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.

So let me give you a little more background: The user is presented with a Facebook ad that directs them to a landing page within the site. It is not a dedicated landing page per se, it is a page within the site that is germane to the ask in the ad. The user is instructed to read an excerpt from the author’s latest book. When a user clicks on the excerpt link, then we consider that a conversion goal achieved.

Landing Page for Facebook ads

This is a landing page screenshot for Cal’s Facebook ad campaign. In an effort to boost conversion rates, I added the badge on the first read. So far the numbers have gotten a small boost, running at about 11 15% since implementation. Actual landing page.

Conversion rates have been running from 0% on some days to over 20% on others, coming in at around 11 15% on most days. The research that I have done has indicated that I might be in the right range, although this is not quite a sales pitch nor is it an opt in. What I have noticed is that users are exploring the rest of the site which is good for brand engagement.

Email marketing opt-ins are coming in steadily at 1 per day, so a nice little audience is building which will make future marketing efforts that much easier.

More to come!

We created a generic branded QR code that will take the mobile user to a special landing directory that can be changed up whenever the client chooses. So if he’s running an acquisition special, let’s say, that landing page can serve up the content without having to create a new QR code for that special occurrence.

Tracking will be easy too, as the landing page can then redirect to  a sub-page. Not only does this aid in deep-link tracking, say to prevent someone from stumbling onto the page accidentally, but content can be recycled just by changing the re-direct. Fun!

Here is the working (test) QR code:

Branded QR code. Set the Error Correction Capability (ECC) to high (30%) and a branded element can be added without loss of functionality. Please note that this is the test QR code.

If you missed my first posting, I hypothesized that icons may do better in attracting attention and boosting CTRs than a traditional image due to image fatigue on Facebook.

So here is the setup:

3 sets of A/B ads, one with an icon, the other with an image. The copy will change slightly between them, but the general tone will be the same. One set will be a national campaign to generate fans for the client’s person page, the other two will be limited to geographic locations, in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic region. I’ll be reporting on each of the ad’s performance and the loser after 10 days will be dropped. Stay tuned for the numbers!

UPDATE:

Creative Face-off (A/B testing results):

The ads are performing remarkably well, and of course, the results are inconclusive about what is drawing more attention. A well-shot (thanks) photo of the author for the fan page is going like gangbusters and beat out a graphic of the book.

A graphic of a skull rising in the Carribean beat out a picture of a nuclear explosion for the ad meant to get people to the main brand site to buy books.

Change in strategy:

Originally, the book ads were concentrated in geographic locations known for sailing. We targeted the area around Providence, RI and Annapolis, MD. While the ads performed fairly well, we noticed a high bounce rate on the landing page.  We’re pretty sure that the landing page is not the problem, since there is only two CTAs on the page. We traded demographic segmentation for behavioral segmentation.

We re-aligned the ad to the same population as the fan acquisition ad and so far, CTR is improved and visitors are responding better to the CTAs on the landing page. Hopefully those hits will turn into sales, but there, only time will tell. Stay tuned!

So both of these ads are running and are targeted to the same group of people: those that are 30 years old and above, who are not already fans of M19 MEDIA and live within 25 miles of Wilmington, DE. That comes out to about 186,000 people. I am reaching about a tenth of those people, but that is okay. I am only working with a $50 budget for the entire campaign, which was what my budget app recommended. I want to keep the reach small.

Facebook has added a Social Reach category, and it tells you the number of people that are friends of current fans. Your fan base can be leveraged to boost your click through rate (CTR) without having to do anything!

So up until two days ago, the icon was winning hands down in all categories, posting a healthy .039% CTR, kicking a** in impressions and social connections. Now the image is having a late surge with a mind-boggling .057% CTR (that number will certainly decline). There is still some time left in the campaign, and after tweaking the amount per click that I am bidding we’ll see how the numbers will pan out. Stay tuned!

UPDATE:

The campaign is winding down. With only $10 left in the lifetime budget, there’s little that can happen now to drastically change the statistics. The icon is the winner! Posting a healthy .020% CTR, it beat the image hands down. The image achieved a respectable .014% CTR.

While this is no means an exhaustive study, it does mean that mixing up your creative is the best way to maintain viewer interest and determine which approach is resonating with your audience. Test, test and then test again until you get your desired results.

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?

So it got me thinking and spelunking on the web. But the answer was in one of my Evernote folders. The author of an article that I clipped spoke about the user experience and echoed something that I have been speaking about all along: the designer and the brand must take into account what the user’s expectations are when landing on the site.

This user expectation is what drives Google and other search engines. When I search for something, I expect that the page that I land on will give me (some of ) the information that I am looking for. If it doesn’t, then I bounce and am off to the next option.

Trust me, I am going somewhere with this. So let’s say that you have a touch point with a prospective customer. And let’s say for example that this touch point is not a digital channel. You handed them a card, a flyer or they saw your ad on TV. What do you think that their expectation would be once they got to your site?

Of course you know the answer. They expect to recognize something in the web space that they saw or experienced in that other channel. If they don’t that is a disconnect (shock) and that is bad, because users usually react negatively to shocks online (aww).

But even if you have everything aligned and symmetrical between your channels? Well, you still have this: The New Room Effect.

As you might expect, the New Room Effect is derived from the experience from entering a room that you have never been in before. The momentary confusion when confronting something new (and let’s not forget that confusion = fear and hesitation) is alleviated when one locates familiar objects. Ah, that’s actually a window. Oh, the toilet is over HERE. Anticipating and compensating for this confusion is the essence of UX and UI design. Here is a snippet from the article by Shawn Borsky for Anthem Design Group:

The main focus of interfaces should not be avoid all confusion, because that’s not practical. Its too easy to confuse a user. It is much better focus on how to handle confusion or hesitation. Consider this situation. When you walk into a room or building in which you have never been, you will be initially confused.

Why? Naturally, you must become familiar with the new information before you can interact with it. I like to call this the “New Room” effect. Your main focus as a designer should be to anticipate this stage of analysis and confusion and then dispel it quickly by creating familiar cues, anticipated guides, and goal oriented design.

So okay. When you are asking people to perform a task, say, BUY NOW!, this is not the time to make your user spend valuable time and cognitive energy trying to determine if this object is or isn’t the proper button to click. Not to make too dramatic a point, NOTHING should stand in the way of your user accomplishing the goal you’ve set for them and you should do whatever you can to help them decide that your goal is their goal. That’s digital’s contribution to a solid, cross-channel, brand-nourishing, customer-centric creative strategy.

More from Shawn Borsky:

What does this mean for usability designers? Our goal should not be to make something simple or clean, those approaches will come later. We should first make sure to help our users form the right expectations, be comfortable with the results, and become familiar with the process.

This of course, takes a keen understanding of your audience and your business objectives. Take time to evaluate them both and how those two usually competing objectives will interact so that everyone feels satisfied.

Creatives and clients, ask yourself and your team: what would the average user expect to see when they land on this page? Why is the user here? What barriers can I remove for the user? When you answer those questions, make sure that you have created enough expected creative/content/brand elements that reduce the time that it takes for your users to figure out that they are in the right place and that it’s actually easy to accomplish their (your) desired task.

SHAMELESS PLUG:
We’re UX, UI, and IA experts at M19 MEDIA, and we answer those questions with every site that we build. Give us a call if we can help you.

One of the themes that I have found in my spelunking is that creatives found it frustrating that clients don’t /can’t buy in to their perfect design. And I realized that that clients (especially small business clients who have no filter) didn’t buy in because the design came as a shock to them because (surprise!) they didn’t effectively communicate their vision for the end product. We all know, unless it pops out of our favorite cake with a wad of hundreds, people generally don’t like shocks.

As a matter of course creatives and small business clients should demand that a creative brief be drafted and perfected so that each party can know what to expect from each other from a creative standpoint and minimize those end product surprises. That said, a significant problem with creative briefs is that they are prose documents and don’t give the client an idea of the look and feel of the finished product.

So how to manage that? Enter the mood board.

The mood board outlines the color palette, images, typography and other design criteria in a visual manner that the creative brief cannot.

The mood board is a way to get clients to buy into the visual aspect of the design project and can reduce the number of iterations before approval. So, especially when it comes to a project where M19 MEDIA is developing a new brand, style guide or critical design project, we will employ a mood board as part of our creative brief.

As a small business client (hell, as any client) you should ask for a mood board from your creative vendor. Creatives? Get the client buy in on the mood board. It will save you time and effort. Below, you will find a mood board for a current client. And yes, I was listening to Robert Plant while I wrote this post.

This is actually a time-saver. The mood board serves as the visual bible for any creative project and defines the sandbox in which the creative team can play. It is also a critical client buy-in checkpoint and should be a part of every designer's creative process.

My argument that impressions matter more than clicks just got a shot in the arm.

Most of my clients are trying to build a brand presence online as well as generate conversions and this new technique is just the ticket to measure how well that brand development effort is going.

So without getting too deep in the nuts and bolts, MOAT measures how long a user hovers over an ad and determines if it is simply recognition, did you grab their attention say from color or a particular image, or if it is engagement, and you held their attention from compelling content. Check out the demo.

It’s a fantastic process and it’s going to change the way we look at online marketing. More to come.

You know that I have nothing but love for my small business clients. They are overachievers. They create something from nothing. They are proud of what they have accomplished and usually the copy on their websites reflect that. WE can offer…WE have the latest…WE carry a full line of… you get the idea.

Unfortunately, users don’t really care that much about that. They are in it for them. So, your copy needs to reflect the benefit that your product or service offers to the user or they will lose interest.

Friends, I am guilty of it too. I went to this site to test how my copy stood up to the  we vs. you test. It turned out that my copy spoke more about M19 MEDIA (60%) than my user (40%). Some tweaks to the copy, and I came up with this:

Check out the links below and test out your ratio. You’d be surprised how long a little attention will go in keeping your partner’s interest, while if you want to get friends you go to https://chatempanada.com to meet more people.

We We Calulator for your website

We We calculator for plain text