1. YES; we’re all based in the UK (Yorkshire, actually)
2. YES; we do our our work in-house
3. YES; we really are 15 years old
4. YES; we are NOT a traditional agency
5. YES; we’ll take work from agencies and other third-parties
6. YES; we use Basecamp to manage our projects
7. YES; we love what we do
8. YES; we sometimes say no
9. YES; we welcome anyone to use our offices and facilities, FOC
10. YES; we try to work 10am to 4pm and have a day off every week

At it’s simplest level its about presenting the people with rational, sensible and best-solution defaults as people can be persuaded to accept defaults if they seem sensible. At a deeper level its about firing the sub-conscious automatic elements in our thinking to create a desired outcome. The theory is gaining a lot of credibility as an approach for running large organisations such as governments as we saw in 2008 when Richard Thaler visited Britain to promote his theory. He met David Cameron, and made such an impression that for a time he acted as unpaid adviser to the Tory leader.

The philosophy of approach to designing systems of choice is often referred to as “libertarian paternalism”or “choice architecture”, a concept implying that an organisation can be the architect that arranges personal choice in way that nudges customers in the right direction. This might seem all a bit high-brow for a web-site but you’d be wrong.

Planning how and what the site visitor sees and the order in which it happens is all choice architecture and with modern, personalise-delivery web-site platforms such as VITES  it really is quite easy to implement. Examples?

a. We want to encourage people to visit our flagship outlet in Bristol. The default choice for venue then become Bristol, regardless of where you are in the UK. All the supporting content talks about how good Bristol is, the photos are from Bristol etc…people automaticallt make a connection with Bristol and as Bristol is the first default choice then a higher-than-normal percentage of people will go there.

b. We want to encourage people to request an email version of our information pack, that becomes the default choice and whilst the visitor can still request a printed pack that route requires the visitor to go through one extra hoop. In this hypothetical case it’s simpler, cheaper and more effective for the visitor to receive an electronic pack so we have nudged them down a more successful route.

c. We want people to call us on the phone rather than fill in a contact form. Everyone in the online enquiry process is off-ramped to a call-back, stating “We need to talk to you to clear up xxxx before we can confirm your booking”. The visitor is not to know that everyone is off-ramped, they will think it’s just them.

It is worth reading Richard Thaler’s book, available from Amazon and costs a fiver.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting some articles which are all linked with the idea of leaving behind the old world and looking towards the future of the web. First up…

Cross browser pixel perfection

This is an old and tired battle that has been waging for years and I myself have battled so often I could count myself among the ranks of web veterans of the world.

The idea that all websites must look the same in every browser is a time consuming one. Lack of good standards support in browsers like IE6 means we are still having to apply hacks and workarounds to ensure a site looks the same as it does in the latest version of Safari. To achieve effects like rounded corners and colour gradients we require the use of images which means more work to create the images, more files to maintain and more HTTP requests and downloads for the end user. I think you’ll agree that’s quite a bit of work just to make a rounded corner work in older browsers.

Just to give you a quick example, say we have a button on a form. Using old techniques, we would apply extra code and images to make buttons look like this:

Embracing up-to-date standards would mean modern browsers are capable of seeing the button above and lower grade browsers would see a simpler version:

While it doesn’t have the “clickable” look, with the right wording, this can be easily identifiable as button. Facebook has over 500 million users yet their buttons are much more akin to my latter example so even the big players sometimes choose to ignore what is considered best practice or conventional.

Rather than concentrating on creating cross browser pixel perfection and worrying if IE6 users will see curved corners, we should use our time more efficiently and pool our efforts into creating the best overall experience. Websites that load quickly, have great content and CTAs which are well thought out have far better chances of succeeding than a site that’s riddled with round corner images and old hat methods to make sites look the same across browsers.

I believe that long-term business success (survival) requires only mild attention to some basic mathematics and business should be never centred around it. Period. Lose the love for your business and it will fail, eventually, as those feeling permeate through the structure and people in the business. So, to continue the drive and innovation requires an element of love, trust and giving and if done in the right measures rather than costing money it can actually improve all aspects of the business from greater work satisfaction, better client relationships and closer team working.

As a business we have strived to share that passion, trust and love both inside our organisation and with our clients. I firmly believe that is why, over the last 13 years, we are able to build long-term, mutually profitable relationships with over 100 clients. It sounds simple. Keeping the love going is the tough bit. I promise we’ll try harder in 2011 to share the love.

Want to feel loved?

Some say providing choice is a fundamental part of building trust in the online world but everyone is different and not just down to the choices they make but how they make. It, therefore, makes perfect sense to offer visitors some choice but a good dose of pre-making some of the choices seems intelligent. Refining this is the study of defaults; the standard settings that people will simply accept and move on.

There are some really good best-practice defaults that should be probably be used. Examples included are not showing an event in the past or offering a service that has been repeatedly refused. This is mainly common sense and most web-sites are (or should be) doing this now. Good defaults don’t force the visitor to think to much about choice or clicking, they simple ease the visitor onto the next step.

How questions / fields are worded makes a big difference to how they are perceived: The theory that framing a question not only illicits an answer but also changes the thinking of the participant prior to answering the question. Avoiding a heavy psychology lesson here, but we can make a marked difference (aka: improvement) in visitor behaviour and conversion by framing the questions differently.

So lets get rid of pointless choice questions, these might be “needed” for your organisation but have little or no bearing for most people. A good example of this is requesting a person title (Mr, Mrs etc) – people don’t use titles these days and it simply adds another hurdle into the conversion process.

Incentive-based defaults

People tend to respond well to some form of incentive so default ticking the box marked “Please enter me into your draw to win a free iPad” would make sense. In fact, it would be rather nuts to have the box not ticked as default. The same would apply where the incentive is a value-trade on the web-site such as “Please send me an electronic guide”.

In many of these cases what we see happening is a value-trade whereby the visitor exchanges her details for some item or service. Where the provision of this item or service has a close-to-zero cost then the default should be ON (i.e. ticked) by default.

The same does not apply when we use discounting. This has a cost and unless the visitor needs tipping over the balance point it would be crazy to hand out discounts to everyone so take great care with cost-based offers.

Push defaults

As web marketeers we are always looking for ways to improve the online conversion rate. Pushing people down a path is one way to do that and works, again, because people are really rather lazy (proper psychologists call this the status quo bias).Lets look at the typical “Thanks” page; it’s the end of one stage of the customer journey and therefore the beginning of the next stage but how many pages simply say thanks and offer no further actions. We’ve all seen these, they are the dead-ends and cul-de-sacs of the web world.

Adding actions at these stage markers is a simple and highly effective method to keep the visitor moving along. Not only are they at the boundary of two stages they have also committed time and effort to complete the previous stage. Lets, then, capitalise on this momentum and offer the next along, with suitable incentives.

This is only a short article on what it a pretty large subject, contact me if you want to find out more, but it does show that some simple thinking about how and when you lay out your calls-to-action can make a huge difference to stage and overall conversion rate in the online world.

I’ve just finished reading Rework as it had been mooted as suggested reading. It sounds trite, but we could have written that book 10 years ago. Amazing! It’s exactly how we have been running the company – almost to the letter, and from day one.

Makes you feel quite proud.

Related articles

• Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals (theequitykicker.com)
• Blogging Innovation ” What Works about Rework (fredzimny.wordpress.com)

Redesigning a site can be risky. On a large site, regular users become accustomed to how it works, they develop their own behaviour patterns and ways of doing things. A major design overhaul could demolish these patterns for users and put them off coming back to the site as often. Facebook has fallen foul to this a number of times, had it not been for it’s millions of users willing to put in the time to relearn the system, it could have proved fatal for them.

Make small changes to improve the bigger picture

Imagine you’re driving to work and you hit a pothole, then imagine the pothole could be corrected overnight as if by magic, without the need for traffic cones and workmen. The next day, you drive down that stretch of road and, whether you notice or not, the road just seems better than before. To put it simply, rather than ripping up an entire stretch of road and relaying it, creating confusing diversions and inconvenience to the end user (or the driver in this case), solve the smaller problems individually and the user journey can continue uninterrupted whilst being improved at the same time.

We’re big believers in A/B testing and over the years we’ve performed hundreds, maybe thousands of tests on many client sites. In my experience, changing smaller sections of a site have made a much bigger difference than making big sweeping alterations. Experiment with different words on your form submit buttons or make your primary cta look more enticing, encouraging your user to make an action.

Making small improvements to your site over time can reap huge benefits.

We all occasionally have flashes of inspiration and think of a way to improve our working practices or the way a site works but with all that goes on in the online world and our own weekly schedules, we sometimes don’t have the time to properly plan out and develop ideas into something substantial.

To combat this, we have started a little internal project called “20%” or the “20% project”. The basic idea is we devote 20% of our week to work on a project which will help us keep up with the times, develop new ideas and applications or even just doing some research on new trends or technologies which could help us in the future.

With our first project kicking off today, we plan to wrap up the project in a few weeks time with some achievable goals which will greatly improve the experience for our client websites and set a new internal best practice to build on in the future.

Please do take a look at www.kiva.org, it’s a really clever idea that allows people to loan small amounts of money to budding entrepreneurs, no more than £16 ($25) in the third world.

These small amounts, aggregated, provide (typically) no more than a few thousand dollars to micro-business people to start small ventures designed to raise the standard of their lives.

These are loans and are repaid so you can then invest more.

The small value of the contribution multiplied by the volume of lenders reduces the risk and allows struggling people to access funds that would not normally be available to them.

Try it. It’s fantastic. Better still, start a Kiva club at work and each person can invest in different projects and race to generate the best and fastest return. Highly recommended.

From September 1st, Connected are throwing their doors open to any creative types

What? Yup, we’re opening 1,500 sq ft of cool office space to anyone who wants to use it

We already have quite a few friends and clients who use our office space and we thought, “to hell with, invite everyone In”

Great minds thinks alike, CONNECTED for FREE

We’ve got FREE ultra high-speed Wi-Fi, hot desks, huge LCD screens, sofas, colour printers (A3/A4), usability testing suite, a great library, parking, a massive conference table for 18 people, breakfast bar, all-day cafe (not free, sorry) plus an art gallery to refresh tired creative juices.

You will also have access to some of the best brains in the web marketing world, for FREE

We’re running this experiment until the end of year so why not drop us an email, find us on LinkedIn, visit our Facebook page or just drop in and say hello.

We’re open from 10am every working day. Our coffee pod machine is a Krups Dolce Gusto so bring along a pack of pods, mine’s a Cafe Lungo.

Even if you are not strictly creative in terms of pretty pictures, maybe you are just creative from an entrepreneur point of view, maybe you simply crave the company of bright, link-minded, people.