My canvas was the night sky last night at a Community Day fireworks display in my town.

Flying Apple

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Twin Towers

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String Theory

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Exploding Sun

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God is Watching

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Close Encounters

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Sea Creature

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Dedicated to “iamlost”

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Native American PowWow

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View Fireworks images here.

All pictures owned by Kim Krause Berg, Cre8pc.com
Taken on July 6, 2008 in Perkasie, Pennsylvania

One thing you can count on when it comes to “usable” web site design is that nobody can agree on what that is. Is the perfect user experience when a web page comes up near the top in search engine rank? Is it high conversions? Is it a site that blind persons can use?

One of the quirks of Twitter is that you can participate in spontaneous one on one conversations and your “followers” can “listen” in. The other day my friend Elizabeth Able picked my brain with questions like “Is marketing like war?”.

I replied with my 147 character limit,

War? no. War is forceful, no choice. Marketing is ideas, persuasion, suggestion, competitiveness…

Thinking about marketing, she asked about war vs. competition. Are they the same or different? I said,

I think to compete is to lose with grace and war is a fight that never ends.

Competition allows for negotiation and permits the wise ones to learn from the experience. War teaches more war.

Liz wondered if marketing can work without hype?

I felt that,

Marketing w/o hype? Yes. It’s called value proposition and that has to be honest and real, not fake.

How do these marketing questions relate to user experience design?

The other day I visited a site that claimed to do online usability reviews of various web sites as a weekly feature. I read their critique. I hope the company didn’t pay for it. The feedback was “The colors are boring”. It was designed for 640 resolution. First of all, for a weekly feature, I would choose a web site built in the present century to review.

There was no information on conversions or traffic. Nothing about value proposition, credibility or accessibility. Clearly, there are parts of the planet that aren’t on the usability train yet or don’t understand WHY a heuristic exists.

The search engine marketing industry is often at odds with one another about setting best practice standards. Obviously, for an industry made up of people who tend to be quite independent thinkers, the very idea of rules or being told how to do their job by some governing entity isn’t going over very well.

The same standards idea exists on the usability side. No two usability companies, when given a site to test, will come back with the same results. When Jakob Nielsen came out with “discount usability” and testing heuristics, he may as well have stood on a mountain top reading from tablets. His Alertbox posts are still often considered usability gospel.

I consider his advice as guidance and observations. His data is often really helpful, if even only to add insight or understanding into a common practice or behavior. Most practitioners, in both the SEO and user centered design houses, test practices and theories. They have to. Nothing on the Internet stays the same. Human/computer behavior changes as we adapt to the latest technology or cool-web-thing, like social networking.

Why the Dark Ages?

Matt Bailey wrote an exceptional blog post on real estate web sites that shows just how far behind one niche remains when it comes to web site design. He nails point after point in Online Marketing in Real Estate - Fast Start to Stagnation

Not only does he point out all the ridiculous usability errors, but as someone trying to use real estate sites to find a new home, he’s a potential customer who is finding the user experience to be infuriating.

When I was looking to buy a new house in 2003, I ran into the same thing. I wasted untold hours on real estate web sites that didn’t know how to sell online, but were chomping at the bit to get my personal information so they could call me.

Finally, it was the photography that worked. I swore I’d never buy a cape cod style home. I never liked them. Then one day I went onto my local realtor’s web site, which is barely tolerable, and found 10 rotating views of a cape style house interior located nearby that looked move-in ready. The pictures showed all the living space on the inside, but they forget to add some other value proposition points.

Therefore, when my kids and husband-to-be drove down the long driveway and saw the built-in pool in the back, it was a real shocker! Then, there was the huge half circle garden leading up to the deck coming off the back of the house that was designed as a private paradise. The house was loaded with extras and had room for my home office and organic vegetable gardens. None of this was mentioned on the real estate web site.

I made an offer that same day. It may not have happened if the site didn’t at least have professional photos on it. I could have cared less what the resolution was. (However these days, a mobile phone ready real estate web site is a strong competitive design choice.) I’ll always wonder why the Realtor didn’t include the pool in the house description or place any emphasis on the outside of the property. Some buyers, like myself, are gardeners or like trees and fields around them. These are selling points.

It can seem to some as though online marketing has to be cut throat and in your face to be noticed. To me, there’s nothing more frustrating than “get rich quick” schemes and affiliate template sites that show no character or USP. I’m uncomfortable with boldface text yelling at me to buy something. Who has the time to read a mile-long scrolling corn field of endless content?

Bad web site design is not a good teacher.  One person’s bad design is another person’s perfect web site. The true measure of success is brand trust, customer satisfaction, word of mouth referrals, continued business and steady sales leads. Search engines notice.

When usability reviews are presented from the perspective of marketing, it becomes easier to understand the importance of user experience design. Boring colors will not make or break a sale. Neither will flexible or fixed width pages. These are user annoyances and factors to consider for your business requirements but in no way should any design review settle for limited fixes like these.

Today’s user experience enabled web site is an honest and frank design. It’s friendly. It’s easy to understand. The experience includes what happened to find it, how your visitors feel when they arrive and leave and especially if they feel persuaded to come back.

An old friend once told me back in 1995, “Assume that every email you send will eventually land on the lunchroom bulletin board for everyone to see.” It was great advice for email. It’s even better advice for blogs.

Miffed at someone? Kill them with words. With the Web as ammo, it’s easy to wreck someone’s job, life and reputation. Google has a great memory. Glen Allsopp wrote about three women who went off to raise a little hell at their boyfriends in A New Wave of Reputation Management Issues. He wrote:

These three women found out their partners were looking for love elsewhere, they all found their relief online. Did they find support groups or forums that could help them deal with the emotional pain? Nope.

* One started a blog about the cheat
* One edited a dating profile for her partner, adding some embarassing extras
* One “hacked” into her partners emails and humiliated him

Oh, how I’ve wanted to vent, curse, whine, scream bloody hell and verbally beat the crap out of people or companies who’ve been total jerks. What stops me? It’s so uncool to do it. Why? Because nobody can hurt you unless you let them and revenge doesn’t heal the pain. It deepens the wound.

It’s frustrating me how the Web is used as a weapon. I refuse to use it that way. It’s always been my vehicle for peace, community, knowledge share and crossing bridges.

Competition on the Web can get ugly. Signals get crossed. I lost a friend because of a disagreement over links. To me, it looked as though I wasn’t good enough to be associated with his company and I took it hard.

In a different twist, I’ve been accused of being unfriendly to people who believe I’m ignoring them. Perhaps I am. Have you offered me a reason to trust you? Do you work hard or expect free hand outs? Do you want friendship or want to use me for something? I can usually tell.

With the Web, friendships seem to develop and erode very fast. The word “Friend” online is used to loosely describe anyone who walks up to you and requests to be called your friend. I know I have some “real” friends because they’ve put up with me for years, no matter what.

Not all of my friends like each other, which is tough to deal with. On the web, we’re judged by who we associate with, who we work with, our business partners, blogrolls, and now, who we yack with on Twitter. One of my SEO friends is working her butt off trying to get my 50th birthday party worked out. I met her online. She’s been one of the most incredibly loyal, devoted, supportive friends I’ve ever had. She believes in me and has faith in my work and career. Sadly, some of my other “friends” don’t like her, with one of them going public about it.

And this is what scares me about what people can do when the Web is treated like a weapon of mass reputation destruction. If someone Googles a name and finds something harsh written about the person they’re looking up, how true is it? Is it one person’s experience or 100 people?

There’s two sides to every story.

We can’t grow if we keep throwing rocks. Granted, I can see why those women went off on their boyfriends. But, would you date a woman who hacks into her boyfriend’s email or thinks public humiliation is justified? Glen’s blog post included their pictures.

Lunchroom bulletin board.

There’s a scene in the movie version of “Oliver” where merchants walk along the street outside his bedroom window peddling their wares. They sing out “Who will buy?” this or that, holding up samples for passersby to see. Oliver has never witnessed such a thing before.

He sings,

Who will buy this wonderful morning?
Such a sky you never did see!
Who will tie it up with a ribbon,
And put it in a box for me?

I visited a web site today that sells dessert products. Its homepage had no content, so there was no one to “sing” to me about the products.

In the movie, the rose seller stresses her “sweet red roses”. Anyone walking by her on the street would be able to hold a rose up close to press a satiny red petal to their cheek. On the web, we have no such luxury.

We depend on page content to paint a picture of what a product looks and feels like. If a web site offers images that express feelings of joy, satisfaction, thrill, fun or hope, we’re given something to emotionally connect with. We can hope our experience will be the same as the people in the pictures.

The site I visited today had no pictures of people. Its products were beautifully gift wrapped so that I couldn’t see closeups. Other pictures showed food items that were lacking in detail. When the product description says 1 dozen cookies, are they big or little cookies? Are the raisins plump? How thick is the shortbread? Are we talking one cookie per person or does it take 3 cookies to equal one serving?

Oliver sings,

They’ll never be a day so sunny,
It could not happen twice.
Where is the man with all the money?
It’s cheap at half the price!

For this site, sale items were a click away from the homepage. To get to that page meant first finding it. The link label simply read “Sale”. Wow. That will drive in the hordes of budget crazed thrill seeking bargain hunters!

What do we get for our time on this site? What if we click, there’s only 3 choices and none of them are interesting? Does the page lead us anywhere else or just leave us dangling from the swinging chandelier?

Oliver has no money. He’s an orphan. He’s had a rough life. For him, anyone with something to sell him is incredible. The point is, someone WANTS him to buy something. If he can hear them hawking ripe strawberries, they must know he’s there somewhere inside a building, wanting to buy them.

Someone wants him to buy. He is special to the seller. They helped him feel that way. He sings,

Who will buy this wonderful feeling?
I’m so high I swear I could fly.
Me, oh my! I don’t want to lose it
So what am I to do
To keep a sky so blue?
There must be someone who will buy…

When was the last time you got this excited about buying online? When did you last feel madly driven to toss items into an online shopping cart? Which site makes you feel special when you’re there? How many web sites acknowledge your presence at all? Do online shops know you want to feel special?

Try adding little details to your online store. Help your customers feel wonderful, wanted and welcome.

There will be someone who will buy.

In the news:

Omaha based Netshops has hired an ex-Googler, Ash ElDifrawi, as the company’s first Chief Marketing Officer. He’ll be responsible for managing the company’s overall marketing strategy, including online marketing, brand marketing, SEO and strategic planning and corporate communications. At Google, ElDifrawi lead Brand Advertising for Google and YouTube, and was also the architect of the Google Brand Accelerator.

Look at Netshops. You’ll understand what Oliver was singing about.

When I was a young girl growing up, a particular TV commercial aggravated me. It was about a liquid vitamin supplement called Geritol used for “iron poor blood” that contained alcohol and was said to give women lots of energy and ambition. The TV husband would rave about the miraculous feats his wife could perform while taking Geritol. The commercial ended with, “My wife. I’ll think I’ll keep her.”

The message I got from it was that if I wasn’t perfect in every way, there were products out there I could use to help me be perfect. Not only this, if I didn’t buy and take them, I’d never be worthy of a man or worth keeping.

To me, this kind of marketing was severely wrong because it’s degrading to women. Even as a teenager I felt the insult. The commercial was the brunt of jokes. In fact, in a classic I Love Lucy show episode featuring the famous “Vitameatavegamin” skit, Lucy gets drunk after sampling the product.

How could advertising firms have gotten it so wrong? Sure, women want energy. But to tie their lack of it to the security of their marriage was cruel and showed a lack of understanding about where women were going. The 70’s, when that commercial came out, was also the time when the feminist movement began to rise up again. The second publication of Betty Friedan’s, “The Feminine Mystique” came out in 1974, and this time, eleven years after its debut, brought US women face to face with themselves. They were more than “Wifey”.

Do agencies still make mistakes advertising to women? You bet! Are web site designers making the same mistakes? Yes, they are.

In a newly published book, “The Soccer Mom Myth”, written by Michele Miller and Holly Buchanan, the focus is on female consumers, who she is and why she makes purchases. The book describes the differences between how men and women think and why this matters with web site design, especially e-commerce.

Over half of the USA population is women. By this year, females may account for 52.6 percent of US Internet users - in other words, outnumbering males. Consider that men still dominate web site programming, advertising, search engine marketing, web design and performance testing positions; you can immediately see the potential for missing the mark. We all know men don’t know what women want.

In their book, Miller and Buchanan discuss the female brain and how MRI’s have proven they’re wired differently than male brains. Until recently, no one really considered a possible physical difference. According to the book, women have four times as many neurons connecting the left and right side of the brain. They process information differently. Men process content from a logical, linear perspective while women add nonlanguage-based processing that includes emotion, imagination and experience. The extra connections between a female’s right and left side make her able to “transfer data from one side to the other at a high rate of speed”. So much for needing Geritol.

Watching out for trends in women’s lives is important. They spend a lot of time on the Internet. Understanding how they process the information they see there is necessary to being able to promote your products. Females remember and reward good experiences and excellent customer service.

They need to feel a connection. I love how automobile sites drape slinky gorgeous women in evening gowns over the hood of their cars. This is great for the male brain, which has two and a half more brain space devoted to sexual drive, aggression and action. But women buy cars too.

My copy of The Soccer Mom Myth has yellow highlighter and sticky tabs all over the book. The authors write in short chapters, which for a multi-tasking woman like me, made it much easier to take in because I was always interrupted. Their dialog isn’t overly technical. They banter. Show examples. Tease. They make point after point. They shatter stereotypes. They show how to create personas and illustrate how stupid mistakes can kill a sale.

In one chapter, Holly asks, “Can you lose a sale in just two words?” Yes. “By starting out with ‘Dear Sir’”.

The book delves into how to perform research and ask the right questions. It helps you plan personas and scenarios that help you create pathways on your web site for their different buying processes. The book bounces with stories that stick in your mind, like the Volvo automobile executive that said, “We learned that if you meet women’s needs and expectations, you also exceed those for men.”

This new book will show you how to do that.

……………

Order The Soccer Mom Myth at Amazon.