We’ve learned that one of the best ways to ensure robust ROI for any website or web app project is to first build an accurate profile of the “desired and likely user,” which we can then use throughout the process to guide key architectural, functional, and aesthetic decisions which would please this “desired and likely user”.  Shorthand, we call it the persona approach.  We didn’t invent it, but it’s really common sense when you think about it.  Say you’re building a house…for whom?  That’s the starting point.

You may care to read Steve Baty’s recent article on the UXmatters site about the building blocks of persona research.  Baty’s overview of the concept is particularly useful as a starting point:

Personas are archetypal representations of audience segments, or user types, which describe user characteristics that lead to different collections of needs and behaviors. We build up each archetype where the characteristics of users overlap.

According to Alan Cooper, author of About Face 3.0 with Robert Riemann and David Cronin, “The persona is a powerful, multipurpose design tool that helps overcome several problems that currently plague the development of digital products. Personas help designers:

• Determine what a product should do and how it should behave.
• Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers.
• Build consensus and commitment to the design.
• Measure the design’s effectiveness.
• Contribute to other product-related efforts such as marketing and sales plans.”

But where do we start looking for the data we need to build up these useful archetypes.

Baty suggests surveys, ethnographic research, interviews, contextual inquiries, and web analytics as the primary research tools to formulate a meaningful persona archetype.  Even for our tiniest projects, ENTERMEDIA tries to get as much information as possible upfront about your probable site or app user so that we can efficiently build assets they can and will use.  As Baty puts it:

One important thing to consider about these different research techniques is that each of them is good in certain ways and can provide insights into different characteristics of your audience. A common refrain among UX practitioners who are looking at personas is to draw upon as many different sources of data as you can. This helps you create a much richer representation of each different persona, but also helps you arrive at much stronger set of personas. Each data source has its own built-in bias, so combining data sets helps mitigate that bias.

You can read the full article here.

A great collection of interviews from the illuminating Jeffery Zeldman starting with the past, present, and future of web standards (and then on to the history of blogging, open source collaboration, and more).

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.

You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

The above, known as Gall’s Law, makes good sense doesn’t it?

Perhaps another way:  if you can get the simple part right, you’ve done something.  And not until then.

Came across a randomly thought provoking Golf Magazine feature on “How to Hit All Feel, No Think Shots,” wherein the pro player, Stewart Cink, gives us shanking and slicing amateurs five tips to to get out of our head and into our groove on the golf course.

Here’s the take home message:

“Your goal should be to become a feel player, where your only swing thought is where you want the ball to go.”

What about “all feel, no think” web design?

Sounds a little like other mantras we’ve got in the industry…”intuitive information architecture”…”the right look and feel”…”the user is in control”…”don’t make me think”.  Or the KISS method we were taught in high school journalism class and still applies for building websites:  “keep it simple, stupid.”

Don’t you love websites that really just do one thing and do it well? That resist the illogical urge to (try to) be all things at all times to all parties?  That refuse to overthink it?  We do.

Here are five rather small but highly effective websites ENTERMEDIA has built in the last few years that, in their own unique way, were simple by design, rapidly assembled, and ROI-driven.   In other words:  all feel, no think, and straight down the fairway.

Julio’s Cafe - hours of operation, their menu, and a map.  Julio’s is always delicious (nice people, too).

Nano Whitman - a musician’s website:  turned out really cool, even though it’s just facts.

Ambiente Wine Importing Company, Inc. - a sophisticated web presence/sortable wine list/sales contact directory.  Done.

Austin Rent Fence - temporary fence supplies for construction jobs or special events in Austin.  Need a quote?

Friends Without Benefits - testing the viability of a startup business idea:  the pitch explained, the feedback requested.

Recently we were referred a potential client requesting us to review his website and provide a cost estimate for attaining first page ranking for two specific keyword phrase queries in Google’s natural search results.  We thought it might be instructive to publish our email reply back, as an opportunity to introduce our general philosophy on SEO.

Hi —–,

We really appreciate ———- referring you to us, but we are not a pure play SEO firm that will give you a ‘guarantee’ about where you will end up. Be wary of a web design company that would!  However, we do know a lot about SEO and would be happy to consult with you on how to do-it-yourself or make a plan of action towards that goal.  It’s really not that hard and we advise that it’s best to learn and direct SEO strategy on your own rather than spend up to $2-3K a month for these services.  Others may disagree.

There are several different components to an effective SEO strategy.  Please allow us to explain a few concepts, and forgive us if you are already familiar with the following.  As a baseline, you need to attend to some basic structural elements throughout your website:

• Well-designed, hierarchical information architecture
• XML site map submitted to Google
• Title tags
• H1s
• Alt tags (photos and links)
• Meta-description
• Meta keywords
• Keyword density
• SEO friendly URLs

Take care of all that and you’ll doing well.  You can also do a lot with press releases:

• You can use press release distribution services to send newsworthy events out on the wire online, allowing online publishers and aggregators like Yahoo, Google, etc, to pick up your press release and publish it on their site. Just as important, you get a permanent page on this press release distribution site that links back to you.
• A word of caution:  you should hold yourself to a high standard and make sure that whatever you do is actually newsworthy. Some SEO firms believe in ‘creating news’ to be able to send out press releases all the time, but this approach seems unsavory to us.

Try to generate good inbound links:

• Target listing sites, partner companies, directory listings, blogs, etc, anyone that has a website that it would make sense to have your company mentioned with a link back to your site.
• Build quality links every month that will be there permanently linking back to your site. The more links you have and the longer they’ve been there the higher your page rank will go.

Be a blogger:

• Frame yourself as an expert within your industry
• Each blog post acts as yet another way for you to promote your agenda (more qualified traffic to your website). Many times your audience might find you through a search query that you would never predict, which is why having quality articles and posts on your site that discuss your industry using your industry language is very important.
• Open up the outgoing RSS feed on your blog post. With quality blog posts on your site you create the opportunity and possibility for others to want to display your content on their site. When others do that it creates backlinks to your site, which is what you want!

As an advanced technique, try a desirable ‘widget’ or freebie of some sort.  Be creative:

• If you offered something to your clients that they could put on their site, such as a ‘[-----] Certified Professional’ seal of some sort you could give them a reason to put something on their site that links back to a page on your site that explains that ‘seal of approval’. These are all free links from extremely relevant websites.
• What I mean by relevant is that it’s better when a website has related content to what you do. Having a link from ESPN to your site would be nice, but it wouldn’t necessarily be that powerful in the eyes of Google.

We can absolutely assist you in all these pursuits–we do these services all the time for clients– but we cannot guarantee a ranking because a) we focus on sites, not search, and b) our approach is to teach our clients to understand SEO for themselves first because it should be a long term goal.  It’s not hard to learn or implement basic SEO tactics.  All it takes is time and consistent effort.  We do understand that sometimes time can run in short supply, so If you’re interested in a referral we can recommend a very proficient SEO and PPC firm here in town that can do it all for you, but again, we believe that no outside party can do SEO work as well as you can do it for yourself.

Hope this is helpful to you, —–, please let us know if you have any questions or would like to schedule a time to talk.

Think you have an idea that’s the next Digg, Amazon, or Twitter, but don’t know how to get there from here?  Before you do anything else, call us. Then take solace and inspiration from a look back at those mega-sites in their formative days, courtesy of Ross Hill, who reminds us big websites start small.  Is there any other way?  Well, supposing you had millions upon millions in seed money lying around…you could start big and get even bigger.  In which case you should also contact ENTERMEDIA right now this very minute.

Digg cost $200 to build and launch, really?  Twitter was almost named FriendStalker?  Okay, not really.  Here’s the real story of Twitter’s very first steps.

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.

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.