The Holistic Web

What gets your visitors motivated to take action? You need to think about providing them with relevant information.

If you were trying to motivate a dog, what would work better: the world’s tastiest, freshest, best carrot, or any old piece of meat?

Be careful you aren’t spending too much time making carrots…

(inspired by “The Principles of Effective Copywriting” DVD)

From the book “Nudge”:

You are more likely to agree to an operation if you’re told that 90 out of 100 people who had it are still alive five years later than if you’re told that 10 out of 100 people die from it.

Food for thought there.

I’ve posted before about the role of designers - how it should be changing to be more business focussed and scientific but mostly isn’t. I’ve been getting increasingly interested in this subject and have been reading extensively on it and starting to apply it. FYI, I’m not a designer.

Here’s a scenario. You are building an ecommerce site. You have a designer create the skin for you. Of course, one of the things that is needed are the “Add this product to your cart” button. What colour should that be? Well, you are too busy doing important shop stuff, you leave those little decisions to the designer, that’s a creative decision. Bzzzzt. Go straight to low profits. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Pop quiz: which colour button will get the most clicks? Red, blue, green or grey? There IS an answer to that question, it’s not an artistic/creative one, and the difference is not trivial. It’s one that’s been tested by a lot of people over time, and is more or less consistent. Yet, how many designers know the answer? “Don’t cramp my mojo, man. I’m an artist”. How about the address form on your shopping cart? Should the background be white or coloured? If so, which colour? Once again, it has been tested and there is an answer.

Interesting times ahead.

(No, I’m not dead, and this hasn’t been abandoned, I may even start posting semi-regularly again!)

A few centuries ago in Europe calling cards (also known as visiting cards) were popular in Europe. There was quite a lot of etiquette around the use of calling cards which were primarily used to announce the intention to visit someone. Also popular a generation or two ago were autograph books, another similar form of social ritual where visitors would record their visits in a book.

With our global society now and busy lifestyle, this niceties are impractical. However, it’s interesting to see amazing success of MySpace (hey, you never predicted it would get this big either!) which in some ways bears a resemblance to these social niceties of old, although with many differences as well of course. Any technology that allows people to interact socially with their friends stands a great chance of success.

There has been a heap of photo sharing sites, but flickr with its clever integration of social networking and folksonomies has taken the photo sharing space by storm. Likewise with YouTube.

It’s so easy to get carried away with technology, web 2.0, tags, folksonomies, and all that sexy stuff, and forget the big thing: people want to connect with other people. Make that happen, and there’s a good chance you are onto a winner.

I’m increasingly thinking that we make the web too complicated. Those of you who know me know I’m an advocate of Web 2.0 (unlike many I even like that label), RSS, AJAX and all those new things. I’ve worked on projects that use them heavily and have championed them to clients. The problem is that people get too caught up in these things, and forget the basics.

Like my post from a few weeks ago about fast loading web pages, we can forget the basics. I was reminded of this in a recent article by Jakob Neilsen called Fix the Basics First. I’m no Jakob Neilsen fan, but he makes good points time to time. To quote:

Companies champion technologies because they can be sold as products and consulting services. Go to any tradeshow and you’ll see plenty of booths pushing various fancy technologies — most of which will make very little difference to your bottom line. But each of these technologies has smooth-talking salespeople who will invite your executives out for a round of golf. In contrast, no trade show booth features Photographers’ Society representatives saying “clear photos move more products,” even though it’s the truth. Nor does the Writers’ Guild cold-call Internet managers to sell them on the value of bulleted lists.

For those of you thinking “but no one is selling AJAX/RSS/OPML” etc, read the article - he covers the glamour of new technologies in there as well.

Marketers are just as prone to this as techies. Marketers get caught up in brand integrity, across the line integration, expressing value propositions and other important things, but tend to forget the user in the process. It’s surprisingly easy to do - I’ve been guilty of it myself.

So, let’s not forget the basics. Here’s my list of basics, feel free to suggest more.

• Write the copy for the web, including using bullets, highlighting key phrases, and keeping it short.
• Have good quality pictures that support the copy.
• Make sure the pages load fast.
• Test across the common browsers.
• Use terms that are meaningful to the user, avoid corporate-speak and euphemisms.
• Remember that you are almost certainly not an exception to the rules, no matter how much you want to be. For example, if your content is too long, people probably won’t read it, no matter how “important” you are or your corporate initiative is.
• Test your site with average users (raise your hand if you are guilty of not doing this one! My hand is up high). It doesn’t have to be big and expensive, just find a few people and get them to do a few basic tasks. You’ll learn heaps.
• Give the user content they want.

Any more?

I’ve been thinking a bit about the pros and cons of using a Taxonomy vs a Folksonomy. For those not up with folksonomies (spelling?) then read this to explain all.

A folksonomy makes a heap of sense on the internet where there is no central governing body, and even if there was, it would probably be widely ignored. However, internally to a company, it’s a different story. Does a folksonomy make sense, or is a taxonomy a better way to go?

So, I came up with this list as I was thinking about it. I’m sure it’s far from complete. Post additions as comments and I’ll update the post as appropriate.

The question I’m really getting to is: can a folksonomy work in a corporate environment? And I’m not talking about at Microsoft where the audience is, on average, more sophisticated than the general public. I’m talking about at any large organisation. My gut reaction says a folksonomy would be a bad way to go, but I can’t seem to come up with the reasons to justify my gut. Would you use a folksonomy for an internal corporate taxonomy?

So we all know, web pages should load fast. It’s web design 101. Make your code lean, your images well compressed, etc. I’m not saying anything new here. In fact it’s one of those maxims that is so well established it’s almost ignored. It’s too simple, it’s too basic, in this world of CRM, search engines, viral marketing, etc, who really spends that much time worrying about something so simple as fast pages. We’re too sophisticated for that. Right?

Well, maybe focussing on fast loading pages has been overlooked a bit. I saw a thread at Webmasterworld entitled Optimized Pageload Time Increased CTR & Income. It’s not an especially well written thread or anything. What it does have is a string of people all saying “we did X to speed up our site (where X was normally changing the hosting environment or location), and revenue increased as a result”. The people are mostly talking about advertising income, but advertising is just one goal of a site. Surely the same principle would apply to lead generation, ecommerce, or whatever else it is your site is trying to achieve.

That thread has caused me to stop and think - is there anything I can do to speed up my sites? Are my hosts good enough? Do I host in the same country as most of my visitors? Is my code optimised? Do I have gzip enabled? (I just turned on gzip for one site this morning). Food for thought, sometimes it’s good not to ignore the basics.

On the surface of it, I’m the sort of person that online sellers of music (iTunes, Napster, etc) dream of.

• I’m a music junkie - I absolutely love music
• My tastes are eclectic and I almost never buy from local CD shops - they don’t have my stuff. A large online shop often does (try finding the latest Animal Collective CD at the local HMV shop, no problem at napster.com)
• I listen to music almost all day, every day, and almost always on a PC, so a digital format is the most convenient for me
• I have a high speed internet connection

A perfect combination, right? Yet, I have never bought any music from any of those sites, and don’t plan to.

DRM is the reason. I don’t get too hung up on the politics of DRM, although there are some very legitimate concerns around restrictions of fair use rights, etc., and those issues definitely need to be thought through. My concern is far more simple and logistical. I simply don’t trust DRM to work.

I have a theory which is completely unproven. My theory is that within 5 years, over half of DRM protected music purchased in the last year will be unplayable. This could be for a number of reasons.

• Some DRM policy was violated (moved computer too many times, etc.)
• Something happened to the certificate to make it unusable
• Files were lost/deleted/corrupted, and there weren’t proper backups
• Something else I haven’t thought of

So, I basically just don’t trust DRMed files. Time may prove me wrong, we’ll see. In the mean time, I’ll stick to either CDs or high bitrate non-DRM file downloads. The latter of course drives me to independent music, which means those most hoping DRM will save them are in fact having the opposite effect. But the death of the record company is another post altogether…

In Australia there seems to be a race on at the moment in the local search space. I know local search has been in the US for a little while now, but there’s been no serious attempts in Australia. http://www.truelocal.com.au seems to be leading the pack, but others are close behind.

What bugs me about local search is it seems to be a technology focussed solution to a much broader problem. Now, don’t get me wrong, local search by itself is kinda cool and mildly useful. But it’s not taking things much further than a yellow pages approach to things - let’s organise stuff in a directory by area. The web can do so much more!

My thoughts are when people are making simple purchases, they are interested primarily in one of 3 things: distance, quality, or price. Local search solves the distance problem only. Quality is best solved by user input. It’s a new way of thinking about things - no one has ever reviewed the local doctor before, and you can be assured that many local doctors won’t be happy about it. Price is shopping comparison sites, much like Froogle and similar sites.

So, why no merge the 3? “Show me the cheapest place to buy a panasonic cordless phone within 10Km of my house”. Or, “show me the best quality plumber in the North Sydney area”. I don’t know about you, but I’d use a service like that!

Complex products are a bit different. I’ve tried to tackle that one personally at my site about Shopping Carts (a little hobby I run in my spare time). Fairly typical of complex products, people are more interested in features, quality or price, distance is less important (obviously a generalisation, but true in many cases).

And I’m not pretending it’s an easy problem to solve. Google seems to have most of the pieces in place, I wonder if they’ll pull it together?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of designers. Over the years I’ve been in the web business, I’ve worked with many designers, written my share of design briefs, and been involved in the normal design interactions that most people in the industry get involved in. I would say in my experience that less seasoned designers tend to focus on prettiness, more experienced ones tend to focus on usability, not that usability & prettiness are always exclusive.

One thing I’ve never heard from a designer (and I’ve worked with some pretty senior people) is about how the design can help improve business performance. I’ve been reading a lot lately about how the design of a landing page can have an enormous impact on the ability of that page to convert visitors to the desired action. That’s well established and proven, there’s no doubt that changing the design can substantially change the conversion rate.

What I have never heard is a designer say “but if we put this content here instead, you’ll get greater conversions”.

So my question is, if design is critical to increase conversions, but designers aren’t doing it, then who should be doing it? There’s a few possible answers I can think of:
1. Designers should be. Maybe there’s a 3rd generation of designers who have moved past usability and onto business performance. That does make a radically different role for the designer, they will need to be far more integrated into the business than before.
2. Conversion specialists. I’ve never heard of these people, but maybe there’s a role for them. Heck, if someone said to me that for $5,000 they could improve the performance of a page by 50%, and I’ve got a $50,000 ad spend driving traffic to the page, it seems like a no-brainer.
3. Producers. The traditional “people who do things that no one else does” of the online world. As everything else falls into their bucket, why not this?

My money is on all 3. The better designers will become more aware of it, but not be specialists in it. Still, a good designer will be able to avoid the worst mistakes. A new class of specialist will emerge, perhaps sitting in the bigger online agencies, or as independent consultants. They’ll work on the big boys, the ones with money to spend to squeeze that extra 5% of performance. And producers, like designers, will pick up the basics.

This all more or less mirrors the growth of search engine optimisation as an industry. Perhaps SEO companies will branch into conversion optimisation? Who knows. It does seem a natural fit.

Still mulling this over in my brain, so let me know if you have any thoughts….