Design Details - April 2008

April 30th, 2008

April 2008

In this issue

1. A Change
2. Always A Little Broken
3. Are You Losing Because of Bad Design?
4. Find of the Month

Hi,

A Change.

If you receive DesignDetails each month you will notice that we have slightly changed the design. The format is essentially the same but the visual design, or ’skin,’ is different. The change is to align this email newsletter with our new website which we talk about next.

Always A Little Broken.

The ‘true inventor’ of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (sorry Al Gore) said, “The web will always be a little broken.” The Internet is never perfect, things change and web sites change to keep up. I have recently completed work on re-launching the HamiltonBerchman website. It took far too long for this to happen partly because my company is so busy (always a good thing) and because I wanted things to be “just right” before launching it. I realized that every website will always be a little broken and decided to finally publish because no website is ever truly perfect. We are still pouring some content in the news section. The new website has our portfolio of work, a blog (with more frequent thoughts/info/updates than this e-newsletter), archives of DesignDetails, and a news section, each with its own subscribable RSS feed. Take a moment to look and I welcome your feedback.

Are You Losing Because of Bad Design?

Original image concept by BadDesignKills.com

You may be losing business because of bad design. When people have bad experiences they go elsewhere for information, products, or service. As a business person this could be the kiss of death. However, there is great opportunity to address these issues and create a return on investment (ROI) that can reach up to 1000% or more.

Bad design can be applied to anything we interact with: websites, cars, houses, appliances, electronics, etc. In my field, I see bad design as anything getting in the way of easy access to and understanding of information. I’m sure you have experienced bad design in your life as most people have. I, too, recently experienced a bad design when I tried to purchase an item from an e-commerce website. After going through the entire process of selecting the desired item and entering all of my information (including credit card), I received an error that didn’t tell me anything except that there was an error. I tried a few times thinking maybe I entered something wrong but only got the error.

At this point, I was concerned that the orders went through and now my credit card was charged three times and I was going to receive three packages. After speaking with customer service, it turns out that their website cannot process orders shipping to California. They knew about the problem but did not care enough to fix the problem or to put a note on the order page letting customers know about the error. Because I needed a specific product found only at this particular company I could not go to another website. I did finally get what I needed (only one package and one charge). However, had the item been available anywhere else, I would have been out of that website in a heartbeat and that company would have lost a sale to a competitor.

The easy question to ask is, “Are my web communications meeting the goals I have defined?” If you do not have any goals for your web communications you need to rewind and define the purpose of your communications and then define their goals. Goals should be measurable in some way. For example:

• “x” number of sales per month
• “x” number of leads per month
• “x” number of downloads per month
• “x” number of subscribers per month

When you are not meeting your goals the likely culprit is bad design. Something is not performing its function to allow people to follow or flow through what you are presenting them online. Examples of bad design include:

• Incomplete information: not providing complete descriptions and/or hyperlinks to supporting material
• No call to action: are you asking for your visitor to do something in plain language? “Make a donation now!”
• Improperly labeled links: ‘Click here’ is not as effective as ‘here is a company overview PDF file’
• Unnecessary layers causing extra clicks. Extra ’splash’ pages on a website that provide no content value

I recently read a good article on Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox titled Four Bad Designs. The article gives four concrete examples of websites that can use some help. You need to ask yourself:

• Are your web communications meeting your goals?
• Are you happy with the results you are getting?
• Do you want to get more from your web communications?

If you answer no to any one of these I would be happy to talk with you about what you can do. Awareness is the first step to addressing any issues you may have.

Finally, Find of the Month

Every month I share an Internet destination that has some application to doing business, getting things done, or just plain cool. This month it’s a website called BuyMyTronics.com. They want to buy your used, new and broken Electronics today! They offer a fast, simple, and eco-friendly way to get money for your devices. Following up on ‘The Story of Stuff” and in light of needing a little extra $$$ for gas ($3.89 a gallon is as cheap as it gets around here) I thought it appropriate.

Wrap up

That’s it for this month of DesignDetails. Let me know if you have any questions about any of this content.
I am always on the lookout for article ideas. If you are facing a challenge or have a question relating to the Internet or design and are willing to share, please let me know. I can answer your questions and share with everyone—with anonymity of course.

If you like this e-newsletter, consider forwarding to a friend. Thanks for spreading the word.

Do you know someone in need of expert help or advice with web communications? I always welcome your referrals of friends, colleagues and family. And let me know if you welcome referrals as well.

I’ll talk to you again in May.

Bert Mahoney AIGA
Publisher, DesignDetails
Principal and Creative Director
HamiltonBerchman Design Group, Inc.
Director of Internet Strategy and Services
AIGA Santa Barbara

AIGA | the professional association for design

Giving People A Reason

April 18th, 2008

How do you get people engaged with your business, product, or service in the digital space?

The great opportunity available to everyone using the Internet to communicate their message is the chance to innovate and create. A myriad of ways exist to engage people using the Internet. Depending on what you are communicating, what your defined goals and objectives are, and what strategies you employ will determine what type of success you will encounter.

Many of these experiences are based on tried and tested techniques, and people experience them on a daily basis. For example blogs, online forums, and email newsletters have all evolved in their own ways to give people a reason to engage with your message and the value you can provide them. The best ideas and practices bubble up to the top and are continuously refined to deliver the results people are after. You only need to go and look at the blogosphere to see the endless discussion on an ever-expanding range of topics about making things better, faster, and more effective.

Why should someone care about what you have to say? Why should they engage with you? What about innovation and invention in ‘giving people a reason?’ What are the ideas and techniques that have yet to be invented? These are new paradigms that interest and engage people on a mass scale in ways never thought of before. I do run across new examples of this from time to time.

An Example, Or Two.
There are two recent examples of this type of innovation from the music world. As some of you may know the music industry and their distribution model have been brought to the Internet in a haphazard and less-than-elegant way. Had music companies been innovative and not resisted change, their fate today might be different–but we digress. Our  two examples come from the band Radiohead. The band earlier this year released their latest album “In Rainbows” first, and only, on the Internet. Other bands have done this before, but what Radiohead did was to allow people name their own price, and then download the entire album. Many people thought they were crazy to do this. Would people actually pay? Or would they just run off with a freebie? The feedback that I read reported that, on average, people paid what would be considered the price for a new CD. So, overall the experiment worked. Some people paid little or nothing, others paid a bit more and the result was proof of a new way to release an album for a major music artist. Radiohead then went to release the album on a traditional CD a few months later.

The second experiment involves remixing a song from their new album–the song is called “Nude.” This is not the first time an artist has done this on the Internet, but this time Radiohead is charging 99 cents per track to download. People then remix them to create a variety of new versions of the song. People can then upload their mixes and the public then votes on these mixes to arrive at the most popular version.  To date there are over 1600 remixes submitted to the website.

It will be interesting to see what the final results are from this second experiment. What ways can you engage your prospects, clients, fans using digital technology? What examples do you see within your industry or others that get you thinking of ways you can give people a reason to engage?

HamiltonBerchman’s Web Site

April 2nd, 2008

After months of debate the decision was made to finally re-launch the web site today. There was big push over the past month to make this happen. Design, programming and technical configuration took many hours but here is the final product.

Our decision to finally go live was made because we realized that the web site will never be perfect—no web site ever is. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been quoted as saying, “The web will always be a little broken.”

Not that our web site is broken, rather the realization is that the web is an organic entity—change is constant and tweaking essentially never ends.

It is time for the new web site.

So here is our new web site. Enjoy.