Building trust through experience quality

While in the field doing in-home research, we recently passed a new house on the market for US $2 million. From the street, it wasn’t possible to see if the structure was sound or the quality of the construction was good - but what we did notice was the house number stickers on the mailbox. They were the cheap stick-on type from a local hardware store, with each digit slightly askew. And that made a big impact: what else did they skimp on?

Websites work the same way: they are a direct and immediate reflection of the company behind them. We’ve seen consistently from our research that no matter how much social media, web 2.0 interactivity, and rich media you build into a site, it’s the little things that quickly add up. Poor website quality affects not only clicks or sales, but can also create a strong and lasting negative impression of a brand. Frequently, each individual issue isn’t that grave - users may not even consciously notice them - but in combination they erode the experience:

Amateur visual design: confusing page layouts and low-quality graphics, especially those with compression artifacts

Lack of alignment: no sense of grid or other visual structure to the page, making it difficult to parse and understand

Inconsistencies: lack of cohesive feel throughout the site, such as a button marked “Buy” in one place and “Purchase” in another

Outdated design: use of antiquated visual design styles or methods of interaction (aa.com comes to mind)

Difficulties finding: issues with finding content or features, whether on a specific page or across the site

Weak Copy: bland, corporate-speak, excessively long or content-free text that does not bring immediate value to the visitor

Lack of content: missing details on products, lack of selling messages (“Why should i buy this? Sell it to me!”), and lack of depth on company

Technical bugs and performance: layout and font issues, dead-end pages, poorly-designed UI widgets, and slow response times

What do you think?

SXSW: Zero Waste: The Future of Green

Live from SXSW in Austin, TX, Sunday March 14, 2010

Sol Design Lab

Sol Design Lab has created solar-powered ‘gas pumps’ in the Austin area, which are 50’s gas pumps that have been retrofitted with solar panels on the top, and outlets below.

First electric vehicle 100 years ago got 100 mph, we’re at 30 mph today, there’s a lot of potential here.

One of their key factors is to “make energy visible”, to help people stay within the means of solar energy. They display how much power is coming in from the sun, and how much is being drawn by whatever is plugged into the pump.  This helps have consumers demand things that are more efficient.

DOE did a study to look at forward demand for energy.  Greatest new energy source that DOE sees - 40% - is to reduce energy consumption.

Rechar creates carbon-negative systems

Build off-grid plants that turn biomass into electricity and biochar (like charcoal in BBQ grills) which can be used for power or buried in soil as a fertilizer and improves crop yield up to 200%.  Can sequester 200B tons of CO2 a year this way.

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SXSW: Banking 2.0: Financial Services Driven by People and Emerging Technologies

Live from SXSW in Austin, TX, Saturday March 13, 2010

Presenters collectively have more followers than the top 10 banks combined. People are coming together to invest better than the pros on Wall Street. Making products that are relevant to what people want. Transparency into what is going on with one’s finances, no more black boxes. Anytime, anywhere.

The paradigm has changed:

• Increased awareness of importance of savings
• Responsible borrowing/investing
• Frugal is the new smart
• Financial education starts earlier

New wave of financial products

• Stock picking communities
• Person-to-person lending, micro finance, crowd funding
• Community-based personal finance management: getting out of debt, better interest rates
• Credit score management
• Social savings

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SXSW: Design for Awareness: Mobile Technologies & Health

Live from SXSW in Austin TX, Saturday March 13, 2010

Presenting: Robert Fabricant, frogdesign

Growing appreciation of the need for awareness of health issues; people don’t work very logically.  Mobile technologies can provide awareness around our own understanding of situations and decisions of health considerations.

Four people in frog talking about this: Robert, Fabio (“Design for awareness”), Clay, Josh Musick (“Augmented mindfulness”)

Augmented mindfulness: ‘A growing field of UX design that brings together methods for recording, processing, and feeding back to the individual or group so that they can better understand what they are doing.’

“It would be a great tool for people who have a harder time feeling what’s going on in their body.  It gives people a way to ‘see’ the result of an exercise or activity in their body.” - Chiropractor reacting to early product design from Robert

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Honest and engaging corporate blogs (Part 2)

(See part one of this article)

Blogs are one of those “simple, yet so complex” online marketing tools. On one hand, if you can talk clearly and captivatingly with your customers about issues they care about, blogs can go a long way toward making long-lasting connections that build your business. You don’t need an outline, nor a proposal. Just write and make it real.

On the other hand, you can really screw up a blog fast if you aren’t methodical about when you post, how you promote it, and how you handle the interactive element. As we wrote in the previous post: don’t take your blog lightly. Successful blogs need a strategy, and they need to be on topic, credible, interactive, and written by someone with an engaging online personality. By conducting one-on-one interviews with people reacting to corporate blogs, we discovered some golden nuggets for success.

In this post we focus on how to foster valuable discussions and gain critical mass. In essence: how do you write a blog that has regular, active participation from your target audience?

Consistency is everything. Yes, you’ve heard it before, but for corporate-sponsored blogs it’s critical to establish a schedule for posting and stick to it. Weekly posting is a typical schedule that seems to be manageable for most companies beyond startup size; participants in our study told us that occasional posting, such as less than once per month, seems uncommitted. We’ve seen some blogs hosted by big corporations that haven’t been active for a couple of years yet are still live on the company site. If you have decided that blogging is not your thing, please, take down the page or leave it up in archive form if other people are linking to your entries.

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Honest and engaging corporate blogs

Among other social media activities, executives at large corporations increasingly feel pressured to have a blog to communicate with customers and partners - but what does that mean? Blogs are informal journals of a sort, and have over the years become a popular way for people to engage in conversations with others in their industry or sphere of influence. But exactly how to have a conversation with your customers is more complex than it looks. Don’t take your blog lightly: it needs a strategy, and it needs to be on topic, credible, interactive, and valuable to readers — among other things. By conducting one-on-one interviews with people reacting to corporate blogs, we discovered some golden nuggets for success. This is the first of two articles about corporate blogging.

1. Negative is positive. It’s generally not a sapient tactic to use your blog as a mouthpiece to promote your wonderful company and its “leading” products and services. People want the real scoop: what are the issues customers are complaining about and what are you doing to solve them? What are the needs and desires of your customers that you are developing into valuable offerings? Where did your last product or service fall short? As well, don’t hide negative comments to your blog. All comments are a positive contribution to the discussion unless they are offensive or inappropriate in some manner. We have seen that blogs with only positive feedback are not only deemed suspicious by readers, but can do more damage than good. Be honest and forthright, and readers will come back.

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