Return on Intention

The trend of websites (or other online presence) being the first point a potential customer comes into contact with a brand continues to grow. First impressions are lasting so getting this introduction right is pretty important. There are many opportunities to get feedback on how your online first impressions are going, such as survey tools like 4Q from iPerseptions and Avinash Kaushik or simply asking your customers. You can also glean some insight from your web analytics – look at things like bounce rate and page views per visit. These can identify how people are using your site, giving you some quantitative results, while the surveys and user polls give you qualitative results.

Always proceed with your best judgment, but then take the time to set up a feedback / improvement system to continually improve. Like many things on the web, getting this part right is usually done faster through quick test and improve cycles rather than months of contemplating the right move.

The key here is make sure that you are offering an experience for your user. Pay attention to not only what you are saying, but how your are saying it, and how it all looks. A good combination of content, presentation and interaction are the cornerstones of a good experience, so long as its unique.

Being unique is critical. With so much competition out there on the world wide web, it is easy to forget or get confused about who is who. Getting around this problem is the process of building a brand. Too often, however, people try to take a shortcut and end up shooting themselves in the foot.

Remember splash pages? Thankfully most of these monstrosities are now gone, but there was a time when the “splash page” was running rampant and out of control. Part of this tragedy can be linked to the early idea of the web being the new television, but a lot more of it had to do with trying to take an experience short cut. Instead of spending the time to make a compelling experience, these folks tried to throw so much sizzle at us in flashing, fast moving graphics hoping to blind us from the lack of steak.

While splash pages are now mostly gone, the tendency to take this short cut still exists. It is a good idea to try and be clever and push the envelop, but there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. This line comes in the form of the “use your mouse to chase down the moving navigation elements” and other such ill-conceived ideas. The biggest problem is that it can be hard to know where this line is until you’ve crossed it. Getting the user to chase your page elements around is interactive and can even be fun the first time, but when the novelty wears off it becomes frustrating and a waste of time. Its kind of like a one night stand. It seems like a fun adventure, but it’s no way to build a long lasting solid relationship. No one wants to be with (or be) the guy who is a lot of fun for the first few minutes but then falls short after that. Don’t let your first impression online be that guy. Marriages are built with the consistent guy, not the party guy. Spend 10 minutes on your own site everyday for a few weeks and see if you can find where it falls short.