We’re excited to be sponsoring the MIT100K Business Plan Competition and have the opportunity to help the winner boost their web presence, which can help an early-stage startup have an edge when seeking more funding or funding their first customers.

Why is this important?

Having a well-designed site gives you cred. A good first impression and delivering your message effectively to initial customers (think: early adopters) or investors is key when you may not yet have a whole lot else to show for yourselves yet. When you’re featured in Mass High Tech’s “Startups to Watch” you want that traffic to convert into initial sales, inquiries, or investors, and for your design to have a positive effect with these initial visitors.

If you’re developing and selling a web application, it’s better to show what your first customers can expect to see and get them excited about it, rather than having a “coming soon page”. Even screenshots and a quick tour of your application can do wonders when it comes to converting initial customers even if you haven’t built out your application yet. In fact, this is a good way to test the viability of your web business without going into heavy development right off the bat. We call the initial mockups of an application rapid prototyping.

When you launch your initial site you should build a blog to start your search and social media marketing by developing online thought leadership and traffic to your site. Even if your business isn’t ready for launch yet, it’s important to have an excited group of primary customers who you can rely upon for beta testing or initial sales, as well as being able to update the investment and entrepreneurship community on how things are going for you. Visibility and maintaining interest from the different audiences is vital to gaining traction.

We met one of our clients RetireLife at the Babson business plan competition – here’s RetireLife founder and CEO Megan Shea’s take on the subject:

“By creating your web presence early on in your startup you can begin to understand customer preferences and ways they use the site to define and optimize your message as you scale the business – we have taken our learning from the past year coupled with the UI expertise of Fresh Tilled Soil to completely redesign our website to make it more user-friendly and fit for our target audience” – Megan Shea, RetireLife

We love talking about this. You can find us at the MIT100K semi-finals this Thursday or get in touch with Matt Boynton

Today we launched The Morality of Profit website. Alex, our creative head, did an amazing job with this clean crisp layout. The book by the same name will be launched with a cover reflecting Alex’s design.

The Morality of Profit is a global project sponsored by The S.E.VEN Fund inviting discourse on the morality of profit. The competition seeks pieces that explore a range of positions through the lens of diverse cultural, religious, philosophical, and academic traditions.

We just found an awesome post from www.LukeW.com about how redesigning forms to read like conversational paragraphs can boost conversions up to 40%:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1007
Can’t wait to give it a try.

A new FTS client, RetireLife, has been working with our UI team to launch a website for their start-up company.  FTS’ user interface web designers are now in the final stages of creating a comprehensive website, designed to fully support Retire Life’s business model to get the company up and running.  The young entrepreneurs behind RetireLife are a group of Babson students whose entrepreneurial objective grew out of their own personal experiences with friends and family members; they recognized the struggle their parents’ generation was experiencing as their grandparents aged.  There were very few resources available to their parents, (the Baby-Boomer Generation,) who have become the caretakers of their aging parents.  These Babson students realized that they, Generation Y, would inherit this same problem fifteen to thirty years from now, when their parents, (from the even bigger Baby Boomer Generation,) grow older and need the same type of care.  RetireLife.com helps assuage the tension and anxiety surrounding the very difficult, sensitive issue of caring for our aging loved ones. Read more

A recent situation encountered by by one of our clients has inspired me to pontificate on the topic of “Marketing Committees”. (Read: Why Corporate Web Design is Broken) Recently one of our clients mentioned to me that her marketing committee needed to review our design. Now, while in this particular scenario, I was assured that she has the final say in terms of this type of formality she often encounters with her organization (phew!) which calmed me down about the possibility of revamping our mockups again,  I’ve paraphrased, extrapolated, and derived questions from the our conversation  to represent what can happen when a committee who’s expertise lies just outside of the design world gathers in a room and analyzes site design:

“Does this constitute conventional web design?”

“Can we see research on where the eye lands first?”

“We need a few more mockups to help us decide what we want”

Ok. My suggestion to a marketing board such as this would be to avoid engaging in discussions about things such as “eye path”. While that is important for some applications and marketing material, it’s something “we all” heard about at one point or another in school and is the closest thing to psychological qualifiers most people can connect with in terms of effective design. It’s one of many aesthetic and functional elements that can go into designing a site. Psychologists do exist who study these types of things. But really, this is going too far.

Basically, if a site looks good and is easy to use, it is good. Worrying if evolutionary experts would find the site as perfectly engaging, sustainably and organically designed doesn’t really apply here. The site needs a clear purpose and the goal is to convey what you need to convey as most straightforwardly as possible.

In terms of “conventional” site elements, keep it simple. People travel to web pages because they expect to learn things they think (and hope) that web page holds, not browsing around the page for what they want to find out. That’s where simplicity comes into play and why one text column, one description, and clean functionality often wins out. For example, focus on including more “need to know only if it applies to you” information as you progress throughout the site or down the page. You’ll look if you need to look. Otherwise, no need to worry about it.

While these thoughts may not constitute criteria for a site to win international design awards (we don’t design that way anyways, because they often sacrifice content for aesthetics, which doesn’t really work for many of our clients), the purpose of the site is what drives the design. Don’t overcomplicate things.

Lukas Mathis has written a short but insightful piece on the idea that simple designs for icons and action related UI makes more sense. His conclusions also reminded me of some of the studies done on faces and body shape as it relates to attractiveness. The retention of juvenile characteristics or Neoteny suggests that the retaining the basic look or shape of the child or immature version has the outcome of making it more attractive to our visual brains.

A great example of this is the evolution of the Mickey Mouse character. In 1978, Stephen Jay Gould theorized that Walt Disney and his animators gradually discovered what it took evolutionary psychologists decades to prove: that baby-like features and proportions elicit an “automatic surge of disarming tenderness” in adults.

Simple UI or icons offer more inferred information as opposed to prescriptive. The simpler the icons the more likely we are to throw them into a general category instead of wondering which action or quality to ascribe to them. As Lukas Mathis points out, “People are confused by symbols if they have too many or too few details. They will recognize UI elements which are somewhere in the middle.”

While you were sipping bubbly and counting down the last moments of 2009, we brought in the New Year with what else but the launch of a new website.  XtraXtra.com went live January 1^st and is already getting “dugg” by users. We designed a personalized news site for Xtra Xtra that allows users to search for and share personal news and professional milestones with friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc..

The project involved a complete design overhaul of the existing site. We restructured the entire site to improve upon elements of functionality and navigability. The client provided market research and focus group feedback that allowed our designers to create a user-friendly, aesthetically appealing interface. Usability is always a central consideration when we implement new designs, but it’s especially paramount to the success of a website (like Xtra Xtra,) that’s inherently based on personalization and user interaction.

New features were added to make the site Xtra Xtra customized (…clever, I know). A geo-location element was added to detect the user’s location and provide highly-localized, relevant content—much like Citysearch does. A Facebook Connect feature was added that allows users to login via their Facebook account, and distribute site content around the web; for example, you can comment on another user’s “milestone” and it will stream directly to their Facebook account feed.

Lots of other changes, improvements, and revisions went down during this three month project schedule.  But let’s skip to the happy ending– check out the before/after shots below:

Before                                                                                            After

Yesterday I watched Sherlock Holmes and loved it. The movie was true to Sir Conan Doyle’s dark and dirty London without all the typical Hollywood crap we’ve grown accustomed to. The witty dialogue between Holmes and Watson caught my attention from a designer’s point of view.

Two things that Holmes said that are extremely relevant to the art and science of design are “the devil is in the details” and “don’t find facts to back up your theories, find facts to construct your theories”. I’m paraphrasing of course but you get the idea. The first quote is obvious and doesn’t really need additional explanation but the second one is the cornerstone of successful design projects.

We are all guilty of creating theories that support our own biases. In our roles as strategic designers we hear these types of things all the time. There is nothing more damaging to good UI design than statements like “I feel like our clients would want this feature” or “I’ve heard that features like this are really popular”. When we hear these general and emotional responses or suggestions we ask where the data is to support that idea or ‘feeling’. Is the data from a respectable source? Where else have we seen this feature and how successful was it in achieving the site’s or app’s goals? Are their user experience tests or best practices that support that idea?

Love the data. It’s more rewarding than falling in love with your own ideas.

Jay Jaboneta from HungryPeople interviewed about Fresh Tilled Soil and website design the other day for his blog. Here’s a little taste…

How come YOU never met a whiteboard YOU didn’t like?

If you think of designing web applications you don’t think of whiteboards. In our studio we often sketch on paper or draw on a whiteboard before we start designing on the computer. I love the old-school feeling of a pen or a pencil in my hand when we’re working on something as ethereal and virtual as a website.

This afternoon Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and UX, announced that Google and Twitter have reached a deal to use Twitter content in Google’s results. Although not entirely surprising it’s pretty big news for search marketers that Google will now include the Twitter posts in it’s search results. This makes me wonder if the status updates from Facebook would ever be considered as a relevant search result?

(from the official Google blog) Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.