The pulse of Alexander Interactive

I am an unabashed fan of 37 Signals’ Highrise contact management tool. For concentrated, straightforward sales and CRM, it’s an ideal web app. Between notes, contact information and useful task reminders, it’s a key part of how Canopy does business, and by and large it’s a delight to use.

Today Highrise rolled out LinkedIn profile integration, a nice idea that they say has been regularly requested. But the implementation is cumbersome and disappointing to the point where I’m probably not going to use it.

Here’s why:

It’s reactive. LinkedIn profiles are only added to Highrise profiles once the user has pasted the appropriate link from LinkedIn into a text field in the contact’s edit screen. There’s no dynamic list generation, no scanning the LinkedIn database, and more importantly, no recognition of post-login URLs. Which means…

It’s cumbersome. For each contact, I have to go to linkedin.com, find the right individual, click through to his or her full profile page, and copy the public link off the web page to add to Highrise. Grabbing URLs out of my status bar won’t work, because Highrise can’t reconcile them. (I suppose one could just find public profiles via Google, but that doesn’t seem practical at all.)

It’s account-reliant. Despite the need to use public profile links, Highrise and LinkedIn require users to log into both systems to coordinate data. But:

It’s not relational. Highrise doesn’t care if you have connected with the people whom you access on LinkedIn-via-Highrise. It also doesn’t care about your accuracy. I had no problem, for example, dropping LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn profile onto my own Highrise contact page. This doesn’t much matter when it’s being manually updated, assuming the user is careful, but it’d sure be nice to hit the right David Wertheimer by cross-referencing company, title and location data between the two services.

This seems like a great idea missing some key integration points that would make it as practical and useful as the rest of the system.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the following Thursday are just days away… Holidays are right around the corner. We’re not looking to change the world here at Ai, but we do want to play our part in making this upcoming year a safe, secure and profitable one. That being said, have a look at an article I recently wrote which was published in the B2C Marketing Insider.

12 Tips on Creating a Safe Online Customer Shopping Experience

“84% of polled Internet shoppers don’t think that online retailers are putting enough effort into protecting customers” (Forrester Research, Inc)

The E-commerce holiday shopping season is upon us and online retailers are busy implementing new shopping features, social campaigns, analyzing their test results, and redesigning their funnels from browsing to checkout.

The experts are out in force: Focus on usability! Optimize your product page! Come up with brilliant holiday promotions! Study the shopping trends! Yeah! Yeah?

No. Don’t waste your precious and ever-dwindling time focusing solely on usability and Ui improvements. Bottom line: If you don’t have your customers‘ trust and confidence, you won’t convert–regardless of all the improvements that your testing results indicated you should make.

This holiday season, make it a priority to ensure that your site is providing your customers with the sense of safety and security they are longing for in their shopping experience. Use our tips below to ensure your customers spend their precious time deciding which product to buy from your site, rather than then if they should even buy from you at all.

Prominent Contact Information

Contact information should be prominent and in a consistent place within your header and footer so that your customer knows where to go when they have questions or encounter issues. Display both phone number and email address so that your customers can contact you in the manner of their choosing.

Privacy Policy

Include links to your privacy policy on all transactional pages. The ubiquitous footer link is a good place to start, but too often overlooked. On transactional pages, make sure you have it prominently called out in the body of the page, above the fold. Spell out pieces of your policy as needed. For example, when asking for an email address, state your email usage policy right next to the field. Best Buy says this perfectly “Best Buy does not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to third parties”. Clear, blunt and to the point. As it should be.

Don’t Hide Costs

Transparency in shipping costs and delivery times is key – especially come holiday season. Be sure to provide all of the actual costs up front, including shipping, handling, and sales tax. These can have an enormous impact on the final price. According to OneUpWeb, 95% of customers want to know the exact cost of the order before proceeding into checkout. There is no better way to put the kibosh on a potential sale than to withhold additional costs until later in funnel.

When the user can expect to receive their package is enormously important as well, especially to shoppers cutting it tight during the holiday season. Show this information as early as possible as well. This is actually a deciding factor when it comes down to those final few days. Shoppers are willing to pay a premium as long as you can provide them with the security that it will arrive on time, as promised.

Return Policy and Shopping Guarantee

Shoppers want to know what their recourse is if their item arrives and is damaged, the wrong item, or just simply not what they wanted. Be sure to clearly spell out your return policy so there won’t be any surprises later. Do you have a shopper satisfaction guarantee? Nice! Again, place this prominently above the fold, and inspire your shoppers with confidence that they can’t make a wrong or irreversible decision.

Anticipate Their Concerns

Be mindful of the various sensitive touch points throughout the purchasing process.  Address concerns before they even arise. If you expect your customers to share private and personal information with you, you need to address the reasons why you need the information at the appropriate times.

• A “We 100% guarantee your safety” link right next to the checkout button, and in checkout header that leads to a DHTML popup with your 100% satisfaction guarantee inspires confidence and keeps the user in the funnel.
• “We will not share your email with anyone.” next to email field lets user know you aren’t going to sell their email address.
• “Shipping details” tied with product, in cart and checkout, makes user aware of costs and availability early and often.
• “You can always change your order later” when tied to a call-to-action removes some of the hesitation associated with doubts on whether to commit at that exact moment.
• Don’t be afraid to invite phone calls. A sale is a sale. Including “Prefer to checkout over the phone? No Problem. Call us at…” at the top of your checkout give shoppers a sense of security even if they don’t plan on calling you.

Apply the Human Touch

Ten other sites may sell the same product, at the same discounted price, and have the same safety features in place. Differentiate yourself by emphasizing a personal touch and telling your shoppers that you completely understand their concerns. Give them that warm and fuzzy feeling that they are in good hands by hitting the emotional aspects of shopping.

Using the right tone and personality makes a difference. It is comforting for a customer to see “Please don’t hesitate to call us with any concerns or questions. Your security is our sole priority.” compared to a simple link to the Help Section. Instill confidence in your customers by speaking to them like human beings, rather than unique visitors, throughout the shopping process.

Your “About Page” and Value Proposition

Part of converting the customer is making them feel confident that they are in good hands. The ‘about page” is an often overlooked part of creating a secure shopping experience.

Are you family owned? Are you quirky? Are you a huge company that started off with two people in a garage? Do you donate a certain portion of profits to charity? Don’t let “About Us” be one paragraph of fluff about commitment to selling great products. Shoppers will see right through this. Be yourself. Shoppers have a greater sense of confidence knowing that they are at a real store run by real people.

Make a Good First Impression

Visual design has a huge impact on new customers feeling safe. Shoppers will form an opinion of your company within five seconds of seeing your home page. Want them to feel safe, and not think you are a fly-by-night outfit? Invest in design. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be award-winning, gorgeous visual experience. The site’s design need to give an instant sense of credibility and trust to visitors. Even though customers may not be entirely conscious of it, good design inspires confidence.

Performance & Stability

A slowly loading page, a site that’s down, or obscure programming error messages can raise instant doubts in the shopper’s mind. It is likely they are in comparison shopping mode, so if they were to leave one site and arrive at a site that loads slowly, or not at all, then the experience comes to a quick end. If they see errors and messages they don’t recognize, they will doubt your professionalism and whether their information is safe on your site. A solid technical implementation is as important as a great design.

Badges, Tigers and Seals Oh My

Seals of approval from TRUSTe or Better Business Bureau Online are widely recognized, but remember that a seal is only a graphic; it can be counterfeited. To be sure, make sure you link to the certifying agency’s site that profiles the merchant information. Also, avoid the Times Square approach putting eight different seals on your site. It diminishes the effectiveness. If you really feel the need to bombard 8 seals on there, all I ask is that you use the animated graphics. At least your savvy visitors can get a laugh.

Sweat the Small Stuff

Be sure your site has been thoroughly reviewed and that there are no misspellings or grammatical mistakes. They may seem tiny, but they will immediately cast your professionalism in doubt.

Security Through Social Validation

Social validation is a proven factor in influencing how people purchase products, and it’s no different when it comes to influencing why they should shop at your site for these products. Customer dialogue, reviews and interactions (regardless of what is being discussed) brings instant credibility to your site. People want to know that other people shop at your store. They want to see activity and not just take your word for it.

Now more than ever, privacy is a huge customer concern. Between Facebook privacy issues, Google ego-searching, and countless ads aggressively targeting hackers and screaming identity theft shoppers are only getting increasingly more sensitive and aware of the how, why, and when their sensitive personal information is used.

As online retailers, it is our responsibility to provide a safe and comfortable shopping environment for the customer, both online or off. The most successful businesses are able to instill confidence in their customers, and adding a relatable human touch. They develop a trusting, ongoing relationship with their customers to ensure repeat purchases and loyalty.Look folks, lets not forget – it’s the holidays! Do your customer and your bottom line a favor by letting them focus on giving rather than worrying. So you better be good for goodness sake.

PSFK has published a report (disconcerting, damning or riotous, depending on your station) showing that many top luxury brand websites don’t function on the iPad. (That image above is the Prada home page.) Given that Apple buyers are often luxury product consumers, this is a glaring omission for some of the world’s strongest brands.

The iPad is a reminder that the web is now rapidly moving away from the “build a website, let it run” strategy. A growing diversity of web-enabled devices is going to force companies to build websites that make usability the prime directive. The direct problem is the use of Flash, but the real issue is the lack of universal accessibility.

The growth in broadband mobile networks has led to rapid adoption of web access by consumers. Smartphones are nearing 20% of the American cellular marketplace and are expected to reach 30% soon. Ai clients saw growth in mobile traffic as high as 600% over 2009 alone.

The iPad is the latest and most profound bellwether in this usage shift. Contemplating how to service users with 1.5″ BlackBerry screens was one thing; dealing with iPad users, with their 1024×768 screens and just-like-a-laptop-only-better expectations, is entirely another. And while the iPad may be just a first step in an evolution, a million unit sales in a month suggests someone found the keys to the steamroller.

Computers are not going away; manufacturers shipped 68 million of them in 2008 alone. More important is the fragmentation of the marketplace, which, years after homogenizing almost entirely in Internet Explorer for Windows, is now an open landscape. Four different browsers have substantial (greater than 3%) market share. And dozens of devices are now displaying web pages in displays ranging from 320 to 1920 pixels in width, both with and without Flash.

The requirement for 2010, then, is to adapt to the fragments. Good websites need to actively identify visitors’ platforms and deliver user-centric results–not just the Amazons and Facebooks of the web, but the many small- and medium-size sites that encourage exploration and engagement. As platforms continue to diversify, creating flexible, accessible sites is a must.

Click to zoom.

“The evil that men do lives after them;
the good is oft interred with their bones”
—Mark Antony, William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Today’s item is a guest post by Ai fender Skottey Forden.

The visual components of a website are, quite obviously, the primary impact on a user’s impression of that site. Ai takes pride in creating visually compelling sites while taking an immense amount of care with the gears grinding behind the scenes. One aspect of the visualization that is often overlooked is the shortcut/favorite icon, more simply referred to as the favicon.

This tiny 16×16-pixel icon shows up in the address bar of nearly all modern web browsers, and is generally also visible in tabs when using tabbed browsing. One might notice a favicon, but chances are good that users never dwell on it or consider it to be of much use.

When a website does not make use of a favicon, it is potentially decreasing usability and a branding opportunity. That little 16×16 symbol adds value. It is a branding element and a visual component to which a user can associate a favorite website. This holds true especially when a user opts to bookmark that site. When applied to an e-commerce website, a favicon is a crucial element.

Online businesses want customers to access a site with as little effort as possible. If a favicon has not been set, the site it will show up in lists and browsers with a generic icon, or none at all. If a user has multiple sites with a generic favicon in the list of personal bookmarks, a site will fall into a pile of other “generic” sites. This may seem mundane, but it can limit accessibility as well as brand.

Over the past month I have performed a spot-check of Ai’s client sites to validate if a favicon has been implemented. If one existed, I checked to see how up-to-date it was, based on the most recent design of the website itself. If it needed an overhaul, it got one. If there was no favicon present at all, I created one. It is not a difficult process (and it’s fun!), but one must also consider that a favicon essentially sets a brand for a website, so it’s not a trivial item, even within the confines of that tiny square.

To date, a large percentage of Ai’s client sites, as well as our own internal sites and browser-based applications, have favicons. All future Ai sites will have a favicon implemented before the launch date.

Someone at Blockbuster thought it would be great if its movie categories were easily found, perhaps with on-rollover navigation.

Someone else at Blockbuster insisted on preserving the company’s intricate category format.

Which begat this second-level menu item:

Click to zoom, and note the many “See All” links. Even at this level of detail Blockbuster couldn’t fit everything in.

Original is here. Happy browsing.

Someone please tell the clever folks at Chase that this whole no-envelope deposit thing is a stroke of genius.

Earlier this week I went to the Chase ATM across the street from Ai HQ to deposit a check. Pen in hand, I headed for the slips-and-envelopes counter. But the slots were all empty. Almost instantly, a Chase employee welcomed me to No-Envelope ATMs and led me through the process.

Here’s how it works:

1. Start your transaction the usual way.
2. Press Deposit, and instead of preparing an envelope, the ATM prompts you to insert your check in a new slot on the upper-left-hand corner of the machine.
3. The ATM scans the check, then presents an image of it on screen. It simultaneously uses OCR to read the amount on the check, and asks for confirmation: “This check appears to be for $5.28. Is that correct?”
4. Confirm the value and the deposit is finished.
5. Ask for a receipt, and the printout now includes a miniature reprint of the check for your records.

This fulfills another piece of the theoretical promise that ATMs bring to banking: speed and simplicity. No more filling out forms; no more stuffing envelopes; no more needing to remember 12-digit account numbers or carry deposit slips. I already see the previous generation of ATMs as hopelessly obsolete.

A side note of praise, too, for Chase’s smooth rollout. The woman in the vestibule intercepted me before I could get confused, and walked me pleasantly through the deposit process without waiting for me to ask for help. She was fully briefed on the nuances of the upgrade and enjoyed the wow factor that came with it. Nice work all around.

This morning we gave a first-round design presentation to a client. In order to accommodate all participants and scenarios, we used three computers, four screens, one projector, and a GoToMeeting remote setup, all to show a series of visuals.

Unsurprisingly, every screen looked different. The projector washed out lighter colors and gradients; the widescreen LCD’s robust color was dwarfed by the projected image; the folks watching via remote had a smaller screen area with a too-high “fold.”

All of which serves as a reminder that visual web design remains an incredibly difficult medium. Colors wash, screens change length, text rendering shifts, scripts and cookies disable: any number of challenges stand between a designer and the effective presentation of designs.

Ai’s developers pride themselves on pixel-perfect page outputs that stay true to our visual comps. But even perfect execution does not eliminate the vagaries of millions of users’ screen resolutions, color depths, and personal settings. The level of user control that we celebrate online also creates an incredible set of scenarios that, despite 15 years of advancement, still requires clever compromise and broad acceptance.

The nascent mobile revolution will only add to the complications surrounding online presentation. It’s a tough job, but fortunately a fascinating one.

I keep staring and staring at the quote below, which is deep inside an article on New York City’s new calorie law. Chain restaurants now have to post caloric information on their menus, giving consumers new–and abrupt–information on what they’re eating.

A Starbucks barista revealed his customers’ habits thusly:

Some people actually tell us we should take off the labels, because it discourages them from ordering what they want. But I think honesty is the best policy.

Can I say that again? Some people actually tell us we should take off the labels, because it discourages them from ordering what they want.

Think of the logic that goes into such a request. People are more comfortable ordering unhealthy foods when they can deceive themselves into forgetting the drawbacks. I really want that piece of pie. I know it’s probably not good for me, but heck, I deserve it, so–d’oh!–what do they mean it’s got 900 calories? I can’t order it now! If only I didn’t know how bad it was for me, I’d have been fine!…

Does the average consumer think that pie is healthier when he doesn’t know the calorie count? Probably not. But at least he can pretend that it’s something less than it is. Posting calories not only bares the ugly truth, it removes the sheen from the guilty pleasure, turning it into pure guilt.

One more time: Some people actually tell us we should take off the labels, because it discourages them from ordering what they want.

One could argue that New York City has overstepped its bounds in forcing these posts, much as it insisted on banning trans fats in city kitchens last year. Yet this is a terrific example of the benefits of representative government: sometimes, what the typical person says is desired is not necessarily the right answer.

This theory holds true in many areas. Seat belts, for example. Raising taxes to pay for schools. Homeless shelters. The electoral college (not that it saved us the last few times around, but I digress). It especially holds true here: the city has found a way to subtly improve public awareness and, over the longer term, general health. And it has done so with a law that runs against personal preference.

This philosophy applies to user experience design as well. Here, too, the effect can be subtle. But consider the difference between giving the user what he wants and giving the experience that best suits his needs. The effect can be extraordinary.

Editor’s note: today marks the first of our UX Critic features, where we’ll be giving rapid-fire critiques of multiple players in a single industry vertical. Today we start with online photo-stamp creation, for soon-to-be obvious reasons….

One of the subtly fun developments of the online era is the introduction of photo stamps, where individual consumers can custom-create official US postage. Having started and stopped a few years ago, the segment has commoditized nicely, with even the US Post Office offering its own online and offline stamp-creation tools.

This writer, having recently had a baby, and having been sent by the new mother to buy stamps at the post office and found a fairly abysmal selection of 42-cent stamps, decided to make his own. (The original image can be viewed here; the stamp snapshots are included below.)

First stop: Zazzle, the popular custom printer. Zazzle’s online tools are easy to use and extremely fast. I was able to upload multiple images, move and size them with ease, and compare multiple images atop each other. Their discount pricing model kept costs reasonable ($12.95 a sheet for 10 sheets of 20 stamps). I liked the 24-hour turnaround time. But the large ZAZZLE.COM imprint on the stamp turned me off, so I kept looking.

I next went to photo.stamps.com, the official outlet of the US Post Office. But their stamp layout, a large square, didn’t serve my image well. (It should be noted that zazzle.com seemed locked into a horizontal layout–not useful for vertical images.) The site required registration for anything beyond basic image positioning, so I was unable to compare pricing without going into the FAQ–they turn out to be $14.95 for my quantity. They also don’t ship for 3-5 days.

Last stop: yourstamps.com. Their site identified my image as horizontal and created a layout that matched–nice! They had custom borders and designs–nice! But they don’t have discount pricing, making my order nearly twice as expensive ($18.95/sheet) as stamps.com and Zazzle. Worse, the site logo switched twice midstream, from Fujifilm to Cooper Imaging and then to Epixel, making me nervous about placing an order there. Finally, the site needs 7-10 days to process orders, even for local pickup. Too many negatives despite the visual appeal.

In the end, despite that ZAZZLE.COM imprint, their site had the most compelling offer. They gave the best price, layout, and turnaround time, and their tool was a cinch to use. Even a few of these would be good differentiators; having them all on one site is a real victory for the Zazzle team.