Today I launched a new website for Jim Ordway at Beckon Call Window Cleaning, out of Halsey, Oregon. Jim’s a great guy and we got this project under-foot and moving along at a very quick pace.
I’m very happy with the final product. Take a look, and get in touch with him for your Windows if you’re local to the Willamette Valley. He’s a professional who takes his business seriously, and he does some great looking work.
I’m really excited to announce the launch of John Turman’s “Turman Financial Group, LLC” website, as of this weekend.
We worked together with Trent Bingham to create the awesome logo. The site itself was built using Wordpress for the CMS, and XHTML/CSS for the front-end.
Most websites are designed to direct you towards a “call to action.” This may be a call to purchase, contact, subscribe, tweet, or download. “Click here” and your wildest fantasies will come true…
This is a very important component to brick and mortar businesses on the Web that need to quantitatively measure the number of contacts, revenue generated from each contact, and cost to acquire these contacts. For a digital downloads site, it’s an even cleaner and more direct route. Set up an Google Adwords campaign, measure the number of exposures, cost-per-click, clickthroughs, and the number of downloads or purchases. It’s a direct funnel with little wavering and clearly defined holes*.
The analytics funnel can be measured simply with numbers in, numbers out, and diversions along the way. 0-100% optimized.
What about blogs, online books in HTML, magazines, or art exhibitions and galleries? An argument can be made that for these types of sites, the goal is to get the user to engage more than it is to get the user to click, buy, or contact. If you are using a photo montage, slideshow, or writing thought-provoking blog articles, is your goal to ship the user away via a click, or to get her engaged, talking about your story, and believing in your vision? A “call to engage” is what this site needs. Design to lead the user into your story, captivate her with your photos, and rid the landscape of peripheral “calls to action.”
Most news sites follow a three or four-column approach to their website. This can be understood, as the news business model is tied around advertising. But, wouldn’t it be nice if you read your articles with big type, restful whitespace, and engaging pictures? Many follow the recipe, but forget that the signal gets lost for the noise when your reading one amongst four columns, and the highest contrasting elements on the page are the banner ads, trying to get you to click away and buy a cell phone.
The next time you redesign, consider if it would be most appropriate to have numerous and loud calls to action, or provoking and relaxing calls to engage.
*The attrition and loss of users along the way due to checkout abandonment, site bounces, or click-aways.
In November, I had the pleasure to work with Dr. Michael Klautzsch, and John Admire at All Family Vision Care working on a re-design for their existing eye center website.
I partnered with Trent Bingham on this project, and we launched a slick new design that adds personality to the previously templated-design, common to vision care providers. The site is built using Wordpress for the CMS.
On April 1, Seth Godin wrote a blog post about not writing a blog post.
Annually, Seth drums up a well-crafted April Fool’s day post, and then pats himself on the back for being clever. However this year, he was even more clever — he didn’t write one at all. Instead, he exclaimed how brave he was being for not writing something only good, and not exceptional. His argument is that if you are not going to produce something exceptional, don’t produce at all.
This is written like a man whom marvels at the yellow of his own pee.
Seth, you are a fantastic writer. But, clamping up the perfectionist learners following you is ignoring the fantastic joys and evolutions of ideas themselves.
Sure, an idea that isn’t exceptional is probably not worth the dirt on your $5,000 shoes. However, taking a nugget of an idea and sharing it with others allows for the growth of newer and more evolved ideas.
How would Flickr ever have come into being, had it not been for first showing a non-exceptional idea?
I can agree that telling a non-exceptional joke may be lame. But applying your no-exceptions rule to ideas and aiming to spread the rule across evolving platforms is silly.
I attended An Event Apart in Seattle this last week and had a great time. The presentations were engaging, and all of them inspired further thinking and reflection.
In particular, Andy Budd’s “Are you experienced” and Jeff Veen’s “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps” made me think about the parallels between user-experience design and an often-used behavior-change model in sport and exercise psychology.
The transtheoretical model (TTM) is used to assist people with behavior change, specifically by addressing how prepared they are to making the change.
This behavior can be exercising, smoking cessation, or–in the case of the web–purchasing a product, joining a community, or posting a video.
For example, our hypothetical user is a 42 year old father of two with an annual household income of $72,000. Here, our examination of this persona, different from traditional user-experience-design, is that he will not be seen as a representative of 42 year old middle-class fathers. Rather, he will be representative of users in his “stage of change.”
The TTM has six stages.
Stage one is the pre-contemplation stage.
In this stage, our user has yet to consider adopting the new behavior, and is often oblivious to how this change would benefit him.
This experience can be common when our user comes to a web site for the first time. He may not be familiar with a company or product, or how it might benefit him. So, his user experience should be tailored to giving him information, helping him consider the benefits of the change, but not yet pushing action.
Stage two is the contemplation stage.
In this stage, he has started to realize the benefits of adopting this new behavior, but is still far from planning on making the change himself. His user experience needs to have the benefits hit home, be tailored to why he specifically should be making this change, and help him prepare for the change. We are still not pushing him to act – he is not ready.
Stage three is the preparation stage.
Here, our user is planning on adopting the behavior in the near future, and has acknowledged the benefits to him. His user experience needs to be a call-to-action. Help lift him that extra step and make it easy for him to do.
Stage four is the action stage.
This is a key stage. We have helped the user make the change. Now we need to help him keep it up, tell his friends, and maintain this new behavior. His user experience needs to be aimed at removing potential obstacles to future action, keeping him enthused, and reinforcing the benefits that initially brought him to making the change.
Stage five is the maintenance stage.
Our user is committed to the behavior, he is returning on a regular basis, and does not plan on stopping. Beautiful! But…
All parties have reached their goal. Our user is reaping the rewards of the behavior change, and your business or community has a new loyal member. Everyone is happy.
What happens when he leaves? He finds a better offer, stops seeing the benefits, or just stops participating.
The sixth stage is relapse.
His user experience should help motivate him to re-adopting the behavior, and provide future strategies that will prevent relapse. This involves community support, reinforcing contact, and similar “touching-bases” strategies.
I’ve outlined a rough method for contributing to the web user experience through the Transtheoretical Model of behavior change. This is nowhere near a complete treatise on the subject, or a golden solution that all companies should adopt. However, I think this outline could be a useful asset to anyone considering an in-depth examination of the user experience in their design.
