If a web site falls in the search engine forest, would anyone hear it? If the web site belonged to Victoria’s Secret, it wouldn’t be missed by a shopper like my young adult daughter. She doesn’t need search engines to find Victoria’s Secret products.

Why? Because the company sends her discount cards in the mail every month to lure her with 20% off or Buy One, Get One Free offers. They know she uses them and bribes (begs) me to come to their store so she can talk me into buying more Pink (trademark) sweatpants. Being price conscious, she searches online first for deals and compares that with information from the catalog she gets in the mail.

Whether online or off-line, she loves the Victoria’s Secret shopping experience. And best yet, marketers skillfully converted her while in her teenage years with a line of products for her generation. She’s absolutely not afraid to enter the store, despite its obvious emphasis on sensuality.

Persuasion Requires Comfort and Trust

Branding is more than a logo or web site design. It’s the customers’ experience with products or services that counts and contributes strongly to word of mouth advertising and repeat sales. The customer experience doesn’t need to be a one-shot approach. Our experiences are culled from anywhere we learn to trust a company and feel comfortable enough to do business with them.

Interest in persuasive web design is exploding due to user behavior studies. What jazzes us off-line, also works online. We want to be remembered. Marketers know this. The result is intuitive design. We want products on sale, services by credible companies, solutions to problems and answers to questions.

We want a choice in how we get these things.

Persuasive design invites and encourages interaction between you and your visitors. This can be something subtle such as beveling an “Add to Cart” button, instead of using plain text, because people like to push buttons. For travel sites, it may be guest stories. Real estate sites show rotating views of rooms in a house to help you decide if your Golden Retriever will fit in the living room. Amazon suggests related books during the purchase process and emails recommendations based on your purchase history.

An online form that includes the reason for requiring a phone number will be rewarded for this consideration by delivering qualified sales leads from people who really want to make contact. This is because persuasion is not about manipulation. Rather, you want to understand visitor intent and satisfy customers’ needs. Requiring a phone number for a newsletter sign-up communicates a severe lack of understanding about why people sign up for them.

But I Built it for You!

So, what happens if your web site has been found in a search, all bright and shiny, and no one is completing a task on you site? You may even track some interest and wonder why, 3 or 4 clicks into the task, your visitor suddenly jumps off the site. This is where human behavior and getting into the minds of your target market gets interesting.

I tested a web site designed for “Generation Y” users by planting a teenager in front of it and watching her use it. She, being of the MySpace and IM generation, is not afraid to push buttons. Past experiences with web site applications help her understand how to select, move, delete, save and edit choices in new sites.

We remember past experiences with other web sites. Our memories guide us to trust new sites and find what we think we know how to do. We may develop a certain amount of trust in our own abilities to try something we’ve never seen before.

In this test, the teenager quickly discovered what the application’s goal was and she mastered the basics. However, she wanted to do things the application didn’t allow. Quickly, she became a dissatisfied user. She felt the site was more for 12 year olds. I knew the site was built for a wider age range that could go up to age 20. A site built for a certain demographic that misses its mark is dangerous to the bottom line. Fortunately, this company knew enough to get it tested before launch.

Sometimes I test web sites designed for young people, but the payment has to be by credit card. They need someone such as a parent, who must then go through the purchase process, decide to trust or not trust the site and possibly not understand what they’re seeing because it’s not targeted to them.

The Cutting Edge of Persuasive Design

Today’s persuasive web design strives to reach those who may be struggling to connect with your product or service by offering reasons they may benefit from it and making the value immediately clear.

It also connects both on and off-line marketing into one long continuous experience between company and customer.

Social media provides user generated content such as comments, ratings, reviews, personal experience stories and community discussions. This provides a goldmine of information on user intent, interests, habits and choices. Understanding this information helps you to put site elements on a web page at the right moment during a visitor’s decision making process. Content and marketing writers want to create pages memorable enough to be bookmarked or linked to when someone is in a hurry and can’t buy now, but may be able to return later and do so.

Still being explored are emotions and the part this plays in web site design. Should the cancer information web site experience be the same for the person who just learned they have the disease vs. family members doing research on a loved one? We’re unable to pick up on our visitors’ emotional states, but we can look for patterns and make predictions.

Our emotions and mental state play into impulse purchases off-line. There’s no reason to think web sites are any different.

(This blog post is adapted from an article written for and published in the Search Marketing Standard, Summer 2007 issue called “Persuasive Web Design”, by Kim Krause Berg. )

A commercial in the USA may be aimed at the woman inside the woman. A woman with magic, spark and a no regrets sense of who she is and where she’s going. For starters, in the TV spot, she’s in the driver’s seat.

I can’t remember the make or model of the automobile. I don’t care who the woman is behind the wheel. What I remember and giggle to myself about is that she asks if your car turns you on.

Well, hell yes.

Thanks for noticing!

I have a friend whose car was in my driveway recently. He left at night and my kids and I cooed at how the interior dashboard lit up in blue light. I wanted to make out by that dashboard light. So there.

Marketing to women is usually off the mark. For sassy women like me, however, when you get past how I’m supposed to be according to what tradition and society says I should be, you’ve probably just sold me your product.

Why are men the only creatures who need to be turned on? Who made that rule?

Light and Sound

There’s another user experience rule I’ve discovered I love to debunk. It has to do with sound.

Still experimenting with my new MySpace account, (where I have one friend, who at this point likely thinks I’m completely nuts), I uploaded another new Moby song. I changed my profile picture to remove the bare breasted woman who wasn’t me, because…well. Just because.

(For a moment I thought of putting a photo of chicken breasts there. I still may do that.)

Anyway. I’ve been writing in the blog there. To nobody really, although one man whom I don’t know thinks I’m really far out and “interesting”. I love how I can use images and sound to express myself in MySpace.

I can’t do that here. Usability Law states, “No piped in music.” Guess what? There is, indeed, a place for it. It doesn’t belong on a corporate web site but it can certainly be used in situations with friends where you’re networking and hanging out.

When I want to express light and sound here, I need to find words to turn you on with.

Incentive and Play

When you design your web site, have you put in light and sound? Have you created a mood? Is there something you can say that communicates in an instant why your service is the best? Did you remember to create a need?

Can you change? Yes. When Emoms At Home changed its brand to Sparkplugging, I’m sure there was great agony in choosing the right time, right design and right words to reflect the reasons for the change and not lose anyone in the process.

The new name turns me on. It’s vibrant. It describes exactly what goes into my bloodstream when I’m working on the web or helping clients with their web sites. The new design is surprisingly easy to navigate and more importantly, understand. I LOVE the extra content between the global navigation link labels that describe what’s inside each hub, without the need to click or negotiate a clumsy drop down menu.

Kudos to these folks for providing incentive for me to return, bookmark and write about you. All you did was turn me on by making me feel good and welcome once I arrived.

We need to feel wanted. We need to feel welcomed. We need to feel we’re getting the best bargain. We need to know companies care about our web site experience. We need to be turned on, inspired, catered to, informed, responded to in a timely manner, guided and nurtured.

Is thinking outside the box risky? Yes. Do you like to be entertained while shopping? Well, let’s see. I showed Hema to my daughter and her boyfriend. A minute into watching the homepage explode into something I’ve never seen done before, she asks, “What’s the point?”

Would you sit through while the center content FLASH loads and then watch how the products bang into each other and perform clever tricks? If after I was entertained, I was offered great prices, fast delivery and excellent customer service, I might. I think most people will be annoyed.

Social Disconnect. Yes, I Keep Harping on This.

Many of us seek one another because our butts are glued to our computers.

I’m bored with Twitter. Reading disjointed conversations by other people who don’t know or don’t care that I’m there isn’t doing it for me. I don’t like that feeling of being on the sidelines. Web sites often leave out visitors too. One of the very first words I look for on an e-commerce page is “Customer service”. You may be surprised to know it’s hardly ever there or buried far, far down in the footer as an afterthought.

Customers are not afterthoughts. They don’t want to be treated like one. The HEMA site, while breaking rules for sound and visual, makes me feel like they love what they do, are having fun doing it and want to include me (someone they may never meet) in their fun.

I liked that feeling.

So. I wonder. How come I feel so lonely, that after being in Twitter and Facebook and even owning Cre8asiteforums, that I’ve resorted to writing to nobody in MySpace?

Is it because I want to be un-edited, raw, bold, without barriers and don’t want anyone judging me?

Is it because car’s turn me on?

Or is it that the Internet was an experiment in intimacy with people that failed?

Could it be, that in the end, we need to hold hands and make eye contact with one another?

When I decided to teach myself HTML in 1995, I did what many others did back then. We studied source code by copying and dismantling what someone else did. In those days, there was only one background color - gray. Creativity felt limited, but that didn’t last long.

Today, there’s no end to what web designers can do. If you can imagine it, someone is inventing a way to do it. The pace is fast. We call it things like Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. What excites me is that the quiet pioneers in emotional design (captology) are more visible these days. I’ve long felt we can do more than static, one dimensional web pages. Internet users rely on the ‘Net for so much that usage is an extension of our selves. Many people need the ‘Net and demand it to enrich their lives.

More and more people approach web sites expecting to feel something from the experience. This is where we’re going. This is what’s next with software application design and web page presentations.

Social media plays a part in our expectations and our interest in experiences that touch us. Video games, online video sharing and virtual Internet worlds also opened our eyes not only to what we can do to satisfy ourselves, but made us want more. Whether you noticed it or not, what you feel while using a web site matters. How you respond to it matters. You can vote. You can comment. You can recommend. You may find yourself loyal to certain web sites because of how you feel when you’re interacting with them. They may make you feel content. Happy. Safe. Included.

I think Flash is going to find itself in more and more web sites, and developers who teach themselves how to make Flash pages and scripts accessible will be setting the stage for greater adaptation of web site usage by a wider range of people. Personalization is going to become specialized and eventually, individualized based on, again, how we feel about our experience.

As content producers, some companies will want to cause experiences. They’ll learn to create reaction.

Influencing the customer experience through the internet by Mona Patel, executive director at Human Factors International, discusses emotion and trust, and how these influence our decisions and choices on the Web. She writes,

Whatever a site’s conversion goal, it is now more about people than product or services.

How do you design to reach out and touch someone? How do you test to see if you have done so? What types of web sites may want to explore emotional connections and trigger reactions that convert?

Health care sites, beauty (hair, skin, weight), dating, clothing, jewelry, non-profit charity organizations…are just a few. I like to take the ideas and apply them to harder situations, such as furniture sites, educational institutions or food. Anything we search for in a search engine can be found. But getting us to choose, commit, try, buy, recommend, or get in the car and drive to the store takes more than playing with color contrasts, table-less CSS and long shopping cart processes.

Do you make purchase decisions based on a certain “something” that’s kind of undefined but you know it when you feel it?

That’s what fascinates me. Designers and developers are learning how to inspire us.

Here’s another article that may inspire you…

Monday Inspiration: User Experience Of The Future

Below we present some of the outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but they are reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous over the next years.

Holly Buchanan from FutureNow has a fun blog post called Would You Buy A Bra From This Man? I watched it and no, I would not.

She’s seeking comments on the video advertisement. I responded with mine. But I’m really curious about ads like this one, where I’m convinced the advertising agencies don’t get away from their desks enough. For starters, hand gestures about a woman’s knockers is something guys do when describing their pick of the hour. It’s not a great selling technique with women.

When it comes to breasts, I can vouch that having a large rack is not everything its cracked up to be. For starters, I can’t tell you how many times, when talking with men, I need to draw them a map to my eyeballs. At least these guys are confident in their gazing. The guy in the ad Holly wrote about had no idea what to do with his eyes or hands when discussing the topic of bras with a woman.

Why should she trust him? Why would she purchase from the company he represents?

Trust

Trust is something we’re still learning how to do with our websites. We need to let our customers know we won’t sell or trade their personal information. As site visitors, we need to know when we’re being tracked by search engines and why. Our credit cards are sometimes ripped off no matter what kind of policies there are because hacking is alive and well. “Trustmarks” are viewed as signals that a site is a credible business.

How many of us actually click on them to see if they contain up to date, authentic information? How often do we stop to verify it? Does the Better Business Bureau really know the company?

Testimonials are another sore spot. Can they be verified? Are they real or fabricated? Are the personal stories on travel sites real or paid content used to help sell services?

Can you trust paid content? Do you prefer user generated, objective content?

I trust whatever feels natural and familiar. I believe the more we know our site visitors, the better we can become at understanding what is natural and familiar for them. What is it that they relate to and how can you put them at ease, based on what you know about their lives?

A nerdy guy in a lab coat asking me questions about bra sizes is not something that occurs in my everyday life experience. Confident women hired to help women customers with sizes and merchandise are activities that do happen in the real world.

In those instances, we give them permission to look because we need their help in determining the right size. I’m one of those women you hear about who is always in denial, trying to stuff the motherload into a smaller boat.

As for that ad Holly writes about, if it had used a topless hunky man to walk up to women and ask them questions about their breasts, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

I’m no dummy.

I’ve been working on websites since 1995 and, eleven years later, we are still trying to understand how to build a good one. Nobody agrees on what works best. Nor do they agree on how to make some work better.

A gentle discussion has erupted into a serious inspection of persuasive web design, personas, usabilty and marketing in Persuasion Architecture and the Art of Agreement for Website Success. Not everybody is drinking the Eisenberg kool-aid. As we discuss Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? : Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing, you can see that some people place no or little value on personas. Perhaps there is no such thing as a business successfully selling online? It takes too much time and money to understand all the different types of people who come to your site, so don’t bother.

I’ve never been a good marketer. But, I do care deeply about customer satisfaction. Ignoring customers can take down a dot com and it will never come back. For me, it’s exciting to find studies on how people use and respond to web sites. This information matters a great deal to people who make their living online. It may have even saved the dot com I worked for, that built and sold web sites, and still crashed during the dot com bust.

We know that “ugly sites” and boring sites, and ho-hum sites survive for years and years. It’s easy to shake one’s head and complain to the web owner that their site sucks, but interesting to note that they remain in business. This is because they did something to convince, to persuade, to prove they could deliver on whatever they claim to offer.

What is it that they do, that makes them sucessful? Perhaps persuasion architecture, which Bryan and Jeff Eisenberg have trademarked, is something to explore and learn more about.