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.
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.”
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.
Some individuals may think of SEO as spam and I’m not talking about the Spam you find in a can. Although in this situation I would rather eat spam in a can than be called an online spammer. However this is simply not the case… unless of course you hire a black-hat SEO. By definition online spam encompasses individuals who find shortcuts that “trick” the search engines into ranking webpages higher than the competition, without necessarily following best practices. In the short run this may be a successful strategy, but over time will not sustain the test of time. Make sure if you are hiring an SEO firm, they are not taking shortcuts when it comes to your SEO or practicing black-hat SEO tactics that will have negative implications on your website. If SEO is considered spam than any message offered by any organization to their customers or the general population should be considered spam.
Onsite SEO:
If you are starting an SEO effort always look for changes you can make onsite. Setting up your website internally is the first and most beneficial thing you can do. Think of it like this: If you were building a home would you start building your new home on a cracked or unsteady foundation? probably not. Any successful SEO strategy starts at the foundation or on-site and builds upon the successful block that have been created. This means creating an optimized URL structure, title/description tags, internal links, setting up 301 redirects, RSS feeds and blogs.
Offsite SEO:
Once your onsite SEO efforts are fixed and complete it’s time to work on offsite SEO. This means building external links and content to your site. Today offsite SEO strategies are not about spamming the end users, but providing offsite content that offers dynamic and relevant content to these individuals. This can be done through article submissions, social bookmarking, comment link building and a variety of other online mediums.
Making certain that you are following the best practices of SEO will ensure that you are not spamming your audience with irrelevant or useless content. Although to some extent SEO is a numbers game, it’s also about a content game. Creating relevant and quality content links to your site will maintain their sustainability and popularity over time.
If you are an online marketer then you have probably heard of hubspot.com. If you haven’t, then jump on over to their website right now and read up about them. Among it’s various online marketing tools, Hubspot has developed a website grader tool (http://grader.com), allowing individuals to examine the strength of their website from a quality score and detailed report.
I am happy to announce that as of today www.freshtilledsoil.com’s current website grader score is 99.7. What does this mean in terms of SEO?… well, a lot. Much of the website grader score is based on the marketing effectiveness of your site. Out of 1,655,774 websites that have been ranked thus far, freshtilledsoil.com ranks in position # 5,795 and scores 99.7 percent higher than the other sites evaluated.
It’s entirely important to focus both on your off-site and on-site marketing and SEO efforts to help increase the web presence and popularity of your site. In turn, you will be able to increase your overall traffic and the amount of potential leads you receive.
Ok, content may not be King per-say, since there are so many other factors that affect your overall SEO effectiveness, but it’s right up there in terms of importance. It’s not only about the content really, but how you use your content to gain SEO strength within the search engines.
I’ve always found article submission websites to be a great way to promote yourself or your company online. From a human element, the trick is to offer your viewers valuable information, which with help increase the popularity of your article. The next element is to be subtle when you mention or link to your site, unless of course your are explaining the purpose of your organization. From a search engine perspective, article submission sites are highly relevant since the content is always being updated. Many of these sites allow you to hyperlink to your website within the article, which essentially helps drive traffic to your site.
We have been working with an online process equipment vendor, Equipment Genius. We have been focusing our off-site SEO efforts on content creation. I’ve submitted one our articles to an online article submission website, docstoc.com. In a little over two weeks the article written for EquipmentGenius.com is already ranking in Google on page 1, position #4 (check out the screenshot below) for the keyword iteration “online process equipment.” Google has quickly indexed and placed a higher relevancy on this article than it has for the EquipmentGenius.com website. So if you ask me, content is definitely something to use within your SEO efforts.
Great article on how good UI and UX design leverages the overall customer experience to offset marketing costs.
By focusing on the quality of design and user experience and improving it, marketing dollars can be spent much more efficiently and work to support a product that has a clear competitive edge through ease of use and quality of design. In addition, making the product easier to use can reduce the amount of effort and resources needed to support it, which can lower costs and increase your return on investment.
I just came accross a new hosted photo service called Fotopedia that offers a great way to create quick, elegant photo gallery widgets that you can share on your website within minutes. You can also integrate Fotopedia with your flickr account (thanks JOI ITO) to display your flickr image sets inside of their slick HTML widgets.
I’ve created a quick video walk through showing exactly how easy this process was. I’ve also included a sample of the HTML Widget to accompany the demo.
“Come up to the lab… and see what’s on the slab.” – Dr. Frankenfurter
It’s been a big, bile-filled week for new application launches and the evil scientists behind them. Both Squidoo’s Brands in Public (another in a long line of brainchildren from Seth Godin,) and Google’s Sidewiki have bloggers and traditional journalists clamouring to dissect and criticize these potentially game-changing additions to our online world. And the villagers are definitely restless.
What is Google Sidewiki?
The latest offering from the Google Labs has been live for a few days now and opinions, especially within the search engine optimization/marketing industry, have been flying fast and furious. Sidewiki has sparked as much debate as any application to ever come out of their underground lair, and that’s hardly surprising considering the massive impact it may prove to have on brand reputation management and other aspects of user-generated discussions in the social sphere.
At its simplest, Sidewiki allows any website visitor to leave a comment about it which is then displayed for any other visitor to read, should they have the capability turned on. Anonymity is not an option, however, so this should greatly reduce the number of participating trolls, rivals and doodie jokes. Reactions from around the web:
Goggle’s new Sidewiki web annotation feature doesn’t allow anonymous commenting, and that is an excellent thing. The Web has been held hostage by anonymous comments for far too long. But, Google is also treating other peoples’ content as its own, and that’s bad. – David Coursey
Somebody should have asked the “is it evil?” question. That’s why it’s there. I sense no one did. – Jeff Jarvis
Several of us here at FTS have installed the new toolbar and are getting under Sidewiki’s hood. First impressions seem to all come back to one thing – will the lack of anonymity be enough to keep the new tool useful or will it degenerate into a chorus of moans. As the old adage goes, if someone has a good experience they might share it with one person. If they have a bad experience they will scream it from the rooftops. The jury is understandably out – but the potential for a great addition to the Google toolbox is definitely there.
What is Brands in Public?
Seth Godin, usually heralded as nothing short of a marketing genius, has kicked up a lot of dust with his latest Squidoo-centric baby. Similar to that network’s user-created “lenses”, Brands in Public will allow companies to create and manage the same sort of entity centered around their brand.
You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time. – Seth Godin
As with a lens, BIP will pull in and syndicate any brand mentions it locates via RSS feeds – news, blog posts, tweets, videos, images, etc. Where the problem for the new service’s detractors lies is its $400 a month price tag. While the hefty cost is a good thing when it comes to making sure the brand-specific real estate is actually owned by its associated company and not an affiliate marketer or competitor, it has also created the impression of extortion among many:
Give Squidoo $400 a month. Or your brand gets it. – Meghan Keane
Wow. I’d personally like to welcome Seth Godin to the world of brand-jacking and hostage taking. I didn’t know you had it in you. – Lisa Barone
If you’re a highly visible company Godin and his team intend to create your brand’s dashboard for you. In fact, they probably already have. If you want to have some degree of control over this entity, which will surely end up ranking very well in the search engines for your brand-specific searches, you have to cough up the dough. Monthly membership includes:
It would also appear that you can make money for charity (or contribute to Squidoo’s bottom line depending on your payment choices) via the Amazon, CafePress, etc. affiliate revenue modules which the network has offered since its inception. It’s Squidoo for brands. At a hefty cost. I don’t like its chances and I think big-business participation will be done begrudgingly as part of an existing online reputation management strategy which will now require an additional $400 a month. I could be wrong, though. There’s always the Stockholm Syndrome to consider.
Our clients and development partners, Janeiro Digital, have just launched their new site. The site is built entirely on WordPress giving them amazing control over the content across all areas of the site. I really like the simplicity of the design and layout (thanks Kristy!). What makes this project interesting for both us and the client is that because of the flexibility of WordPress, and the associated plug-ins, we could create a full-enabled CMS driven site with a totally custom design in just a few short weeks.
