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?

There’s not much we don’t know about web forms.

We’ve been designing forms on web sites since 1996 and were one of the first companies in the UK to utilise the form as the engine of the site in 1999. Since that time our approach has been widely adopted, copied and used as examples of best practice by some of the leading minds in this field.

Form best practices

Start by clearly defining the purpose of the form, many of these aims are pretty diverse to make sure you set a clear and SMART objective for each and every form. You are allowed to have a secondary objective but you must take care the ensure that the secondary objective a) doesn’t confuse or distract the visitor from the first objective and b) has it’s value clearly understood compared to the first to avoid selective reporting. Ensure your testing method would stand clinical scrutiny.

Secondly, you should set a performance target for the form, a fill or completion rate. This sets a bar by which you can measure it’s current and future performance

Thirdly, the form must be designed with the visitor/user in mind. You need to protect yourself from HiPPOs, at all costs.

Once you have agreed the objectives, targets and approach you can set about designing the form.

Keep in mind the following golden rules:

1. Short forms rock! It is well documented that visitors dislike long or complicated forms. Keep it short and simple and be wary asking for information that visitors might feel is either sensitive or intrusive.

2. Label the form clearly. Each input field requires the visitor to click the box and fill in details so make sure it is 100% clear what you are asking and use helper buttons, mouseovers and text to guide them through the input procedure. You must clearly mark a field as mandatory if required and it’s worth explaining why it is mandatory.

3. The layout of the form should dictate the design and that should be a naturally readable as possible and, if the form is a significant call-to-action, should stand out against the background of the page through the use of colour, reverse, font or size.

4. A large percentage of forms are filled-in incorrectly so you should always adopt a soft-error approach to dealing with errors. Soft-error management can double the fill rate of the form and needs careful consideration. Not all errors are equal; the visitor may have missed a mandatory field or typed an invalid email address or illegal telephone number / postcode. Each type of error needs dealing with uniquely and sympathetically – a massive great red box saying “Error, please fill the form in properly” is not very useful!

5. Always be testing. No matter how brilliant your first attempt at the form is you can always improve so go back and continually test every form you have – ideally you should be continually trying to improve key calls-to-action. Without continual testing you won’t get continual improvement and it’s an easy win. Be careful with your testing mechanisms, if you are using a third-party hosted service such as Google Analytics then you might find the result increasingly unreliable as privacy opt-ins become mandatory. Consider using a server-side, in-house, solution if possible.

6. Watch out for privacy. It’s fast becoming a hot topic so you should take care to have a simple and clear privacy policy that doesn’t detract from the form fill. As part of this you need to consider what tools you are using to track visitors; there is a strong movement in the US and mainland Europe to make most third-party reporting systems (such as Google Analytics) an option for visitors with the default position of “opted out”.

Magic stuff

There are a few great tricks, some of which I am sure you are using but it’s worth listing the standard list of winners/losers and red-herrings.

1. Lightweight wins, every time. The heavier the logical page is the worse it will convert – try to get you form-based pages under 50k in size but certainly no heavier than 150k.

2. Red buttons do work. Use them.

3. Always make the button text the nature of the call to action, never “submit”. Never put a “reset” button on the form.

4. Need lots of information? Break the forms down into multiple stages.

5. Pre-fill the forms; always remember what a visitor types into a form, never make them re-enter information they have already given you.

6. Make sure the “Thanks page” has further Calls-to-action on it and where possible send the visitor an email thanking them for their time and explain what happens next at the same time giving them further things to do via additional links.

7. Never ask “where did you hear about us”, you should be able to work this o

8. If you are going to validate form fields make sure you get it right and are not over-fussy with spaces, commas, capitals and numbers etc.

9. Spend some time understanding Choice Architecture to permit gentle coaxing of visitors in the right direction.

10. Remember the mobile world. Smartphone/iPads/tablets are becoming commonplace and these typically have very different input methods that can make traditional forms difficult to complete. As part of this…never use flash.

Finally, small improvements compounded over a period of time make for big improvements in conversion rates with little risk and low cost. Alternatively – huge changes tested continually will, if monitored properly,  generate quicker improvements and a huge pile of discarded ideas; but might be more expensive. Why not mix and match, going after small changes continually and then every now and again chucking in an odd on…why not try single box multiple entry?

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

How does A/B testing work?

The idea is to change some part of your website and see if the new version does better than the old.  A good place to start is just changing words – maybe a headline. You call the existing version “A” and the new version “B“.

You already know that the page is converting at 2% so you could just try the new headline for a few days and check the new conversion rate.

Trouble with this method is that conversion rates change from day to day. You can guess at some of the reasons: weather, day-of-week, competitor activity.  So you may be trying a bad headline on a good day or a great headline on a lousy day – and make the wrong decision about the headline.

Focus on what has changed

We can remove these other factors from the test. We show A and B at the same time. Software randomly decides if a new visitor to the site is going to see A or see B, then tracks visitors through to conversion and measures if A or B is doing better.

• If it’s raining – people will see both A and B.
• If it’s sunny – people will see both A and B.
• If a rival starts a price war – people will see both A and B.

You have removed the other factors.

Is it significant?

We use a statistical test to check that results are significant – and not just random effects. Sometimes improvements are small, but still worth having. Several 2-3% increases start to add up.

Is it just Connected doing split testing?

Amazon, Zappos, Google, eBay, EasyJet – all the big names use A/B split testing. Join the big boys – with our help.

The results were stunning (for 2001) and showed that 80% of the advertising spend was pretty poor indeed. Not surprisingly our client was over the moon with this new-found transparency and their business exploded when they invested in the right online advertising and had faith in the value of it. It was a real way to measure the actual return on advertising investment.

VITES™ 1.0

Born in the middle of 2003, this was the first time page content was linked to data recorded. It was clear that first time visitors to a website needed to be encouraged to return to generate revenue, and that returning visitors to the website needed to be treated differently to first timers. So a simple “tunneling system” was implemented that established where the visitor was in the sales cycle by understanding their previous activity on the website and also by interrogating the offline CRM system.

By doing this, VITES™ dropped people into the most appropriate tunnel and fed them tunnel specific content, imagery and, most importantly, applications.

Conversion rates rocketed. We had stumbled across a killer application for the web. In much the same way as Sergey Brin devised a method at Stanford University to “rank” sites in importance based on inbound links – which then became the basis for Google – we stumbled upon the link between recording and behaviour and predictive purchasing or behavioural targeting was born.

VITES™ 1.5

The original version was a killer. It doubled conversion rates overnight but it was very cumbersome to build sites around it and the clunky tunnels were flawed when it came to bookmarking and search engine maps. This needed addressing so a specification to improve the whole system was hastily put together in 2004 to meet these shortcomings.

This was a simpler beast to operate, more flexible, more powerful but still required hand cutting of the tunnels. We had tunnel vision!

VITES™ 2.x

A huge step in development was identified in late 2005 and the move to visitor profiles is set in stone. The whole system needed to be rewritten and was completed by the middle of 2006. This included a number of innovations including profiles, rules and confidence ratings (how confident the system is that a person fits a profile).

The latest platform is developed was the established LAMP platform and the task of rolling it out to the first handful of clients started.

The tool

Soon after VITES™ 2.x was launched it was realised that customers were coming up with great ways in which to use this tool. It became a very natural and easy tool to customise web content so sites could change at the weekend or overnight or when the call centre was busy or any other internal or external event.

Market leading online advertising companies became exposed to the technology and started sharing their data with VITES™ allowing it to make better decisions. We’ve only just scratched the surface with the VITES™ tool – there are a hundred or even a thousand more uses for it that we are yet to find.

Overview

Break your visitors into groups of any size (1-1,000,000) and serve them their own version of the web-experience, now and every time they visit. Personalised calls-to-action (CTA), web 2.0 functions, layout, navigation, content and design. Automatically move your visitors from group to group using simple rules. Restrict what the groups see and can do. Communicate via email, ICQ, dmail & social networking according to the needs of their group.

End of the “one-size fits-all” web?

The “one-size fits all” web is a compromise, a general-purpose attempt to deal with all the potential combinations of types of visitors. By way of example, the benefits of creating creating custom landing pages by simple keyword groups is widely documented as hugely improving online conversion rates. Despite this, even the most savvy organisations don’t carry this any further than the first landing page and certainly look to learn from this when the visitor returns to the site. This represents a huge loss in conversion rates.

Compounding this loss is the increase in visitor expectation. No two people have the same needs and need to be dealt with in an intelligent manner or they well simply go somewhere else.

Web III? (sic)

Personalised, adaptive and tailored content goes a long way to answer the need of this new breed of customers and the results speak for themselves. For most organisations this means that they can successfully dominate their Internet marketplace with a reduced cost of marketing and increased visitor value.

An organisation showing a 20% reduction in cost per enquiry could use the marketing spend to fund the driving of an additional 30% of revenue, this is a powerful reason to chase the goal. This is not chump change, this is a seriously attractive and compelling goal.

Web plus (sic)

Interactions don’t just exist in a single online space anymore, other mediums are frequently used to talk and drive the site visitors (call centres, direct mail, physical meetings, email, ICQ, social networking, off-site interaction). These are all source of intelligence and information [and covered in-depth here] and can be used to either feed to personalisation engine or be fed by the engine. The relationship is bi-directional and so it should.

The sky’s the limit

When considering tailored or personalised content there is really no end to it’s uses; it really is a marketers dream tool. Any item of information available anywhere can influence what a visitor is shown. Some examples of the triggers for content change are shown below:

• Macro environment. Time of day, day of week, season, weather, public holiday, event, share price of BP, lead news story.
• Visitor environment. Geo location, browser, operating system, ISP, IP address, iphone.
• Visitor history. Last visit, first visit, frequency, pattern, number, relationship period.
• Visitor engagement level. Place in sales cycle, previous actions completed, next planned actions, off-site interactions, email interactions, telephone, face-to-face
• Source. Ad type, keywords used, product/service interest, ad network, demographics learning
• Demographics. ACORN type, income, peer-group learning

What’s next?

If you want to learn more about how you can utilise this element of the VITES™ platform then contact Liam, Nick or Martin or you can learn more about the other 4 key functions and benefits of VITES™.

This is a classic sales process for many organisations, often referred to as the sales funnel, yet this methodology on the web is not widely available. Below I will provide a brief overview of a client that uses this technology to stunning effect.

Laser eye surgery company

Founded over 10 years ago on a traditional clinical sales model (information -> consultation -> sale -> treatment) the emergence of the Internet offered this client a unique opportunity to map their current sales process onto an online model. At the start of this project in 2002 less than 20% of treated individuals ever touched their web presence. In 2009, nearly 90% of treated patients went through some element of the various web assets – they have, in effect, transformed into a dot com business in just a few years with spectacular results.

The challenges

Mapping a sales transition curve onto an online system is relatively simple to do with the right platform and this was achieved quite quickly and easily. Using the VITES™ platform a number of sales steps were created; first-timers, information gatherers, thinkers, consultation bookers, consultation attenders and treated patients. At all stages in the journey help and assistance is made available. Testimonials re-enforcing and evangelising the positives in the process are posted.

To grow the business and generate sustainable sales, every person in the process has to go through (almost) every stage and this process is not always linear, some steps are missed out and some are clumped together depending on the needs, fears, issues and financial standing of the customer.

At each stage there are various challenges faced by the company and the customer. Here is a summary of the stages and the challenges:

First timers – Stage A

Customer : Who is this company? Are they right for me? What’s involved in surgery? How much? Will it hurt?

Company : Quick engagement, make sure they stay or leave a method for re-engaging (email, address)

Information gatherers – Stage B

Customer : Where is the information I need? How much will it hurt? How can I afford it?

Company : Getting the “this is simple & painless” message across. We can make this affordable. We are the best.

Thinking about it – Stage C

Customer : Really not sure about surgery? Will I go blind if it goes wrong? It’s expensive.

Company : Gotta keep ‘em warm, if they disengage we stand a good chance of losing them. It really *is* safe.

Consultation bookers – Stage D

Customer : Can I see someone near me? Does it cost? Will it hurt? Credit or cash purchase?

Company : Consultations are free, no obligation, no sales pressure. We are the best!

Consultation attenders – Stage E

Customer : Hmm, I’m suitable now – should I go ahead? What happens if I go blind? What about post-op complications?

Company : Gotta get them to buy, this is the most expensive stage to lose ‘em, momentum is the game

Treated patients – Stage F

Customer : Wow, it’s fab – who else can I tell this about, can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner, it didn’t hurt

Company : Lets get these guys talking to the wide world and also to the people in the early stages

There are clear themes that run throughout most of the process, fear and cost for example, but at each stage there are subtly different issues, challenges and therefore different messages, different calls to action and different ways of dealing with the visitor.

The solution

Using the VITES™ Journey Platform, rules define that each visitor is tagged at each stage and “dropped” into a profile that fits the stage that they are at. In each profile there are different ways of dealing with the various challenges and these are served up as custom content based on what is known about the visitor. Additionally, there is external learning that can be transferred into the system; for example an incoming first-time visitor who has typed “laser eye treatment” into Google has a higher preponderance to move faster through the sales cycle than, say, an individual who has responded to a “win FREE laser eye surgery” banner on Hotmail.

A bespoke forum comprising FAQ’s and posts is available to the visitor. It is important that platform technology and the quick and easy availability of “help” work together to enable the journey to continue.

Below are some rule examples:

• If you are a stage A and have typed “laser eye treatment” into Google then show a “Consultation request” form
• If you are a stage A from a (filler) banner campaign based around “Win FREE” then show a “Win FREE form”
• If you are a stage A person and leave the site then flood the visitors banner network with “Win FREE” banners to get you back.
• If you have been on stage B for more than 30 days show an “Interest Free Offer”
• If you have just become a stage B then show a “Consult Booking” option
• If you are at stage C then show testimonials from people like you, treated near you and show forum posts from stage F people (how wonderful it is)
• If you are stage D then show special offers during week 6 to 9

The rules are not complex but there are a great deal of them and with around 3,500 entrance points to the site used by approximately 1,000,000 visitors per month the automated system simply chugs away delivering the right content at the right time. To further expand the model, to say “show a consult booking” option is wider than just online; it includes the use of personalised email and also communicates this information to (and from) the call-centre to ensure that the sales message is consistent across all communication platforms.

See it working?

The average time from first-arrival to sale is around 90 days and with the VITES™ platform being self learning and with many of the rules making quite subtle changes it’s actually very difficult to see the process in action – which is good. You don’t want the visitor to have a “jolting” experience every time he or she returns to the site. The very nature of VITES™ is that it is subtle.

Trial and error economics

The very nature of the platform encourages testing, seeking improvements in all the stages. A few percentage point improvements in the stages generates huge compounded gains. For example, the overall conversion rate from visitor to client has doubled over the last 3 years and the cost per sale has dropped 80% over that time period whilst the time-to-close has fallen by over a third. These are all substantial gains and one of the reasons that the work done on this client is often quoted as real “best practice” across the world and used by some of the top Internet gurus as the basis for workshops, seminars and events.