Tag: UX

Your customers read the web in Google’s language – be ready

We’re used to thinking of Amazon as a best-practice-setting e-Commerce giant, but customers are learning and re-learning the language of the web on every site they visit – and one juggernaut is teaching them how to engage with the web in a big way.

Google doesn’t just rule search, we use Google products to manage our email, help us find where we’re going and store our documents.

Because customers are so exposed to Google products, Google has built users’ expectations for how the web works – so when they arrive on your site, potential customers expect to be spoken to in a language crafted by Google.

By speaking to customers in the language they expect, marketers can optimize customer experience to increase revenue and create happier customers.

Example 1: “I need to find something… where’s the search box?”

What Google did:

More than a decade ago, before Google reigned supreme over all other search engines, there was another option: Yahoo! Comparing the two site’s home pages from the year 2000 gives you a pretty clear understanding of their different strategies:

Where Yahoo! prioritized categories – attempting to guess how users would group topics – Google allowed the user to drive their own experience by prioritizing search.

Building on that all-important search supremacy, Google changed the way we use email by prioritizing search and providing unlimited storage in Gmail. It followed a similar strategy with Google Drive, prioritizing search as a way to find documents rather than depending on remembering the path of folders.

What users want as a result:

Users expect to navigate sites using search and filtering, not categories.

How to give the people what they want:

This means you can’t neglect your internal search. Make sure your site search looks at titles, tags and descriptions of products.

Additionally, track your search box (which you can do with Google Analytics!) and regularly look at what customers are searching for – these can serve as keywords to optimize your product descriptions.

BONUS: Google now includes a search box in Google search results – meaning when customers search on Google and find your site, they have the option to search your site directly from the search engine results page. By adding a bit of code, you can redirect customers who use this sitelinks search to results on your own site.

Example 2: “I’ve been to this site before – where’s that product I considered?”

What Google did:

Five years ago, Google rolled out personalized search – meaning your search results page is customized based on your previous searches.

Google later expanded personalized search to include results from Gmail and Google Drive, to make search results even more useful.

Then, last year, Google shifted to not providing what keywords were driving traffic to your site and increased emphasis on ‘semantic search,’ which considers searcher intent and context to create relevant, personal results.

What users want as a result:

Users expect sites to serve personalized, customized content that is uniquely relevant to their particular circumstances.

How to give the people what they want:

Take what you know about user behavior and serve different web experiences based on that data:

Calculate shipping based on user location before they get to the shipping page
A lack of transparency around shipping costs or confusing terms can lose sales – the earlier you can get this information to customers, the less likely they are to be dissuaded by a price hike at the end. Since the users’ location is available in Google Analytics, you can add estimates to their shopping cart before they enter their address.
Change the homepage based on the number of times they’ve visited your site
The first time a user comes to the site, they may just be browsing. They’ll land on a few product pages but won’t make a decision. The second or third time, they likely already know what they want.
To building on this idea, prioritize featured products or seasonal offerings on first visit and then switch to search for their later visits, when they already have something in mind.
Feature products they’ve considered on previous visits
If a customer visits your site a few days after their first visit but has still not made a purchase, they might be looking for the product they left behind a few days ago. By featuring that product on the homepage, you’ll reduce friction and make it more likely that they buy.

Customized experiences are not limited to the web – you can also create a personalized, relevant experience by including the user’s name in an email, sending an email to customers who have left items in their cart or emailing recommendations based on previous purchases.

While e-commerce sites shape users expectations of other e-commerce sites, it’s important to keep in mind that most of a user’s time online is spent talking to friends and family or looking for interesting content. The conventions of those platforms shape the way potential customers view the web and what they expect from your site – so speak to them in their own language.

Black Friday is dead – long live delightful customer experiences

Traditionally, Black Friday is the start of the holiday shopping season – a landmark to jump start the busiest buying time of the year. But with more screens and devices, increased consumer expectations and more competition between retailers driving earlier and earlier sales, retailers should call time of death on this out-of-date tradition.

This year, the National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates that overall traffic for Black Friday was down 3.6 percent from last year’s traffic. While comScore data (also shown above) shows online sales are up, that in-store traffic slump amounts to nearly $7 billion less spent over the holiday shopping weekend this year versus last year.

Yet despite this slump, NRF projected a total 4.1 percent growth in overall holiday shopping this year. Taken together, these facts suggest that holiday shopping isn’t slowing down, but rather shifting away from traditional holiday door-busters to instead reward retailers with more well-rounded plans.

Retailers are taking the punch out of Black Friday

Retail deals site DealNews reported that Thanksgiving day had 30 percent more Editor’s Choice deals (sales that offered all-time price lows or best-of-the-year discount) than Black Friday for the second year in a row. Similarly, Adobe reported that online shopping on Thanksgiving (or ‘Grey Thursday’) instead of Black Friday yielded average savings of 24 percent.

By offering bigger discounts at earlier times, retailers are competing to get to holiday budgets before each other and, as a result, Black Friday is less important.

Google saw this reflected in search trends as well – with “a shift away from “tentpole” events such as Black Friday” but earlier searches for terms around Black Friday associated with deals:

Via Google.

This year, deals started rolling out as early as the first Saturday after Halloween – now dubbed “Orange Saturday” – marking a potential new start of the season. Store traffic and revenue are projected to steadily continue and spike on Super Saturday – the last Saturday before Christmas.

Consumers are moving out of stores, off of devices and into multi-screen shopping experiences

As Black Friday falls by the wayside, so does its more tech-savvy iteration Cyber Monday – but not because users are moving offline or off-devices.

First written about in 2005, Cyber Monday started when workers returned to offices on the Monday after Thanksgiving and continued shopping while taking advantage of their business’s better Internet connectivity. Since 70 percent of Americans now have high-speed Internet at home, the factors that led to Cyber Monday are no longer relevant and shoppers are behaving differently.

Tracking online sales on holiday shopping days, IBM found that online traffic on Cyber Monday is highest between 5:30 and 8 p.m., meaning after work hours.

Via IBM.

In the same report, IBM also found that 41.2 percent of all online traffic was mobile, up 30.1 percent over 2013, amounted to 22 percent of total Cyber Monday online sales, also an increase. This is consistent with estimates that between 30 and 50 percent of e-commerce traffic comes from a mobile device.

But more than just shopping and exploring products on devices, shoppers are moving between mobile, web and in-store in seamless but meaningful ways. Research from Google in 2012 found that 90 percent of shoppers moved from one device to another during a purchase process. Today, nearly 50 percent of 25–34-year-olds use their phone to shop online while standing in line at a store.

Consumers already view purchasing as a multi-screen experience, which makes dedicated deal days for different purchase behaviors, like online versus in store, irrelevant.

Retailers can build on success and remix the parts of Black Friday that work

While Black Friday as we knew it may be on the decline, the importance of the holiday shopping season for commerce is here to stay. To better drive sales in the future, retailers can build on what works with current shopping holidays but adjust to emerging shopping behaviors.

Instead of broad trends, target segments based on unique behaviors

Black Friday and Cyber Monday were built on the knowledge that consumers need holiday gifts, employers have high-speed internet, etc. Today’s marketers have the luxury to tap into big data to drive targeted, personalized holiday offers rather than directing marketing initiatives based on broad-sweeping trends.

Instead of thinking about when a customer might go online versus in-store, think about the different jobs that different devices fill in the sales process. For example, customers turn to cell phones to improve in-store shopping (by finding the store or storing a coupon) once they’ve decided on a purchase. Tablets, on the other hand, fill the job of research ahead of a purchase decision:

Via Nielson.

Customers are turning to mobile to simplify their purchase process more and more – 30 percent of revenue on Black Friday came from mobile, a nearly 50 percent jump over last year. For Cyber Monday, mobile held 41 percent share of traffic.

Customers are turning to mobile devices to fill specific niche roles within the sales process, and by considering how these jobs fit into the path to purchase, marketers can improve the customer experience and drive more sales.

Email traffic has largely shifted to mobile, so device usage should also be a consideration for the tried-and-true email offer. Email continues to do the job of informing customers about deals and offers, but marketers may be missing out on additional revenue by not optimizing what offer they send when to the device customers are accessing at that time of day:

Via eMarketer.

Taken together, marketers can consider these shopping and email trends to send relevant offers at particular times of day, rather than general offers on certain days of year.

Specifically, customers may find mobile-optimized email offer with coupons useful during commute times while ‘gift-guide’ type emails may work better during work hours or later in the evening, when they’re viewing on their desktop or tablet.

Give customers incentives, but don’t limit yourself to discounts

As retailers battle each other to send out the biggest discount the earliest – often not publicizing all of their deals so they can undercut competitors at the last minute – they are limiting themselves to competing only on price. Deals increase the motivation for shopping, but competing on price ignores what’s unique about a brand.

Apple, for example, offered customers an extra gift card rather than slashing prices, giving a higher value product rather than devaluing their existing product. Since Apple customers are buying into a high-performance brand, a deal that increases value makes more sense.

Outside of monetary value, retailers can add value in the form of utility – helping customers more easily find the product they’re looking for, discover related products or even save on bundled products. By analysing what different customers buy and even looking at what products customers buy together, retailers can send more relevant offers rather than blindly hoping a lower price will be relevant.

At the same time, non-profits and charities are leveraging Giving Tuesday, their own holiday day, to get donors to spend more by tying it into a bigger, united movement on the day. Rather than offering gifts, which can cheapen the giving process in the same way discounts cheapen goods, they are using the day as a rallying cry, proving the added value of unity.

Conclusion: win the holiday shopping season by knowing your customer

Ultimately, Black Friday is dwindling because it has stopped being a useful tool for customers and retailers alike. By leveraging data to drive holiday marketing initiatives, retailers can build new and relevant holiday shopping experiences.

Today, you’ll find everything from wine to cars on sale on Black Friday, but luxury retailers treat the day a bit differently. Where most big box and low-end retailers open on Thanksgiving and offer a plethora of dirt-cheap deals, luxury retailers will open at a reasonable hour and offer a sprinkling of deals.

Luxury retailers are tailoring the holiday to their customers, and more retailers can adopt the same practice. One game company even got customers to spend “$5 more” on Black Friday by knowing their customer.

With the right data, marketers can send relevant offers to customers and turn the holiday season from an onslaught of cheap deals to a season of helpful gift guides and meaningful purchases.

Background photo for featured image from Alan Carter via Flickr Creative Commons.

e-commerce email holidays mobile personalization shopping Social user experience UX

Creating the right user experience for your personal brand:
why & how I changed my site

Working to help companies connect to audiences with digital tools, I regularly preach that your website is your home online. A site offers a lot for you and your users: it’s a one-stop-shop for all the content you are ideally producing, it allows users to connect to you directly via comments and contact pages AND (hopefully) it communicates your brand through a dynamic and delightful experience.

With that in mind, I recently spent a lot of time clearing out the cobwebs, installing new features and just generally sprucing up my digital home to do more work for me. Here’s the why & how, so you can do it too and do it faster.

Step 1: Align content to long-term brand goals

I first built this site a few months ago as a digital resume to showcase my work to prospective employers. After months of professional development, I’m now thinking of how to develop my career well beyond this job search, to position myself as a top-notch digital strategist and industry expert (girl’s gotta have goals!), so the site needed to evolve.

Based on my experience, the roles that appeal to me now and the ways I hope to continue growing as a professional, I laid out a set of goals for my personal brand and then developed the site based on those goals.

Brand Goal #1: Be known for my writing skills > Strategy: Showcase writing through blog posts

For me, writing is a core competency and integral to my personal brand, so I wanted to make sure my writing had as much opportunity to shine on this site as anywhere else. If your content is special, it should get to dress up in special clothes, right?

To make my content stand out, I added a few features:

Featured image – The large image at the top makes posts more visual and compelling, it draws readers in. We process visual content XX faster than written text, and that’s an insight I regularly employ in my professional work, so I wanted to use it here too.
Full width everything – Readers just don’t look at sidebars… they just don’t. So I took them out.
Better styling for headlines – It’s a cliche today to say that users don’t read, they scan. Well-styled headlines make it easier to create scannable posts.
Author Bio’s – While I intend to be the only writer on this blog, I also want to brand myself as a writer which means making my bio visible on every post.

For more inspiration, HubSpot recently relaunched their blog to prioritize discoverability and integrate different sections.

Brand Goal #2: Become an industry expert > Strategy: Highlight expertise on site

Thinking long-term, I hope to some day be an industry expert who speaks on panels and so on, which means my digital home need to reflect all of who I am, not just my full-time work experience.

I prioritized my unique selling proposition (data drive funnel optimization + delightful execution in one package) and highlighted both my overall expertise and key results, alongside examples of my work in leading blogs:

Special thanks to Michelle Nickolaisen for the expertise & results design and how to highlight guest blog posts.

Brand Goal #3: Be an accessible resource > Strategy: Add friendly contact CTAs everywhere

Though I am an introvert at heart, I’ve been blown away by how welcoming and helpful others have been as I look for the next step in my career. With that in mind, I want to be accessible to anyone who may have an interest – from those who can help me (like employers and guest posting opportunities) to those that I can help (like anyone looking to build their personal brand in digital marketing).

With that in mind, I added calls-to-action everywhere to contact me, because if you don’t ask, you can’t blame people for not doing it.

[vc_row]

[vc_column width=”1/2″]

Powered by AppSumo, the scroll box is the only contact form that jumps on to the screen, the idea is that motion draws the eye.

[/vc_column]

[vc_column width=”1/2″]

This was built in to the theme and I just think it looks classy

[/vc_column][/vc_row]

Special thanks to Paul O’Brien, who inspired the “Let’s Get Coffee” language and overall friendly tone.

Step 2: Make the site sustainable to further growth

Working on a project basis, you learn quickly that your time is the most valuable asset you have, so you have to prioritize spending time on activities that generate revenue and automate as much of the rest as you can.

With a website, that means thinking critically about what you are and aren’t good at. I, for example, am not a developer, but my brand is about delightful user experience, so I knew a site that was responsive and ran quickly was important.

Time saving priority #1: Flexible WYSIWYG page layouts to save you time debugging

While I really liked the homepage of my old site, it was the only option available in my theme. That tied my hands if I wanted to create any more pages. My new theme includes Visual Composer, which I’m a big fan of. It’s an easy-to-use, visual way to edit page layouts that adds a ton of options.

Time saving priority #3: Balance quantity and quality of plugins

WordPress is great because there are countless resources from themes to plugins to forums. However, adding too many can plugins slow down the load time of your site, and that makes users bounce, so it’s important to find balance. Site speed comes down to more than plugins and not all plugins are created equally, but finding a balance and being thoughtful about your plugins is still important.

Because it focused on the resume template, my previous theme did not include nearly any UI shortcodes like buttons, accordions, etc. Those types of elements are critical to the look of the site, so they should be baked into the theme.

On the other hand, my new theme includes Google Analytics tracking and social sharing integrations, as well as some SEO options, but I’m not using them. In both cases, I want more measurement options on the back end, and that extra functionality is worth it to me to use a plugin.

By balancing the quantity and quality of plugins, I’m balancing the delightful experience my users deserve with my functionality needs.

(I use the Google Analytics by Yoast, SEO by Yoast and Easy Social Sharing plugins)

Time saving priority #2: Find a credible theme author to get quick support

With my previous theme, there were some strange bugs when adding in new plugins, so I contacted the author. Four months later, not a peep from them.

As a non-developer, it was important to me to have access to someone who could answer my questions and debug.

I purchased my previous theme and this one on Themeforest, which is a great storehouse of design and code starting points. To make sure I didn’t repeat the same negative experience, I looked for the ‘Elite Author’ badge on any theme I considered. I had an answer to a support ticket question within 12 hours.

(Fellow freelancers also suggested looking through an author’s support feed on ThemeForest or buying from reputable theme shops, like WooThemes.)

As with everything, process is key

I find figuring out how to something to occasionally take as long as actually doing it, so here’s my website process for reference:

Begin with the end in mind

Define your target audience – Like you would with any campaign or communications product, narrowly define who you’re doing this for. I wrote up a one-page brand guideline document for myself including target audience, value proposition, key messaging and keywords.
Look for inspiration – Once you have a sense of what you want to do, find others who do it well. I reached out to the Austin Freelance Gigs Facebook group for feedback and spent a while Googling.

Pick a theme

Look at LOTS of themes! – As much as other websites can be an inspiration, I find that theme stores can give you a lot of ideas, so I browse for a long while and bookmark my favorites for review later.
Make a matrix – Once I have a collection of lots of themes, I try to figure out what I like between them and how important each of those things is. Then I grade each theme based on that criteria and with a little Excel magic get a numeric value for how good a fit each one is.
Leave it up to your gut – Ultimately, a theme is more than a list of features, it’s a big part of a user’s experience on a site and that, for me, comes down to gut feel. I try to narrow it down to about five themes with the matrix analysis and then consider them individually (research shows humans need limited options)

Implement

Create a sitemap & wireframe sketches – If I worked with a developer, a sitemap would be the first thing on my list after research, but in this case, I knew I couldn’t necessarily get everything I wanted in a purchased theme. With that in mind, I waited until I knew the boundaries of my options to create a site map & sketches of wireframes.
Collect & copy all of your theme-specific content – While changing your theme won’t make your blog posts disappear, anything stored in custom objects created by your theme will go away. To save heartache and time, copy all of this stuff into a document for later use.

Write copy & create images – If there are extra or new pages, I would write all of the content and images at this point.
Go! – Once all the elements are in place, it’s just plug-and-chug till it’s all done, including ad-hoc testing throughout. Word of warning: have coffee and something comforting on-hand, this is the stressful part.

freelance themes UX Web Web / UX Wordpress

90 years in one digital campaign

'United for 90 Years' Timeline - Responsive

This year, United Way for Greater Austin celebrated 90 years of making Austin greater – the locally-run chapter started in Austin in 1924. The anniversary presented an opportunity to tell our rare story and a challenge to do so in a new way.

Goal:

To recognize this key milestone, UWATX wanted to create an online experience to draw in new audiences and delight existing ones.

Strategy:

This project brought together multiple disciplines in the digital marketing spaces:

Create a responsive timeline highlighting UWATX and Austin history: Working with a design/developer, we created a dual timeline that both showcased our own history but also told the story of how Austin has changed as a community through nine decades. We used the timeline as the center of our 90-day celebration by also highlighting the anniversary with intro text at the top and featuring our zine and photography project as well.
Include categories to highlight niche parts of Austin: Categories allow users to zoom in on the part of Austin history that is relevant or interesting to them and allows UWATX to market parts of the timeline to more targeted audiences based on interests. (Example: Tech category)
Fill the timeline with extensive, rich content: The timeline includes 200+ highlights in Austin and local United Way history, all researched and written by internal staff. In addition, most posts include a photo (with Creative Commons or Public Domain license) or YouTube video and a link to learn more. Rather than providing a list of events, we wanted users to be able to dive in to Austin history.
Promote extensively across all channels: To kick-off the 90-day celebration, we reached out to our universe of subscribers via e-mail (approx. 20K individuals) to let them know about the timeline and featured it in some way each month in our e-Newsletter during the campaign. We also posted on our Facebook and Twitter channels throughout the campaign, highlighting a specific event or specific category from the timeline, and drove traffic from targeted interest groups to the category pages with Facebook advertising. Finally, with the help of our PR firm, we implemented a Pinterest strategy to highlight particular events on the timeline.

Key Insights:

Content should be useful: As more and more brands embrace their roles as content creators and publishers, audiences are bombarded by selling messages. To cut through the clutter, brands must not only tell compelling stories, but ones that add value for their audiences and that users can see value in sharing – content that has youtility. We could similarly cut through the clutter by producing content that was useful to our audience, while also highlighting our own story.
We are not the star of anyone’s movie…but Austinites LOVE their city: While 90 years is a significant hallmark for an organization and a badge of honor that few attain, we recognized that it wasn’t inherently or deeply interesting outside of the organization. The challenge became how to create content that was engaging beyond that simple fact. To solve that challenge, I reviewed and analyzed quantitative data from other content marketing efforts that confirmed a completely unsurprising fact: Austinites loved sharing and clicking on content that reflected the city or our unique culture. By including UWATX history alongside Austin history, we could create something that was interesting to users regardless of their relationship (or lack thereof) with UWATX.
A timeline of Austin must reflect its diverse interests: When we started, the goal was to include approx. 20 or so events to tell a simple story about our city. As I researched and reviewed content with our internal team, the list kept growing as all of us wanted more information on different aspects of our history. We realized that each of Austin’s diverse communities – film makers, foodies, musicians, techies, environmentalists, etc. – had a unique history and, in order to make the timeline as useful as possible, we needed to consider all of these unique histories and make it possible for users to select only the one they wanted to engage with.

Results:

During the initial 90-day campaign, the timeline drove an additional 10 percent of traffic to our website above our normal traffic. Of this traffic, 72 percent of this traffic came from new visitors versus site average of 67 percent. After launch, the timeline immediately became (and has remained) the second most visited page on the site each month – second only to the home page. Users also average twice as much time on the site when visiting the timeline.

To date, 2-3 other organizations have followed up to create a similar timeline including the Corporation for National and Community Service and a child care advocacy consortium funded by the Annie E Casey Foundation.

Lessons learned:

The timeline succeeded in meeting initial content goals of engaging existing users and attracting new visitors. Within a few weeks, we determined that this success could further be leveraged with a more obvious call-to-action to convert new visitors, so we implemented a modal window pop-up to collect email addresses. More iteration needs to be done to refine this process and add other ways for new users to become engaged, such as easier social sharing.

Partners: Development – Pixels Fear Me | Pinterest strategy & execution – Elizabeth Christian PR

Complete Campaign Content content marketing Data Digital Strategy E-Mail Facebook Illustrator Photoshop Pinterest Research Responsive Design Social Social advertising Social Media Strategy Twitter UX Web / UX Wordpress Writing

Meeting donors where they are: smart phone edition

At UWATX, the main fundraising vehicle is Employee Giving Campaigns, which rely on fundraisers attending in-person staff meetings to pitch why donors should give back and why UWATX is the best option. With the rise of smartphones, our fundraisers had a problem: people were on their phones and not paying attention to the pitch.

Goal:

Create a second screen experience for fundraisers to use in meetings when donors are on their smartphones.

Strategy:

Leverage existing high-value content and extend it to a mobile experience through a mobile version of the Impact Calculator. Allow donors to take easily action by filling out a form and receiving an email reminder to donate.

Desktop experience:

Key Insights:

Distractions are here to stay: Increasingly, research shows people engage in multiple experiences at once and take tasks from one platform to another. Fundraisers – our front-lines in identifying how prospects were engaging with us – were already seeing this trends, and we knew it was here to stay.
Impact drives giving: Over and over, donors say they are motivated to give by seeing the specific impact that their dollars can make. Our existing Impact Calculator made this connection direct by literally allowing users to input the amount of their gift and see how that investment through UWATX could impact our community. We could improve on the experience (adding more giving options for flexibility, playing with the design) to create an even higher-quality experience.
People don’t like to give via mobile websites: While mobile transactions and giving are becoming more common, UWATX internal research shows it has not yet achieved widespread adoption as the process remains clunky – it can be difficult to enter so much detailed data on such a small screen. Additionally, UWATX believes strongly in the power of Employee Campaigns, and creating a second screen experience had the risk of moving donors from campaign giving to online. We needed to move donors from the mobile experience to their desktops to give.

Mobile experience:

Results:

The new Impact Calculator generated 1000 views from Jan. to June 2014, a 57 percent increase over previous year, showing widespread adoption in meetings. This included approx. 25 percent mobile views, a 5x increase over previous year. To date, approx. 10 other United Ways have requested further information to duplicate the Impact Calculator for their own communities.

Lessons learned:

While the Impact Calculator did increase engagement, it did not successfully drive individuals to fill out the form and take action. Future iterations should focus on improve the conversion rate of the tool.

Partners: Design – Creative Suitcase | Development – igray consulting

Responsive Design Strategy UX Web Web / UX Wordpress