Websites and advertising are different mediums; best staffed and managed accordingly. Remember (circa 2000) when Pets.com‘s sock puppet ads won lots of awards, then liquidated 10 months later? In the end, the campaign’s creative brilliance solved the wrong problem. Like any great campaign, Pets.com focused on getting your attention vs. building a successful user experience. Amazon.com’s never won any major creative award, but has done something much more valuable – earned the trust of millions of customers and generated Billions in revenue for more than a decade running. Unlike Pets.com, Amazon.com focused on creating the user experience that you, the customer, prefer. The site’s page design is far from perfect, they aren’t as interested in awards vs. delighting users. So does that mean the less creative site wins? Depends how you define it.

I believe creativity follows the same rules as humor – both depend on incongruencies to succeed. To paraphrase John Morreall, author of Taking Laughter Seriously, running into your next door neighbor at Heathrow Airport would make you laugh because it’s highly unexpected to run into him so far from home. Seeing your neighbor pull into his driveway any weekday evening isn’t funny because it’s expected. We judge creativity similarly. If it’s an obvious pattern, we discount it. If it’s different and breaks a pattern, we celebrate it. (Jackson Pollack would have made a horrible web designer.)

If you accept the incongruence theory for creativity, I’ll assert it’s a misguided criteria for making good web design related decisions. While humor can be effective in getting people’s attention, it’s not for creating user experiences that build trust, meet specific expectations, and measure performance. This pitfall of applying the same creative behind effective advertising to web design assumes the same (creative) tasks carried out by the same (creative) talent. But they’re different: good advertising gets attention, persuades and drives traffic. Good web design empathizes with and engages users, and converts traffic into sales. The creativity involved in building a site’s architecture, user flow, and a successful user experience is more akin to product design vs. advertising actually. The creative challenge is finding new ways of celebrating the obvious and actually supporting patterns. When it’s successful, “it just works.”

The criteria you set and manage for creativity throughout the web site creation process ensures your site’s success. Criteria focused on getting attention and novelty, will underserve the user’s experience – like Pets.com. Criteria focused on empathy, engagement, and analytics will create a successful user’s experience – like Amazon.com.

What undermines more advertising, email, or promotional campaigns isn’t the budget or message, it’s the underperforming site design. Despite conventional thinking, success is not measured in hits, but in sales conversions, increased productivity, or other measurable metrics.

“A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.”
Groucho Marx

Too often, people read into things, make illogical predictions, assume outcomes, bet on unfounded hunches when there’s evidence to guide decisions. Consider a recent retail client’s path to increase their site’s income from one of their products. Average monthly figures: 1,200 hits and $300 net income from a conversion rate of 6.8%.

They first engaged an ad agency to implement an advertising-centric strategy to increase hits. The ad campaign (and very minor page copy changes) successfully
increased hits by 32%; at the same time the conversion rate dipped to 4.7% resulting in a net loss. The clients considered doubling their ad budget. Fortunately they didn’t and turned to us for help instead.

We’ve recognized these patterns when working with clients:
1. Objectives are based on assumptions (e.g. hits = sales)
2. There’s a default to budget for advertising (vs. fixing the user experience on the site)
3. Decisions are guided by incomplete data (e.g. measuring the wrong things)
4. Most sites underperform (e.g. inefficiencies are being ignored)

To break their “spend and hope” cycle, we helped them look at their site metrics differently. It started with how objectives were set and pursued. The result after revisiting their stats and conducting A/B design tests (and no advertising): 1,300 unique visitors and $1,200 in profits. Conversion rates jumped to 10.4%.

In a nutshell this client had originally fallen into the pitfall of measuring the wrong things and tracking superficial metrics like hits. Such metrics make people feel good because they are easily accomplished, but they don’t achieve the ultimate goal. This incomplete site strategy suffers from what Norm Brodsky may call the sales mentality: pursuing sales without minding more important factors, namely profits.We instead focused on actionable metrics, such as conversion rates, to employ a profit mentality.

Not only was there financial gain from our work, it’s a cheaper endeavor vs. advertising. Building a better page design with SEO-friendly code is a one-time expense. Performance is not dependent on ongoing media budgets or retainers.

There’s no denying that people enjoy voicing opinions, but that can be costly when making design decisions. Each doctor and engineer has deep expertise in a narrow discipline, but just an opinion outside their field of study. Our deep expertise, guided by Design Analytics, helps you make better design decisions about improving your site’s performance. It saves you from misguided objectives and incomplete information that can undermine your pursuits.

Google on the other hand spends a radically large amount of lot of time, resources, and energy on quantifying everything, including design. They famously tested 41 shades of blue in determining their hyperlink color. They view the world as a pile of data to be analyzed. Google’s view of the design process is empirical and akin to most MBA decision-tree curriculum. Both methods, subjective taste and analytical, on their own are incomplete. To paraphrase Jim Collins, the tyranny of the or limits each of these design approaches.

The case against intuitive decision making is that it’s a prediction based on assumptions and people are notoriously bad predicting events beyond their contral. (Just ask any odds-maker, our egos seem hard-wired to believe otherwise.)

On the other hand, purely analytic decisions are void of empathy that affects how people feel and respond toward things. Also, analytics is a reactive task, it’s hard to have effective insights without enough data to benchmark and test. Google’s 41 color study had the luxury of billions of transition to measure, compare, and analyze.

The key to successful effective designing is to combine the two – ala Jim Collins’ genius of the and – in the right order. A good UX designer can anticipate user needs and create a more enjoyable experience, but must rely on analytics to find out for certain and fully realize your goal.

The only way to predict the future is to invent it. That takes courage, and a tuned sense of what people will want without asking them. To ensure your goals, it also takes the discipline to leverage the readily available data to measure the results of your design choices. Only when you combine the intuition and measurable outcomes can you predictably achieve your goals.

Measuring design may be difficult, but the results from our design choices are easy, if you know how to make better design decisions.

If you want objects designed to decorate your company’s identity, that’s easy thanks to today’s software, the internet, an opinion, and eager design school graduates. If you need to design a way to improve your sales performance, or reduce waste in your bottom line, that’s something else. I’ve noticed that whenever design becomes visual, it becomes trivial, superficial, worthy of trite contests to determine the best looking solution. Note the most recent case from the White House – even irony can be ironic apparently. Plumbers, doctors nor accountants would let you hire them this way. This thinking exists because clients ask, and designers and agencies abide.

The tragedy in this thinking is it undermines design of it’s real purpose; to improve how something works. The late Steve Jobs said this about Apple’s most misunderstood success factor: “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” This active view of design is the kernel of a company with a market value is over 350 Billion and ridiculously profitable.

Most of you haven’t had the experience of working at a company like Apple, and some of you may never have purchased web design services. That’s ok. When buying web design services, effective buyers set specific and measurable success factors, like increase conversion rate from 2.3% to 4.0%, and give us the opportunity to design ways of achieving them. Their project briefs avoid useless adjectives like “easy to use” or subjective terms like “clean.” They skip unrealistic feature wish lists and statements like “just like apple.com.” An effective client brief is an honest assessment of their current situation filled with information about what makes their business succeed and user data to support the project. They understand that websites that succeed have to be relevant to those users vs. what your CEO thinks after looking at it for a minute.

Regardless of one person’s opinion, a “clean” looking website like Apple’s won’t ensure your success, but designing a better way for your customers to understand your product and easy way for them buy, like Apple has, will. Those differences in managing design is quite different, like the differences between nouns and verbs.

Advertising great George Lois is known for proclaiming “Great ideas can’t be tested. Only mediocre ideas can be tested.” and helped spark the creative revolution of American advertising that has fed the egos and lined the pockets of many smart, clever ad men and women since. The mid-20th century formula for success was the Big Idea plus reach and frequency. A world where you could reach a high percentage of your audience in several key placements and the audience trusted your claims.

I’ll spare you ed-op about traditional advertising’s decline and significance of post-Google advertising, or how measuring success by GRP is incomplete at best. (quick note: roughly 96% of Google’s 29 Billion in 2010 revenues came from advertising). This article isn’t about media buying strategies, it’s about challenging that great ideas can’t be tested.

How did you test ideas in 1959? Well, we know George didn’t have the amazing tools we have today; he lived in a world without software or Google Analytics (or websites like kissmetrics, Clickable or Kickstarter. George’s clients didn’t have the ability to automatically capture real-time customer shopping behaviors, track conversion metrics of multiple concepts, headlines, call to action, button color, or button location, etc.

The best they had was their two-martini-lunch-filled guts, accounting, and agency reviews. Don’t get me wrong, mid-20th century advertising in NYC was some of the most innovative thinking of it’s kind, but it’s marginally meaningful in today’s post-Google world.

But not much has changed apparently. What I’ve learned from working with certain ad agencies is they’re scared to death to test live ideas. When pushed why they won’t run a simple A/B test on a banner ad: defensive, irrational, and bogus reasons abound. One client tried to argue they couldn’t afford the $25 media surcharge for an A/B test. The media budget was over a quarter of a million dollars. Obviously there was other reasons.

What I’ve learned is this: testing ideas for banner ads or landing pages or call to actions undermines the ego-centric “agency knows best.” It dilutes the drama in the big pitch where they present and sell the almighty Big Idea. Testing concepts, the agency must park their ego outside and actually adapt a different problem-solving approach.

Agencies still do things no other business can do, and are capable of more than clients typically give credit. But it’s hard not to by critical, if not cynical, of the myopia agencies live in if they think their untested ideas are great. They’re not great until customers act on them and they help achieve clients’ objectives.

Like the radical ideas George and his conteporaries changed modern business in their pre-Google world, the new post-Google radical ideas are among us. Time to adapt and test their greatness, or die.