The Nerf N-Strike Vulcan ($43) is the mother of all Nerf guns. A belt fed-automatic dart gun that can fire 3 darts a second will strike fear into the hearts of your enemies. Finally you can take out that cubicle dweller without fear of imprisonment. It’s also called a Vulcan so you know it’s cold and calculating. Vulcan death grip not included.

I’m sorry but I do have another design rant. Pepsi spent nearly a million dollars on this new logo and I just don’t think they got their money’s worth. Was it even necessary to do a new rebrand anways, let alone the cost it’s going to be for changing all their vending machines, trucks, and marketing materials. Was their visual brand not currently successful for them? You need real communication justification to address a problem for such a massive marketing effort. So let’s start with the few positives. I like the idea of a simplified design approach but not sure if it fits for this product line. The darker blue in the background gives a nice contrast against the lighter blue in the swoosh with the subtle gradients at the base and top. There that sums up the positives. Now onto what needs some work.

Font choice…ugh…yeah another thin line web 2.0 font. It’s almost so subtle you don’t even see it and reading it on a vertical axis makes it that much more difficult. A cold and sterile choice. Hilarious that between the different versions of Pepsi the symbol mark actually changes it’s shape breaking the golden rule of branding consistency. It looks like a side profile of a plumbers butt crack. The more crack you can see the more calories you’re drinking. Unintentional humor by their designer? The zero cal,carb,sug almost looks like an design element as a giant letter “O” people might not get the cal,carb,sug. A little too minimalist in that regards.

And yet more abbreviations as Mountain Dew is changed to MTN Dew. That font choice is beyond me. It’s sort of 80’s bad vibe to it but it has a sense of rushed thought process to it. It doesn’t exude the energy and impact that traditional Mountain Dew has been associated with in their previous marketing efforts and simply using red as the complimentary contrast colors gives it too much of a Christmas vibe complete with pine trees in the background.
Sierra Mist. Oh it’s Mist…so let’s do the font as a mist. I already saw that movie…it didn’t end well. That redesign is probably the weakest of all the product lines.

Listen, if your going to spend huge amounts of money to redesign your brand, then really try to push past the envelope and then come back away from the edge a few steps and see where you are. This was a poor evolution for Pepsi and more tragic detours for Sierra Mist and Mountain Dew brands. I think a board of directors had a bit too much to say in these. “Well, we want a new brand but not too new, we want it high techy so it’s sort of futuristic. Oh we like that new Obama logo can we do something along those lines. Everyone’s is doing that social media style thing. Let’s get on that wagon.” You need to have a good reason to recreate your branding especially with the price tag that it comes with, and I just don’t see any clear justification of why this was done. Stop following generic aesthetics and design trends and set your branding apart so your identity can withstand the test of time.

I totally mis-read that my day was actually free (notice in the top left corner) because my eye was instantly drawn to the meeting occurring tomorrow due to it’s visual weight and color contrast. So I frantically called my wife and said I couldn’t make the parent/teacher conference because I had a meeting at 1:00! She was not too happy. I realized my mistake about 5 minutes later and called her back and did a lot of apologizing.

So I thought with a few simple adjustments I wouldn’t have made this mistake. See my quick fixes to design below to make it a bit more useable.

Now it clearly stands out with a color keyed area that my day is free. You can’t miss that. It’s no longer buried up in the left corner. I also separated upcoming things for subsequent days a bit more and more importantly muted their color tones. Now when I would mouse over that upcoming event then it could brighten up significantly, but in the meantime a meeting that is a day away doesn’t have to beg for my attention. There’s enough distractions in life already.

Some great examples of nicely designed price table layouts. Notice the simplicity and readability using color and varying font sizes for identifying priority of information. Check out the samples here. It goes to show that down to the very details of a pricing table you can utilize usability and creative design to make them more effective.

The problem with the traditional methodologies for obtaining this data can be time consuming and costly, and typically do not correlate well with the different shopping and/or brand experience of a company’s web presence.  So if you’ve spent a lot of money on a website, you’re likely doing some basic tracking to understand where your traffic is coming from (particularly if you’re doing pay per click marketing or other forms of online advertising) and how well your site is converting visitors to customers.  However, if your site’s not generating business, or if you would like it to generate more (and who doesn’t?), you need to be looking into ways to ask your customers “Why not?”

I recently began working with a client to provide web analytics consulting for their recently launched web store.  For the client it was their first venture into online retail, and they had no idea what to expect.  Upon our initial engagement, I was extremely impressed with how intelligently they had approached this initiative.  They chose an experienced developer who had put together a site which was aesthetically strong, had a logical navigational structure, and a robust content management system.  Upon first glance it appeared I would simply have to drive some qualified traffic to the site and the cash register would start ringing.

Not long after the contract was signed we had our search engine optimization and search engine marketing initiatives underway.  Traffic increased by over 500%, average page views and time on site were strong for visitors reaching the site directly as well as through organic and paid search.  We had only one problem…no one was buying.  The question, of course, was “why not?”

I began scouring the data available to me.  All of the baseline website health metrics, aside from sales, looked good.  So what was the issue?  The answer was found in a scenario analysis of the site’s shopping cart system.  Using most web analytics software these days allows the administrator to set up scenarios, or funnels, of defined steps users take through a process whether it be through a series of product pages or the steps to purchase through a shopping cart.

In this instance, there were six pages through the purchase process from adding a product to the shopping cart to the final step which was an order confirmation.  When we took a look at the funnel, we saw that a large percentage of visitors were successfully getting through the first three steps, but when users got to the billing information page, 100 percent of users were exiting.  So we quickly jumped into the purchase process on the site and when we reached the billing information page, we put ourselves in the users’ shoes, and found the data had led us to the reason users were not buying.  At this exact step users were being asked to input their billing info after they had already input their shipping information, with no ability to mirror that information (a simple radio button saying “check here if the same as shipping address” would have sufficed).  This was redundant and annoyed users enough to make them not purchase despite the fact that they were halfway through the buying process.  Immediately after we fixed that step in the shopping cart, sales started steadily increasing and over time the funnel has continued to improve dramatically.

So in this instance, we were able to utilize web analytics to take data and determine the answer to “Why not?”  However, in sites that have more ambiguous goals, it can sometimes be hard to statistically measure if users are having successful visits.  In these cases, you may literally need to ask the question of visitors on your site.  Companies like Foresee Results have had great success instituting in site surveys to gauge customer reaction and generate a constant flow of feedback (you will run into this on sites like bestbuy.com and many others) for a broad array of organizations.  These solutions have been well received by clients, but in many instances, a much less intensive (read: free) solution can provide enough information to gauge your website’s pulse, and its ability to ask your visitors “Why not?”

One such solution I have used in the past is iperceptions’ 4Q, an in site survey tool that allows you to gather qualitative data to supplement your quantitative analytics data and help you answer some nagging questions about your site’s performance.  The tool itself is very easy to install, and once installed, provides a handful of customization tools to select the frequency of visitors who will be presented with the option to take the survey, select alternate answer sets, etc.  The 4Q survey asks users five questions, asking them to rate their experience, define the purpose of their visit, whether they were able to complete that purpose, what they value most about the website, and whether or not they were able to complete the purpose of their visit (here’s where you’ll find your “Why not?”)

I like to constantly trumpet the Internet’s ability to generate accountable marketing decisions, and this is a prime example of what we mean.  Through the fluid ability to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data, you can ask non-converting prospects “Why not?”  With this information you can continuously optimize your site and your online marketing efforts to break down those barriers and convert more prospects into loyal customers.

Adam Henige is a Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, an Internet Marketing Consulting firm specializing in search engine optimization, search engine marketing and web analytics.

My wife and I were down in Novi for another repair on her iMac (long story but we’ll say that gravity was involved and the Mac shouldn’t take the blame.) Anyways on the way back we stopped at a grocery store called Trader Joe’s. My wife had heard online that there was some good organic food choices there for here special diet. East Lansing does have a store somewhat like it called “Foods for Living” which we like but find their prices a bit on the steep side. However Trade Joe’s is a different story. They buy their products direct from the producers and sell it under their own brand name. They also change suppliers frequently so if they find a particular product isn’t performing well then it’s pulled from the shelves. Nice to see that a can of lima beans has to pull it’s own weight around there.

Their organic natural foods are usually priced lower than competitors as well often being priced lower than the non-organic equivalents you find at other chain stores. Sure you could live on organic groceries from the other stores but all you could afford would be the organic mac and cheese and a box of erbal tea. Not a good way to support a family of 5.

What I really liked about Trader Joe’s was the store itself. It had a sort of quaint old town store feel to it. The signs were hand painted and the decore was a sort of island retreat, even down to the detail of bambo aisle signs and hand painted wall murals. Even their recycle bags were custom designed with fun tropical prints. There was no sterile endless giant grocery isles in a sea of stainless steel freezers, no markdown sales tags, no gimmicks, no discount cards, no self checkout computers, and very few brand name items. It certainly didn’t feel like your typical impersonable grocery-supermart. The workers dressed casually some wearing Hawaiian shirts and they were genuinely happy to be working there and helping people. And there were a lot of customers…apparently Joe’s is not a well kept secret. I think their success can be attributed to it giving back a small bit of that sense of community we’ve lost with all these cookie cutter chain stores taking over our town’s streets. Now if we can just get one in East Lansing.

It was a great grocery shopping experience and this is coming from someone who hates shopping. So much so that we plan to make some regular trips down there to stock up on some healthy organic food. Definitely swing by one of the stores if you’re in the area.

You don’t hear of this too often in a grocery store. If you don’t like it bring it back.

“Do you have Moral Fiber?”

Sorry for the blurry image. The sign says “He who must not be named has closed this register!” Children of the corn movie reference, 2 points.

I finally got my phone and DSL service switched over from TDS to AT&T today. Besides all the acronyms to remember, the switch took nearly 2 weeks and was probably one of the worse experiences I’ve had in getting a service up and running. Their customer support phone system passed me from department to department and person to person never actually letting me talk to the final person that could actually get the problems fixed. Automated computer voices asking me the same questions over and over again didn’t help either. By the way someone out their needs to redesign customer support systems. Apple you hearing me?

AT&T has become the giant monster of smaller telephone companies it’s devoured over the past few years promising better service but under delivering. It’s for all intents and purposes a Monopoly. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. You know what causes a company to no longer have great service and great products? It’s when there’s no true competition left and they just don’t care anymore…because well they don’t have to. There’s no passion left and no sense of urgency. It becomes a well feed pet whose every needs are already being met and it gets lazy, bloated, and bogged down in it’s own bureaucracy.

I find the most exciting companies are one’s facing their own tough challenges and outside competition. It’s about the people keeping the business pushing forward, innovating and not resting on the fence. Knowing that you might not be in 1st place right now but that you’re doing a good job for your customers and you know you can do better. This keeps you humble and keeps you motivated to improve. When everyone is contributing and has a passion to see the company succeed they are a part of that success and not just a nameless worker. A successful company is one that still has that hunger to fight the good fight. Sure, not everyone can get the silver race car but it’s even worse to be the thimble and there’s no one else playing.

I’m actually quite fond of this alert box for IE6 users:

But what does this imply for web developers, if anything? Is Microsoft setting precedent to stop supporting IE6? We certainly hope so. It’s nothing but a nightmare of legacy support for those of us who want to build web app UIs in 2008. And they’re not the only ones. 37signals is also phasing out IE6 across all their products.

So is it time for us to follow suit?

Internet Explorer 6 is by far the worst browser on the mainstream market today. It’s finally showing serious decline in recent days, but for small and local business, we’ve found the stats to remain steady and strong. The answer to my question is still “not yet” at this point. We’ve certainly made compromises and restrained some UI effects and application features from being available for IE6 users, but we haven’t completely phased it out of our testing environment.

Maybe one day we will, and I’ll actually thank Microsoft for taking one big step in moving us along.

It occured to me the other day that sometimes clients really don’t know what the heck we’re talking about as designers and programmers. You might as well be speaking Klingon. That’s not a slam on the client’s intelligence (or on Klingons.) It’s more of a failure on our part in effective communication. If a doctor starts talking medical terms, I have no clue what he’s talking about either. But a reputable doctor will have a good bedside manner to compliment their medical knowledge. Their ability to relate the information to the patient in a clear and friendly way really helps distinguish them from other professionals in their field. I think designers and programmers can take a lesson from this. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our little world of technology buzzwords and designer lingo we forget that our clients aren’t apart of that same crazy world. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a acronym in our business.  Here’s an example of a typical conversation.

“We’ll be taking your XHTML and .ASP files along with your css and image directories and uploading those up to your host domain through a FTP program. It’s behind our a secure firewall so it may take a while. Shouldn’t be a problem though.”

All the client heard was “blah blah blah.  Shouldn’t be a problem though.” 

So let’s say that in some terms they can better relate to.

“We’re about ready to launch yourname.com once we upload the files to your website. We’ll have it live on Wednesday by 5pm so your customers can get  started visiting it then.”

There, done and to the point. The client doesn’t need to hear how you did everything or your fancy technical terms. What they do need to know is how it’s affecting their business in clear concise words and what the next step is in the process. You are also not talking down to them and if they want to know the nitty gritty details, you can help guide them through those as needed. Remember they can teach you just as much about their business as you can teach them about yours. Great business relationships are a team effort so make that client apart of your team. Save the Klingon talk for the next Trek convention. 

Chris and I were chatting and he threw me this comment today:

Nobody reads anything from usability experts. Especially programmers. Some day our field will be taken more seriously. For now, it’s an after-thought.

On the contrary, I think usability and beautiful design have gained momentum recently, and web firms are taking these things much more seriously than they were five or six years ago. What we really need to shift our focus to is content. No, I don’t mean Information Architecture. Leave that in the SEO & Usability camp, too. I’m talking about writing. Usability adoption and understanding still has a long way to go, but now we need to go adopt its orphaned cousin, content writing, and bring it along for the ride.

The fact of the matter is: If your content is good enough, people will take the time to learn how to use your shitty site to read more of it.

Example: www.sheldonbrown.com is the most popular web site for bicycle information among bicycle enthusiasts worldwide. Look at the web site. It has terrible design, a poor structure and inconsistent navigation menus. It truly lacks all the essentials to what we in the web industry would judge as esthetically pleasing design and architecture.

The late Sheldon Brown didn’t buy Adwords campaigns. He didn’t have PPC (pay-per-click) accounts. He didn’t know a damn thing about Search Engine Optimization. He never hired a web designer, an SEO consultant or a marketing agency.

Sheldon Brown knew about bikes, which makes his web site the best resource for cyclists at any difficultly level.

Don’t buy into the tricks and promises of SEO work alone. You can fool Google and Yahoo into listing you at the top, but you’ll never fool people. Machines recognize patterns and play along to the rules of an algorithm (which, remember, is written and rewritten daily to emulate human behavior). But people are emotional, irrational and impulsive. People have short attention spans. Humans still need an interesting headline. They don’t care about your keyword density.

If you can’t write something people actually want to read, all your SEO, usability studies, information architecture and beautiful design flies right out the window.

Start with a good headline. What was true in print design on newspapers hundreds of years ago is still true today. You have to grab the reader in the first sentence. Regardless of how well you did on Google, people still have to be intrigued by your title.

Write with conversational tone. Business2Business, Business2Customer. It doesn’t matter. Write with a natural voice in human language that common people understand. Don’t overdo it with technical words and exceptional vocabulary. Send your content around the office. If most people get stuck on the words, make them simpler, smaller and use less of them.

Poke a little fun at yourself. Don’t be afraid to inject some humor and playfulness into your writing. It makes your content easier to digest and can get people feeling good about contacting you for business.

Invest in the community, not just campaigns and charts. Google analytics and PPC charts and graphs can never teach you what your customers can. Start a conversation with them, find out what they think about this or that, find ways for them to get involved and show you what you’ve missed.

Write about things you care about because they matter to you, too. Don’t pick topics that are trendy, cool, or because you can “monetize” them (worst new word in the web industry, by the way). If you stay engaged in the things that are important to you, what you have passion for, you will attract more people like you. You will get more customers who are like you.

Business doesn’t have to be just about money. Of course, revenue and profit are important. But business can revolve around things you genuinely care about, too. Think about how you can have fun and do what you love now, rather than putting it off until retirement. Thanks to the age of the internet, there’s all sorts of ways that you can turn what you love into a profitable business and have some great conversations with people.

There is no easy over-night answer. You can’t flip a switch and magically get countless people visiting your site over and over again. You have to participate, engage and inspire others in your community. You’ll have to make comments on other blogs and forums, appear at public events, speaking engagements and conferences. But this means you’ll attract others who are like you and care about your business, too.

This is in contrast to haplessly attracting mindless internet searchers who will take the first decent result they see. Of course, you want to get them, too. And you will, but this time with much better content that keeps them coming back for more.

Write for humans and hire a good HTML developer who can code for machines.

When I saw the Microsoft Surface Demo I was saying things like “wow…very impressive!” and “oh…that’s cool” It wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking as many of the ideas of the touch interface are also employed in technology like the iPhone, the pinch and zoom in particular. But it was very impressive when you could drag photos from one camera to another simply by placing the camera on the table. I’m not sure how often that feature might get used on a day to day basis but it sure makes photo transfers a snap when you need it.

The most useful demo was setting down a credit card and then dragging your meals to it on the touch screen surface. This solves a real efficiency problem in restaurants making it very streamlined in how you select and pay for your meal especially amongst a group of people. This was an example of a technology solving a problem or doing a process better. 2 points Microsoft.

However it is not without potential downfalls. It would fit very nicely into markets like sport restaurants or casinos, but I can’t imagine having this screen throwings ads at my face while I eat at the Olive Garden or my local quiet restaurant. And you know they’re going to run a ton of ads on it and while I’m eating and I certainly don’t want a light up display under me advertising the latest special on mozerella sticks at Chili’s. I already go to the movies and have to sit through TV commercials and a slide show of loud ads before the movie even starts. This Surface technology could be more of the same, and please oh please don’t have it make sounds at me too. We learned that lesson with noisy flashy websites. Aren’t we already overly video/audio bombarded in society? Remember Minority Report?

Tom Cruise annoys me enough let alone this potential marketing dystopia. The idea of successful technology is something that goes beyond being cool or flashy. Apple has recognized the idea of finding niches and doing things better in those niches to serve it’s users. Apple saw the mp3 player and knew it could do it better, they saw the cell phone and knew there was a better solution. I’m not sure if Surface is identifying anything that’s being done poorly besides the bill paying solution to warrant a business investment for it’s price but it raises some interesting new ideas. As the cost of the technology comes down it just may find some useful niches. If not then it just may become more flashy noise in already over stimulated world.

(paraphrasing, mind you) “We care about the small teams within those companies and the thousands of other small companies using our software. We don’t feel the need to brag about the size of our clients.”

Personally, I don’t see the value in showing off your client list as a sales tool. The potential customer cares about their project, not someone else’s. Maybe some of you will say that a case study or portfolio might give them an insight into what kind of work we do, and influence them to buy. And maybe some of you are right sometimes.

I say that being personable, genuine, caring and passionate about the work that you do will drive the right customers into your office. You can tout statistics, testimonials and corporate buzz words like “e-business” all day. But unless you can relate to the person that represents your potential sale, build trust and communicate how much you care about their business, you’ll either get no sale or an unsatisfying, uncooperative working relationship.

So, focus your time and energy on caring about the sort of people you want to work for. 37signals gains its success by caring about small teams and businesses, the kind of people they want to work for.

Below are a few examples of some typical billboard ads. Notice the small text, poor font usage, no rhythm or reason to it’s layout. Much like web surfers who have notoriously short attention spans you need to grab a drivers attention the same way with clean precise text that gets your message across in seconds. Keep in mind that they’re talking on the cell phone, eating, putting on makeup or balancing their checkbook at the same time. You have to make that initial impression so memorable that your company names remains in their brain…even if they don’t remember the phone number you plastered on the layout or the web address just getting that brand recognition is critical so that they might look you up later. A common problem is that a designer will just simply blow up their yellowpage ad to 500% and feel that’s good enough. Well it might work in the yellow pages (that’s a whole other topic) but on a larger scale format it’s not the same way of viewing. The reader is certainly not up that close and if they were it’s probably because they hit it with the car trying to read it. “If you can read this then you’re too close”

Let’s have a look at some poor implementations…

Come to Lavender Court..where you too can push old people on swings. Yup that’s about sums it up. Can’t really read the amenities and is that text “Elegant Living” or “Elephant Lying?” Not a good font choice for readability when you’re going down the highway. How about saying 6 homes starting at $664,000 for a bold headline, if that’s their major selling point make that standout along with maybe 3 of the most critical amenities. Those logos along the bottom serve no purpose along with the tiny photos of the interior.

Never use tiny photos of the things you’re trying to sell on a billboard. Make those images stand out and make that text work with it. This is so dull you could swap it out for a funeral home and no one would know the difference. “All our coffins must go! We’re clearing out the old dead to make room for the new!” This is a British billboard by the way, but is everything there really this dull?

But font sizes don’t matter. It’s not just that that the small text is so unreadable, it’s that the whole design is so dull. Remember you can still get your information across and provide it in an attractive manner instead of beating your design with an ugly stick. Try some strong font combination and colors that make your brand apparent. That poor quality photo of their entrance-way probably serves the purpose of you recognizing it quickly but I sure don’t get any warm fuzzies about going there and the ad certainly won’t stand out visually. If I’m bleeding and driving I’d definitely miss this sign and probably just pass out near a Taco Bell.

Whose billboard is it anyways? These guys really are hilarious on TV but on this billboard it makes them look like suspects in an Amber Alert. Difficult to read text that’s kerned way out of control, poor font usage and the obligatory star burst. Yes it’s blue and yellow text on a red starburst (eyes still burning), that goes out to you color blind folk out there. By far the worse example I found.

Now finally here’s some great billboard designs. you’ll notice some consistent themes of large imagery that strengthens branding, clear text that’s concise but more importantly it’s eye catching, and often times clever in what it says or how it’s visually presented. Simple, creative, effective. That’s what billboard advertising should be.

Colorful metaphors aside, he makes some valid points even if he did get threatened with a lawsuit (please don’t sue me I’m here merely to observe.) It’s a dangerous scenario when a client posts a couple sentences description about a logo design for the whopping price of $200 and then expects designers to battle it out posting their blindly informed visual concepts for the customer to choose from. It is a dangerous trend and damaging to design community at large in my opinion. It also perpetuates stereotypes that designers are merely there to make something pretty and anyone can do that..a sort of Miss Universe beauty pageant where the contestants aren’t allowed to speak.

In our society of commodization the last stronghold tri-fecta is that of creativity, innovation, and strategy. You simply can’t outsource that or box it into a plastic package for sale in the checkout isle. Sites like the one he mentioned among others with similar business approaches only cheapen what we do into a 5th grade art contest trying to please the judge with the prize of a some cash in our pockets. There is no give and take between a client and the designer, no partnership in the creative process. Designing is a relationship between the client and creative architect where each educates the other resulting in a well thought out final design solution. The designer explains his reasoning for his visual approach to a business problem and client teaches the designer about their business. If we degenerate into a design community of lowest prices goes based on a few short sentences about our client then it’s game over. You might as well just select from some clipart as a customer since that’s the quality you’ll be getting. Think of it as an investment, spend the extra money and get something that is at that professional caliber your business deserves. You’ll be happier, your customers will be impressed and the designer will respect himself in the morning. There are lower cost design services out there that still offer quality work but making it a contest doesn’t do justice for anyone.

“Anyone can perform open heart surgery just give them the right tools”

“Usability Testing Castaway”

We’ve been working closely with MSU Usability Center to conduct testing on a high profile website client. This testing came after the fact we built the site but now I can see the benefit of testing through iterative phases. While not cheap to conduct an organization that truly wishes to make their site focused and effective should definitely consider running their site through this valuable process.

The testing entails a series of questions they ask typical users to run through in finding some information in the web site or to perform a specific task such as purchasing something. The subjects are monitored on video and they’re encouraged to verbally talk about their process as they decide where to go as well as offer up suggestions that would improve their experience. Meanwhile we as developers watch the testing in another room and can’t seem to yell loud enough through the wall “click on the link that says e-commerce!!” all the while they were just looking for a link that says “Buy this item here.” I think we as web developers and designers often forget that we’re not the typical average user. We often fall into traps of using jargon and terminologies in our sites that an avergage user wouldn’t understand. Many times this is the verbage coming from the organization but they too aren’t the typical user. They come from the perspective of how their business runs and already have their own biases in using internal terminologies that can further confuse a user. If you want to make a happy customer they need to achieve the goals of your site, enjoy the experience and come back. A effective useable website will provide them answers quickly and be presented in a logical layout that strengthens your branding but more importantly accomplishes helping your user find what they need. A happy customer means a happy website owner.

Often during the study we noticed a simple thing of how something is labeled would confound and confused users even if it made complete sense to us. Simply adjusting the verbage to something more simple and clear to the customer and not to expectations of the organization or developer increases click through rate immediately and drives them to the answer they were looking for to begin with. We should always be conscious of how the site is reading right down to how we verbalize the links or the sub headlines. User center design starts and ends with the users and the sooner we can have them involved the better the site will be.

Should design, programming, usability, and architecture remain exclusive? No.

A designer should know the limitations of HTML and CSS, a web programmer should know basic usability practices and design aesthetics, an architect should understand the customers needs and the client’s goals, and a usability expert should know a thing or two about beautiful design. And everyone should know how to write for the web!

There is a huge difference between programming for a web site and building a web site.

With traditional print your open to a totally new set of creative possibilities and new types of boundaries so It’s unfortunate they miss some of these great learning experiences about content layout and page flow that could help them increase their web design skills. Really isn’t that the purpose of web? Content presentation and providing information? So when designers get so focused in on making big flashy graphics and ignoring text and how it reads within the page, they’re doing their readers and themselves a disservice. Magazine layouts and brochures are a great resources to get inspiration for line height and weight and unique layouts within an organizational grid. They show us from decades of the industries’ evolution how to effectively make copy readable and impactful. Ever create a 3 column text layout with a quote callout within the body copy? It’s done in magazines all the time but you don’t see it too often in a webpage. Most of the time a webpage’s subpage copy is just a pasting of a word document with some paragraph breaks thrown in. With the power of CSS we are given much more control of the type than we used to and we need to take advantage of it.

We as web designers need to take special attention and care to the text and how we present content and help engage the reader. Save that beveled gradient button for another day. Check out some of these great examples of content presentation in some brochure samples over at Smashing Magazine. 

click on any of these images to see some more.
 

The options are:

• I’m confused
• I’m worried something bad happened
• I’m upset or disappointed
• I’m panicking right now
• It’s not a big deal, just need some help

If I was going to design their web site, I wonder what I would do? I wonder what anyone on our team at Artemis would do? Maybe for fun, I’ll post something here later.

I’m going to keep checking in on 37S and watch where this goes.

Oh, and this makes me want to post a reference to a quote by Zeldman: “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

Photo Copyright 2008, Reuters

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24880941/

It kind of makes me think about what I read in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, which you can also find in the Amazon.

The “Face” is the visual things you see about a brand. It’s the logo, the colors, font that are used, even the language of your marketing efforts. Your website’s design, your printed marketing materials right down to how you design your fax cover letters look needs to have a consistent visual identity so that people recognize it immediately and associate it to your business. That visual identity takes on a life of it’s own it represents your organizations character.

The “muscle” is the quality that goes into your service or product. How well does it perform? Does the design of the service or product reflect who you are and how you want to be portrayed. Apple excels at this portion. The level of attention they give to every component of their products design is scrutinized down to the tiniest level and they’re known for that.

When you get to the “heart” of branding you get down to the core culture of your business and the employees attitudes in how they interact with each other and their customers. A main principle is a company’s ethics and morals. Are they being honest about who they really are? The importance of being honest and consistent can’t be understated. Without honesty your hiding behind a mask that the customers will see through. You’ll set yourself away from others competitors when you talk honestly with your customers.

Finally there’s the “bones” that give strength to rest of the the brand. These are really the unseen factor to a brand but are just as important. Bones are the business structure consisting of a company’s processes, policies and procedures as well their systems and tools they use to do their job effectively.

When you are developing your brand or revising it, a good approach is to develop a sense of amnesia about who you are currently and get feedback from your customers and community about how they perceive your current identity. You maybe surprised that how you’d like to be known or what you currently think of yourself aren’t matching up with public perception. Figure out who your target audience is and market your brand towards them.

In summary you should continue to strive to better your processes and quality, be consistent and honest about who you are and let your branding build from what your customers are saying about you. Don’t spoon feed them some marketing jargon that glosses over what the core is of who you are. Be precise and work hard to make sure it’s what you want them to say about you.