Jonas Lamis, TechRanchAustin.com – Door64 Tech Fair
Here’s Jonas Lamis of TechRanch Austin talking about their services for pre-seed and seed stage companies that can change the world. Jonas and Kevin Koym also presented an overview of their “Employee to Entrepreneur Program” at TechRanch. Really smart guys doing some great stuff for Austin startups!
Ash Maurya, GetCloudFire.com – Door64 Tech Fair
Ash Maurya of GetCloudFire.com shares an overview of his interesting photo and video sharing service. Basically it saves you from having to actively upload your photos and videos to online sharing sites. I may have to test this out!
Prahsant Kadam, MopacStudios.com – Door64 Tech Fair
Prashant Kadam of Mopac Studios a design firm gave me a quick overview of his company. They do branding design, 3D, Flash, ecommerce and marketing presentations.
Non-profit Usability and Trust Online
Philanthropy.com the “Newspaper of the Non-Profit World” has an article today on how confusing websites discourage donors from giving online. They point to both communication/marketing issues as well as usability issues with many non-profit sites. Many sites that were tested didn’t even clearly state their mission and where donations would go.
Jakob Nielson of the Nielsen Norman Group released highlights of a study of 23 non-profit websites that the article was based on. The report is $98 on NN/groups’ site, but here are some highlights.
Test subjects were observed performing two tasks: Choosing a recipient and making a donation. By far, the thing the users sought first was an understanding of the organizations’ goals and objectives. Only 43% of the websites studied put their mission on their homepage and only 4% stated on the homepage where the donor’s money would be applied. This information was often provided inside the website, but users had trouble finding it and this affected their donation decisions.
Nielsen Norman group estimates that donations could be DOUBLE current donations in many cases if best practices in usability, communication and trust were used. Shockingly, they say 17% of testers couldn’t even find WHERE to make a donation. Wow.
Unfortunately, many commercial sites have similar issues. I posted in January 2007 
“10 Steps: Making it easy for your customers to trust you” based on some research Stanford University did. It’s probably my most-referenced post of all time, as I still forward it to companies that I work with. Keeping these 10 steps in mind and constantly evaluating your website, Twitter, Facebook and other social media properties against them are crucial to effective communications.
Related to this, NN/group also has an “Alertbox” summary and research report on “About Sections of Websites”. These are HIGHLY recommended reading, as the About section of any site, from services, e-commerce, government or non-profit sites all need to explain who they are to visitors. For anyone considering a relationship with an organization, knowing who a company IS, is a first step towards trust and a relationship.
Is your company’s mission, goals and About section clearly enunciated to visitors that don’t yet know you? How does your site stack up on trust metrics? Could your grandmother understand your mission and use your site?
Social Media understanding in 3 minutes, 44 seconds
I’m a new fan of Common Craft, a small consultancy that says “Our Product is Explanation.” Nice stuff.
Here is a good video, “Social Media in Plain English”.
My short version is “making it easy for your customers to talk about your business.” How have you explained Social Media to co-workers and friends?
The Rare “Sword of Data”
Just finished reading an interesting post from Douglas Bowman of StopDesign, he’s just left his role as Visual Design Lead of Google. He talks about his experiences of pure quantitative research overtaking visual design principles and creativity at Google. He confirms that:
“Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. “
He goes on to say that he understands why Google needs to approach decisions this way, but he also feels like they don’t balance the quantitative with other research or best practices in design. (There is an interesting related article on Marissa Mayer’s role in this on the New York Times site.)
I have three quick thoughts on this:
1. Although as a designer, Douglas has trouble with this extreme strategy, knowing who Google is and who their products target, i.e. everyone, I think it’s a pretty good idea to approach their user experience this way for them. BUT, testing 41 shades of a color doesn’t seem like the best use of anyone’s time. 8-)
2. Any idealistic, enthusiastic professional in their field has specialty backgrounds and expertise that make them good at their job… but it also can bring them further away from the perspective of their users. This is part of the ongoing conflict between “usability” professionals and “visual design” professionals. One wants “pure” usability with nothing extraneous to get in the way, the other wants style, panache, and a “wow” factor for the work. Who’s right? Both of them… that’s the fun part, the negotiation, part of the constraints and collaboration on teams that drive successful products.
3. More companies could learn from Google’s approach. 
Quantitative analysis doesn’t have to be 100% of the decision, but it should approach half of the input for many decisions. In my experience, most companies suffer from the opposite problem. Too few companies do any testing of designs for their website, their messaging or even their products. The only testing many have done is some vaporous “focus groups” recruited and paid for poorly thought out opinions. Too often the designs are based on what executives or the production team “think,” or “like” as the priority input over real users and actual data.
Any company with a significant part of their business on the web should have these efforts as core to their website or application marketing strategy and internal or external staffing: (No, this is not a complete list. 8-)
- Web analytics that are set up correctly and constantly monitored
- A/B testing or even multivariate testing, especially for ecommerce and applications
- Social media monitoring, WOM, user comments, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs
- Use of paid search or media buys to test messaging, (yes, marketing/branding messages can be tested effectively via PPC!), ads and landing pages
- Frequent direct contact with customers and users (yes, this is qualitative too!)
What areas of input and research is your company missing in gathering for your marketing, website or application? What can you jump into *today* to move more in that direction?
Social Media Measurement
I’ve been focusing a lot of my spare time on new social media conversations like Twitter, (CharlieNB) FriendFeed and the like. Sorry that the frequencey of my blog posts have suffered for it! But I think social media and “instant customer conversations” that happen are a VERY important trend that deserve to be investigated fully. I learn new things, meet new connections, repair relationships with companies, stay in touch with friends, and often get questions answered immediately. Good stuff! (but that’s not the point of this post… 8-)
As the various elements of “social media” emerge from person-to-person conversations to business conversations as well, measurement and return on investment become top priorities.
“Why should my business/employees be a part of Twitter, what’s in it for my business or customers? Why should we be looking at comments or blog posts?”
There is, of course the intuitive answer, of getting better in touch with customers and understanding their needs, but that’s pretty “soft” and may not fly with metrics-driven organization… and really who isn’t with this economy? 8-)
Recently there have been quite a few startups tackling this question. I’ve seen Radian6 and ScoutLabs, they seem to be strong startups with rich tracking, measurement and reporting. Mashable has a great overview of the Top 10 Monitoring tools, so I won’t reiterate the rest.
I guess I’m most excited about one of the heavyweights in the web analytics industry’s addition of Twitter measurement into their primary offering. Omniture has announced that Twitter measurement will be integrated into their SiteCatalyst product via an API. They’ve also mentioned a few new features/ideas on how some of this data can eventually be used to better inform search marketing campaigns. Clickz coverage is here, there doesn’t seem to be a press release from Omniture available yet though.
My dayjob is an Omniture customer, and we’ll likely be taking advantage of this, as I’m sure many customers will. It’s a great sign of a maturing trend that not only startups jump on with new products and services, but industry heavyweights do too.
I really enjoyed the story of how this new product feature came about, which Adam Greco (Omni_man) covers on the Omniture blog. It’s great to see an organization move so quickly and be so agile with their products.
Even more so, it’s great to see more measurement being brought to social media!
How is your organization measuring and particiapating in Twitter and other social media conversations? Are you talking to your customers and prospects?
