Inner Circle Media

If you have a website or you sell your own software, you are probably familiar with the terms “usability testing” or “user testing.” But there’s a good chance that you haven’t embarked on testing your website or software in a meaningful way with actual users because user testing seems like such a complex and overwhelming task.

When you think about doing user testing, do you cringe? Do you imagine all the hours and effort, it would take to design the test? And then you’d have to carry out the test with so many participants who will likely feel uncomfortable about performing the test in front of you! Plus, then you’d have to spend time compiling the results and trying to draw conclusions about what to change on the site or software.

And oh gosh, what about all the time it will take to find the right software? And how much does that software cost anyway?

So many questions and worries! Well fret no longer – we assure you, it is not Rocket Surgery!

In his book “Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems,” Steve Krug calms the fears of all those who are intimidated by user testing. If you aren’t much into reading or just need a quick overview to convince you it’s worthwhile, here you go. Krug’s 6 “maxims” included in his book are…

1. “A morning a month, that’s all we ask.” User testing doesn’t have to take up oodles of time. There is no need to test with 10 people and then spend an entire day analyzing the results of those tests and deciding what you’re going to change. In one single morning you can do 3 user tests and then debrief with your team over lunch. Don’t spend more time that you actually have to!

2. “Start earlier than you think makes sense.” You don’t have to wait until the website is completely finished to start testing. In fact, it’s best to start testing in the beginning design stages because it’s often easier to make changes then. If users don’t respond well to the use of hot pink as your background color, it’s good to know sooner rather than later because you can more easily change a Photoshop file than a coded website. Those initial design tests can be ever easier with resources such as Krug’s “Five Second Test.”

3. “Recruit loosely and grade on a curve.” Don’t get so caught up with finding the “right” users to test your site or designs. Be flexible on the type of user you’re recruiting. If your target audience is familiar with technical terms required for understanding some of the content on your site, but a test participant doesn’t know that jargon, it’s okay. You can note that the test subject doesn’t understand some of the words, but you don’t have to change all of the terminology. You are just making sure that the user can navigate the site, understands where to go and what to do.

4. “Make it a spectator sport.” You should not be doing all of this alone! Get others in your organization involved. Invite anyone and everyone in your organization to be observers for the test. The more eyes watching what users are doing, the more diverse and comprehensive your observations will be. The requirements for participation as an observer are as follows: attend all user tests, attend the debrief meeting, enjoy the snacks in the observation room during the test and submit your lunch order for the debrief meeting in a timely fashion. That doesn’t sound so bad, right?!

5. “Focus ruthlessly on a small number of the most important problems.” The odds are that your users are going to be perturbed by lots of different things on the website, but the truth is, you can’t fix everything. So, focus on fixing the top 3 most important items, as decided on at the debrief meeting. These things should give you the most bang for your buck in improvements, and also not take up the most time. After you make those 3 most important improvements, you can test the site again to see if any other big complaints come up.

6. “When fixing problems, always do the least you can do.” Make the smallest change possible that will make a difference in the user experience. If a user was having trouble spotting the “Sign up for our e-newsletter” button, you don’t necessarily have to move the button and recode the template. Instead, change the color, add a graphic, and/or make the font larger. Often little changes make a huge difference.

So there you have it, a quick and easy overview of User Testing and the book “Rocket Surgery Made Easy”. User testing will help you as a web designer/developer/ project manager create better websites for clients. And if you’re a potential client thinking about a new website project, talk with your project manager about a possible user test or two. It will only help create a better website for you. Now… get to testing!

Search engine optimization, personalized web content, customer-focused branding, listening to the “voice of the customer” through social media – these are all buzz words and hot topics in today’s world of marketing.  Your business is living in a time where new ideas, strategies, features, and technologies are being developed each and every day. It’s so hard to keep up with all the changes without getting bogged down or overwhelmed. That’s where your marketing firm can help!  When choosing a marketing company make sure these items are on your check list:

1. Collaboration is key.  When you start a new project with a marketing firm, you don’t want them throwing your goals and ideas out the window and going in a completely different direction without considering your own plans.  Make sure your chosen firm listens well, is knowledgeable, and offers suggestions and solutions without overriding your needs.  
2. Project management means good communication.  When we say “project management,” we’re not talking about setting a timeline and getting back to you when our part is finished.  Ideally, your project manager should feel more like a coach and teacher. When a project is managed properly, it means your marketing team works with you side by side during each step of the process.  Don’t expect them to hold your hand the whole time, but do expect that they will answer questions promptly, tell you where the project stands, and make sure you know what needs to be done next to keep the whole project on track. 
3. Let us be your trusted guide.  Look for a marketing team that is confident, helps you understand everything, and doesn’t talk down to you.  They should exude a feeling of “Yep, we know what we’re doing.” Realize that it’s impossible that they know everything, but they should know the right questions to ask and where to go for answers.  As the Brits like to say, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Their work should speak for itself – whether the end product is a website, identity materials, SEO or social media recommendations.
4. Make sure they “teach you to fish.” Don’t let your marketing firm hand you a spanking new website without teaching you about what to do with it after launch. The great thing about your digital marketing initiatives is they can CHANGE all the time. Look for a marketing firm that will teach you about search engine optimization, Google Analytics, and content management. Then you’ll have the knowledge to improve your marketing materials and keep bringing in the big fish.
5. Something your target audience LOVES:  Ultimately, you are paying for an SEO strategy, a new website, or new branding materials that will boost contact and communication with your target market. Hopefully, all this communication will lead to happy customers – existing and new.  Your marketing efforts should help customers relate to you in an emotional way that encourages them to trust you. Ask customers for feedback, and make adjustments based on their needs.  When your customers LOVE your marketing efforts, you can see and feel the LOVE in new sales and positive feedback.  And you gotta love that!

Here’s a great article for professional services companies – especially law and accounting firms – Pitching Your Law Firm: Skip the Hard Sell.

Marketers and advertising experts were trained to help their clients find their Unique Selling Proposition, but this can be difficult when all law firms, all accounting firms, and all consulting firms seem to do the same thing.

Hard sells like “”Our thoughts are assembled faster than anybody else’s in the profession!” don’t work for law firms. Nor do empty claims like “We listen” or “We are honest.” In fact, making statements like those can cause folks to ask “Are they really that honest if they have to tell me they’re honest?!”

Rather than using a hard sell, law/accounting/consulting firms can do a few things in their marketing messages to set themselves apart in meaningful ways…

1. You can state the facts – “Every client’s account is managed by a partner, no matter how small the account.”

2. You can describe specific problems and explain how you fix them – “The strategies we design for controlling the flow clients’ regulatory compliance have increased their productivity by 35%.”

3. You can show who the actual experts are. For example, you could run an ad with a photo of a partner in your firm, identify her by name and say, “She has been counseling clients on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance since the day the law was passed.”

In these ways, you’ll do more showing and less telling/bragging, and your target audience members will actually begin to feel that they can trust you because you are capable, creative, thorough, helpful, and great listeners (but you never actually used any of those words in your copy).

Read the entire article on RainToday.com at - Pitching Your Law Firm: Skip the Hard Sell.

Here’s a great post (from Webmaster Tips) about the top 10 reasons why you should seriously be considering Drupal for your SEO-based websites.

1. Advanced URL Control — Unlike WordPress, Drupal gives you precise control over URL structure. Each item of content in Drupal (called a node) can be given a custom URL (called a URL alias). In WordPress you are generally limited to one type of permalink URL for all posts. You can override the “post slug”, but it’s much less precise than Drupal’s URL aliases. You can also automate custom URL structures for each different content type with the Pathauto Module. The Global Redirect Module will automatically 301 redirect the internal Drupal URL to the custom URL alias. Unlike many other content management systems, Drupal’s content pages have nice clean URLs.
2. Custom Content Types and Views — You can use the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views Modules to create new content types and create advanced custom views for them without writing any code. A few examples of “content types” are “blog posts”, “news stories”, “forum posts”, “tutorials”, “classified ads”, “podcasts”. You can create as many custom content types as you would like and display them in many different ways. Most content management systems would require writing code to accomplish these tasks, but there is no programming knowledge required to do them in Drupal. Here is a quick & basic intro to Views called How To Build Flickr in Drupal.
3. Revision Control — You can configure Drupal to save a new version of your pages every time they are editing. That means that you can go back to view or revert old revisions if you want.
4. Taxonomy — Drupal has a powerful taxonomy (category) system that allows you to organize and tag content. Each Drupal “vocabulary” (set of categories) can be limited to certain content types. For example, you could have blog contents that allowed free tagging (similar to WordPress categories), while your news section might have a different vocabulary (set of categories) that could only be selected from an existing list of categories. You can also have hierarchical categories, with single or multiple parent categories. Drupal’s advanced taxonomy features, combined with CCK and Views, allows you to easily target all of those long-tail keywords that you researched in Wordtracker.
5. User Management — Drupal was designed for community-based Web sites and has strong user role and access control functionality. You can create as many custom user roles with custom access levels as you need. For example you could create the following roles, each with different levels of access to your features: “anonymous visitor”, “authenticated user”, “moderator”, “editor”, “webmaster”, “admin”. You can keep the advanced user management features (like multiple blogs) turned off if you don’t want them, enabling them later if your site grows to a point where you would like to add more community features.
6. Page Titles and Meta Tags — Drupal’s Page Title Module gives you custom control of your HTML <title> elements, while the Meta Tags Module gives you control over your pages’ individual meta description tags. This is difficult in some content management systems, but it’s easy with Drupal.
7. Excellent Documentation — Documentation includes the official handbooks, the massive API Reference, numerous tutorials, blogs, videos, and podcasts, and the excellent new book Pro Drupal Development. There is even a Drupal Dojo community where you can learn how to become a Drupal ninja.
8. PHP Template — Drupal uses the PHP Template theme engine by default. Theming in Drupal is easier than theming in WordPress and doesn’t necessarily require any PHP knowledge. Drupal’s Theme Developer Guide is a great resource. I also recommend reading Chapter 8 in Pro Drupal Development.
9. Drupal Cookbooks — If you want a feature that is not built into Drupal by default, chances are that someone has already written a code snippet for it and posted it in the code snippets section of Drupal.org.
10. Large and Friendly Community — With so many major sites using Drupal, it’s not going away soon. For an idea of the size of the developer community, take a look at the long list of community-contributed modules. The Drupal forum is highly active and are a great place to get your Drupal questions answered. You can also find Drupal support on IRC chat on channels #drupal-support and #drupal-dojo. To meet other Drupal users in your area, visit Drupal Groups.

There are other open-source alternatives to Drupal, but here are a few reasons why I think that Drupal is better:

• Joomla – It’s not as search engine friendly out of the box as Drupal.
• Plone – It”s powerful, but Plone is written in Python and has certain server requirements. It is not as easy to extend as Drupal, and it’s harder to find people who know Python than who know PHP. Plone runs on the powerful, but complex, Zope 2.
• WordPress – WordPress is excellent, but if you need something more heavy-duty or are building a site that you might want to extend in the future you should be considering Drupal.

Many marketing and advertising agencies talk about “integrated marketing communications” – which may sound like promotional jargon to folks who aren’t marketing gurus, so let’s clear up any confusion. Integrated marketing means that your marketing message and the tools used to deliver the message are fully considered, planned, and integrated, so the “campaign” or promotion rolls out in a comprehensive and cohesive manner.

Toyota‘s marketing efforts for the Sienna (their van) are the perfect example of integrated marketing. For years, Toyota ran rather dull ads that focused on the product (the van) and how customers thought the product was so great. Boring. Working with the ad agency of Saatchi & Saatchi, Toyota decided to take a new approach where the van’s features were no longer the focus. Instead, Toyota played up the positive effect the van had on the family who bought it.  Toyota released fun, goofy ads featuring two parents and two kids who use the van everyday. These were no ordinary ads – these parents were big dorks who played up the perils and rewards of parenthood while also promoting the trusted machine that transports their family to games, parks, school and work.

If you haven’t seen the ads, go see them NOW – http://www.youtube.com/sienna

Why did the ads work so well?

Let’s remember – in early 2010 Toyota had a global recall and a horrific PR nightmare. If they’d run ads, that said, “Trust us. We worked through our problems, and now our cars are safe again. Please buy them.” consumers would have said, “No way.”

Instead Toyota took the “showing is better than just telling” approach. Toyota showed a  family using the van, having fun, and being happy. And they used just the right amount of humor. Let’s face it – when you make someone laugh, they are thankful and they begin to trust you.

Clearly the integrated campaign was well planned and implemented. TV ads directed viewers to Toyota’s YouTube channel. The ads went viral and were shared by millions of people around the world. In fact, more than 5.7 million page views later, it seems Toyota’s campaign worked brilliantly. Moreover, Toyota created original online content to complement its TV ads. The “Swagger Wagon” music video was entirely ingenious (the parents perform a witty hip-hop song about their van), full of dorky goodness, and just what Toyota needed to do to help car buyers once again trust and bond with the company. What a great way to repair the company’s reputation.

Debra Power and I received some great coverage in Concentrate regarding the upcoming WXW event (all-day fun fest on May 21st!). For information, click here. We also were asked to provide our thoughts on a multitude of questions about the business climate for women and entrepreneurs in Washtenaw County as well as the State of Michigan.

Here’s a link to the full article.

And here’s a super duper photo of Debra and I with our fine Governor.

Go Women in Business, Go!

Last week one of our websites (Saint Joseph Academy) won an award. Yahoo!

For 9 years, the Troy Chamber of Commerce has held its Helen eWards for Web Excellence.

Does your website look a bit rusty? Is it time for a fresh new site design? Often prospective clients come to us with websites that were built at the turn of the century (the 21st century that is), and they want to get a head start on planning for their new and improved site. If you are revved up to revamp your old, stagnant website, you can get a jump on the process by considering the following questions before you even meet with a web development company:

GOALS:

• What are the high level business goals for your company or organization?
• What are the goals for the new web site?
• How are those goals different from your previous website?
• How will you measure success of the new web site?

AUDIENCE & MESSAGE:

• Who is the primary audience? Secondary targets?
• What will visitors do on the site? Consider age, education level, gender, tech savvinesss, and any other visitor attributes that might help you understand how they’ll use your site.
• Please sum up your customer’s/audience’s needs and concerns in a sentence.
• What are your key marketing and communications messages?
• What does your audience think you do/are? What do you want them to think?

ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN:

• Will the new site’s architecture differ from that of the current site?
• Have you established hierarchy and labeling for navigation for new site? (Global navigation/main buttons, local navigation/subsections, etc.)
• Has style guide been approved by your company? (i.e., colors, fonts, etc.)
• What is the desired site attitude/look and feel?
• What sites inspire you? What do you find appealing about these sites?
• Who are your competitors (or comparable organizations)?
  

Recently I spent an hour in a room with representatives from five other Ann Arbor web design/development companies. We’re all bidding on a job with the university, and we attended an informational session where we asked questions and the prospective client provided answers. These types of meetings are fun for two reasons – you get to actually talk to the prospect AND you get to size up your competitors.

A little background on the project – the proposed site is modest in size. The most functionally complex site elements are a calendar and a keyword search. The client asked for wireframes, designs, and coded templates. They will develop a site diagram; they will build out and maintain the site.

It’s also important to note that the person answering our questions was a graphic designer by training. She is not a webbie. She doesn’t know much about information architecture, coding, user testing, or search engine marketing; she knows nothing about programming, frameworks, servers, etc. She just wants someone to design and code templates for her new site. That’s it. Fortunately, this thoughtful woman wanted to gather all of the bidders together to help us think about her project and decide if we want to bid. She kindly tried to answer our questions and was as open as she could be about the project.

After the meeting, I assessed the situation and here’s what I learned about my competitors: They really want to show what they know. More specifically, they wanted to tell the prospective client (and everyone else present) that they are web development experts. They did this by grilling the prospect about details of the project. They asked things like –

• “Would you like us to assure compliance to usability heuristics?”
• “Do you plan to do the requirements engineering?”
• “Don’t you think we should also develop landing pages for your online marketing campaigns?”
• “Will you add user behavior notes to your home and subpage wireframes?”

Now I’m not saying these are necessarily bad questions, but they probably aren’t appropriate questions for a not-so-web-savvy graphic designer. After many of these questions, the poor woman answered by saying, “Honestly, I have no idea what you just asked me.” I often found myself trying to translate the question into common language, so she could at least attempt an answer.

When I had the chance, I asked some questions that probably seemed rather simple to everyone in the room. I asked – Why do you want to build a new website? How will the new site help your organization? What role will you play with the new site? Will you be leading the project on your side? What matters most to you about this project?

No, these questions do not demonstrate my web expertise, nor do they highlight the capabilities of my company. But hopefully they do show that I want to understand the reasons for the new site AND I care about the prospect’s personal thoughts and concerns. Because we were in a room full of people, I doubt that the prospect felt any special connection with me, but I can tell you this – she didn’t have trouble deciphering or answering my questions. And at the end of the meeting, she called me by name.

Inner Circle Media has been lauded as a commuter-friendly business by the getDowntown program, which is committed to promoting alternative transportation options. Click here to read more about our sweet award.

There are so many people we’d like to thank: our parents, who taught us how to walk, ride the bus, and drive; our family members for supporting our carpooling efforts. Oh wait, there’s the music telling us to wrap it up…