Online Strategy

The Death of “Just in Case” Web Design

Ever since the first web browsers were created in the mid 1990’s people have been endlessly debating on how to design a web site. Or more specifically their companies’ site. At first it was left to a small group of people to make the decisions, because it was probably a fad and why spend time there. Once the fad thing became the next big thing everyone wanted in on the gold rush. Opinions were as common as… Well, you know.

To see how far we’ve come, check out Evolution of the Web an interactive site that shows the progression of Internet technology and human adoption and integration in their everyday lives.

Usability science came along, disciplines were created and the work was put into trained hands. The problem lies in the fact that most corporate web sites, especially ones that are C to C and have a significant traffic, must sometimes serve a dozen or more masters. That calls for scorecards, prioritization frameworks and, oh yes, a check back to what the objectives are.

I’ve sat in so many meetings where business partners want to put things in the interface “just in case” a user may be looking for it. They come up with all manner of wild use cases. They are very creative. Bring them back to reality. Search is what we use when we are looking for something. Navigation is for fast access to what you want or need to do during any given visit. Design is for connecting with a customer so they will want to know more.

The new design trend emerging, one of “Point Solution” is I think fantastic. It fills the digital canvas, is responsive to the device that beckons it to life and incorporates a storyscape of the functionality. It seamlessly combines high impact graphics, video, animation and interactive scrolling. When done well one doesn’t know if we are learning or accomplishing a task. And the doing becomes commerce, crossing an invisible line without being detected. It’s bulletproof for solving one or two use cases, but challenged when there are ten to twenty functions available for customers.

The “Just in Case” design is too broad and the “Point Solution” is too narrow. Designers with the help of business partners must find the middle way between the two. Uncovering the dark data hidden in the click stream married with back end analytics is critical. Start with eliminating all of the use cases that are remote, then progressively work your way toward the desired outcome. Oh yeah, you need really, really good designers.

It takes courage to avoid the “Just in Case” design trap and to stave it off you must have hard data showing it’s the right way to go. It’s best to be able to bring a design to life that has absolutely no hierarchy, only a flow of perfectly quilted content.

The poster child for “Point Design” is the Pencil 53 product site from the company Fifty-three. I love the site but loved the product even more. That helps. Their singular objective is to communicate everything about the Pencil 53. What it is, what it does, why it’s better. My review of the Pencil 53 is here.

Apple is great example of incorporating “Point Design” when they want to be bold about a product, then shifting to a more traditional design for product comparison, shopping and support. Sometimes you need to tell the story on a deeper level. For Apple’s 30th anniversary they created a time line of their products and the people behind them. They allowed a user to click on their first Mac and let Apple know what it meant to them. Emotive memories. They have always excelled at closing that last mile between a person and technology.

Microsoft is also getting in the game. They are simultaneously upgrading their product design as well as their sites. Their Surface experience is excellent and they are working hard to put the brand back on track after years of being completely lost.

Samsung has a very difficult design problem to crack. Parts of their site are absolutely on point while others appear archival but are probably effective at selling, so it may not matter. Remember the data. The Apps and Entertainment section is outstanding at showcasing a breadth of products and covers a lot of ground without being overwhelming.

We see people, read their stories, watch their videos and learn how technology works in their lives for convenience, efficiency and peace of mind.

Finovate. Worth the Wait

I attended Finovate 2009 (Financial Innovation) in New York on Tuesday, September 29th. I love this format. Thirty-two companies show-up to present their next generation releases and try to convince banks and credit card issuers to buy their solutions and embed them into their online environments. Here’s the really cool part. Each firm gets only 7 minutes on stage and must demo their wares, no PowerPoint allowed.

FinnovateLogo

You don’t want to go first or last here, but in my opinion the pre-lunch slots were the best in terms of keeping the audience’s attention and avoiding the numbing blur of one demo after another. There were a lot of mobile solutions, particularly for payments, as well as personal financial management applications and a sprinkling of social/community. Needless to say I won’t be summarizing all of them, but I want to make mention of the ones I found most interesting based on the following criteria.

Utility
Uniqueness
Innovative
Good user experience
Helps financial firms solve problems
Presentation quality

BrightScope – They had a mission statement. “Help Americans Retire in Dignity.” Their research showed a large percentage of Americans rely heavily on their 401k to support them after they stop working. Their online application rates over 10,000 plans with a simple score and shows you where yours stacks up vs. others. If your plan isn’t there, you can request it be added and in most cases it’s up within two weeks. It has a neat projection tool that calculates shortfalls in money, or additional years you may need to work. They also have a solution for plan advisors as well. I mention them because retirement is being re-thought by almost everyone in the wake of the downturn. Also for their focus on trying to do one thing and doing it well. Visit them here.

BancVue/First ROI – I know, not a memorable name, but their product is called Kasasa (new day). It’s a turn key co-op solution that helps smaller banks come together and at least have some way of competing with the mega-banks. They focus on the younger market by offering a rewards checking program that pays them in iTunes cash. Spending is only part of the solution. The program encourages saving and giving to charity. The marketing is really crisp and encompassing. They seem to have thought of everything; advertising, customization, all the way down to email reminders. Great presentation and the only firm to bring a customer on stage for a testimonial. This one was my choice for best in show and I found out later, that it actually won it. Visit them here.

TILE Financial – Their observation is today’s wealth is sandwiched between the aging population and their financial advisor. When the inevitable time comes, that wealth, about $1 trillion according to TILE, transfers to survivors and the advisor and her firm loses it. Their solution, The Investing Learning Environment (TILE). It helps manage the shift in assets from one generation to the next while keeping the funds and investments at the firm. Three modules in the application, Spend, Grow and Give help young and old make decisions together as well as reinforce the practice of giving back to the less fortunate. They have an elegant user-interface and a strong feature set that seems usable for seniors, but cool enough for their children. The spend module captures where spending occurs and presents company stock price and carbon footprint adjacent to the transactions, expanding the potential horizons. I spoke with them afterwards because I was curious as to how they were selling the product. It needs to travel from advisor to client to their family in order for the relationship to take hold. They didn’t give me a satisfying answer apart from saying this would be most effective to newer wealth. Visit them here.

Yodlee – In the past Yodlee has always been strong in functionality, but not always the most easy to use UI. This time around they clearly focused on the user experience and presentation layer in their upcoming release. Their MoneyCenter product accounts for 90% of their use cases onto one widgetized screen, eliminating pop-ups, glides and page reloads. These widgets can be dragged around the screen to create a personalized environment. The window is framed off with the ability to house critical stats you always want front and center. And oh yes, it’s now blue. These changes are big moves. Viewing, tracking and paying are all here. They have an interesting feature that shows good and bad days to pay based on your cash flow. They announced a partnership with UltraSoft that will come to the rescue of soon to be abandoned MS Money users. Your data will be fully importable to Yodlee in the near future. Visit them here.

iPay Technologies – The women who presented really made their product come alive with the use of personas and storytelling. Tops here. They took us inside the world of a small business owner and their back office assistant as they demonstrated the product. Take away here is, the owners are too busy to bother with the office, and the office managers need help getting direction from the owner. Their solution gives business owners a customer database, online invoicing, online payments and choice of templates for easy personalization. Their get paid faster functionality allows business owners to email the invoice and their customers can click into the iPay site and pay right there. An email summary is produced at the end of each day so keeping track of your money is easy. Nice interface. Clean, feature-rich, but not confusing. Visit them here.

That’s my short, short list. I thoroughly enjoyed the day and got some great ideas to bring back to the office. Would consider returning next year.

A Great Online Experience is like The Twilight Zone

Updated: February 8, 2009

The classic 30 minute television drama is all but extinct, having given way to reality shows and various forms of forensics and autopsy programs. Thanks to

Me TV and Nick at Nite numerous classic (and not so classic) shows still live. There is one show from television past that has a unique brand, The Twilight Zone. A full 40 years after it first aired, the mere mention of its name takes everyone almost universally to the same place; ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. A dimension where things are just a little bit askew. The thought of TZ might even elicit chills. It’s one of the few programs that has sustained life outside the cathode ray tube. Rod Serling was the mastermind and creative genius behind that groundbreaking show and attracted a who’s who of actors and technical talent. Everyone wanted to work with Mr. Serling and be part of the creation of this new and exciting form of television.

So, how is The Twilight Zone like a great online experience? Many of the attributes that made The Twilight Zone so successful eerily overlap with the very best web experiences. Both:

Are easily accessible to a broad audience
Present a fresh, unique approach
Provide a consistent experience
Contain highly engaging content
Have the power to surprise
Capitalize on teachable moments
Are highly memorable
Transform skeptics into loyal fans

Which leads me to MCD Partners. I work with Magnani, Caruso and Dutton (New York), an independent interactive agency that places a premium on ideas and a priority on understanding their client’s business objectives and brand value proposition. They are skilled at helping firms craft and execute their digital strategy. I’ve been working with them for over two years now and have not only made a great business partnership, but numerous friendships as well. We work long hours trying to solve the latest problem or design the next generation web site experience. But no matter what the deadline or obstacle, we always try to make it fun.

Speaking of fun, here’s some, at least for me. I revisited those classic Serling episode introductions and altered the copy so I could include members of my MCD account team. Using a cool microphone called the Snowball, I channeled my best Rod Serling imitation in a series of recordings I call The MCD Zone. I know I’m opening up a can of worms here, inviting a response in kind which will be much more polished than my meager creative skills can muster. But that will be even more fun.

So turn up your speakers for The MCD Zone theme. Disclaimer. It’s not really a video.

The cast of characters on my MCD account team is diverse and I highly respect their talent and professionalism. As time permits, I plan on posting more episode introductions with members of my MCD team as the stars. So if you work there you may want to bookmark this page and check back. Who knows, You might be next!

Identity Crisis

Word Traveler

Machine vs. Man

Missing

Now I have to say, lest someone think I’m serious, working with MCD is not really like being in the Twilight Zone. No one has aged prematurely or been lost to roam an empty vortex for all time. But we do create some extraordinary online experiences together. Some of them have been positively other worldly. Thanks MCD team for your effort, energy and oh yes, your good sense of humor. It’s a relationship that pushes all of us beyond The Comfort Zone.

Special thanks to Mr. Rod Serling. He’s not dead, he’s just gone ahead.

Participation, Power and Social Influence Marketing

So much talk about social media. It can’t be ignored by firms who want to find more effective ways to market. Everywhere pundits are saying that advertising, as we know it, is dead. That social is the next thing. If we create an environment or community where customers can help each other and in the end your product, you will save money and get great ideas. Win, win. But how?

Senior executives of companies are understandably shy about going all in on this social thing. They see it as a potential loss of control. As a strategy that could easily backfire. Customers may say bad things about their products or company that just aren’t true. In some cases the customers may have an irrational grievance, or just didn’t understand something. Happens all the time. It’s happening right now in social networks everywhere. That’s the point. It happens and we don’t pay attention.

It’s dead simple. Firms that don’t participate will fall behind the ones that do.

I came across Ross Mayfield’s Weblog the other day. It’s really good. He posits a concept called the Power Law of Participation, and illustrates it nicely in this graphic.

Graphic Credit: Ross Mayfield

The tail defines the low threshold activities and represents the network’s Collective Intelligence. The community identifies their likes and interests. Some of this is tracked by web analytics tools inside companies, or on broader site-spanning networks, while others manifest themselves in the communities at large in the form of links, videos, posts and subscriptions. Once an individual or ideally individuals (and lots of them) reaches collaboration, moderation, and leadership, they are in the high engagement category of Collaborative Intelligence. They process what the low engagement citizens are doing, sharing, and subscribing to, then take it up several levels. Potentially all the way to the point of producing content, even product ideas. This principle maps nicely to Forrester Research’s Ladder of Participation concept of Internet users.

We know that Google allows their engineers to spend 20% of their company time on pet projects to help foster innovation. Now that is a scary thing for mainstream company executives. And it has been said that Google is the best beta company ever, but they need to finish some things in order to grow up. There is certainly proof they have done both. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO has said.

Virtually everything new seems to come from the 20 percent of their time engineers here are expected to spend on side projects. They certainly don’t come out of the management team.

This gives us a different way to think about social networks. As an equivalent to the 20% Google grants it’s employees, except much better. Firms should start off by working the tail of Mr. Mayfield’s Law of Participation, by leveraging content they already have, or can aggregate without much effort. This will pull consumers to their site. Further up the curve it will be necessary to create influencer marketing programs that will push vs. pull. No one can say for sure where it will go, so trying to have a 5 year strategy doesn’t make any sense. Most companies don’t have the skills in house right now anyway.

By developing strategies and campaigns for each phase of this curve, companies can begin to shape and measure the practice of Social Influence Marketing.

It’s a convergence of publishing, product development and service in a social network of prospects and customers. More to come.

Social Influence Marketing – Learn or Burn

Everyone is a buzz about social networks and the impact they will have on marketing. As a marketer myself, it’s something I have been thinking a lot about lately. The world is changing, converging and seems to be getting smaller. As a result the market size and opportunity is getting larger. The science and practice of marketing will have to evolve from the tried and true (tired and flawed) linear approach that dominates today, into something very different.

Most brands are not ready. They are not organized for it, don’t understand it, lack the necessary skills, and are not courageous enough to even try. The situation is further complicated by the fact that new technologies underpin everything related to this dynamic new sphere of marketing.

Here is some of my recent thinking boiled down into everyone’s favorite medium, powerpoint.

It will be challenging as well as interesting to create new, innovative strategies and marketing campaigns over the next few years, in an effort to operate in and monetize this unique opportunity. If you are a marketer and not thinking about this, you run the risk of becoming road kill in less than five years. Not kidding. Learn it now.