Your site's user experience: Balance user needs and business goals

Yesterday I attended a lunch seminar on the user experience (UX) and how it needs to be a fundamental component of your website.  The presentation was given by Jason Holmes, Aaron Rosenberg, and Craig Kistler, three speakers from AG Interactive, the online arm of greeting card maker American Greetings.

They rightfully pointed out that for many websites, the experience is the product.  That's certainly the case for AG Interactive, where users come to their site to send online greeting cards, either for free or as part of a paid subscription.  If the customer's interaction with your brand is going to take place entirely online, you better be monitoring the user experience!

The presenters talked about the intersection of development, design, and experience.  If you don't have someone watching over the user experience, it can get lost in individual departments or functions.  In my own observations of websites and the way they're run, I've found that for the best results, a single person or group needs to take charge of the overall UX -- to be the "owner" of a product or a process.  If you try to divide the task to multiple people, it doesn't get done.  (For example, producing an email newsletter by committee is never a good idea, unless you have one person at the end who brings everything together and has the power to make changes for the good of the reader.)

The speakers also raised some excellent questions you should constantly be asking in regards to your UX:

• What problem are we solving?
• Why is the user here?
• How can I make it better?  (Note that the it doesn't always need to mean a website.  It could be a single page of a website, or a single element on one page of a site.)

A user experience person or team needs to balance user needs and business goals.  Sometimes a UX team can be viewed as a roadblock that gets in the way of a company's business needs.  But the key is to put UX into every process and every project, and to prove to the business people that you're trying to help them make more money -- not throw up unnecessary roadblocks.

To do UX testing if you don't have a dedicated person or team, you have a few options.  Perhaps the easiest is going into a coffee shop, offering to buy someone a cup of coffee, and asking them to look at your site's printouts or wireframes.  More complex approaches involve usability labs (a number of colleges have them), as well as remote usability testing.  AG Interactive conducts its remote testing by triggering a pop-up on a site visitor's computer, asking the user if they'd like to participate in testing.  If they agree, the UX team walks them through the process of installing simple screen-sharing software on their computer that will help the team track the user's movements.

Unfortunately, many companies do usability testing on big projects too late in the process.  Many times companies only approve a budget for UX testing when the project is finally approved.  But by that time, it's too late to make dramatic changes to the core idea of the project/product that the testing might uncover.

Here are some UX resources the presenters recommended:

• Nielsen Norman Group -- offers free white papers in the Publications section of its website
• Usability.gov
• Usability Professionals Association
  

And one of my favorite blogs that explores user experience in all areas, not just websites:

• Good Experience
  

Getting the most out of your YouTube video post

Here's a blog entry from the folks at thunder::tech with some simple but effective tactics to get the most from your YouTube videos.  I can't say it any better, so I'm not even going to try.  Just read their article for some nice nuggets on tagging, geocoding, captions, annotations, video quality, and metrics.

Lexus vs. Acura: Email marketing showdown

I love reading car reviews, like CNET's Car Tech, Consumer Reports, Gearlog Car Tech, and Car & Driver.  So I thought I'd do a little auto review of my own -- but without looking at an actual car.

Within minutes of each other, I got emails from two competing luxury car manufacturers -- Lexus and Acura.  The emails struck me as being quite similar, because they were both promoting the launch of a new vehicle in each automaker's lineup.  Because of this weird coincidence -- two very similar emails reaching me at the same time and sitting back-to-back in my inbox, I started to do some comparing and contrasting in my head.  Soon enough, I was examining each message for email marketing best practices.

Which luxury automaker came out on top of the email battle?  Let's take a look:

Round 1: Subject line and sender

(Click here to see a screenshot of how the messages appeared in my Gmail inbox.)

Since the sender name and subject line are the first thing a user sees when an email hits their inbox, this is a very important attribute to any marketing email.  Both companies simply used their brand names as the sender name, a smart move.  Both companies kept their subject lines short, which is good once again.  But neither subject line got me very excited:

"Preview the all-new 2010 Acura ZDX"
"A glimpse of the future. Inside the 2010 Lexus HS 250h"

They're both OK subjects, but Acura's lacked sizzle, since "preview" isn't exactly an exciting term.  Lexus was a bit better, although "a glimpse of the future" borders on trite.  And although it's good that both companies are putting a header in their email for people who don't have graphics turned on, they missed the opportunity to put more sizzle in the message for people whose email clients show the first line of an email (like my Gmail does here).  Starting with "This message contains graphics" is wasted space in the inbox.  On a scale of 1 to 10, my scores for each: Lexus 7, Acura 6.


Round 2: Appearance

(Click here to see screenshots of the Acura and Lexus emails.)

The emails carry a similar look and feel.  Both companies are going for a clean and elegant approach, with dark edges of both messages, simple design elements, and lack of clutter.   Both messages' appearance are effective for what they are intended to do -- get people excited about these new models.

Lexus takes you directly into the cabin, where they're highlighting one particular feature of the car -- the central controller.  Also, it's not shown in my screenshots, but the Lexus email contained an animation in the image.  The "Adjust Sound, Plan Travel, Control the Climate" phrases appeared one at a time within the email.  That little piece of eye candy got me excited about this email.  However, Lexus drops the ball in a simple place: Anyone who isn't familiar with the HS 250h will want to see what the outside of the car looks like.  Skipping an exterior shot of the car is a mistake.

On the other side, Acura gets the exterior shot right in its email, but its interior image is the question mark.  I understand the "this is brand new" feel that the viewer gets by looking at the interior sketch.  But it screams "concept car" to me, not something that's going to be coming to my car lot soon.  The whole design isn't bad, but it's not as good as what Lexus showed us.

From a being pretty standpoint, the Lexus email is better here, with a beautiful photograph and a simple but attention-getting animation.  But no exterior shot of the Lexus is a dumb move, and that takes away from it.  Scores: Acura 8, Lexus 8.


Round 3: Content

You can tell that Lexus copywriters spent more than five seconds on their headline -- "Your index finger may develop an ego."  It's smart and a little funny too.  The animation I mentioned before leads perfectly into the headline.  The text is short but sweet, perfect for an email of this type.  But again, there's no mention of the car as a whole -- especially the fact that it's the first hybrid-only Lexus.

On the other hand, the Acura headline and subheadline are two giant yawns.  The first sentence of body text about the Acura Design Studio in Southern California is pretty weak too.  I see the connection between the design studio and the sketches of the car at the bottom, but it's too much for the reader.  They care about what the car looks like, what it does and how it performs -- not where it's designed.  However, the Acura copywriters redeem themselves somewhat with the rest of the body copy, which is quite descriptive and makes me want to see the car in person.  Scores: Lexus 9, Acura 7


Round 4: Call to action

In the Lexus email, the copy works together with the call to action to get the reader excited about the technology inside.  The "Learn about all the innovation the HS 250h puts in arm's reach" works well with the big arrow graphic next to it.

Acura's call to action seems disconnected from the body copy.  The call to action wording is uninspired.  On the plus side, it's obvious that Acura wants the reader to take an action, thanks to the blue underlined text to signal a link.  But thumbs up to Acura to mention the ZDX Facebook group, because that's the sort of move that can build long-term excitement for the new model.

The Lexus call to action by itself is better here, but Acura's Facebook group mention narrows the gap.  Scores: Lexus 8, Acura 7



Summary:

Both companies made a few minor miscues, especially on the subject line.  But overall I must say that these two emails got the job done.  They were definitely better than the majority of email marketing I see.  Lexus takes the prize though, mostly thanks to its superior body copy and call to action.  Final score: Lexus 32, Acura 28.

Labor Day thoughts: morality, ethics, and online marketing

On a day that celebrates the American worker and the careers that we pursue, I think it's fitting to step back for a moment and look at the big picture about what we do for a living.

I first got started on this train of thought thanks to a post by Mark Hurst on the Good Experience blog.  Mark asks readers to ponder the value of the work you do -- not in a monetary sense, but in a "are you making a difference?" sort of way.  It's a great question many people don't examine much -- maybe because they're afraid they'll come to a conclusion that upsets them.

Here's the portion of Mark's blog post that really rattled me:

Julian Koenig, one of the most accomplished ad men of the 20th century (he was even referenced on "Mad Men"), was featured in a recent episode of my favorite radio show, "This American Life." Now at an age when he's looking back on his life and career, he had this to say about his profession:

Advertising is built on puffery, on, at heart, deception. I don't think anyone can go proudly into the next world with a career built on deception, no matter how well they do it.

That's quite a statement about your business, after a career that spans decades. And it speaks volumes about the methods and intent of advertising, that all-American activity.

Wow, what a powerful statement -- "advertising is built on deception at heart."  I'll bet Koenig would extend his statement idea to many digital marketing techniques too.  Just a few examples:

• Search engine optimization is an area of online marketing that many call into question on ethical grounds.  Critics would say the entire purpose of SEO is trying to "game" the search engines into showing your page at the top of the results.  They'd argue that whether or not you're using black hat techniques like keyword stuffing, mirror websites, cloaking, and link farms is irrelevant.  You're still trying to get your company to the top of the results by altering your website's content.
• In the B2B world especially, online lead generation is becoming a huge business.  In many cases it can be completely innocent -- but the line gets fuzzy.  When can a lead be turned over to a marketer?  Does the prospect need to explicitly express interest in the marketer's product?  What about so-called "soft leads" where the prospect took an action or matches a profile that's of interest to the marketer?
• Email marketing has its own set of ethical dilemmas.  Opt-in, double opt-in, confirmed opt-in, opt-out?  If the fine print of a company's privacy policy says it's allowed to do something with your information, are they really allowed to do it?  For example, the FTC recently ruled in a settlement with Sears that language buried deep within a privacy policy, even if completely accurate, may not be enough notice to consumers.

You could easily add dozens or hundreds of issues to this list, since advertising and marketing will always come under some sort of ethical scrutiny.  But my point here isn't to have an academic debate about the ethics of online marketing.  Instead I want to address the deeper questions Mark Hurst posed in his blog on behalf of online marketers. Can we make a difference?  Can we do good with our advertising and marketing careers?

A lot of people would start by saying you should do work you can be proud of.  Are you just cranking out what Mark Hurst calls "sorta-kinda deceptive ad copy," or do you truly believe in the products you sell?  For example, the late Billy Mays and his TV show PitchMen comes to mind.  In several episodes of PitchMen, Billy talked about how he wouldn't sell a product unless he believed in it passionately.  He did his own testing, trying the products himself or finding people who could give him their feedback on a product.  He only agreed to pitch the products he believed in.  (Of course after Billy's death, his passion for a different sort of product -- cocaine -- came to light in the autopsy.)  But very few people get to hand-pick the products they're advertising or marketing, like Billy Mays did.  So where does that leave us?

I've had several recent discussions about this topic with some very smart people.  One of them called my attention to a quote that really struck me.  The quote is from 4th century philosopher and theologian Augustine of Hippo, also known as St. Augustine.  He said: "Love God, and do what you will."  So how does that apply to this big-picture question about marketing?

• I think St. Augustine gives us a beautiful perspective of life in general.  Not everyone can have jobs that give you the warm and fuzzy "I make a fundamental difference in people's lives daily" sort of feeling.  If everyone was a pediatrician or a teacher or an attorney defending the environment, who would do the other stuff in our world?  Who would build roads, who would keep our money safe, who would serve us at restaurants, etc.?  So just because many online marketing jobs (or other jobs) don't make a fundamental difference in people's lives doesn't mean they're unworthy.
  
• Many people will look at the "do what you will" part of this quote, and take it as meaning they can do whatever they want, no matter the ethics.  "St. Augustine said I can do what I will, and I want to defraud people" is not a valid approach.  You need to look at the entire quote.
  
• St. Augustine is saying that if you love God first and foremost, anything you choose to do with your life will be a result of that love -- so you won't be able to choose a path in life that's wrong.  If you truly love God, you won't put yourself in an occupation that isn't morally or ethically ok.  You won't kill people or steal from them for a living.  And if, for example, your boss begins to ask you to do immoral or unethical things, you'll refuse to do them (and even quit your job if necessary).
• Even if you don't come from a religious background or have faith in God, you can still take a similar approach with your career.  Although it's not quite as powerful in my opinion, saying "Do good unto others, and do what you will" is still a great philosophy to guide you.
  

Most online marketers might not feel like their job makes a huge difference in people's lives every day.  But don't hang your head, my fellow marketers, because what you're doing for a living can be good.  Take St. Augustine's words to heart in everything you do, and you'll have a compass to guide you.