It appears that throughout history humanity has a primordial instinct to flee away from what is generally classified as “ugliness.” Moheb Costandi’s article in Seed examines how our brains react to ugliness and ugly design. It’s interesting how visual patterns have been repeated throughout history and in different cultures that people gravitate towards as asethetically pleasing while others have an opposite affect. The perceived ugliness of something actually causes motor cortex activity as if the brains is preparing the body for escape. Perhaps that’s why a site like www.bermuda-traingle.org makes me want to scream and cower under my desk.

I was using Entourage’s My Day widget the other day and almost ended up sleeping on the couch because of it. If you study this screen capture below with a keen eye you’ll notice it said that I had a acceptance design meeting tomorrow (wednesday.) But notice how simple it would have been just to assume that event was scheduled for the current today.

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.

As a marketer, you’ll undoubtedly realize that data should be one of your best friends.  In my own customer experiences (as well as my professional experiences) I’ve come to realize that many market research and data collection initiatives are focused on asking the question “Why?”  This question is asked to understand the triggers that make people perform a given action which is then used to generate plans to capitalize on those insights by reaching more of that target market.

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.

We’ve just recently launched a very large website redesign for CATA. I was thinking how this site truly showcases the differences between visual eye candy design and useful informative web site design. While CATA’s makeover is still visually appealing the quality of the design comes from a underlying thought process of what information should be displayed and where as well as what users will need to do with it. The information architecture forms this foundation and the design is merely there to support that. In fact the best designs for the web are the ones where the user doesn’t even notice the design, it just falls to the background and the purpose and content rise to the surface. They simply and intuitively know where to go and how to get there because the design guides them and doesn’t distract them from doing what they need to do. While I’ve done many heavily branded and thematic designs as a web designer where the visual treatments are weighed heavier it’s important to not allow the artistic elements to outweigh it’s usability. Your website still has a purpose and relevant information to provide to it’s users. Your web audience is an inpatient group so the quicker you guide them to the info the better. If you put that as your main focus you’ll find a clean effective appealing design will naturally follow. Everything else is just window dressing.