Don’t get fooled again by following some of these enlightening glimpses into how web sites try to trick you into getting you signed up for a trial or buying a product from them.

We’ve all experienced it at some point; the sneaking suspicion that those we’ve chosen to trust may not be entirely worthy.

Here’s some pointers to how sites get your information based on a number of emotional and social factors:

SLOTH

Users are lazy. They follow the path of least resistance. When these paths are trampled through ornamental flower borders (”Desire lines”) then you know the flowers were planted in the wrong place.

It’s your job to make your desired outcome follow the path of least resistance.

PRIDE

The desire to be more important or attractive than others – and in this day and age, also the desire not to look stupid. Think fear.

Think about the ability to manipulate people based on their fear of being less important, less attractive, or looking stupid. Easy.

• Linkedin needs your data in order for the site to be useful. So they use language like “your profile is 30% complete” (oh dear!) and offer to search your contacts list for other linkedin members. If you think this is silly, explain the existance of sites such as toplinked.com, which provide a ranked list of the most linked-in individuals on the service.
• Fear of looking stupid leads users to trust sites which display security certifications more than those which do not. However, Ben Edelman discovered that the sites displaying security certifications are actually significantly less trustworthy than those which forego certification. Way to go, evil sites!
• Southwest Airlines have a boarding process which rewards early checkin and being at the gate on time – you don’t get an assigned seat, you get an assigned boarding order (and then choose your own seat). Fear of having the worst seat on the plane means that people arrive at the gate early. Southwest is the only profitable US airline at the moment.

ENVY

An uncontrollable urge to possess something that someone else has, which you do not. The trick is in making people want the thing in the first place.

• Apple. Smaller, lighter, smoother, sexier than the competition, so you just have to have one.
• Airline mileage rewards – you too can be “Elite” and get that extra five inches of legroom if you just slug it out in cattle class for another fifteen trips…
• youvebeenleftbehind.com – because, when the rapture comes, you want to be even more smug than you are now

GREED

All we have to do is give people the reasons, and greed is motivation enough for them to carry through.

Amazon (among many other e-commerce sites) shows you a discounted price and calculates for you how much you save. They offer free shipping if you just slip one more thing into your cart. You can have it sent to you with a single click (no worrying about credit card numbers or any other stressful stuff). If there aren’t enough justifications right there, you can add it to your wish list for later.

The move from cheap to free is much bigger than the move from expensive to cheap, so making something about the transaction free (shipping in the example above) removes any remnants of rational thought from the shopper’s mind.

Another way to encourage greed is to reset people’s expectations. We seek prices coherent with what we know, but of course those benchmark prices are only arbitrary. If you can succeed in resetting users’ benchmark values, you can charge what you want. Ways to do this include putting your product in a different category from those which already have a benchmark price, redefining a unit of measurement, or changing a definition so that an increased price is justified (for instance biodiesel over regular diesel).

LUST

Exessive thoughts or desires – often of a sexual nature. Well, of course sex sells (as long as it isn’t too blatant), but how else can we introduce lust?

Examples:

• Mini, on their USA site have a very slick and quite well implemented configurator that lets you design your own car. In the cold light of day, you’d never consider paying $150 for little wing mirror covers that have a union jack image on them. But once you start playing with the site, that and many other options just look right on the car, so you add them anyway. Because you are unlikely to have a good anchor point for these costs (see greed), and because they are relatively insignificant compared to the overall cost, lust can be an easy sell.
• We all want to be loved. On May 4th, 2000 an e-mail purporting to be from one of our friends told us that yes, in fact, they did love us. That prompted enough people to open the attachment (10% of all computers attached to the Internet) that $5.5 billion of damage was caused.

Anything that you can do to make people feel loved will endear them to you, and make them more prepared to do things for you.

WRATH

Uncontrolled feelings of hate or anger. How many times has that happened to you online? Your job is to channel your users’ feelings, control them, and bend them to your advantage.

Don’t label required fields on your registration form. Instead, return an error when people don’t fill one in. Now, they’ll be angry but in order to get past the form, they will be more likely to fill in all the fields!

Normally, social structures prevent people from really demonstrating hate and anger. Anonymity and a feeling of belonging are both states which encourage behavior that individuals wouldn’t normally engage in. If you can create an anonymous group of individuals with similar interests, just sit back and watch the flame wars start!

GLUTTONY

Your users’ brains have consumed so many web pages that now they ignore most of the content and make assumptions.

Unfortunately that now means that they ignore advertisements. In response, we have to place ads front and center, make them blend in with the site, and justify it to ourselves and our visitors by saying that as the ads are highly relevant, they are obviously improving the usability of the site.

Pop-up windows are now either blocked by browsers or ignored by users more often than we’d like (although a North Carolina State University study suggests you can fool your users 63% of the time). The answer is to repurpose a different control type to serve our ad revenue ends. Let’s see – oh yes, the hyperlink would be a good one: ubiquitous, familiar, and users are already trained to hover and click on them. Let’s turn those into advertisements!

You don’t have to be evil

It’s easy to shake an accusing finger at these and other sites who deliberately lead visitors into unintended actions. But waiting for them to change their ways isn’t the answer. As long as the rewards of this approach are greater than the downside (customer complaints, blog rants, etc.), they’ll keep right on down the same path.

What can we do about making bad usability good? By following these steps:

• Complain to the company, often and annoyingly.
• Warn and educate everyone you know about tactics like this.
• If you think that’s a friend of yours on twitter, don’t be so sure.
• If you get a chance to invest online, think twice.
• Don’t buy anything from an inbound phone call.
• That email you sent in confidence… probably won’t be read that way. And that photo, yes, it’s going to show up in the digital world where you least want to see it…
• Avoid companies that consistently use these tactics, and spread the word about them.
• On the flip side, reward companies who treat visitors with respect. Visit them, buy from them, and spread the word about them.
• Help those who are less internet-savvy than yourself through the minefields.

These notes are from the Usability Week conference we recently attended by the Norman Nielsen Group.

The theme for the event focused on creative approaches for design:
The main ways for the speakers we by ‘changing your perspectives’ and ‘asking and collaborating with other people for ideas’.

Inspiration vs duplication – Often leads to designs being directly copied as its easier, but leads to abuse. How do we go about doing the right thing? By looking for elements that solve problems in intersting ways.

Inspiration. Takes practice and is never ending process. Lead to wealth of ideas that you can apply to web design

Future design trends:

• Softer colours – wordpress org
• Use of video – Ms Dewey
• Horizontal vs Vertical Scrolling – ie. Personal portfolio site site where you can push creativity

User experience vs brand identity – ‘The iceberg experience’

User Experience and successful websites are built upon the following values: Visual 10%, Interaction 90%.

• Top part of iceberg is amazing but underneath is terrible.
• Like code on some web pages. The main and rewarding part of experience is when they start interacting with the site.
• Looks do count but if not thought well the user can be left with shallow experience.
• Create good cohesive experiences, by paying more attention to whats underneath.

A great designer creates the tools to help a user achieve a task they need to accomplish. A user will validate the success of the designers work or design.

Inspired design: a usable design need not be a Safe design (back to horizontal scrolling? , as this is the way the limits of design can be pushed further online.

Hot Design Tips – from various speakers

• Make connections. Show your name, your company. Develop relationships. Build trust. – join communities
• Trust, passionate users, ambassadors, Enthisiasm – Be human
• Desire paths, don’t try to predict things – get the site out the door and see how people use it.
• Adapt to scale – its a great problem to have. Solve problems that you didn’t worry about before
• Subtraction is iteration too.
• Realign don’t redesign – users will lose their pathways if you remove/change important functions.
• Don’t panic – listen and learn carefully before reacting to latest release.

References to sites and books mentioned by the speakers:

• Society of Digital Agencies – Created best practices for our service industry.
• Ideas that spread are more likely to suceed. These are idea viruses. Best ones are by friends and recommendations. Purple Cow
• Designing for Interaction – New Riders
• Ways of saying hello – Business card book
• Juxtapoz.com
• Seedconference
• Revyyer.com
• Abriefmessage.com
• Shauninman.com
• Creativebits.org

http://video.sxsw.com/2008/mov/ Movie – Quicktime

http://video.sxsw.com/2008/swf/ Flash – swf

http://video.sxsw.com/2008/mp4hi/ Audio – MP4

Probably the most important one being “You have less than 5 seconds to catch your customers attention.” If the design or interface of the web site or application confuses you will repeatedly lose valuable customers.

A company’s homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website’s business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment..

We use an article by Jakob Nielsen that was written back in 2002. It is very easy in the Web 2.0 bubble to over-complicate things, these points bring things back to basics and enhance your website’s business value at the same time.

To increase the usability of your website we advise the following easy steps to take:

1. Include a strapline or one sentence tagline
2. Write a window title containing keywords from the pages content, good for the search engines
3. Group similar content into meaningful categories
4. Include a search box, another tool for people who may prefer navigating to content this way
5. Emphasize the sites main tasks
6. Useful meaningful graphics, something that is associated with the content
7. Provide new and fresh content directly on your homepage
8. Don’t overcomplicate ‘format critical’ content, especially navigation
9. Begin link names with the most important keywords, don’t forget these are ‘action items’

These aspects can be continually reviewed by analysing site and visitor statistics. We can find which are the most popular pages, as well as the least popular, exit pages.

Of course, like search engine optimisation, the content should not be forgotten. It is an ongoing process, and the difference in using professionally copywritten content should not be underestimated.

Reference: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020512.html

Vodafone: 191 million customer worldwide, and member of w3c mobile working group

Do users want the web on their mobile?

The answer is yes, due to:

1. The largest uptake of mobile web content in africa and developing countries
2. Creation of worldwide mobile web initiative

Leading to the mobile web best practices – which focus on the following:

1. designing for one web
2. rely on web standards
3. stay away from known hazards
4. be cautious of device implications
5. optimise navigation
6. check graphics and colors
7. keep it small (file size)
8. use the network sparingly
9. help and guide user input
10. think of users on the go > stripped down version, interaction design

These are the current best practice details for mobile content creation.

Mobile web 2.0

1. transition of mobile apps to an internet model mobile web and connected apps
2. user choice
3. leverage open standards
4. more interactive mobile apps running in the browsers

Further resources
www.w3c.org/2005/mwi/bpwg/techs > wiki with info about the mobile web
dev.mobi > venture between nokia, aol and microsoft > developer resources and forum

There are many organizations and online resources that offer Website owners and authors guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including Web Content Access Guidelines that are helpful for Website owners and authors. Broad adherence to these guidelines is one way of ensuring that sites are universally accessible.

Enter Google labs Accessible Search

http://labs.google.com/accessible/

Called the Google Accessible Search, the search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search and finds the most relevant results as measured by Google’s search algorithms, but also sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. So when users search from the site, they’ll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully – pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

We look forward to this developing and making the web more accessible. And the Co-op developing into making algorithms more favourable toward accessible web sites, like the ones we make at Callender Creates.