and specify sizes. The site shows them how the clothes would look on them, or at least on a model their size.

But many more could be doing so. Sellers of building materials could, for instance, let people scan in pictures of a foyer and then show how it would look with a slate floor. Politicians or lobbyists could post their planning models, so visitors could see how a tax cut would affect them personally.

AGENTS: Educators also understand that teachers will numb people’s brains if they just sit there at their desks, reading to the class. Good teachers probe the class, asking and answering questions. It is harder to build that sort of interactivity into a Web site than it is to add simulations, but it is possible.

One way to add interactivity is through intelligent agents such as Ask Ida at etown.com, which sells home electronics. Ask Ida is like a calculator on steroids. She uses artificial intelligence to pose questions about you and the products you want, and answers any questions you have. After you progress through the questions and answers, Ida presents a list of recommended products, along with additional questions for you to answer if you want more refined suggestions. The interface is simple, the information is relevant and concise, and the activity is engaging.

Ida—represented by an amusingly retro science-teacher cartoon graphic—is by no means perfect. When I told her I wanted to buy a digital camera so that I could post pictures to a Web site, she showed me some options. What she should have done was offer to teach me how to post a picture to a Web site. That was what I really wanted to know.

Still, most sites don’t offer interaction that comes close to Ask Ida’s capabilities. Eastman Kodak (kodak.com), for instance, includes tutorials on how to avoid common photography mistakes and how to take great pictures. While the tutorials offer good content, they are devoid of interaction. There is nothing engaging about them. Imagine how much better they would be if Kodak built into the tutorials a "What’s wrong with this picture" game. Perhaps it also could design activities that simulate picture taking under different conditions and that offer advice when customers make mistakes. The value and impact of the tutorials would increase exponentially.

VISUALS: Even as Web sites try to use video and audio, they miss opportunities to include simple, graphic demonstrations. A site that includes recipes should include a sort of visual dictionary, showing what "soft peaks" look like on beaten egg whites, as opposed to "stiff peaks." Companies that sell products that need to be assembled should have directions on their Web sites that don’t just tell, but also show, how to put things together. Think of how happy customers would be if, during the Christmas holiday season, they could ditch those "insert flap R into slot S" directions and get a simple demonstration.

The cost of not providing this sort of clear, visual instruction is high. Even if your customers don’t run for the exits, you will have to build a big, expensive customer-service operation to handle all their questions and complaints.

At the moment, few enough Web sites do a good job of engaging customers that it is hard to point to many companies that are strong examples. But it will soon be easy to tell the companies that had the passing grades from those that failed. It will be just like after you got out of high school: To find the failures, you just look at the corporate equivalent of the unemployment line.

Hoffman is a partner with Diamond Technology Partners. He specializes in e-learning, user-centric Web design, and learning and change-management strategy. He can be reached at hoffman@diamtech.com.