Fresh

Your users.  They have opinions about a lot of things.  They probably have opinions about your site and what’s on it.  What’s the best way to collect those opinions in order make your site better?  The easier it is for your users to tell you what they think, the better. Here are a few ways for your users to give feedback painlessly.

“Was this helpful?”

In a situation where you want to help the user find an answer to a question, or learn how to do something with your product or service, you can ask them directly: “Was this helpful?”  or “Did this answer your question?”  Allowing the user to also leave a comment along with their “Yes/No” answer (most likely “no” if they are frustrated enough to leave a comment) might give you some insight into what they were looking for and how you can improve the content itself, or the search algorithm to better help answer their question in the future. But the “Yes/No” buttons alone, along with a good look at your help documentation search logs, might be enough to show where you may have dropped the ball in your documentation.

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A few weeks ago a bunch of us from eROI went to see Jared Spool present “Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon”. It was a fantastic presentation about some key learnings about e-commerce design from experiments on Amazon.com. One tid-bit really especially struck a chord with me: Jared went in-depth about Amazon’s review system and conjectured that to amass 20 reviews for a product online one must have had 26,000 sales (on average one out of 1,300 purchasers will write a review.) Assuming the site has a 2% conversion rate (a typical rate for e-comm) the product needs to have 1.3 Million hits to reach 20 reviews.

What!? Only one in 1,300 purchasers will write a review?? That seems like a depressing statistic for people hoping to use user reviews as a means to help sell their products online! Another drawback is that customers are also a lot more likely to go back to a site to write a bad review versus a positive review (if the product is just as they expected, the user goes on living their life. If it isn’t, they want to tell someone about it.)

Fear not, there are some creative ways we can overcome the challenges!

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For people like me, who like to research products before purchasing them, online shopping is very convenient.

One of the things that I like to shop for online is apparel (like blouses, shoes, accessories, etc.). From the comfort of my couch, I sift through countless pairs of pants, high heels, or dresses and visualize how they’d integrate into my wardrobe. I rely heavily on customer reviews when making online purchases, and can recall a recent shopping experience when customer reviews strongly influenced my buying decision. Let me explain.

Jeans in Question

I’m not a fan of buying jeans, but when I decide to buy a pair I try on style after style, brand after brand, and fit after fit. One brand that I’ve had success with is Banana Republic, so I went to their site one night knowing that I was looking for a pair of dark skinny jeans. After browsing through their selection, a pair caught my eye; it had everything that I was looking for — dark wash, allegedly long length, and my size. After reading the customer reviews, however, I learned that these pants ran about 6 inches shorter than the advertised inseam length! So, when I ordered the pants online, I made sure to order my size in a longer length so that they’d fit me the way I wanted. In the end, I loved the pants and ended up keeping them!

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This year I had the opportunity to go to SXSW. As a conference newbie I didn’t know what to expect. I heard stories from friends and co-workers and read some awesome blog posts about how to get ready, mainly Last-Minute SXSW 2010 Planning Guide and Tweeting from SXSW — Don’t Throw Up On Me Please. No rookie mistakes for me.

As the new kid on the block, I didn’t know what sessions I wanted to see or which ones would be most appealing. So, after reading through session descriptions, I found a few that I thought would be interesting. Two that I stumbled upon that I found particularly interesting were about web design psychology. Mind control- Psychology of the web by Ben Scofield (here are his slides and blog) and The Art and Science of Seductive Interactions by Stephen P. Anderson (here are his slides and blog).

I had learned about some of these theories from my peers, and most are pretty intuitive, but having them laid out in one place will hopefully be a useful reference or helpful review.

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When it comes to Facebook, Dunkin’ Donuts does it right.  They have well over 1 million fans and they have carefully crafted their profile to accomplish wide spread support.  I recently went to a PAF event that was led by Kevin Tate from StepChange Group.  He did a rather large feature on why Dunkin’ has found such success on Facebook and I personally found it really interesting.

One of the first things you’ll notice about their profile is that it opens on the News/Promos tab which features simple things for fans to do.  This is important for a couple reasons.  The first is that most companies seem to have success on Facebook if they give their fans something to do.  Dunkin’ Donuts has a callout for people to dunk themselves in chocolate and another for people to enter a contest (located off Facebook as you now must pay to host a contest within Facebook).  The second is that they didn’t over-complicate it.  You’re decorating a donut and dipping yourself in chocolate – both very much on brand as well as easy and fun.

If you go a little deeper into their profile, you’ll notice that their profile picture is a “Fan of the Week”.  This is a really great approach to having their fans do the marketing for them.  Each week they pick a new photo and the person who is selected will most likely brag on their own profile about being the lucky choice.  This accomplishes two things:

1. They’ve reaffirmed their relationship with that customer.
2. That customer’s friends are most likely going to become their fan because they want a crack at the “Fan of the Week”.

It’s a perfect domino effect.

I think the biggest takeaway I had from the presentation was to not over-complicate anything when it comes to Facebook.  It doesn’t need to be elaborate or overly processed.  It can be super grass roots and organic.  After all, that’s why people are on Facebook.  They don’t want marketers throwing things at them but they do want the opportunity to interact with their favorite brands.

I think it’s time for me to go dunk myself in chocolate. Care to join me?

You’ve written the copy for your site (or you’re about to), but will it get the results you need? Put your copy to work and get everything out of your site that you possibly can by following these 6 strategic tips.

But first, let’s just get this out of the way: dumping your copy into your site and calling it good will lose business for you. Period. Think about it. When you create an email or landing page, you likely pour over precise pixel placement, copy and button placement. Why wouldn’t you do the same for your website, particularly now that your home page isn’t the guaranteed entry to your website. (Check your analytics, you’ll likely see that your home page isn’t necessarily your front door any more.)

Search continues to change the game so you should make sure every page is playing its part in giving the right impression and achieving your objectives.  You have a narrow window to grab a user’s attention and get them where you want them to go.

Now let’s get to the tips! We’ve split this up into two areas of focus: the first is the “30,000 Foot View” (the big picture) and the second is the “100 Foot View” (digging into the details). (more…)

If you’re one of the people out there pondering the ‘mobile’ question, then here are a few things to think about. Let’s start by answering question #1: “Should my website go mobile?”

Yes, you do need to optimize your website for mobile devices.

Year after year, mobile usage is growing and it is expanding to include new formats (Apple iPad, HP Slate and the much rumored Google Tablet). The way we interact with these devices will mature as the technologies and devices develop. For now, there a few simple things to keep in mind.

First, if you have a website, then you should absolutely invest in establishing the mobile version of that site. The key to creating an effective mobile site is in the strategy. A good mobile site isn’t just a tiny version of your existing site. A good mobile site needs to focus on addressing your core marketing objectives in a way that is in keeping with the brand experience of your website but is also optimized for mobile screens.

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While sorting through the cupboards in my bathroom this past weekend I was puzzled to discover that I owned 23 bottles of lotion: some of these nearly empty, some barely touched, and others well past their expiration date. This got me thinking as to why I seem to forget about all the products I already have at my finger tips, and instead go out and buy the first new item I hear about promising firming, moisturizing, and/or bronzing benefits in a bottle. Like myself, I often witness clients honing in on new technology, overly excited to snatch it up and apply it to their own online marketing objectives, before first asking themselves the question “Do I really need this?”

While change is good, there is something to be said to having a purpose behind each change. We are consumers by nature and always want that new best thing, but why not first take a look at the tools you already have at your disposal and assess if you are indeed using them to their full potential.

Here are some questions to ask when considering whether or not to invest in the next latest and greatest marketing tactic. These might help you figure out if your money is best spent on what’s new or if it’d be better spent fine-tuning what you’re already utilizing.

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Often here on Fresh we bring you what we’re digging and what inspires us. We give ways to make what you create easier, ways to solve development issues creatively, and generally anything that we think you’d value. Sometimes we find problems that need to be solved that are staring us right in the face and we don’t even realize they exist.

After visiting An Event Apart this past month, I came face-to-face with one such situation. Have you ever wondered why sometimes when you create a website for a client, launch, then hand over the keys – things go haywire? All of a sudden the format is broken and the copy no longer makes sense, and all you’re left to do is shake your head and pray you took a screenshot before they took the reigns. Before you know it, the client is back at the drawing board wondering if they should’ve just changed that background color or moved things around on their home page a bit. Should we simply resign ourselves to blaming the client and moving on to the next project? I think not.

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In this years’ election the Internet played a new, critical role in politics that gave us a glimpse at what’s to come and the future of the World Wide Web as a multi-functional tool that has already been used to accomplish everything from organizing grass-roots campaign efforts, raising campaign funds, creating discussion boards, inspiring countless blogs to becoming the constant face of a whole campaign.

The key word here is constant. Anyone at anytime could go to a candidates website and learn their views on the issues and how they plan to deal with them. They were taking advantage of higher bandwidths to show video and audio clips of rallies, speeches and even supporters’ home videos.

They were also taking full advantage of the e-commerce aspects of the web by not only offering sections to donate to the campaigns but also pages to buy t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs and signs. The Obama-Biden site even has selected products for sale directly on the home page.

A major difference in their e-commerce sections was the user experience. Once in the McCain-Palin store each section takes you to a different looking third party e-com site that doesn’t even attempt to carry over any design or feel from the home site. This is in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden store experience that was fluid and consistent with no disconnect as the store carries every aspect of the design into their e-commerce interface.

Obama’s Store Page               Mccain’s Store Page

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