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. )

Meet Darryl Heron, who took advantage of our relaxing promotion rules and wrote an excellent piece on Earth day.

It’s been 31 years since the first Earth Day.

Are you involved?

I’m very excited to point you to Cre8 Green Week.

“We’ll be celebrating Earth Day, April 22nd, with a week-long “green” focus. The most unusual facet will be that we’re temporarily loosening some of our usually strict policies about self promotion. We want to make it easier for the community to come in and share about how their projects inspire awareness of our environment and sustainable use of resources.”

Logo design: Risa Borsykowsky of Rb3Webdesign.com

Cre8Green Week Planning and Implementation: Elizabeth Able of Ablereach.com

Some discussions:

How To Promote A Non Profit Organization, how to get more visibility to raise money and funds

Thus, I’d like to start a single thread, where leaders of nonprofit and charity organizations can find resources to make their organization more visible. Obviously, you are supposed to contribute a link or two that will help them in this direction.

Blogging About The Earth The Week Of Earth Day?

Normally, we don’t allow link drops or self promotion. Like never. Just for the week of April 20-26, even if your site is not dedicated to green living, we are bending our rules. If you have written a substantive post that fits with the spirit of Earth Day, you are invited to tell us about it and link to it in this thread.

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?

As I return to a less intense work load than in weeks past, I thought I’d relax with you and share some recent usability blog posts that caught my eye, but I haven’t had time to write or comment on them.

Four Bad Designs. Jakob Nielsen picks four examples of designs that missed their mark. Each example is right-on, but my favorite is the first one. Without incentive, there’s no reason to care about the call to action.

Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results. There are limits. More information and comments by SEO’s can be found at Sphinn.

Gord gets into brain with Human Hardware: Men And Women.

Website Redesign: Improving Website Usability and SEO. Having come away from giving a class on usability to SEO’s, I was reminded of just how important and timely this topic is.

Shari Thurow wrote a great article called What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability. It’s a 2-part article. Both include quotes from usability professionals.

Colleen Jones never fails to deliver inspiration. Read her Winning Content Persuades, Not Manipulates

What did I miss, that you liked?