The post is a detailed look at the rise of “App-vertising,” a new name for an emerging mix of branded mobile applications and in-application advertising, that is making many rethink the future of mobile advertising. On the branded apps side, I look at UNIQLO, adidas, Chanel and Audi for best in-class examples. On the in-app advertising side I talk about Levis/Dockers and Burger King.

You can read the full post here.

Of course there’s also a ton of research that I couldn’t fit into the post, among them some of the emerging players:

• Medialets - Medialets is one of the biggest movers in the space whom Razorfish worked with for the “shakeable” Docker’s ad.
• Admob — Admob is driving a ton of display advertising in mobile.
• Pinchmedia — Pinchmedia just authored an interesting look at app usage and focuses exclusively on the iPhone.
• Greystripe — The platform/agency responsible for the Burger King ad
• Artificial Life — Who does some of the best mobile games for iPhones, Android, etc.
• Projector — The Japanese agency responsible for the Uniqlo work.

And, finally, the “Appstore Secrets” report by Pinch Media:

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We can continue the conversation on Twitter and in the comments below. You can follow me here:

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The new Kindle DX “wireless reading device” is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Features include 9.7″ diagonal e-ink display, a PDF reader, and the capacity to store 3500 books.

http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/files/articles/kindle.jpg

iPhone

T-Mobile offers iPhone support for unlocked phones. Related: iPhone unlocking brigade goes commercial. And from Gizmodo: how iPhone 3.0 will feel different. Highlights include cut and paste, in-app transactions.

Android

“Eyes-free” shell for Android. Likely beneficiaries: drivers and the visually impaired. Also: a sneak-peak at T-mobile’s G1 v2 aka Morrison.

Networks
Verizon spent $5 billion last year on wireless spectrum auctioned off by the FCC here are some details on the upcoming 4G network, which thanks to Google will be open to all devices and networks. More information on what “open” actually means here.

Ubiquitous banking and mobile wallets
A new gold rush in mobile? Mobile payments via mobile-enabled cloud transactions.

The Facebook Marketing Breakfast will bring together Facebook’s brand solutions team, leading experts from the space, and successful clients to share information on what’s worked and best practices. The breakfast is being held at the San Francisco offices of Razorfish, host sponsor for the event.

At the Facebook Marketing Breakfast, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of products and opportunities in the Facebook ecosystem, including brand, performance, and application solutions, engage with companies that have successfully seen growth in customer awareness and bottom-line sales, and learn what tactics to avoid along the way.

So far, confirmed speakers for the event include:

• Kevin Barenblat, CEO, Context Optional
• Katherine Bateman, VP Marketing, Buddy Media
• Michael Brito, Social Media Strategist, Intel
• Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Brand Product Marketing, Facebook
• Alyson Hyder, VP Digital Media, Razorfish
• Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst: Social Computing, Forrester
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy & Business Development, Slide
• Justin Smith, Editor, Inside Facebook

Space is very limited, so register today to ensure your spot at the event. Look forward to seeing you there!

Schedule

8:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m.

• Breakfast and Registration

9:00 a.m. - 9:15 a.m.

• Welcome & Opening by Justin Smith, Editor, Inside Facebook, and Garrick Schmitt, Group Vice President, Razorfish

9:15 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.

• Introduction, “How Brands Can Maximize ROI through Facebook” by Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Brand Product Marketing, Facebook

9:45 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.

• “How to Start a Game-Changing Dialogue with Consumers on Facebook” by Michael Brito, Social Media Strategist, Intel

10:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.

• “How to Use Applications Effectively on Facebook” by Kevin Barenblat, CEO, Context Optional

10:15 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.

• “A Look at Engagement: Best Practices” by Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst: Social Computing, Forrester

10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. - Panel: What’s Worked?

• Katherine Bateman, VP Marketing, Buddy Media
• Alyson Hyder, VP Digital Media, Razorfish
• Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst: Social Computing, Forrester
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy & Business Development, Slide

11:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

• Snacks & Mingle

Location (Google Map)

Razorfish
303 Second Street, 6th Floor South Tower
San Francisco, CA  94107

There are a number or great examples floating about: Lego, MINI, Toyota, Topps, Coraline and Fanta. You can read the full post here.

Of course, half the fun of AR is seeing it in action. Here’s a collection of videos that I referenced in the post:

Lego and K’nex:

Topps:

Coraline:

Toyota:

MINI:

Fanta Virtual Tennis:

ING ATM Finder:

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We can continue the conversation on Twitter and in the comments below. You can follow me here:

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On the creative services side I discuss OpenAd.net and Crowdspring.com, both of which have drawn the ire of the industry. On the inspiration side, I cite FFFFound.com, Colourlovers.com and PatternTap.com as having a profound affect on the way creatives find inspiration — what happens when we all start plumbing the same pool for ideas? You can read the full post here.

Of course there’s also a ton of interesting things that I couldn’t fit into the post, among them:

• Jeff Howe - The Wired journalist who has literally written the book on the subject with Crowdsourcing: Why The Power of The Crowd Is Driving The Future of Business.
• John Winsor — The head of strategy at CP+B is a great source for crowdsourcing info and has written a book on the subject: SPARK: Be More Innovative Through Co-Creation.
• EyeKa — Similar to OpenAd.net, but more focused on advertising productiona and talent.
• IdeaBounty –  Slick new offering focused on holistic campaigns.
• RocketGenuis — Similar to Crowdspring, offers creative services for logo, web and collateral design.
• Crowdsourcing Wiki — Created by Anjali Ramachandran at London’s Made by Many this is one of the best resources for crowdsourced activities.
• SXSW: Is Spec Work Evil? – The video of this SXSW panel moderated by Jeff Howe is worth a peek. Features David Carson, Jeremiah Owyang, AIGA, Threadless and Crowdspring. No fisticuffs but good stuff.

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We can continue the conversation on Twitter and in the comments below. You can follow me here:

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Having been sandwiched before in the *really* comfortable space that exists between Marketing and IT, I am curious about the true motivations for these initiatives.

Is it true innovation and the wave of the future, or is it an unintended movement, driven by budgets and lack of organizational agility? Have marketers lost patience with the traditional vendor evaluations, selection processes, procurement processes and deployment processes that IT organizations typically require to host their own content, and are resorting to their own creative means?

Regardless of intent, it’s fascinating to see how these brands have adapted on the fly and learned from their efforts. You’re teaching us a tremendous amount through your own tenacity.

Truth is, tons of folks are readily mixing work and pleasure online. In fact, it’s been going on for years; I think it used to be called business networking, or something. Or, maybe just networking? I think the Social Media label throws the whole thing off - as if it were a new frontier. Also, it doesn’t help that a whole new breed of expert has cropped up; Twitter is crowded with self-proclaimed Social Media Mavens, for example.

What will you bring to the space? It’s all up to you. Welcome to the Loyal Order of the Birdbrains.

So, are you unsure about whether your personal and work lives should overlap? At the risk of dropping quadruple negatives, here are Five Reasons You Shouldn’t Tweet Professionally:

1. You’re Not Comfortable with Your Personal and Work Lives Spilling Into Each Other.

You haven’t discovered the concept of managing access to “those” photos on your Facebook. You regularly interact with social technology (phones, email, twitter, etc.) while in a state of diminished mental faculties. Or, maybe you just think it’s weird for your “work friends” to know your “non-work friends.” Maybe you wear a tinfoil hat and are striving to be an anonymous, mostly-invisible, protectively opaque personality online. If this is the case, don’t tweet professionally.

2. You’re Not Funny.

Several ill-funded, half-hearted, and poorly-thought out attempts to deconstruct “cool” or map the route from the underground to the mainstream have taught me that trying to peg the currency of community to one single attribute of communication. However, this Wired article does a fantastic job of boiling down what makes something particularly interesting and tying it to humor, of all things; community’s funny money, as it were. While just plain old listening is a big part of a TwitterPro approach, sooner or later you’re going to have to fire something back to show that you’re a real person; it’ll help if you can bring a smile to someone’s face. If you’re chuckle challenged, you may want to avoid trying to be do business in the social space.

3. You’re Not “Good with People.”

As we venture into a connected world as ambassadors for our brands, we should expect to be sought out for our knowledge of our companies, influence in our industries, and the products/services provided by our companies. As a worst case scenario, you could be someone who is solely in charge of “taking the specs from the customers to the engineers” but who’s assistant physically does your job, in all actuality. If you’re not interested in being contacted about work (thus actually creating more work for you, on some level) via a relatively open social network, you should probably avoid tweeting officially.

4. You Don’t Have a Blog or Somewhere Else to Continue the Conversation.

On Twitter, there’s not a lot of space to editorialize or discuss. Confucius aside, substance and wisdom are hard to come by in 140 char… ! (That’s 140 characters, folks. Ideally you’ve got Facebook, a blog, a Tumblr thing, or some actual service platform where you can say more than … -6) Doh. Bah. You get the point.

5. You Can’t Actually Help Your Company’s Customers.

If you’re not willing to lend a hand, offer advice, point collegues and customers in the right direction, or even talk about work stuff, you may want to keep your tweets strictly casual. Now, the reality is that it’s very cute these days to get a reply from @zappos or some other CSR via Twitter. There are only a few million people on Twitter (here’s a blog post with a pretty interesting guess on this actual number.) I have a feeling that when the twitterverse population approaches weekly Walmart shoppers (in 2005, for example, it looks like 138MM folks wandered into Walmart every week), customer care via may not be so charming or novel. It should be interesting to see develop.

I am sure “social business casual” will rule, for now…but, if you don’t want to be exposed for being completely useless at work via Twitter, don’t talk about work on Twitter.

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We can continue the conversation on Twitter and in the comments below. You can follow Tim here:

http://www.twitter.com/nanotim

]]> http://www.digitaldesignblog.com/2009/04/08/five-reasons-you-shouldnt-tweet-professionally/feed/ http://www.digitaldesignblog.com/2009/04/06/web-20-moms-who-tech-birds-of-a-feather-session/ http://www.digitaldesignblog.com/2009/04/06/web-20-moms-who-tech-birds-of-a-feather-session/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:59:38 +0000 Sarah Murgel http://www.digitaldesignblog.com/?p=1363 Last week I had the pleasure of co-hosting a mom-centric Birds of a Feather session stemming from the San Francisco Web 2.0 Conference. Facilitated by Beth Blecherman (www.techmamas.com), the session was called “Moms Who Tech” and resulted in a passionate conversation about how moms are using technology to manage personal, social and family management tasks.

There was an amazing mix of women in attendance: business owners who were interested in engaging with moms, bloggers who were asked to seed content within their blogs, digital moms interested in exploring new avenues and opportunities related to technology, and Guy Hirsch who recognized the decision making authority of this group yet was mystified by how to reach them. (He won kudos from all of us for being there.)

What was fascinating for me was to hear about how some of the strategies around blogger outreach that we as an agency propose are being executed, yet falling short in a lot of ways. Here’s what I learned:

Why does someone blog? The influential “Moms Who Tech” I met last night do it because they are passionate about a certain topic or issue, and are establishing relationships with like minded individuals. Their blogs are a solid mix of information, perspectives, and support not necessarily a key source of income for them. To work successfully with these bloggers, you need to understand their motivations and passions — and fit into their world.

Susan Etlinger (http://susanetlinger.typepad.com/) put it the best: many times, she is approached as the owner of an influential blog by someone who clearly hasn’t read her blog yet states that they truly love her blog. She suggested it was a bit like dating. You don’t rush to the alter before you have the first date. But that is the feeling she has with a lot of marketers looking to leverage her influence. Her tips for marketers were music to my ears:

1. Don’t approach bloggers like any broad media channel…a blog is a personal extension. Not a technology or medium.
2. Read the blog first. Please.
3. Make sure your product fits within the context of the blog subject.
4. And if it doesn’t obviously, think about tailoring your message so that it might.
5. Establish a relationship with the blogger before pushing your product.
6. Be open and willing to accept feedback…and overall, just be professional.

We fit into the B2B, B2C, B2E mindsets when thinking about businesses, and our approaches to a lot of marketing and channel strategies tend to fall into those buckets as well. You don’t necessarily develop a relationship with a magazine. But you need to with bloggers. We need a B2ME category. Or we need to adjust our thinking.

When all of these things were brought to light in one room, something clicked for me. The web is becoming more human. Trusted relationships are an investment. It took me 30+ years to find my husband. But now I’m his biggest brand advocate. There’s a lot to be said for that.

I also talk about who has really been doing it well, beyond just one-offs and prototypes. My list includes CNN, Perceptive Pixel, AT&T, Orange, Levis, Boxee and Siftables (courtesy of MIT and TacoLabs). You can read the full post here.

Of course there’s also a ton of interesting things that I couldn’t fit into the post, among them:

• Dan Saffer - who has literally written the book on the subject with Designing Gestural Interfaces, and has started his own shop called Kicker Studios.
• Sixth Sense - which was presented at TED by Patti Maes, is the future of wearable computing.
• Graspables - straight out the MIT Media Lab comes Graspables, which is a prototype of a device that changes its function simply by touching and turning.
• BMW Product Navigator — is very a slick way to enhance the vehicle showroom experience, though I think it’s just in the protoype stage.
• Razorfish Surface Demos — not to toot our own horn, but this collection of Micorosft Surface demos and launches is pretty top-notch. Including DaVinci.
• Coca-Cola Vending Machine — This touch screen vending machine is slated to roll-out soon (I believe that Sapient did the UI).
• Jive — Billed as “Social Networking For Your Grands” is a really interesting idea from UK designer Ben Arent.
• Webcam Gestures Protoypes — Publicis & Hal Riney are enabling you to navigate their website via gestures and webcam. Here’s Razorfish’s own early lo-fi expirements.

Please add other interesting gestural and multi-touch interface work in the comments below (with links!). I will also add to this list occasionally as well.

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We can continue the conversation on Twitter and in the comments below. You can follow me here:

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[Image of the week] DIY compact iPhone stand

via Boingboing by way of Make

Foursquare’s Urban Mix Tape

Foursquare is a service created by Dennis Crowley (founder of Dodgeball) and Naveen Selvadurai and it was the breakout app at this year’s SXSW Interactive. The app combines Google Maps and Twitter - you give Foursquare your location and it will tell your friends where you are. You can “check-in” with your iphone or by texting 50500. Each check-in earns the user points, and the most interesting ones earn badges. Additionally Foursquare enables users to create simple lists of things to do in a city. The iPhone app can be downloaded here or you can access via mobile browser here.

Mobile Technology is Closing the Digital Divide

According to a recent research study undertaken by Vodafone, an addition of 10 mobile phones per 100 people can generate as much as 6% increase in GDP in developing countries. An article from the Independent UK cites Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University who states that poverty and isolation go hand in hand and that mobile phones are rapidly eliminating isolation, even in the poorest of countries. The cell phone is near the top of the list of “indispensible accessories” globally, with more than half the human population now having at least one.

The Economic Revolution will be Mobilized

Mashable’s Ben Parr reports that while cut and paste is indeed an awesome feature of iPhone 3.0, support for payments is truly a landmark innovation and will likely spark whole new industries based on micro-payments and mobile purchases. An issue often cited about iPhone apps is that they tend to be downloaded and used only a couple of times before being abandoned. A recent study conducted by Pinch Media, specialists in mobile analytics, claims that only 20 percent of users use the app after the first day and less than 5 percent use an app in the following 30 days. According to Parr, enabling micro-payments via the new iPhone OS will serve as an incentive to developers to continually upgrade their applications, ultimately benefiting consumers with more current and stable versions. Via Mashable, Techcrunch

Sample Page Views Per Session Data

The economic downturn has many of us personally looking to stretch our dollars and make the most of what we’ve got until budgets can be loosened again. For corporations and their websites, it’s no different. Many companies would love to redesign sites, yet can’t get the necessary budgets approved. Yet, they need to see even bigger improvements in lift, engagement, and conversion – growth and profit – to just keep afloat and weather the current economic storms.

Improvements require changes, but what changes? Where should we focus? What should we spend our tightened belts on to bring in the profit we need to see?

Through years of website development and millions of anonymously tracked user sessions, we’ve accumulated a set of rigorous, quantitatively backed best practices – a set of recommended changes that have given our clients the biggest bang for their buck and should do the same for you. These ideas are meant not just to get a site in alignment with industry standards, but to also improve fundamental business metrics, whether your goal is time spent, engagement, or even conversion.

1. Home Page: Don’t Stop the Flow

Many users who visit your website will begin their experience on your Homepage, making it a critical point to capture users’ attention and drive them deeper into your site (25-50% for content, ecommerce, and social networking sites, 75% or more for marketing or technical sites.) There are several key things you should keep in mind as you design your Homepage.

A. Go Above the Fold.

We’re past the days of believing users don’t scroll. The truth is, they do, particularly as they navigate deeper into your website. There is one place you should limit scrolling, though, and that is on the Homepage. Your opportunity to engage customers on your Homepage is limited. In fact, nearly 25% will leave the web’s homepages without interacting with anything at all and median time spent on a given Homepage tends to be only 11 seconds. Most importantly, only 34.2% of users scroll on Homepages that are long enough to require scrolling (See Figure 1 for an example of scrolling for a Publisher website). This means you need to work hard to prioritize what really should go on a Homepage.

Sample Homepage Scrolling Analysis

B. Don’t Try To Squeeze Your Whole Site Onto the Homepage.

Everyone in your organization typically wants a piece of your Homepage, but it will be more effective if you use your Homepage to guide users to appropriate, relevant content instead. Think of it more like the entryway to your house – guiding visitors to the many different rooms within it. One client we had went from 75 links on the Homepage to 15, and increased their click-throughs to desired content by 17%. This isn’t uncommon. The question is, then, how do you decide what should go on the Homepage? One of the areas we’ve seen great success is in analyzing user behavior within clients’ Homepages. If users don’t engage with content, move it deeper into the site. Another area of success is to do a broad audit of all of the content and functionality you need to present in your site, then take a pass at organizing it into buckets you think your customers are looking for. If you’re unsure what those might be, you can use your search logs or a formal card-sorting exercise to find terms that might work well for your users. AT&T does a nice job of providing several categories for users to jump into from their Homepage, without pushing everything on the user at once.

AT&T Homepage

C. Rich media is great, but be careful with it.

More than anything, make sure your rich content loads up quickly, and is short and to the point. You only have a few seconds of users’ attention on your Homepage (except for a few select content sites/blogs). In fact, depending on what vertical you are in, the amount of time you have to grab your users’ attention can range from 7 seconds for financial services to 39 seconds for publishers. If you have a 30-second movie there, think about how many people will actually view it – not many. Rich media on the homepage is great for your brand, but don’t expect a lot of people to click on it. We’ve seen an average of 15.9% of users interact with Homepage Flash modules. The interesting piece here is that interactivity with this content varies widely, from 0.9% to 31.3% of users who visit the page, depending on how well the content is programmed and designed (does it align with a key motivation for coming to the site,) whether there’s a clear call to action, and how fast it loads.

2. Content Pages: Make It Easy + Fun to Explore

Once you’ve captured users’ attention and effectively driven them into your site, the next place they’ll commonly focus their attention is on your main content pages – for e-commerce sites, these are your product pages and for media, content, and marketing sites, these are your main article or video pages.

The product or content page is designed to be the next best thing to being there – to represent something virtually. With advances in social and comparison-shopping, as well as search, personalization, and video, sometimes these experiences are better than the real thing. The key thing we see with clients is the pages need to be easy to move through and fun to snack on – creating a sense of experimentation and adventure that puts the mall or the print edition to shame. The two key rules are:

A. Keep It Clear and Consistent.

Product and content pages should all have a very similar layout and allow users access to the same types of information and navigational options. Generally, the structure that works best is product image in the upper left section of the main body (and make the image clickable!), details below, and add-to-cart/next step options and prominent add-to-cart/primary next step button to the right of the product or page image. Of course there’s also cross-sells, cross-links, and reviews, which should be included where relevant (often either below or on the right of the screen, where the eye goes when it’s “finished” with the main topic.) The Levi’s Store does a nice job of combining these elements on their product pages.

Sample Levi's Product Page

B. Let Them Play.

For physical goods, use color swatches, provide alternate views, and offer options to zoom in and out to view product details. Users love these things, and we always see very strong engagement with them. In fact, for one retail client users clicked an average of 12 different color swatches per product. For media and entertainment or marketing content, add relevant story images, video, user comments and conversation threads, and topically related or time-based summary snapshots. This helps users extend their snacking time with you, understand the breadth and depth of your expertise, control how far they want to dig deeper into the subject, and find a place to go next.

3. Forms: Communicate Context, Expectations, and Respect

If your goal is to drive leads online, to get users to purchase something, or to offer users a low-cost and easy way to connect with you or other customers, you’re bound to have forms. This is one of the areas where we’ve seen small tweaks pay off the most. You can glean a lot from your site’s field analysis charts (such as the following,) as well as the standards outlined below.

Sample Field Analysis

A. Give users context.

When a user comes to a form, they have some basic, very understandable questions. Give them clear and direct information and they’ll feel like you understand them and have anticipated their needs (“oh, you shouldn’t have!”) We’ve seen big performance improvements from answering the following four simple questions – one leading financial services client saw a conversion lift of 28% from these changes alone.

i. How long will this process take me?
The clearest and easiest way to communicate this info is to show a step-by-step progress/navigation bar at the top of your form pages. This bar should track the user’s progress and clearly indicate what step they are on in the process, how many steps they’ve taken (we all like to feel like we’re making progress,) and how many steps they’ve left to take (and hopefully, that’s always fewer than 5 or your form’s too long.)

ii. What info do I need to give to complete this process?
The easiest way to show this is simply to mark required fields with an asterisk. Sounds like a no-brainer, but you might be surprised how many websites haven’t adopted this convention. We frequently hear clients tell us “well, all of our fields are required.” It doesn’t matter (and most of the time they aren’t – take, for example the ever-present ‘Address Line 2.’) Users expect to see asterisks next to required fields, and they get confused when they’re not present, particularly when it’s a long form.

ii. What risks am I taking providing this info?
Describing how sensitive information will be used can go a long way with your users. People are becoming savvier, and they want to know why you’re asking for their information. They don’t want to be spammed and many are worried about identity theft. So, if you’re requesting email address, SSN, mother’s maiden name, or something similar, then include a contextual link or mouseover explaining how that info will be used. Guaranteed, your form abandonment rates will decrease.

iv. What will I get out of doing this?
No one wants to get sold something sight unseen – and that includes the users registering for something as simple as your email newsletter or your website. You don’t necessarily have to razzle-dazzle them with every product feature they’ll get from signing up, yet you should at least include a sample newsletter or a simple and clear list of benefits they’ll receive by giving you all their information. This helps you better qualify your leads, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce customer complaints (especially from vocal users who felt like they didn’t know what they were getting into with you.)

B. Place your first form field above the fold.

Sounds odd, right? It’s not important to put the whole form above the fold, just the first field, and for the simplest of reasons: your users need to know it’s there! We saw one client’s conversion rate jump 100% when they went from a registration-landing page with the entire form below the fold, to moving just the first field above the fold. This same thinking applies to most pages – content, product, category, or even homepages that include scrolling. Make sure that the visual design allows the headings for below-the-fold-content to peek out above the fold so it doesn’t mistakenly look like there isn’t any content below the fold.

C. Don’t request more information than you need.

We see it all the time. Our clients have something a user wants, so the client takes advantage of the situation and asks the user to handover their entire life history in order to get the precious object. Sure, you have a captive audience and you could get some interesting stuff. As tempting as it sounds, don’t do it. Resisting temptation will pay off in the long run, helping you earn and build trust – a real, valuable relationship – with your customers. A good rule of thumb is to only request the information you absolutely need. Are you sending something to the client via mail? If not, don’t request the user’s address. Are you going to call them? If not, don’t require a phone number. Do you need to know their birthday for legal reasons or to send them something special? If not, don’t ask them for it. One travel client removed optional questions from their lead-gen page and recognized a 10% lift in conversion rate. Then, they found contextually relevant times to ask users for the optional info as time (and relationships) progressed. Trust us, your users will respect you for this and will want to return to your site.

4. Invest in The Test

Sample In-Page Drop-off Analysis

Finally, there are a few things that we’ve found there are no clear best practices for, as they vary from site to site based on context. We recommend having a process in place to A/B and multivariate test (and get actionable analysis like the sample in-page drop-off data below for) the following types of questions:

A. What content goes where?

If you’re like many of our clients, you’re constantly battling for real estate on your key pages. How many feature boxes and promo spaces should be included? What combinations of content drive the highest conversion? Which business units should be represented? How? These kinds of questions are best answered through testing. Why?

Politics can create stalemates. We all deal with politics and an easy way to reduce arguments and focus the conversation is to quantitatively test designs. It’s amazing how data that tells you which version drives the best performance can help speed up the decision-making process.

Human intuition isn’t always right. For one financial services client, we tested 16 combinations of a landing page, varying the creative and messaging. When we asked a room of 60 stakeholders which version they thought was the winner, only one person (yes, one) got it right - and it wasn’t the primary decision-maker.

B. How long should our processes be?

One page or six? – what works best? The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is “it depends.” We had one client who tested a one-page vs. a three-page checkout a couple of years ago. The one-page version won. Then, in late 2007, they ran a similar test and the multi-step checkout process won. What gives? Well, the ideal number of pages and the testing of what works best for you depends on a few things:

Consider the customer’s decision-making context - If you’re thinking about putting a long lead-gen form on a Landing page, think again. At this point, you should consider requesting information from users in bits, so they have a chance to warm up to you. One lead-gen client went from a one-screen, 20-questions-style form to a more chunked up two-screen version on their landing page, and realized a 10% lift in conversion rate. If your users are later in the process – deep in product or article pages - or better yet, email-registration or cookie-identified return visitors – you may find it appropriate to offer a longer, more consideration-clarifying form.

Fix your content first – Before you start thinking about whether you should switch to a one-page or multi-page process, assess what you already have in place to make sure the content is optimized. Do you have a clear idea what you’re asking for and why? Do your users understand what you’re asking and why, too, and see value in it? Your problem may not lie in the length of the process, but how you are requesting information from your users.

Control the number of variables – we’ve seen clients attempt to compare a one-page to a multi-page process, yet the structure and information on the two versions was not comparable. This is an easy trap to fall into, especially as most teams only have so much testing time or traffic and want to test as much as they can at once. When testing for process length, though, make sure it is the only variable you’re testing – otherwise, you won’t be able to tell why the winner outperformed the other version(s).

No matter what business you’re in, there’s no simple recipe for getting the most out of your digital efforts. It takes clarity about your site’s goals, planning to best measure and test those goals, and dedication to focus on users’ needs and continuously optimized performance. In the end, it’s not a quick fix, but a profitable journey worth taking – one that can start with these tried-and-true homepage, content, form, and testing best practices.

This post on performance-based web development was jointly written by myself and Seattle colleagues, Randy Barney and Jenny Abdo.

Special thanks to the Razorfish Site Optimization practice and legacy, especially the contributions of Jamie Yaptinchay, Jenny Abdo, and Randy Barney. For more information, feel free to contact me or Randy Barney at randy.barney@razorfish.com.

There are also a number of interesting resources for those who want to explore data visualization in more detail:

• Information Aesthetics, whose tagline is “where form follows data”, is a great — and beautiful resource. Highly recommended.
• Flowing Data, who tagline is “strength in numbers”, is another excellent resource that is slightly less artistic than Information Aesthetics and focuses more on complex visualization.
• Processing.org, which is the online home for an “open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions”, is turning data visualization (through coding) into an art form.

Feel free post any other great resources or examples in the comments and I will create a more comprehensive list.

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We can continue the conversation on Twitter and in the comments below. You can follow me here:

http://www.twitter.com/gschmitt

DaVinci (Microsoft Surface Physics Illustrator) from Razorfish - Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

The goal was to embrace the game-friendly aspects of Microsoft’s Surface table (multi-touch, large enough for simultaneous use by more than one person and a table-like presence that encourages “gathering around”) to create an unexpected brand experience in an environment often cited as anxious for most customers in research.

Rough, early work, but definitely worth a peek to see what possibilities lie ahead.

Carville - A Razorfish Surface Application from Bryan Hamilton on Vimeo.

Intriguing: Zippi Cash will let you search online transactions and eBay sales to find out how much stuff lying around your house could actually be worth. Coming soon to the iTunes App Store.

Study Predicts 913 Million Mobile Banking Users by 2014

This article quotes a new research report from Berg Insight which claims that the worldwide number of users of mobile banking and related services is forecasted to grow to reach 913 million users in 2014. Asia-Pacific is expected to become the most important market for mobile money services. Via Cellular News

Payment innovation will come from outside the industry
David Birch, who writes the Digital Money Blog, has written an interesting summary of a recent roundtable discussion held by Visa Europe Research in London entitled the Paleo-Future of Payments. In it he notes that payment technologies of today such as credit cards and ATMs were developed outside of the banking industry but were later appropriated by the banks. In the future, banking and payment technologies will likely become commoditized - resulting in the further separation between banks and their customers. Via Visa Europe Research

Kenya’s Mobile Banking Revolutions
The story of Safaricom and its mobile payment service M-PESA is well known by now. The service enables its customers to send money to family members who often living in rural areas who do not have access to formal banking services. Perhaps most interestingly they are able to pay for goods and services using airtime minutes. Om Malik points out that other uses for this kind of virtual currency are rapidly emerging citing paying a taxi cab fare, getting money out of an ATM without a bank account, and cellphone-enabled wells that provide clean drinking water. Via GigaOm

Mobile Banking Panel at SXSW Interactive

[ Plug Alert! ] I will be moderating a panel out SXSW Interactive on Mobile Ubiquitous Banking and the Future of Money. The premise: nearly half the world’s population now has a mobile device and more than a thousand cell phones are being activated every minute. The ubiquity of mobile devices will make new services available to billions of people worldwide who have not had access to traditional banks or credit cards. In developing countries such as Kenya - where nearly 80% of the population is excluded from the formal financial sector - text messaging is being used to transfer money to friends and family living in other countries. Moreover, new forms of currency are being created - trading cell phone minutes for goods and services, for example. This panel will explore the challenges and opportunities as banks go mobile, and how the revolution in mobile financial services will change the way we think about money.

Panelists will include Tom Limongello (Crisp Wireless), Sacha Tueni (Vodafone), Ajay Revels (Politemachines), Guillaume Lebleu, (Diebold), Katherine Maher (UNICEF) More information about this panel can be found here.

Today Dockers announced the first truly interactive, “shakable” mobile advertisement within iPhone applications which was developed by Razorfish and OMD.

If you have downloaded an application like Urban Spoon and Super Monkey Ball for the iPhone, than you are familiar with the accelerometer technology that Razorfish employed to make the Dockers ad work.

The ad, titled “Shakedown 2 Get Down,” features Dufon, a.k.a. Orb/Orbit/Orbitron, a freestyle dance expressionist from a Seattle group “Circle of Fire,” dancing around the screen wearing Dockers® Vintage Workwear Khakis. In between levels of gameplay in the select application, users are prompted to “shake” the iPhone to make Dufon dance.

As an experience designer, it’s exciting to start pushing the capabilities of advertising within iPhone applications. According to OMD, free application downloads being 200 to 1 over paid apps and there are 27,000 applications that have been downloaded more than 500 million times on the iPhone.

The ad will launch in early March and will run for four weeks within free iPhone applications, such as: iBasketball, iGolf, iBowl and iTV.

We’ll post video as soon as we have it.

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We can continue the conversation on Twitter and in the comments below. You can follow me here:

http://www.twitter.com/gschmitt

Monday’s segment featured Laura Fortner, co-author of the Razorfish-CafeMom report, and they discussed some of the ways technology is changing moms’ lives.  The segment was called “Life as a Digital Mom.” Today’s segment was on The Big Business of Digital Moms and covers the innovative ways that marketers are reaching digital moms, and about how the voice of consumers in the marketing process is growing.  Terri Walter, who co-authored the Razorfish report and Wendy Piersall, a very popular mom blogger, who was part of a high profile Kmart campaign appeared today.

For those who missed the original report, key findings included:

• Moms with children 12 and older are motivated to adopt new technologies to stay in tune with their children. Of those who use social networks and blogs, almost half (47% and 40%, respectively) monitor their children. Likewise, digital moms of children 12 and older, versus moms with children under 12, are more likely to watch online video, (40% vs. 34%), game (57% vs. 51%), read online consumer reviews (38% vs. 30%), and watch or listen to podcasts (13% vs. 9%); This trend can be explained by different leisure time patterns among women with older children and a compelling interest in understanding their teenage children’s digital lives.
• The gap is closing between TV and digital channels in terms of creating awareness and affecting product decisions, and social influence channels are increasingly important. Although TV still has the most impact on creating initial awareness for a product (31%), social influence channels such as online consumer reviews, blogs, social network sites and RSS are highly influential in the learning/researching stage (29%).
• Moms’ interests are broad; some interests change by life stage, and some do not. More moms show interest in clothing/fashion and food than in parenting information, with the exception of moms with children under six.

The video segments follow: