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.

With search engines being the usual starting point for a customer’s journey, companies are still, largely, trying to attract site visitors via carefully crafted content or special offers. How different, really, is your home page from your competitors?

This approach has a limited shelf life as the search engines are starting to abstract the information from the marketing fuzz on web-sites. So where does that leave companies that want to promote their brand values?

Embracing user-generated content is a good starting point and every internet-enabled business should be running headlong into social-media, review sites, forums and blogs. There is, however, a largely overlooked approach that shifts the game away from information and towards action. Visitors to your site want to do stuff as well as consume information.

The future is applications

It is easy to incorporate brand values and imagery in applications and this is a much under utilised approach. Picking out one of two key brand strengths and converting them into a useful and branded application can easily put distance between your organisation and your competitors. It is much harder to abstract or re-create the applications elsewhere so it is possible to establish a real “home” for visitors to drop in to. At the same time, if the application is strong enough it will actively discourage your potential customers from visiting your competitor sites and when they do they will, hopefully, dismayed by the absence of this useful application.

Delivering this is easy as gadgets and micro-applications and by definition they are more interactive and compelling as the visitor can find out answers and achieve his or her actions without having to browse through lots of pages. Better still, if the applications are tailored to the visitors stage in the sales process and built with the intention to move them onto the next stage you’re able to mix content, brand and call-to-action in a single application.

Applications need to be learned, even the very simple ones, so you have to make them compelling and easy to use. Better still, make it an application that the visitor will need to use time and time again and the investment the visitor makes learning your application reduces the chance they will be tempted to use another application provided by a competitor. As humans we are just  a little lazy so once we have learned one way to do something we really don’t like trying new stuff; look at the dogged loyalty you see with applications such as Ebay, Amazon and Google.

Where to start

So, if the future lies in creating application then you need to look at all aspects of your sales cycle and see where you could introduce a function or a feature that requires visitor interaction and gives out information. This is easier than you think. For example, if you sell double glazing and part of your sales cycle is a visit from an estimator then you have a tailor made hole to drop an application into. Add a “Online Estimator” button and take the visitor to an application that gathers the raw data required for an estimate (number of windows, size, type, opening, glass type, location etc) and let them fill the information in, add some personal contact details and bingo, the application spits out an “estimate subject to survey, click here to book survey” which in turn takes the visitor to an online booking application (one of the great killer micro-applications online). Job done.

Developing micro-applications

Decisions must be made pretty early on about the technology platform you are going to use as very few technologies work on all platforms (eg Flash). The critical choice here is deciding what percentage and what type (mobile, home, office) of customer you are trying to snare. You will also have a set of much wider considerations surrounding your internal systems, scale and compatibility as it is highly likely you will need this applications to talk to a number of your existing systems. This makes the selection of the application developer less of a marketing choice and more of a capabilities and compatibilities discussion.

You’ll need help at the stage so why not talk to us about the best way to approach it, we’ve been building successful web applications for nearly 15 years.

Justin Bieber is the most searched for celebrity on the internet and has the most viewed youtube video in history. His debut album, My World, was the highest grossing debut by any artist in 2009 and he is the first artist in history to have seven songs from his debut album reach the “Billboard Hot 100.”

At this point you’re probably asking yourself: “Who is this kid and how did he do it?”

Scooter Braun, who discovered the child star and is now Justin’s manager, offers some insight:

1. When Justin was discovered, he had 5 videos on YouTube, with the highest viewed having about 70,000 hits. Justin opened a Twitter account and with a year interacting with fans and uploading home-made videos to YouTube. He already had millions of fans when his album launched.

2. Justin’s appearances see uncontrollable crowds flocking to see him. A video of a 3 year old girl crying over Justin has over 13 Million views on youtube! As Braun says, “Kids would rather discover something on the Internet than hear it on the radio… there’s a sense of ownership.  People feel more connected to Justin, and they deserve to, because they made him.”

3. Justin’s dedication to social media tools like youtube and twitter give him unprecedented insight into his fan base. When asked about next steps Braun remarked, “the next step is to figure out what the fans want and give it to them. We know a lot of kids want to see Justin in a movie and now we’re preparing for that.”

4. In order to prevent Justin from becoming another soon-to-be-forgotten child star, Braun researched former child stars who had fallen from grace. What he found was that “the talent was always there, but their heads got too big and swollen and they forgot that without the fans you’re absolutely nothing.”. We often see companies get so big and removed from their consumer base that they have no idea how to interact with the public (BP?).

Comment

Most of this is:

a) Fairly obvious and

b) Simple to do

but requires a will to stick to a plan and make sure you adapt your social media content to the needs of the audience. You probably think that the story above does not apply to you or your company but as all of us start to live our lives in public then we are responsible for our own brand.

Justin has crafted a beautiful brand around what the kids want, why can’t you carve out a brand around what your customers want – that is assuming you know what your customer want!

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.

The absence of many of the senses (touch, smell, taste and largely, hear) when interacting with t’interweb is a challenge that at some point needs addressing if we are to replicate the real world into the virtual world.

Lots of studies have shown that these senses greatly influence our decisions and if virtual environments seek to achieve comparable success to the real world it won’t be overlooked for long.

Sound

On the face of it, sounds easy to deal with – simply play a backing track on a page and you have sound except that’s not the whole story. We use sound in a far more complicated manner and how we perceive or react to sound also varies depending on what we are doing.

We’re going to start testing using sound as an aid to navigation, initially it will be as simple as small “click and ding” cues to assure site visitors that actions they are trying to do, have, in fact been achieved. Sound is, potentially, the easiest sense to deal with as most browsing devices have a speaker, very few have “smell-o-vision” and I’m not aware of any device that produces taste (urgh!).

Touch

Is an interesting one. The growth of touch-enabled devices such as the iPad and other touch screen tablets shows some promise. Joshua Ackerman of MIT suggests that our use of tactile concepts in metaphors that relate to behaviour might influence our judgement which provides an interesting basis to start thinking about how we might use tactile feedback to “convince” a web site visitor. There is not yet a way for a site to directly feedback touch but there most certainly is a way to read touch via devices that have accelerometers installed. In fact simple examples of this exist already on, for example, the iPhone that can carry out actions when shaken, turned or moved.

Early work has started on meta-materials that can impart different touch sensations such as rough, smooth, rippled and whilst this work has an early home working with vision-impaired people the simple idea that a site can “talk” to you through the feeling of the site as your finger or palm wanders over the page is appealing, if not a little ‘Star Trek’.

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• Tactile display allows you to “feel” both light and shadow (engadget.com)
• Sense of Touch Shapes Snap Judgements (wired.com)
• iPad & iPhone tactile object recognition system bodes well for board games (geek.com)
• Apple iPad, iPhone used in snazzy new tactile feedback demo; hints at future haptic feedback tech (intomobile.com)

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.

Too bloody many! All of them purport to offer the answer to the holy grail of advertising landing page design.

Most of the advice is re-regurgitated, old, unproven and bloody obvious if you have more than an ounce of common sense. What would be more useful would be a real guide to what has worked, why and how well.

The reality is that landing pages are very often the real “heavy lifters” on a web-site in terms of generating enquiries, sales, data and actions. That is a good thing as at least we know where to start when in comes to optimising performance as PART OF AN OVERALL STRATEGY.

Let’s not get bogged down in the fine detail of what to try, where and why as this does vary from site to site, person to person and market to market. Let’s start where we should do, at the beginning and from the visitor’s point of view.

1. The visitor arrives at the landing page after consciously clicking on a sponsored link. They want something, you know what they searched for. Give them what they want. If they search for a brand term then give brand options, if they search for a product then show a product, if they search for a place then give then location-based information.

Focussed landing pages have performed 150% better than generic landing pages. In real tests, with real visitors, this year.

2. Don’t make ‘em wait, impatient or frustrated people don’t convert as well. That means a fast loading page (ever wondered why Google’s home page is just 16k in size?). Speed of loading is dependent on small pages, fast servers, good connectivity and few outside “includes”.

Frequent testing with our clients show a direct correlation between logical size of page and performance. A recent test saw a 25k page perform 50% better than a 100k page and 75% better than a bloaty 150k page. The pages were identical aside from logical size.

3. Visitors want to do something, such as buy, apply, find, request or contact. Make those options clear, visible, easy and fast to do.

Above the fold can make a difference but only if the page is uncluttered. A recent test on a cluttered page showed no difference in above and below the fold for a conversion point.

4. No clutter. Less is more. Reduce choices to keep the visitors decision process simple. No need for complex navigation (or any real navigation at all?). Big text, small words, white space, compelling reasons for an action and no bloody clutter. Everything on the landing page is there to drive the conversion, everything else is dead-weight that WILL hamper conversion rates.

Testing a series of landing pages recently saw a dramatic increase in on-page, in-session and intra-journey conversion when the navigation system was removed as the page was de-cluttered.

5. Everyone makes mistakes. Most of the time. And that includes your carefully crafted (call to action) form so make sure the error handling is world class. It’s a trick called “soft-erroring” and works by never actually producing a traditional error. When an error occurs the visitor is gently guided to a “thanks but” page which gently tells the visitor we need a little more information and the reasons why and maybe makes a suggestion or two. With testing you’ll produce better forms in the first place.

This IS a killer. You can easily see a doubling in first-time conversion if the information you require is difficult to acquire (telephone number, for example) or the question is complex.

Stickybits brings the physical and digital worlds together with barcode stickers which trigger audio, video, photo, and text messages when scanned. The product is a mobile app for the iPhone and Android phones which lets users scan barcodes, attach messages, and keep track of the stickybits left by their friends. Will it catch on?