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.

Most well developed and successful web-sites are built around great processes that are easy to use, slick and give the visitor what they want. Yes, the processes are littered with objects such as buttons, banners, content, headlines and other such items but fundamentally it is the process that makes, say, Amazon or Google great. So why are web-site designers seemingly forced to work in a purely object world? Seems like they work in a straight jacket.

It seems that many web-designers were, until quite recently, designers in the static (old) world of direct mail, point-of-sale, brochures et al so how can we expect them to think about the process? The process underlines the all elements of the design, including the objects so the objects must serve the process and not the other way round. If we keep it that simple it is also much easier to evolve the objects as we can think about the objects would better serve the process (red submit buttons, big text, simple content, sensible layouts etc).

Since the turn of century, I have held onto the belief that good web-design is very rare and usually polluted by brand elements. This is confirmed in the way brand is often delivered online via a series of defined objects and properties including logo position, colour and font. These guidelines are usually set in stone and never take into account the process. It’s refreshing to see new exceptions such as Amazon and Google whilst encouraging to see older brands starting to embrace process driven design.

So, before you start wire-framing your next design how about designing and refining the process first? You could produce a bigger performance improvement with a process change alone than you could ever by changing object design when detached from the process. Maybe it’s time for process designers to start double-teaming with object designers?

I am fighting back. From now on I am adopting a new phrase, A CURATED WEB EXPERIENCE. Conjuring up images of musty old men and women in polyester who are ever so helpful and not at all threatening. Probably grey-haired.

A curator will control the torrent of information wooshing out from the Internet fire hose (1999 but even more relevant today). They guide you through the information overload, point out what’s salient, possess bibical-strength knowledge on the subject giving site visitors the shortcuts that they need and the information they seek. Simples.

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.

We all appreciate the huge benefits in conversion rates that personalised content brings and most organisations also appreciate the long-term value in continual testing and improvement. So what’s stopping every-day companies from joining this revolution is the lack of a simple and commercially-available platform to deliver this nirvana.

End of the flat-web society

Our clever and rather cool personalisation and test platform, VITES™, has been used in beta form by a number of leading online organisations since it’s inception in 2004. For the last year we’ve been busy behind the scenes re-writing the core application and adding a number of client-requested features.

So, coming in Q1 2011 is our latest release of VITES, Version 3.0. Packed with new features, improved client interface, better scalability and much faster performance. All this adds up to a better and easier way to join the exclusive world of a personalised web through personalisation, behavioural management, server-side A/B testing and visitor profiling.

Want to be a candidate for the latest release? Speak to Nick or Martin and we’ll give you the low-down on what you can expect to get and how it can help your business.

We laugh now but in the mid 90′s, there was this crazy notion that if you put up a web-site, any old web-site, then the money came rolling in. Even more crazy is that it worked…by the bucket load. Then along came “big” marketing and dragged us down some odd “brand-orientated, synergy-busting and paradigm-shifting alley”. Most of us got lost. Lost in banner impressions, land-grab, click saturation and massive paranoia about “giving away the crown jewels”.

Sadly what had happened is that really good personal relationships and transparency got smacked over the back of the head by mass-market tactics and thinking. It was wrong and a few companies avoided the headlong charge into “flash banner pages“, curious navigation and obsessive prettiness. You’ll recognize the companies that stayed away from this party, names such as Ebay, Zappos and Google spring to mind – there are a thousand others.

During what I call the “dim ages” many companies flocked to the outpouring of flash designers and online brand consultants. I feel sorry for them, during that period (2000-2003) we lost a fair few high-profile clients as they created their animated works of art that nobody wanted to sit through (remember the link “skip intro” appear on a thousand home pages?)

The dim ages were broadly a copy of old mass-marketing or 1:x broadcast style marketing. But what made the t’interweb so good in the beginning was the sheer vertical nature of the content, it started pretty much as a 1:1 media and that was it’s success. Thankfully we are now starting to see a shift back towards a 1:1 Internet and that is where its future lies.

You simply MUST focus on the needs of the individual when thinking about your Internet strategy and that means, due to the volume and disparity of people using the web, you must have a web platform that can identify individuals and serve them personalised content.

There are various platforms available but only one commercially available with open APIs. VITES 3.0, code-named 1:1 Superhero, offers everything you need to serve up personalised content to each and every visitor to your site. Regardless of how they arrive at the site.

License costs start at £500 per month and implementation from around £20k for a full turnkey service to slide under your existing site seamlessly and open up a whole new world of sales, data and conversion opportunities.

China is seeing the rise of online “Gold Farming”

This is the practice of hiring a group of mainly poor kids to ply their way through the myriad of online games (Everquake, World of Warcraft et al) collecting things of value to other gamers such as gold, potions, weapons etc. These items are then traded, via a broker, for real money to players that really can’t be arsed to go collecting or alternatively want to short-cut the tedious lower levers of these games.

The online gaming community really don’t like these “gold farmers” and tend to hound them pretty hard and even kill them (virtually) if the game allows it.

It’s quite a step to think that an online game has such a black economy, especially as most games are not actively policed that hard and rely on crowd-policing to deal with problems.

So what’s this got to do with the commercial world?

At the moment very little except to say that this is an example of entrepreneurship in terms of brokering items of value. As we start to see the rise of proper interconnected social networks who’s to say that “information farmers” cannot carve out their place in the information economy.

The more we live our life in public the more this information is freely available but time consuming to acquire.

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• China will ban minors from virtual-currency trading sites (sunbeltblog.blogspot.com)
• World Of Warcraft Gold Farming Guide (pctechmojo.com)

Here is a brief outline of what you can expect in the next release of the worlds first, commercially available, personalisation and customer journey platform

• Faster core platform, requiring less server computing power and faster serving of content
• In-built AB testing functions, faster, easier testing of content, pages and call-to-actions
• Server load balancing, giving higher system availability, improved fault tolerance and improved performance
• Off the shelf CMS support, de-skilling and speeding up changes to content
• Faster profile management, faster and easier creation of new customer journeys
• Reporting API, simplifying the export of business-critical data giving easier and faster access to real knowledge
• New User Group to support discussions, bug-tracking, feature request and cross-learning between clients

Initially released in 2006, VITES was designed to dramatically improve on and off site conversion rates by providing a scaleable platform that offered proper customer journey management (ala Amazon, Ebay etc) combined with a suite of testing tools that allowed accurate testing of new content, CTAs and traffic streams

Since it’s release, every client using the platform has seen at least a doubling of conversion rates and huge reductions in cost per enquiry/sale

The latest release is a ground-up rethink of what our clients and marketplace needed and part of this was a massive simplification in deployment of changes, testing and profiles

All current clients are on a migration plan to complete the porting to the new version by the end of 2010 and all new clients will automatically get the latest version of the platform

License charges remain unchanged, starting at just £500 per month for the basic 10k users per month version

Contact Liam, Martin or Nick now to find out more about how VITES 3.0 (Rangoon) can supercharge your web strategy.

VITES remains the only commercially available off the shelf journey profile and testing platform

Contact our licensing team (Liam, Martin or Nick) for further information.

System integrators and agencies should contact our CEO (Martin Dower) to discuss how VITES can help your clients

Why journey management?

Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organisations from a current state to a desired future state. The current definition of Change Management includes both organizational change management processes and individual change management models, which together are used to manage the people side of change [Wikipedia]

Organisational change is carried out as a policy handed out from on high and normally has the highest moral, ethics and intentions. This policy then has to be implemented at the people level and all people respond to change differently and at a different pace. It’s quite clear that moving an individual working in a manner type A to type B requires a number of processes, systems, feedback loops and measurement systems together with an infrastructure to deliver this change.

Change often equates to loss and forward-thinking organisations are seeking to use psychological / Neuro-linguistic programming approaches to dealing with, sometimes, huge upheavals that occur in organisations. Examples of these methodologies include the traditional grief cycle and more focused models such as Lewis-Parker and John Fisher.

Each of these methodologies is based on a journey from A to B via a number of personally significant stages such as denial, depression and acceptance. This journey can easily be mapped in an online environment with personal delivery of content, actions, assets, applications tailored to each of the various steps in the process. Rather than being a fixed-time linear process, journey management allows the visitor to move around the cycle and the system recognises what stage the visitor is at and deals with them in a way specific to the stage they are in, all automatically, all seamless and with the ability to report on the flow of individuals and groups.

It’s quite a fascinating subject and a particularly good use of a journey management platform.

The reality is this is really no different from a traditional sales cycle, consumers engage at different parts of the cycle and move around to completion (sales) or drop out of the cycle with lots of additional helpers along the way to make the transition as smooth as possible for as many of the people as possible. In the commercial model as many as 30% of the final sales comes from people who actually dis-engage during the process to re-engage later either by themselves or brought back into the cycle via other communication mediums such as email, direct mail, forums, twitter, facebook etc.

Theoretical in practice (example)

Take a traditional organisation that is moving to flexible working, striving to get more agility and performance from it’s staff and at the same time reduce the cost of space and communications. This is a fairly common scenario and a great deal of resource will have been spent designing the “new” shape of the organisation and how it will operate. Now it comes to start to deploy this change process and this requires the buy-in of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of individuals – all with different agendas, ideas, motivations, fears and engagement.

Enter “My Journey”. An application designed for all the people in the organisation, available 24×7 online and with the ability to assist the psychological and emotional needs of the transitioners as well as the basic nuts and bolts operational stuff.

The online application has a unique login for every person and starts with a simple series of questions to establish where on the transition curve you currently are. Once established, the individual then has access to the most relevant information and applications to support him or her or their journey. A set of rules will dictate when the user is “tested” again to establish if they need to move onto the next stage. This would normally be based on a set of behavioural rules applied to what the user is doing and how they are interacting with the application.

Very often mentoring is a powerful aid to assist people during times of change and a forum would provide this mentoring, targeted to just the stage that the individual is in, so people who have been through the process before or professional coaches and mentors can help the stages as a targeted segment.

There would a hierarchy of change agents overseeing and engaging with the users, providing online guidance and help through community-type functions and also uncovering people that need that little extra help along the way. This help exists outside of the online environment to include classroom/workshop and team-building activities at one end of the spectrum, to one-to-one personal mentoring at the other end.

Each stage is truly multimedia-enabled and assets available to participants could include information, pdf libraries, images, video shorts, training courses, forums, webinars, booking systems, technical support areas, purchasing/ordering, time and holiday management, tests & evaluations, video conferencing, IP telephony, live assistants, FAQs etc. The list goes on and on.

These assets do not (and should not) be all contained within the journey management application; the key here is use the journey management system as a way to access these resources, applications and information. This avoids duplication, out-dated content and the need to have a huge, complicated, system to manage the thousands of assets that would be needed.

Some key pointers

To successfully deliver this needs engagement from all the change agents and also a really friendly and easy-to-use environment for the application to work inside. Engaging the thousands of potential users of the system is very much like a snowball, so requires key people to engage first and then spread the word and, importantly, the community to the other individuals.

The application needs to constantly evolve to improve – much of this could be self optimising and also should provide the framework to test the efficacy of all the elements in all of the steps (people in the commercial context call this conversion rates).

How VITES™ provides journey management

Designed as a platform to recognise who you are and what stage (in life/sales/change) you are at and then with the ability to deliver custom content, applications and information VITES™ is ideally placed to provide this framework. With a track record of successfully delivering personalised content since 2003 you are safe in the knowledge that you can access a highly sophisticated, stable, scaleable and flexible platform pretty much off-the-shelf.

Talk to us to take the next step.

The dynamic web understands better what the visitor wants and provides a vastly improved experience, an experience that is largely personalised to the visitor and one that better matches the needs of both the web-site owner and his or her visitor.

The silent salesperson

With flat web sites having to meet the needs of anyone who might stop by, the key sales messages that you would want to get across to certain groups cannot be given their appropriate space. With VITES™ you can identify the target groups and tailor the message, the content and the path though the site. It’s like having a silent salesman watching every visitor and gently guiding them down the most appropriate path.

Web statistics are poor

The current crop of session and page reporting systems are very complex, very powerful reporting systems. Some can even make sense of real people and try to give you statistics and value rating. But the learning you get from them can be time consuming to understand, possibly misleading and ultimately only tends to explain why something happened in the past.

You have to translate these “findings” into recommendations and then implement them on your (different) web platform. Also these changes can, in their own right, ruin any reporting you might have. A better solution, surely, is to segment all the visitors into groups, report on them and then tailor their path so it improves the value to your business.

Radical?

Not in the slightest. Behavioural techniques have been used in selling since the middle ages – in fact almost all selling has behavioural understanding at it’s core and the best selling is done face to face or one-on-one. VITES™ gives you the opportunity to perform that one-on-one selling role in the world of new media.

Amazon does it, Ebay does it and Google does it a little more subtly so it’s pretty commonplace. But because it happens “behind the scenes” you do not see it as a visitor. These are all very large in-house developed solutions; for the first time VITES™ offers you a commercial product available off the shelf and which is straightforward to implement.