We want to share this usability story with you via the excellent Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering. It’s about a login form, a big ole e-commerce site, and a $300,000,000 usability “tweak”.

How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?

The problem wasn’t as much about the form’s layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product.

The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they’ll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?

User tests proved otherwise.  Here’s how they fixed it.

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

That’s a spicy meatball.  When it comes to path to purchase design, we at ENTERMEDIA advocate collecting as little information as necessary and never interfering with the end goal of completing a transaction.  People really don’t like filling out forms much, and associate this with signing up for marketing spam that clogs up their inbox (and wastes their time).  They will only put up with giving out personal information if they are confident they’ll be getting something good out of it…not just the purchased goods themselves but the convenience of buying online...and so you better make sure they find the transaction process on your e-commerce site easy and straightforward.  Don’t get in the way of what the user needs with what you think they want.

Our first location was a tiny space downtown on Congress Avenue. It served our basic needs for a while, but we needed something ENTERMEDIA could realistically grow in. Bryan heard about an office space above a grocery store in Hyde Park. We checked it out.

It was four times the size.  You could park your car for free.  Desks came with it.  It had a bathroom, a kitchenette…even a large conference room. The kicker was we could just barely afford it.  We knew we’d found our home, especially with Quack’s, Julio’s, Hyde Park Bar & Grill, Fresh Plus, Pronto and Asti Trattoria safely within reach to keep us and our clients well-caffeinated, well-fed and well-met. So we signed the lease, plugged in our gear and got to work. We had rent to pay, clients to talk to, websites to build. We could unpack later.

Three years went by.  We moved in more people, more desks, more machines, but never quite unpacked or fixed up the place like we intended.

Until this week, that is, when we began a long overdue office redesign project. The goal? To make our office more inviting and usable, and clear out the clutter. A designer was hired to give us an outsider’s perspective and plan of action for our budget. Then we got to work recycling old equipment, painting walls, replacing fixtures, hanging art and creating smarter work spaces. We can already see real progress, if not unmitigated success.  Sure it costs money and time but it’s also fun and good for morale…in other words, worth it.

What has been the most interesting realization is how similar our office remodeling project was to our client’s website redesign projects. It’s as if we were saying all the things our clients say when they finally decide they can’t tolerate their old site anymore. Like our redesign clients, our motivation was to take control…to move forward…to reinvest, realign and refine.

“It’s something we’ve been meaning to do for years.”
“It’s just way too cluttered.”
“We’ve changed a lot.”
“We’ve grown so much.”
“We want to modern up our look.”
“We want to project a more professional image.”
“We can afford to do it.”
“We can’t afford not to do it.”

That last one was the one we couldn’t deny anymore.  We agreed it was about our customers. What impression did they form when they came to our office? What did we hope they’d think?

It was time to redesign.

Smashing Magazine did a very nice showcase on designing search boxes last month. You might think the search box is a pretty straightforward affair.  Sometimes it is, but maybe it shouldn’t be considering many people prefer using the search box to drill down for specific information, particularly on content heavy sites.

The article sums up the need for intuitive search box design quite well:

In practice, websites tend to grow over time, adding new content and, more importantly for us, adding new navigation options, such as additional content sections. However, these new content islands do not necessarily fit the whole information architecture that was well-designed and thoroughly structured when the website was initially designed.

Enter the search box, and we begin to separate the wheat from the chaff:

The box must be clearly visible, quickly recognizable and easy to use. One may think that the search box doesn’t need a design; after all, it’s just two simple elements: an input field and submit button. How much harm could a poor design do? Well, there are a number of things that can go wrong; for instance, the text displayed in the input field may be hard to read, or the input field may be too short or too long…Some designers even prefer a minimalist solution and don’t provide a submit button at all: the “Return” key has to be used instead.

Consider it the designer’s challenge…how to avoid reinventing this wheel.

Building a website is thought of mainly as a design and development challenge. And it certainly is. That’s indisputably the bulk of our business…ninety percent or more of our leads come to us seeking “web design” or “web development”, or both. Now those broad terms can mean all kinds of things when we start asking our questions. Every project is different. But ultimately that’s where the demand is, and that’s what our business supplies: web design and web development.

However, at some point (earlier the better) the client, the designer, the developer, or (oops?) the end user will each have to stare down the words on the page, and evaluate the message they comprise (or the damage they cause). There is nowhere to hide when it comes to content. If it stinks, the user will give up on you. So you work on it too make sure you don’t waste your time and money on a fancy website that speaks gibberish to the customer.

Would you believe that very often, almost always, the content strategy task of building a website can be just as involved with and urgently important to your ROI as any aspect of design or development? If that is overstating the case, it’s not by much.

What is “content strategy”, you ask?

In this excellent article published recently on one of our favorite websites, A List Apart, Kristina Halverson writes eloquently on “the Discipline of Content Strategy”:

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place.

Otherwise, content strategy isn’t strategy at all: it’s just a glorified production line for content nobody really needs or wants. (See: your company’s CMS.)

Content strategy is also—surprise—a key deliverable for which the content strategist is responsible. Its development is necessarily preceded by a detailed audit and analysis of existing content—a critically important process that’s often glossed over or even skipped by project teams.

At its best, a content strategy defines:

• key themes and messages,
• recommended topics,
• content purpose (i.e., how content will bridge the space between audience needs and business requirements),
• content gap analysis,
• metadata frameworks and related content attributes,
• search engine optimization (SEO), and
• implications of strategic recommendations on content creation, publication, and governance.

There’s a lot more to digest in this very enlightening article, plus many others on the subject of writing for the web you should really check out.  We can’t recommend A List Apart enough if you really want to know what goes into building a better website.

We’ll have a few important questions to answer before we can accurately estimate a price for your project.

You can help us immensely in this early phase by fully communicating your ideas and preferences. Once we are certain we know what exactly it is you want, what we will be responsible for, and what contributions you’ll be available to provide along the way, we can move forward with deliberate speed.

For start-up or higher concept projects there will be just a few more questions to consider before we can act with confidence. Projects such as these require analysis to uncover the right approach that will achieve the desired result, and it is always time well spent to do so. We are happy to provide plenty of free advice if you want/need it.

Some clients come to us knowing full well the requisite effort and investment that goes into creating quality and long-term interactive assets such as websites, e-commerce stores, and flash presentations. Some come to us knowing exactly what they want and how to expedite the process of getting it done on time and on budget.

We also realize many of our clients are not as familiar with the design process and development costs associated with building a custom website. We’ll explain it all to you. It’s not exactly cheap, it’s not exactly expensive. It’s not overly complicated, but it’s not easy, either. Just as we allocate time at the outset to learn about your business and how you go about it, we hope you’ll be inclined to learn about our business and who we are, too. In many ways, this is one of the most rewarding aspects of our job: the creative working relationship we enjoy with clients along the way.

Please read our testimonials. We’ve turned around flash presentations in 1 week and entire websites in under a month. Alternatively, we’ve iterated on a single aspect of one project for several months. Often we’ve finished a project and later been asked to maintain an ongoing arrangement as the client continues to discover new potential in what we can do. The point we are making here is that there we are flexible in our service engagements and proud of the quality we deliver.

We encourage you to view our portfolio and see the services we’ve provided for past clients. All of these enduring and professional marketing assets began as cocktail napkin drawings, phone conversations, email strings, etc…

Do you have a potential project you would like to talk to us about? Let us know your project goals, target dates, and budget range and we’ll be happy to create a draft proposal just for you.

(note: this message used to be in our about section, but it’s probably better here.)

We’d like to explain how we go about pricing our projects and offer suggestions for getting the most out of your budget.

Pricing our work can be a challenge, because every project is different. We always quote the fairest price we can, based on the probable hours ENTERMEDIA will spend working directly on your project. We only charge for our time. You get all our ideas and collaborative synergy free, essentially. With the custom nature of the work we do, it’s best to keep it simple like that.

In our experience, focusing on goal accomplishment rather than running down a list of technical requirements is a better way to build an action plan around your budget. It allows all parties to explore creative approaches within this collaborative process to balance and accommodate your budget while still delivering the goods.

We make every effort to anticipate and inform you of the potential ‘gotchas’ in your project that might threaten to waste your time or money. Likewise, we brainstorm and recommend options for satisfying an objective through simpler means. If we can do more with less somewhere, resulting in a smaller bill for you, we will. If the original project scope has changed such that we will exceed our original time estimate, we’ll make that clear. For our part, we just want to be as cost-efficient a business as we can be, and keep our clients happy.

Finally, there is more than one way to put a dollar amount on the work we do. We design and develop towards long term value and scalability. How do you put a number on that? In the end, how much an accomplished goal is worth is relative to how completely it was accomplished and whether it was a worthy goal in the first place. We do know the prices we charge are extremely competitive compared to what other firms of our skill level and professionalism would insist on.

Bottom line: we build you the kind of assets that justify their labor cost many times over.