Rod Motta - User Experience Visual Designer » Marketing

Identifying Users’ Trigger Words

Rod Motta — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:57:42 +0000

Jarred Spool wrote an interesting article, back in 2004, about the right trigger words for your user.

Do you want to find out what those words are? Start by asking them. Visiting your users in their natural environments is probably the best way to start.

Jarred’s team found that personas are a great way to communicate trigger words to everyone on the design team. A persona is a detailed description of a user the team wants to ensure is successful on the site. Listing, within the persona, the trigger words that person would use helps us, the designers, understand how the users’ own language will impact the final design.

According to Jarred, his team never conducted a usability test that didn’t yield tremendous insight into how users react to the links the team is using. It becomes obvious immediately when links are missing the clues the users need to go forward.

This powerful trio — field studies, personas, and usability testing — are a great way to start identifying the trigger words that work for your users.

Keeping best practices in mind when creating an optimal call to action

Rod Motta — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:57:18 +0000

The design of a call to action can be broken down into 4 simple elements — size, shape, color, and position. Each plays a vital part in determining how effective the call to action is in directing the user.

Don’t make your users work or think, or they’ll leave. It’s not that they aren’t smart, it’s that they want access to information quickly without spending unnecessary time searching for it.

Don’t overdo it with multiple, competing calls to action on every page. Decide what your primary target is and then define a clear objective per page. Your content should have answered, “What’s in it for me?” and your call to action should now answer, “What do I do now?”

Things to think about – designing the sign up experience

Rod Motta — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:28:09 +0000

These few tips on designing the sign up experience on your website are also the basic outline for Joshua Porter’s book designing for the social web. He has a lot of other very important info but I think these few really help the process of specifically thinking about the sign up experience:

Describe WHAT it is
Show HOW it works
Show the end result
Explain WHY
Give examples of WHO is using it
Use Testimonials or Case Studies
Get Specific
Give numbers

Adding “beautiful” enhancements to our designs

Rod Motta — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:35:08 +0000

We, designers, need to consider two things when adding “beautiful” enhancements to our designs.

Responsive and intuitive page elements
Branding and consistency of theme.

Focusing on these two things will give every pixel in a design a purpose and will contribute to the website’s overall usability. Sure, eye candy is important, but it isn’t everything, and that for a design to be truly beautiful, it has to be functional, have purpose and contribute in some way to the website’s intuitiveness, usefulness and branding. All of these things contribute to the overall effect of a design.

Stop and take time to find the direction.

Rod Motta — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 19:29:19 +0000

A Good Experience blog post by Mark Hurst has an amusing and insightful post on strategy as opposed to tactics:

Why is finding direction (or strategy) so rare, so difficult? One reason is that creating the strategy is different from execution.

You have to stop and take time to find the direction. You can’t run while you’re reading the map.

And this is the potential problem with popular methods such as:

• iterative design
• rapid prototyping
• agile development

…which are great and all, except when there’s no well-thought-out direction to go in.

So be forewarned – it’s hard to be a strategist. People prefer action. “Ready-fire-aim” sounds so much more exciting and appealing. “Do something!” they say – and it can be hard to sit down and say hey, let’s take at least a couple of days to think about who our customers are and talk to them about what they need.

Speaking with the customers refines and narrows the direction. After all you are fulfilling their needs.

Corporate Websites and Social Media

Rod Motta — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:29:03 +0000

As the dynamics of the Web 2.0 continue to evolve, we will see more and more consumers not only expecting, but demanding, to interact with companies and products. Corporate websites can sometimes be less than compelling… Perhaps a shift will come where corporate websites will become the forum for interaction rather than outside social networking sites…just a thought…

Do you see a shift at some point in the future where corporate websites will become arenas for that amount of dialog? Couldn’t it only be beneficial if that interaction was done on the corporate website? For example, rather than fans dialoguing on Facebook and commenting on the Wall there, do you see a point where a corporate website will have fan profiles and a corporate Wall? If so, do you think that would be detrimental to the company’s overall reach for exposure? It is interesting to see how social media forces the evolution of corporate behavior.

I personally love learning more about a company by hearing from its “fans” and consumers through social media rather than having a company website tell me who they are. On facebook, there are many ways to tell that story about your brand or company.

I noticed that VW ran a commercial with their facebook.com/vw website on the bottom right of that commercial. That was awesome!

Great Self Promotion

Rod Motta — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:01:21 +0000

The 37better Project, from the 37signals guys (archive from 2001 – some links may not work), has some really cool promotional things that they did for their company. It brought them tremendous exposure. The 37betters were linked up everywhere and discussed at length in all the right places.

Slow times are a perfect time to start putting together self promotional materials. What are the patterns in your business? How can you demonstrate competency beyond what everyone else is doing? Every designer has a portfolio of their designs, but how many have a portfolio of their minds?

Have you figured out how to market in the new age of conversation and community?

Rod Motta — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:42:16 +0000

The new marketing reality is all about relationships and according to the new marketing reality article, it’s impossible to create relationships from outside the circle.

Shouting your message to your audience in the traditional advertising way is still relevant but declining. Now it’s about getting involved in the conversation that your audience is having. Shouting is a one way conversation, talking is two-way and provides so much more value to your customers.

Your brand needs to join the party: be part of the conversation, listen, learn, contribute. Maybe even inspire and mobilize. But only if you’re there.

Is your brand in the new circle?