Check out the technology that Gucci is planning for their customers. Wow.

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Every so often there comes along a book that completely changes the way that I think about advertising and marketing and About Face is one of them.

Dan goes into great detail about how we truly react to advertising and it’s not in the cognitive areas in the brain. In fact, the cognitive area (where language resides) may actually lie to us to protect our self-image…you know the people who say they watch public television to sound smart, but they really can’t stand it?

There is a part of our brains that has no language but controls our emotions. Dan and his team have found a way to learn what we’re really thinking about ads by examining our facial expressions. We all do it. There are micro-expressions that last a fraction of a second that show our true feelings about what we are viewing. An example that Dan uses in the book helped lead to the Dove “Real Beauty” commercials, that showed women of varying shapes celebrated by the skin care company. When the original video was shown to the target market, they scowled at the skinny models in their undies. “I don’t look like that, so this product can’t be for me” they thought and their expressions belied those sentiments.

Through his research, Dan Hill and his team can tell us which type of advertising resonates most with people, how the same types of advertising win awards, and just how easily influenced we can be by our environment. The photo below is a passage about how changing the music in a wine store influences our purchases and how brands can engage senses other than sight to influence our behavior. Have you noticed how Hilton Hotels offer freshly-baked cookies when you check in? There’s a science to that.

Without getting too long-winded, this is a must-have reference for anyone who is serious about making advertising that motivates and memorized.

Check it out and I’d love to hear your thoughts about the book and what Dan has to say. Get the Kindle version:

Why should you care? Because how people handle conflict is direct representation of their values. You cannot reach an audience unless you understand, appreciate and share their values. There’s a shameless plug for the book in the article. I got it, and it is fascinating. A quick review to follow.

So I was re-reading old posts and came upon a comment that advised me to submit my articles to RedGage to reach more readers. I decided to finally check out the site and see what RedGage was all about. I came to the home page and selected upload near the top of the screen to see what I needed to do to upload a blog post. After I clicked, I was met with this:

As you can see, I hit a roadblock that forces me to login or create an account in order to proceed. Look more closely and you can see that there are no other options. No “x” to close out of the modal window. I am forced to use the “nuclear option”, refreshing the page and starting over.

As a web savvy kinda guy, I know that this isn’t the end of the world. But, it makes me pause and think, “Do I want to do this now?” “I just want information, why do I have to join the site?”  The site is forcing me to make a cost/benefit analysis on the home page, BEFORE I have had a chance to interact with the site in any meaningful way to assess it’s value to me. Since the site has yet to convince me that it’s worth joining,  I let the page sit, in a cost/benefit limbo because they boxed me in.

As I have written before, nothing should stand in the way of your user successfully performing the task that she came to your site to do. Taking that a couple of steps further, people make mistakes, so your site should be prepared for those mistakes and help the user solve them herself without resorting to the (gulp!) non-contextual help pages or throwing the switch and starting over. What if this happened after she had filled in a form? You’ll not likely see that use come back because this site just wasted her time.

One way to get around this is a technique called progressive disclosure. Giving user only the information that they need to make a decision to go onto the next step. When I am at the home page and I have not logged in, I am guest and i am looking for information. I am not yet ready to commit. Only give me the info I need to determine if I want to go further. if so, great. If not, no harm , no foul. I don’t feel as if I over invested to get information.

Take a look at your site. Are you asking too much of your users at any given stage? Are you noticing that people are bailing on forms or not performing all the steps you laid out for them to accomplish a task? If so, see how you can break up the process into smaller, more easily digestible steps instead of one giant leap.

My mother works for United Airlines. Another giant corporation with their own way of speaking. Every company does; every industry does. It’s just the manner of things. You’re a part of a group when you can speak their language.

I’ll tie this into marketing and usability in just a second. Promise.

So I just got a text from her saying that she has boarded a flight from Pittsburgh to Dulles International Airport. Being the airline veteran that she is, she uses military time, 1100 for 11:00AM, 1500 for 3:00PM. She used an airline term that mean that the plane is getting ready to leave the gate to head to the runway: Pushing back.

Mom's text: note the use of military or "Zulu" time and the airport call letters. She's in the zone.

Pushing back means something completely different at Capital One. There, it describes a situation where you are challenging someone’s assessment of facts or recommendation for a course of action. You are “pushing back” against that idea or recommendation.

Why is this important?

Because when you are communicating to your audience, usually a segment of your audience, they have a certain language that they speak and your brand, to establish credibility (CapOne term), you need to be able to speak their language as fluently as they do.

Do your homework. Speak to your audience like they would speak to each other. Than ensures that whatever you’re trying to say won’t be met with skepticism and confusion.

If your audience can’t understand you, there’s no way that they’ll believe that you understand them.

You’re now free to move about the cabin.

I revisited the HUGE website. These guys rock as far as creative is concerned and I feel connected to them in that we chose the same color to represent our brand. It takes a special person to embrace magenta. M=100!

Anyway, I noticed that their website did not scale down for the 1028×768 viewport. I try to stay on top of the design and development best practices and from what I can determine, they made a conscious choice to make those with small (non-widescreen) monitors scroll horizontally. And I am not hating.

I spent a lot of time and vocal chord cells arguing against 800×600 while I was at Bank of America. And I made a fairly public declaration that IE6 users are on their own; I wasn’t considering them when I developed sites anymore. (If I can find that Facebook post, I’ll add a screenshot.)

I have a feeling that the brilliant guys and gals at HUGE, Inc. looked at their traffic and determined that those with old school monitors were either so small a percentage of their audience or there was some other factor that caused them to make the strategic design decision to move past that resolution constraint.

Good for them. I may follow suit….at least for B2B.

The digital space can be a scary place. Lots of bad people are are sending you emails from Nigeria or Kansas asking for your banking information so that the can send you millions of dollars. Companies are asking you to fill out a form so that you can download a PDF of fairly useless information. It’s enough to make you uninstall your browser.

I have long told my students my axiom: brand=trust. So how can a business make that true on the web, which is a low-trust environment? More importantly, how can you get a user to perform a task that he/she is inherently reluctant to?

Transparency

So many times as a youngster, I asked my parents “Why?!?” is response to their requests. Your users are asking the same thing…so tell them! What does it cost you to be honest with your user and tell them why you are asking for information? Better yet, what can you gain in loyalty to be up front and honest with them about the information request and what you plan to do with it? If cast the ask in terms of a benefit for the user, chances are they will comply.

Demonstrate that you value and will protect the exchange of information.

Make sure that you convey to your use that the information that you collect from them is safe in your hands. Have a privacy policy. Make sure that the user knows that you have a privacy policy and, most importantly, let them know what to expect from that exchange of information.

Trustworthy design

Ever bought fish from a beat-up station wagon or a generic white van? Of course not. Equally, shabby/confusing/cookie-cutter design does not lead to user trust and actually deters them from making the purchase/engagement decisions that you want them to make. Need I say more?

The bottom line is that users expect shady behavior in the digital space. Pleasantly surprise them and never make them feel that they are not in on the joke.

Now we have been working with some pretty traditional stuff but giving it a whole new twist with Facebook’s ability to mircotarget audiences and drill down to that set of people that will really respond to the marketing message. But now that we have the audience and they are ready to follow the call to action, what do we do with them then?

As I mentioned in the last post, we’re looking for conversions. And in this scenario, the conversion occurs when the user clicks to read an excerpt from Cal’s book. The hope is that the reader will then continue down the funnel and choose to purchase a book. When I started tracking the conversion rates, the numbers were fairly low. We needed a way to get people to perform the call to action.

Enter design and usability!

One of the things that I noticed first was that when users got to the landing page, that they were going straight for the top-level navigation. Under normal circumstances, that would be a good thing, but I wanted them to click a button further down the page. The client didn’t have the budget to build a dedicated landing page, so a page within the site would have to be modified.

Here is the landing page:

One little design element can make all the difference!

You’ve seen this before in my last post. What is new from the other version is the large badge in the bottom right corner of the first read image.

Chances are, the user will be attracted to the image first. Remembering the lessons in usablity from the web, I placed the badge in the lower right corner, where people tend to look for calls to action. The badge tell them “Right here! This is what you’re looking for!”

So far, conversions are up nearly 50% from a 14.29% goal completion rate just last week to a 24.19% goal completion rate today. Just from one little badge.

Sales are up, too. The numbers are still small, yes, but there was a whopping 850% increase in sales from the week before the change to the week after. Can’t argue with those facts. I’ll keep monitoring the stats and report back.

So when you are looking for a creative provider, make sure that they understand those tenets of usability, task-oriented design and the analytic that drive strategic creative decisions.

I have many small business clients that cannot afford to stage shoots or purchase original images from the artist. Some rights-managed images can amount to thousands of dollars on a website or medium-sized direct mail job. So I turn to stock image vendors. There are a zillion of them, but I happen to like iStockphoto and Veer for images and Thought Equity for video.

The key to good use of stock photography is to find images that support the content; those that help move the story along. My techniques is to use the same keywords for image research as I do for SEO and see what comes up. I refine the results based on color, size, subject matter, the visual story, etc.

So now I will get theoretical on you and give you some guidelines on how properly used stock photo helps a design:

The image is demonstrative. The image shows the typical use of the product or service being used. Imagine a woman using a facial cream or a couple sitting down at a third person’s desk getting home buying/insurance/estate planning advice.

The image is atmospheric. The image conveys some sort of mood that jibes with the tone of the site. Think of a beach scene for a travel site or the Andes for a hiking shoe company.

The image is aspirational. The image conveys an imagined result of following the call to action. Imagine a man in a hammock sipping lemonade for a financial planning website.

The image is illustrative. The image is a visual representation of a key selling point or value proposition. These can be tricky and where many people can get sidetracked because the meaning of an image can be misinterpreted. Imagine an image of a well-decorated room for an interior design service or furniture company.

The image is representative. Here, the image is an archetype of the target market. Attractive singles for a dating site, perhaps.

Some images may be more than one type, but only in rare circumstances should an image be used more than once in any given project.

Avoid overlap. Do your homework! One of the most distracting things about a stock image in digital or print creative is if it has appeared somewhere else. Istock will indicate how popular a photo is, so try to avoid the very popular images to prevent that happening to you. Veer tends to have more exclusive images, so you should be fairly safe there. To be absolutely safe, Google images with the same search terms that you used on your stock image site(s) and see if they pop up on sites other than the stock site.

If push comes to shove, then try/ask your creative to apply a treatment to the image(s) to make it less ordinary.

NEVER mislead the user. if your stock image creates an expectation that your product cannot fulfill, then you have done more damage than if you had no image at all.

Used properly, stock images and graphics can be a creative’s (and their client’s) best friend.

Yes, that’s Montel Williams. I’ll save him for another post. Right now I’d like to pick this site apart and show you why this is a great design. And I want to state for the record that this is an objective observation that I am making about this site. There is no judgement cast upon anyone other than the exploitative company and its spokesperson.

First, let’s take into account the audience. They are people that first and foremost consider the terms of Money Mutual’s services to be reasonable.

Second, they likely saw the commercial on TV and are now acting on the call to action. So we can gather that this is a decision that is made in relative haste.

Third, we can likely conclude that the target audience is not the savviest of web users.

Fourth, this audience is likely to be an African-American female. Thus Montel is the spokesperson. Before you flame me, Montel’s show was very popular with black women. So nyahh.

So okay, we have determined our target audience. Onto the site.

Blue is a color most associated with trust, dignity, authority, intelligence, masculinity and professionalism. Many financial institutions use the color blue in their brands to evoke those sentiments in their audiences. So Money Mutual’s color scheme and, if you look closely, their logo are designed to resemble a bank’s.

Montel Williams is a television personality that they have seen before and probably has high numbers in name recognition and trustworthiness in the target market. He has lent his name to other products aimed at this particular market. So we have his photo prominently displayed in the first read.

Okay, so through color choices, they have gained the user’s trust. Good. I mean bad.

Let’s look at the big, honking, APPLY NOW.

It drowns out every other design element on that page in importance other than Montel’s face. That face didn’t have to be Montel’s; we are biologically trained to recognize and focus on human faces. So those that are in a hurry and need the product that Money Mutual is selling will find it easy to complete the task that Money Mutual has set for the user: apply now and enter into an agreement. The large green button at the bottom of the form tells the user that they are on the right track. Go for the green!

Notice that the other navigation elements are tiny in comparison and are in such low contrast that they fade into the background. We don’t want people poking around and finding information such as the interest rates that make usury seem like a back rub. Oops, there I go judging again.

Should the user have any questions, they are off to the right and will take you to answers that are on the same page. Why? Because the site’s architects don’t want the user to leave the page with the big APPLY NOW. Moreover, we tend to file pages that we have been to as past activity, so it is too easy for someone to drop off if and go to another site or just give up altogether if they actually leave the page.

Lastly, let’s look at the content. The target market has questions and the one that is top of mind is “Can I do this?” The answer is front and center, just under the big APPLY NOW call to action. In the green panel to the right of the call to action is a listing of the benefits that using this product will provide the user. If you read them closely, they are a listing of things to fear: embarrassment, penalties, late charges, bounced checks, etc.

According to CNN Money, in 2009, just 10% of consumers paid 90% of overdraft fees. So this is a very real concern for this target market. Kudos to them for developing the content that will resonate with this target market and get them to act now before it is too late.

In sum, despite my opposition to the product and its predatory nature, it is well presented to it’s intended audience and is masterfully designed from a UX standpoint:

• They understand who their target market is and what motivates them
• They created an interface that makes it extremely easy for the user to complete the call to action
• They used design to convey a subconscious message.

I try to get my small business clients to develop that kind of understanding of their target market so that they can provide their creative consultants with the information and insight to create a site that is as effective as I imagine this one to be.

Too harsh a title?