First Impressions Mean Everything

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

The reference in this post might only be relevant to those of us who live in cold weather climates, but the lesson reaches across every continent.

As I was trudging through the snow today, I found my mood disintegrating with every bit of unshoveled sidewalk I walked upon. Within ther city of Toronto, there’s a by-law that states everyone must clear their sidewalks within 24 hours of a snowfall.

Correction Note: It’s 12 hours actually – thanks to whomever pointed that out. You can read about it here.

You’d hardly know that was a law in my neighbourhood and I wonder how it’s even reported or enforced in the first place. Forget the law even, it’s just the nice thing to do. They say first impressions are everything and with only a casual wave here and there, my impressions of many in my community are not great after today’s expedition.

It got me thinking how this can be used as a metaphor to compare against a consumer’s experience with your brand or website.

I had a task to do today and it was hampered by the fact that it was extremely difficult for me to get from point A to point B. If I wasn’t intent on completing my “task,” I would have just given up.

Many visitors to your website are there for information, but often they are there to complete a task (even if they don’t realize it at first); whether it be sign up for a newsletter, or puchase a product. If you make it difficult for someone to do this, it’s likely they won’t go through and complete the task – especially when you have a plethera of competitors out there waiting to turn your prospects into their prospects.

The first encounter many people have with your brand may be on your website, which means that it is important for you to stop and think about the kind of experience you want them to have. Make it detailed, not just “I want them to like our site and find it easy to use.” Everyone wants that. What specific experience do you want them to have, what do you want them to think about your brand after visiting your site for the first time, or the tenth time? Hold on to that thought and evaluate your current site and any future updates you make to the site against that.

If my neighbours had thought about the experience they wanted to have when they walked through the snow today, then I might have had a better experience myself; perhaps the sidewalks would have been shoveled and I wouldn’t be in such a cranky mood right now.

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14.02.2008 user experience, websites 4 Comments

The Home Based Business Website

Friday, January 25th, 2008

I have friends who have started selling Avon and Pampered Chef. Each of them have sent me emails letting me know about their websites, which the company has provided some sort of boiler-plated template system allowing for “easy creation” and then it is hosted on their platform.

I find it great that the companies provide tools such as this to their consultants/ sales teams to be able to promote themselves. The problem though is that the way the sites are set up, it generally doesn’t allow for them to be very user friendly, or for that matter search engine friendly.

Sure it’s great to have a website, but what if nobody comes to it? Or once they get there, it’s not easy to navigate through the page? Without knocking the efforts my friends have made to get their sites up and running – since I am still amazed at the number of companies out there who don’t have a website – these sites really aren’t going to win them any awards. They don’t (nor should they) claim to be online marketing experts, since that’s obviously not their business. So why should they know how to build a great website that is optimized for search and would be talked about by their customers because they were so easy to use. That’s a job for the company in my opinion.

As a home-based business, you struggle enough to keep yourself afloat and promote your wares, let alone the countless hours of administration that you need to do, having to further promote yourself and redo a website to make sure people can find you should not be on your list of to dos.

These individuals are spending their time selling a company’s products and as that company, you’ve taken the time to make your website look nice and friendly for search engines as well as usability so shouldn’t you offer the same type of service to those who are in essence kind of like your brand evanglists? (I’m making a big assumption on the above statement, since in reality not everyone actually knows how to do this, or does it, but that’s theory we should, or aim to, practice).

Maybe they aren’t going to have as extensive a site as your company, but why not make it easier for them to get business? People who have these little ventures on the side often have other committments (whether a job or family) and generally don’t have as much time to devote to understanding how to market their (or your) business online. Sure if they become successful, this may become their full-time job and they can then afford to hire marketing help, but until that day it’s always going to be a stuggle and companies need to step up to the plate and provide more support than they are presently doing.

I have two suggestions for companies like this:

1. Hire someone (unless you have experts in house) to write some 101s on how to make the software/ templates/ tools you have provided more search engine friendly and usable (so that once they have people on the site, they can keep them there) and provide that as a tutorial to your consultants available for download before they build their website.

2. Create some tools and education maaterial for simple online marketing tactics(explain paid search, social media/ networking, affiliate marketing and (legal) email marketing) that are designed to drive traffic so that these individuals can set themselves and their website up for success.

In the long run everyone benefits, given the pyramid structure of most of these businesses, the more sales/ income brought in from your sales consultants, the more revenue you as a company make.

Side Note: As I am generalizing a lot here and making some assumptions, if anyone out there does know of one of these types of companies that offers this type of “training” let me know as I’d like to show someone whose got it right.

And to my friends whom I’ve talked about here – you know you’ve got an open offer on my end for advice any time you want it, I’m definitely not knocking your efforts and in fact am quite impressed you took the time to create a website in the first place.

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25.01.2008 Email Marketing, affiliate marketing, online marketing, social media, user experience, web applications 2 Comments

Dewmocracy a Don’t

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

When I see a tv commercial solely promoting me to go online for some interactive experience, I almost always check it out because I am always looking for great interactive campaigns. Moutain Dew has a new commercial out pushing folks to Dewmocracy.com.

The commercial is pretty intensive, action-oriented and looks like it cost a bundle to film. Anyone spending that kind of money to push people online gets my interest. The idea behind the campaign is to help create the next Mountain Dew including the flavor, color, name, logo, label, and tagline. Sounds pretty cool.

Unfortunately even though they’ve likely spent more money creating the website than the tv commercial (which says a lot), they really fall short on a few things.

The user experience is lousy right down to have white type in yellow fields as you try to register. Have you tried reading white on yellow? Yup – you can’t see it to know if you actually typed anything correctly. I then had several other bizzare user experiences. When I selected my country as Canada, it automatically refreshed and provided me an error message that I had not identified my province. Of course not – hadn’t got there yet! Province came after country on this form. Once I finished registering (leaving the pre-checked box to receive some updates on the contest) the thank you page confirmed for me that I had confirmed no email subscriptions (pardon?). I went back to check and yup, the box was still ticked, so who knows if I am signed up or not. I then got an additional “information profiling” page which asked me to provide an alternate email address. Hey wait a minute – I already gave you one, why do I need to give you two? Apparently, they say it’s in case the first email address I gave them was incorrect in any way they could make sure I still get the newsletters I subscribed to (wait, I thought they just said I hadn’t subscribed to any?)

Registration finally complete, I log in and get to view the longer version of the movie which is pretty cool from an action standpoint I must admit, until you hit the cheesy ending where the token native guy tells you, “You are the chosen one” and finishes with you replicating a Nestea commercial ending in my opinion.

On to the game itself. Well let’s just say I didn’t get very far and gave up. Now when I say didn’t get very far, well I was on the site for a good 40 minutes with my frustration growing each minute. And I was still only in the first chamber of 7!

Here’s the objective and overview right from the site itself:
Your journey will take you through seven Chambers, where you will meet mythical characters, answer questions, and play games.
Upon entering each Chamber, you will be tasked to create a specific feature of the next Mountain Dew. For example, in the first Chamber, you will select your Drink’s flavor.
Creating the individual features of your Drink will be the first task of each Chamber. Once completed, you can wait for the next Chamber to open or can continue exploring the world of DEWmocracy by playing a series of games.
Your decisions in the first three Chambers will lead you to join 1 of the 3 Teams that will ultimately create the next Mountain Dew. After the 3 most popular combinations of features are determined, you’ll be aligned with the Team whose drink most closely matches your own.
Once aligned with a Team, you will be responsible for creating the logo, label, and ultimately the tag-line of the next Mountain Dew. Each Team will vote on which Drink candidate from those submitted by all Team members will be put forth for a national vote.
Points earned in the game get you higher visibility for your drink, increasing its chances of being selected as your Team’s candidate. Accruing the most points does not directly result in your drink being one of the 3 final selections.
In the final Chamber, your team will vote to determine the Drink candidate that you collectively would like to bring into the real world.

I never got out of the first chamber, several (pointless) games and a lousy navigation experience frustrrated me beyond no end. If I finished a game and was trying to complete another task, but accidently clicked on the game again, when I chose to go back or end the game (since I’d already played it), I lost all the points I’d accumulated playing the game in the first place. How was that fair?

Overall, I think the premise is interesting, the graphics are amazing and this must have been one hell of a thing to program – credit where credit is due.

However, there definitely wasn’t enough thought put into user experience, connection of the games to the storyline or QA. Yes you can log in and go back and play the game more later, making this somewhat like an RPG game, which again is kind of cool for those into such games. The problem is it seems like it is going to be something you would have to play for hours on end to actually finish entering the contest and help make the next Mountain Dew.

Maybe that was the objective, find a way to limit the number of entries. If so, they’ve done it in spades. If the objective was to create a fun, creative, engaging and interactive way to enter the contest, they somewat missed the mark. While the idea is creative and definitely interactive to the max… The fun (at least for me) goes out the window with each user experience gaf that occurs and honestly the length of time it took to get pretty much nowhere with fairly pointless games.

I do have to mention one other cool thing though – the loading graphic is in the shape of a Mountain Dew bottle. I thought that was clever.

Final thoughts – it is obvious that the folks at Pepsi spent a lot of money on this and are serious about interactive for all of their brands. Unfortunately it’s a bit too much flair and not enough focus on the things that make people feel they’ve had the best interactive experience with your brand.

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13.12.2007 interactive marketing, user experience No Comments

Toronto’s Recreational Program Registration – User Experience Nightmare

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

My sister recently asked me if I could her register my nephew for his next swimming classes with the City of Toronto. Registration occurs between 7 and 8 a.m. and needs to be done over the phone, or online.

As she works at a hotel and that is a pretty busy time in the morning it’s nearly impossible for her to take care of that. My brother-in-law is usually in transit to the daycare at that time so it’s not like he can take care of that either.

She warned me it was going to be difficult – advising the phone line would be very busy and it would be hard to get through and that I might have to have my redial fingers well oiled. Given my occupation, I asked why we didn’t just do it online. She indicated that the last time they did it online, he didn’t actually get the class they wanted (some sort of system glitch) and all you can do is register, it doesn’t actually confirm if the class still has space – even if it accepts his information.

So the good aunt that I am, I began promptly calling at 6:55 thinking I’d beat the rush. Well apparently me and every other parent in the city. By 7:50 when I still hadn’t got through, I began panicking – what if I didn’t get through – my poor nephew – what would he do???? I decided to try the online system just to see what I could find out and maybe use that as a last resort.

Well too bad the website was down. The City’s website had actually crashed and wouldn’t load – I assume from too many people trying to register. I was shocked. Thankfully they must have kept registration going, because at 8:15 I finally got through and after being on hold for another 15 minutes finally got him registered.

The whole thing just made me think of what a joke the system is and wonder where our tax dollars – including the ones that are paid towards these programs – are going.
I might be dating myself if I say I remember when programs such as swimming lessons used to be free… Now it’s about $50 for somewhere between 5 and 10 classes (still not bad, but if you ask people to pay for something, perhaps you should offer better service…)

How does the city expect working parents to call and register at 7 a.m. in the morning when there aren’t enough phone lines to keep them on hold, let alone the fact that it is not even an automated process. Then there’s the website. How could the City of Toronto not have enough of an infrastructure in place to handle the number of people coming to the site. As my nephew is 6, and my sister has been going through this process for years, you would think they would have learned by now.

I don’t understand what the point is of trying to offer an online service if you can’t actually offer it when people try to use it. The whole process just seems completely ridiculous and unconvenient to me, but then again it is the City of Toronto, what else should we expect?

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11.12.2007 user experience No Comments

Flickr’s Mistake in User Experience

Friday, November 9th, 2007

I was setting up an account for a client on Flickr today and had a pretty bad user experience.

My client happened to have a very long email address that would be used for their alternate contact info and Flickr wouldn’t take it. It was cut off before I could finish entering all of the charactrs. While I searched for a way to inform them of this error or find a way to know exactly how many characters they allowed in an email address, it was to no avail. I actually had to ask for a shorter/secondary email address in order to create this account; it was somewhat embarrassing.

Here’s a few simple tips to creating forms with the best possible user experience in mind.

1. Always let the user know how many characters they have when creating usernames, passwords or providing email addresses. Supplying information including any special requirements – either in text below, or in a little question mark pop up to the right of the field will keep user frustration to a minimum.

2. Let the user know how many steps, or how long it will take them to fill out this information. If your form is long, try a percentage complete bar and if it’s short – a simple step x of x, or “This will take less than x minutes to complete” will do.

3. If your form is long, ensure that you actually allow users to save their information and come back at a later time to complete or finish it, as life doesn’t always allow you to do things in one sitting. Nothing is worse then getting halfway or more through the form and having some kind of technical malfuction or other interuption that erases it all (as I also recently experienced while trying to fill out a five-page form on another site).

4. Contact information – when creating contact information fields, think of where your users may be located. If your users will be only from one country, then consider using short fields that are the exact length of the information they have to enter and automatically tab over to each place (For example in Canada postal code could be broken up into two fields of three and once three characters are entered, you could program it to automatically tab over so there’s no error in entering information and the user understands how you would like it collected/entered – spaces or no spaces). If you will likely have many users from multiple countries, than something like that likley doesn’t make sense, unless you spend the time programming your fields to update based on country chosen.

5. Required information and error notices. The most frustrating part of filling out forms for a user usually comes down to one of two things – either not knowing what information is mandatory – or not properly being able to identify what errors occured in an easy to figure out fashion.

Both of these items happened when signing up for my client’s Flickr account. Not knowing my client’s birthday, I didn’t put it in. The instructions on the sign up page simply tell you to answer a few easy questions – and don’t specify that they are all required. When I tried to create the account it didn’t seem to work, I wasn’t directed to a thank you page and I seemed to still be on the same form. I didn’t get an error message (or so I thought). After clicking to create again, I did some investigating and scrolled up to find out that there was a little red exclamation point beside the birthday box indicating that it was required.

Better user experience? After either clearly identifying (with symbols, or better text) what is mandatory for the user to complete. Program the form so that if an error occurs, it will automatically jump to the field in question and identify the mistake and possibly provide solutions to resolve the problem; or have the error message appear at the bottom of the form in a place that is easy to find, rather than making the user work to find out the problem, and again, identifying how to rectify the situation, isn’t such a bad idea.

At the end of the day, the most important piece of advice is this: If your user has to work so hard to sign up for your service, chances are you are going to lose a whole lot of potential clients or leads in the process. In this day and age when time is a commodity, wasting minutes means wasting money and no will waste their own money on a bad experience if they have an alternative.

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09.11.2007 online marketing, user experience No Comments

The Interactive Landscape is Changing

Friday, October 12th, 2007

I think there are some big changes coming to the world of interactive and I’m not sure they are for the better.

A landing page is not as simple some copy, links and a couple of graphics and then you’re done. Understanding what the user experience is going to be when they get to that page and ensuring it’s a positive one to reinforce your brand is one of the most important things in the online world. Throw in some SEO so people can actually find the page and you start adding a whole other layer of tactics that many of us have spent years trying to perfect.

Then there’s the QA side of things. QA of a website is not just reading the copy for spelling errors. (I think QA can be a whole separate post – so I’ll stop there for now).

Recently, in an effort to be more “integrated,” I’ve watched traditional marketers flock to the digital space, thinking it is a piece of cake, and that they can follow the same steps/process as they would for an offline tactic; feeling there’s really nothing to learn other than a few “buzz words.” Frankly, that scares me.

If it were truly as easy as that, there wouldn’t be a need for niche little interactive shops or consultants.

Traditional agencies and other marketing companies are starting to realize that they need to change to keep up with the times. Knowing that many of their client’s print/mass budgets are slowly drying up and interactive budgets are in most cases doubling YOY, there’s a trend taking place that sees the most seasoned “offline” marketers suddenly leading large digital campaigns.

I don’t mean any disrespect, but I know I wouldn’t go around telling anyone how to make a newspaper ad or radio campaign – that’s not my speciality.

Throwing the mass/print teams into the interactive pot with no training or real understanding of the space is not a model for success.

We’re now starting to see a two-tier interactive landscape popping up. You’ve got brands with websites and banner ad campaigns that look like brochures and print ads and don’t take into account how people actually use the web, or view an ad online. These brands are not going to understand why their online marketing don’t seem to be working “because it’s prettier than my competitor’s fill in the blank…”

Which is exactly it. Pretty may be the print way, but isn’t web friendly. Not to say you can’t have a nice looking web site, but the web is all about user experience, how customers interact with and find your brand online and of course functionality. Sometimes pretty has to get sacrificed in order to achieve that.

The brands out there who understand that, will go searching for the right people to create their online user experience and they will rise to the top of the space – even if their product offering leaves something to be desired.

At the end of the day, if you truly want to make interactive work for your brand or your clients, you’re going to have to bite the bullet and get someone in a senior position who comes from the space – someone who was in the trenches and who not only understands all about user experience, SEO and so on, but someone who actually can show you the battle scars they earned from physically doing these things and what they learned in the process.

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12.10.2007 agencies, brand advertising, interactive marketing, online marketing, user experience, websites No Comments