Conversion Optimization: User Interface Basics
CoTweet’s Creative Director and co-Founder, Kyle Sollenberger, has rounded up ten design fundamentals on User Interface Design over on Think Vitamin. Below you’ll find a small subtract of some of the key takeaways to keep in mind with UIX:
Know your users’ goals
“Obsess over customers: when given the choice between obsessing over competitors or customers, always obsess over customers. Start with customers and work backward.” –Jeff Bezos, CEO amazon.comYour users’ goals are yours, so learn them… …Find out what interfaces they like and sit down and watch how they use them…
Stick to web-wide Interface Design conventions
Users spend the majority of their time on interfaces other than your own (Facebook, MySpace, news sites, etc.): There is no need to reinvent the wheel…Consistency
“The more users’ expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it.” – Jakob NielsonYour users need consistency. They need to know that once they learn to do something, they will be able to do it again… …A consistent interface… …increases their efficiency.
Provide feedback
Always inform your users of actions, changes in state and errors, or exceptions that occur. Visual cues or simple messaging can show the user whether his or her actions have led to the expected result.Don’t EVER punish your users
No matter how clear your design is, people will make mistakes… …Design ways for users to undo actions, and be forgiving with varied inputs; no one likes to start over because he/she put in the wrong birth date format…Iterate, iterate, iterate
…It is often said when developing interfaces that you need to fail fast, and iterate often…
As Creative Director of CoTweet Kyle -“@iamkyle”- Sollenberger oversees all design activities—from the layout, appearance and usability of products to the representation of corporate identity. Be sure to check out Kyle’s full post and more examples on Carsonified’s Blog.
Pay with Facebook: The “One-Click” Solution to Save Newspapers Online?
“…there is a group of executives inside the company that believe “Pay With Facebook” could end up a bigger revenue source than Facebook’s advertising revenues. We’ve estimated Facebook’s advertising revenues will reach $475 million in 2009.
To get an idea what kind of challenges Facebook will have to overcome to get there, consider that during the second quarter, eBay subsidiary PayPal’s revenues were $669 million, up 11% y/y.
It got there with:
- 75 million active registered accounts
- A total payment volume of $16 billion in the quarter
- With accounts containing approximately $3 billion in stored value that is spent every 2 weeks
- Supporting 19 currencies
- With a .30% fraud rate
Facebook can’t approach any of those numbers yet, but it does possess one distinct advantage — nearly 300 million monthly active users.
What’s more, the rousing success that is Facebook Connect — the service that allows users to log in to participating third-party sites using their Facebook IDs with one click — hints that Facebook users might appreciate a similar “one-click” simplicity when paying for merchandise on the Internet.”
Be sure to check the whole article at BusinessInsider.com
Privacy concerns aside, one can imagine that Facebook’s One-Click payment solution, along with the social sharing of articles and posts through Facebook Connect, could be the panacea for newspaper publishers looking for ways of monetizing content beyond the stale and flailing “generate-pageviews-sell-banners” business model.
How so?
Well, besides the general mentality that digital content should be “free”, one of the major issues in monetizing content on the web by surrounding it with a “Pay-First wall”, is the fact that visitors don’t know in advance what (quality) they’ll exactly be paying for; consumers fear buying a shrink-wrapped magazine purely based on its cover, only to be disappointed afterwards.
Whereas on iTunes or with Steam you usually know that what your getting is guaranteed to have a substantial replay-factor or, in the case of iTunes, since the price is relatively low, you can afford the risk of a dud every now and then.
This, arguably, is not the case with ubiquitous news, or in-depth articles.
Utilizing Facebook’s micro-payment solution combined with Facebook Connect however, publishers will have the opportunity of using a “hassle-less” One-Click online payment solution, powered by trusted(?) recommendations of friends: “Hey Todd, here’s an article I just read about Obama’s healthcare reform, touching it from a viewpoint I believe you’d find interesting, check it out. Cheers, Brian.” Ching!
Farfetched? For a showcase of the true power of social sharing: Think the Bit.Ly-shortened links being universally shared on twitter, spreading idea’s, content (and malware) virally. Only this time it’s done by folks with verified Facebook ID’s so you know they’re actually real and can be trusted.
Off course, should the scenario sketched above come to fruition, Facebook will have to get a piece of the revenue pie too, but the publishing moguls ‘d be wise to carefully re-consider jumping into their fabled “No-Can-Do” reflexes, since it’s becoming increasingly clear that the other option for them and their companies’ stakeholders is not having a pie to share at all…
(PS please note that I deliberately left all privacy concerns regarding Facebook out of this exercise, since I believe that we should topple the online publishing troubles in a concentric way; shilling away to the core, tackling the multifaceted problem layer by layer, instead of pre-maturely obstruficating any possible solution by thinking in limitations only.
This, however, does not imply that I don’t see the possible dangers of Facebook not only owning your social graph and personal data, but also knowing when you bought what (and whom approved said purchase!) and where you’re likely to go to form a political opinion or otherwise.
Though I feel and see that having this kind of aggregated combined profile data of possibly more than 300 million people in the hands of one party could pose a real threat when falling into the wrong hands, I urge you to go and take a look over at Alexander van Elsas’s blog, as he has already indentified and dissected this problem with great abandon.)
Your Online Identity Hosted In The Browser?
Weave Identity is a very interesting component from Mozilla Labs (of Firefox fame) and a possible disrupting one for the Facebook Connect’s, OpenID’s and OAuth’s of this world:
“Offering a single sign-in solution for the web is currently a hot topic. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace and countless other sites are all offering to host your identity for you. Many of these key players on the social web are also offering tools to allow third-party sites to let you log in using the identity you have hosted with whoever your provider is – Google through FriendConnect, Facebook through Facebook Connect and Twitter through its recently debuted OAuth-based system. But in the end, who knows how long any of those sites will last? It seems to make more sense to hand these duties off to something more permanent than the hot site of the moment.
That’s where Mozilla’s latest implementation of Weave starts to make sense. You can store your credentials anywhere, including on Mozilla’s servers or your own web server.”
Source: WIRED’s Webmonkey
If the Weave add-on is implemented as a standard feature in the next version of the 2nd largest browser in the world, it stands a reasonable chance of becoming THE default Online Identity Manager/Social Media Passport; allowing you to safely and seamlessly log in to your favourite Social Networks, blogs and communities, across multiple platforms (Windows, Mac OS) and various devices (think Mobile, Netbooks, Thin Clients).
All the while giving you complete and FULL control over your online identity (you can even store your Weave login credentials on your own server!), which positions it directly opposite of the Walled Garden approach that Facebook is fast becoming notorious for.
The ease of use, combined with the fact that your average internet user hasn’t even heard of Google-, Facebook- and Twitter’s Online Identity Management solutions make Firefox Weave a serious threat to the aforementioned parties. After all: Wouldn’t it seem more logical and feel safer for her to let the browser take care of her online identity?
“Something that often goes unsaid in the discussion about online identity is that while most websites right now require usernames and passwords, many people actually use the password manager feature in the browser-effectively turning their browser into a limited identity manager.”
Source: Mozilla Labs
By offering this One-Log-In-To-Rule-Them-AllTM feature as a standard option in the browser, much like Yahoo’s- or Google’s toolbar, a lot of the hassle and security issues associated with web based ID alternatives are removed from the user’s table:
“User experience in general suffers as protocols for federation (e.g. OpenID) involve complex redirects which jump the user from page to page and leave them open to phishing attacks…”
Source: Mozilla Labs
And there’s another major USP that promises a bright future for the Weave project: Firefox is an Open Source initiative, and even though OpenSocial, OpenID & OAuth are Open Source projects as well, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google and Microsoft are commercial parties with a deep interest into becoming your single sign-in partner, so they can monitor the sites you visit and the time frame in which you did: pure data mining for marketing purposes. In a time where privacy issues are within everyone’s crosshairs, this could become Mozilla’s trump card in the battle for your Online Identity.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping Google (note that they have 300 Million accounts!) from implementing such a feature in Chrome -it’s very own browser- using Friend Connect, or Microsoft from doing the same with their Live toolbar/Live Passport and Internet Explorer. The point is that the former hasn’t yet managed to get any serious foot in the browser market. And though the latter is the current incumbent in browser market share (for now), it has failed for almost 10 years to make it’s .NET Passport/Live ID efforts a true cross-web success, even as younger initiatives from the likes of Facebook and twitter have taken off in the past year or so.
All in all, it’ll be very interesting to see how the developments around Identity Hosting continue to evolve…
[Update: Netlog now accepts Google FriendConnect, more on TechCrunch.]
Als ik de baas was van ING (Column)
Column ING personeelsblad, April 2009: Als ik de baas was… Met Anibal do Rosario
Juist in deze onzeker tijden kun je je als grootbank onderscheiden door de klant van een helder advies te voorzien. Door mee te denken en een stapje verder te kijken. Maar vooral door te doen wat je belooft. Je dienstverlening en product op peil brengen, en daarna pas overgaan tot grootschalige reclamecampagnes. Want de klant van vandaag is extra scherp op de steken die je laat vallen.
Ik zie service verlenen als een kerntaak van de bank en vind dat je dat niet moet willen uitbesteden. Dus zou ik juist meer bankwinkels openen met adviseurs die persoonlijk, op maat gesneden advies geven. Zo krijgt de ING een menselijk, lokaal gezicht. Ook zou ik meer mogelijk maken via internet voor die klanten welke zelfstandig hun bankzaken willen af wikkelen.
Ik zou de bank open gooien voor de klanten en collega’s meer verantwoordelijkheden geven, waardoor de klant écht merkt dat ze direct verder geholpen wordt. Ook zou ik bijvoorbeeld studenten meer perspectief geven op groei binnen de ING.
Als baas zou ik verder onderzoeken hoe we onze klanten en toekomstige klanten kunnen betrekken bij het merk ING door inzet van bijvoorbeeld Sociale Media zoals Hyves en Facebook. Hoe kunnen we onze formulieren en processen duidelijk en korter maken? En hoe geven onze concullega’ s hier invulling aan?
De uitdaging die ik samen met collega’s zou willen aangaan zou zijn: Hoe kunnen we met ING van een Procesgeoriënteerde naar een Klantgecentreerde organisatie groeien, die daadwerkelijk klaar is voor de nieuwe uitdagingen van morgen?
Coaching en training zou ik ook graag naar een hoger niveau willen tillen. Aangezien iedereen ook meer eigen verantwoordelijkheden krijgt, zullen managers minder hoeven aansturen, en zich meer kunnen inzetten voor persoonlijke ontwikkeling.
Met minder marketingbudget kunnen we via internet klanten toch nog op een slimme en doeltreffende manier benaderen. En binnenhalen natuurlijk! Maar dan moeten we ook onze organisatiecultuur durven aanpassen (Google maar eens op Enterprise 2.0). Als we onze dienstverlening aantoonbaar kunnen verbeteren, zullen onze klanten als ware ambassadeurs hun omgeving enthousiasmeren om klant bij ING te worden en kunnen wij onze beloftes vaker waarmaken!
Deze column is ook gepubliceerd in de April 2009 (“Amsterdam in Beweging”) editie van personeelsblad “ING Verder…”. ING Verder… is een Magazine voor alle medewerkers van het ING Callcenter Amsterdam (voorheem Postbank).
Why the Click Is the Right Metric for Online Ads (On Adding Value and Thinking Beyond the Display Advertising Business Model)
“…many advertisers in the past gave most of the credit for a sale or conversion — which in the web world could include anything from visiting a website to printing an online coupon — to the last ad clicked on or seen by a consumer. But that means brand-focused sites such as NYTimes.com and MarthaStewart.com and even social-media sites such as Facebook and MySpace lose credit because they are often not where a consumer will see that last ad. And when they lose credit, they lose advertisers, and when they lose ad revenue, well, you’ve read that story.
“Publishers have a lot to gain,” said Steve Kerho, VP-analytics, media and marketing optimization at Organic. Mr. Kerho has been doing lots of analysis on how online-display ads affect search and conversions and found that in some cases, a display ad can increase a search ad’s click-through rate 25% to 30%. If he had simply measured the clicks from search, he would have missed the display ads’ influence.”
Source: Adage
So… If we’d translate the above model to, say, a real world situation; that’d mean that the sales guy in the local electronics store should get a piece of the provision pie, and maybe you’re neighbourhood whiz kid should be offered a small fee too, since they were the ones that influenced you before you decided to shell out on a new bleeding-edge desktop and order it directly by mail-order, no?
Of course, the conclusion presented above is preposterous to say the least. Not giving full credit to the last click shows a lack of common sense and of everyday reality:
If we’d were to apply this model to the offline advertising industry we’d might as well start charging less for TV ads during the Super Bowl or advertisements in general, since it has never been empirically proven that said ads actually sell significantly more cars, to name but an example.
(Actually I hereby challenge thee naysayers to tell me why the fledgling automotive industry in the US can’t be saved by throwing more money against Interruption Campaigns now that the going is though… Odds are it’s because it just doesn’t work that way nowadays…)
Publishers would of course love to use such a model, since suddenly those abysmally low Click Through Rates on social networks ´d become a license to print money, yet that’s not where the problem lies: it’s about engaging with the visitors of the Facebook’s of this world if and when they feel like it, adding value to the community, giving them something to talk about or a good reason to get rid of their friends. The engagement model is a far more viable one since it makes it very clear for all stakeholders what the true value of those brand interactions are for everyone.
Conjuring op schemes to charge more for a product -display banner- that, on it’s own, has failed to truly deliver on its promise up until this very moment, is not the way forward out of this recession. The research budget would be well better spent on innovation, adding value to the visitors, strategic alliances -you name it, just do not waste it on taking undercover pot-shots at “Go -Emperor CPC- Gle” et all.
There is one thing that does ring true about the statement that a conversion shouldn’t be attributed to just the Last Click alone; and that’s the reoccurring coincidence that carefully crafted, creative Crossmedia campaigns drive word-of-mouth & website traffic, allowing for a tighter control on conversion, ánd they also have the uncanny ability to tip the Attitude scale in your Brands’ favour. A little…
It’s common sense and it’s what marketing should be all about: influencing as many factors as you can to get the prospect to turn into a consumer, making her loyal, spurring her on to buy more and in the end becoming a brand-ambassador.
The communication mix as well as the quality of your product combined with the customer centricity level of your organization all contribute to that end.
As well as a million other tiny factors (does the sun shine, did THAT girl on the train give you a smile, do you have enough money to spare, etc., etc..)
Yet, if we’d follow the philosophy of Mr. Kerho to it’s conclusion, it’d mean we’d have to split the Cost-per-Click revenue and spread the wealth over all communication channels and creatives -and not just the display banner- in order to get a somewhat “fairer” representation of value/conversion for money.
[The Adage article starts with this quote: "The great paradox of the web is that it's an interactive medium and everything can be measured. And that's wonderful -- unless you're measuring the wrong thing."
I'd think what they should be stating is: The single greatest asset of the web is that it's an interactive medium, perpetuously capable of reinventing itself. And that's wonderful -- Unless you don't keep your feet firmly on the ground and try to look at opportunities with a positive mindset!]
