Welcome to our site

This question recently came up in a conversation about a credit union website. So my simple question, in reply, is this:

What if instead of looking for zany animations, a website that plays rock music, or any other of the latest hippest coolest fads…what if the “wow factor” was that your credit union’s site was accessible and easy to use?

If you’re designing a site, or managing the process, ask yourself why your users are coming to your site. Make that experience as close to perfection as possible. Businesses who pay a mind to solid user-experience – scannable content, attractive design that looks consistent across browsers, simple navigation, copywriting that sounds like a human – these are the Wow Factor.

And here’s another question that tends to come up in tandem with the former: “What do young people want in a web site?” As a young person, I can say this: We are impatient. We want what we want, and we want it now. We do not want to have to wade through all the fluff that you think is “neat” to get to the bottomline.

I hereby rename the traditional “Wow Factor” the “Neat Factor.” Because that’s what happens, users will say “oh that’s neat,” and then go back to wanting your site to just work right, please.

Media consumption and interaction are no longer linear. What in the world does that mean? I’ll tell you -

With the accessibility of on-demand media, it means that from the content-producer perspective, time is no longer a huge factor in consumption. To use our own Matt Dean as an example, it means that he doesn’t watch The Office on TV at 7:30 on Thursdays. He downloads it through iTunes and watches it whenever he pleases.

Meanwhile, consumers themselves are creating distribution channels through blogs, podcasts, bittorrent networks, text messages, YouTube, water-cooler conversations, the effects of links on search engine results, and a slew of other things I haven’t thought of. The majority of this consumer generated content is on-demand too.

Because of this, communications do not move along a specified path, they bounce around willy-nilly. Marketers, this is especially important to you because you can no longer think in terms of top-down distribution for your marketing. When you speak, it’s important to understand (and capitalize on) the channels that message will fly through.

We’ll call this “sideways marketing,” and it involves viewing and reaching consumers by recognizing their distribution channels, and making yourself accessible and deliverable through those.

A few examples

Campbell-Ewald’s Chief Contact Officer (cool title) Ed Dilworth (less cool name) gave a session at ad:tech entitled “Navigating the Current of Participatory Communication” that broke down how his firm was flipping clients on their sides.

For their clients, it means everything from setting up corporate blogs to asking consumers to create an ‘07 Super Bowl spot to setting up farmer’s markets throughout the U.S.

Separately, Jay-Z and Coca-Cola distributed a live performance video, embedded with promotions for Coke, through illegal file-sharing networks. Jay-Z’s stereotypically-named lawyer, Mike Guido, said this about the strategy:

“The concept here is making the peer-to-peer networks work for us. While peer-to-peer users are stealing the intellectual property, they are also the active music audience…this technology allows us to market back to them.”

On your own site

Because many search results point directly to internal site pages, the homepage is less significant. People are gaining sideways entry into your site, and your design should reflect this. Embrace this by:

• Tracking the search results that are pointing people to your site using tools like Mint.
• Tracking which internal pages are receiving the most traffic.
• Making sure your internal pages have calls to action and links that cross pollinate the rest of the site.
• Design a clear information architecture that is easily navigable even in the deepest reaches of your site.

Listen

Step one in all of this is to listen to and understand your consumer. How else can you understand how they’re communicating, where they’re creating content, and how they’re accessing and redistributing yours? Once you understand this, it’s simply a matter of working with them.

When we launched the new usecreditunion.org a few months back, I wrote a member poll question for the initial launch. It included an option meant to trick the poll respondent. I asked, “What do you like most about our new website?”

A whopping 34% of respondents selected “There’s more information.” However, there wasn’t any substantial amount of new information on the new site than on the old one. (That is, aside from having the content available En Espa?±ol along with a couple of short news articles about phishing and the new website itself.)

How can that be?!

The results

The poll received 140 votes (we only allowed each IP address to vote once to discourage repeat voting), and respondents could choose to answer “What do you like most about our new website?” with one of the following:

• It’s more modern (51 votes – 36%)
• It’s better organized (34 votes – 24%)
• There’s more information (47 votes – 34%)
• I recognize the faces and places (8 votes – 6%)

But if there wasn’t significantly more information, why did users think there was? Part of the answer lies in Information Architecture (IA), concisely defined on Wikipedia as the art and science of structuring knowledge (technically data) and defining user interactions.

I watched Casablanca last night for the umpteenth time. Remember the scene where Ilsa pleads to Rick, “You’ll have to do the thinking for both of us.” That’s a great way to sum up what an Information Architect does; well-designed IA makes a user not have to think about what he’s doing on a website.

A great site is intuitive enough for users to go correctly with their instincts about where information will reside before a link is clicked. That’s why the USE site’s users thought there was more information – it’s organized more intuitively. We did the thinking for them when we rebuilt the site. (Just try the Wayback Machine for a before-and-after view of the site.)

On another subject …

Matt just showed me the latest feature of our Content Management System (used by our clients to make changes to their sites) – versioning! Holy moly! Now a page’s content can be restored to earlier versions after changes are made. That’s huge.