Fit and Finish: Insight from the Ironworks User Experience Group

Trim your Mobile Strategy to Avoid App Rot

App rot
noun

1. When an app is published and nary a soul downloads it. An all-too-common problem for brands and app developers in today's overcrowded app marketplace.
2. When an app is downloaded by a consumer but is rarely interacted with by said consumer.

I've got 50 apps on my iPhone4. Another 50 or so on my "vintage" model - a 2G iPhone I still use for gaming with the kids. Many of the apps do fantastic things, like turning my phone into a videoediting bay, and enabling me to record R&B tracks in autotune.  (What could be more fantastic than that?)

But aside from the standby apps of social, stocks, weather and maps, there's one app I use more regularly than any other. One app that has increased my brand loyalty and usage: The GreatClips app.

Like a rooster that crows each morn, once a month, I open my trusty GreatClips app. It tells me current wait time, store hours, and … here's the best part… it lets me choose my store location and check in ahead of time so I don't have to sit and wait. Simple, powerful, and very valuable for someone like me, whose idea of torture is sitting in a haircut waiting room on a sunny Saturday.

When it comes to low switching costs -- meaning low brand loyalty -- you can't get much lower than men's haircuts. But the GreatClips app has succeeded in making me loyal to the brand.

As marketers and product managers, we're all scurrying to leverage mobile to increase brand affinity and capture positive ROI. But instead of trying to dream up the next great mobile innovation, the simplest path to avoiding App Rot is to identify your customer touchpoint where the greatest utility can be delivered, like GreatClips did for customers like me. Most of the time, you'll find that the less complex the better, and the less sexy, the better.

Rather than trying to recreate your desktop experience on mobile, or stuff every marketing exec's ideas into a company app, why not start small and simple, with a mobile experience that will do one thing really well for your core market segment? Your customers will thank you, and they'll tell others. And word-of-mouth is the most powerful marketing of all.

Achieving Balance and Harmony on Your Next Digital Project - Introducing "The UX Chakra Model"

 As the Interactive Practice Lead for the ICF Ironworks' Tysons Corner Office, I have the good fortune to manage and work with some very talented digital strategists, information architects, interactive art directors, content strategists, research analysts, and front-end developers.

I was thrilled to learn this week that The UX Booth, "a publication by and for the user experience community," accepted and published an article by our own Colin Eagan.

This is something that started out as a whiteboard sketch, and evolved as Colin bounced the idea off of other peers, and incorporated their feedback and input.

Colin introduces a new model, based on traditional elements, to quickly help a project team identify why a digital project might be heading off-course, and prioritize their efforts to get things back on track.

Anyone associated with a digital project team will benefit from this article. Here are a few more reasons why: 

1. It challenges how most people think about framing a project
2. It articulates and visualizes challenges that you're probably familiar with, but could never quite describe
3. It offers tangible solutions to improve your chances of success in the long run

You can read and comment on the article at: http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/the-ux-chakra-model-finding-balance-in-your-latest-digital-project/

Check out Colin's other posts on this blog: http://profile.typepad.com/ceagan

 

The Dubious Waves of Error

From the customer’s point of view, an error message is a crisis.  When you’re hit by an error on a website, you’re in trouble – by definition.  To make things worse, the message can be so cryptic it stops you dead.  A  poorly-designed error message drives you to a competitor’s site, on the phone with the call center, back to paper-based processes, or just giving up.

Don’t let this happen to your users!  It’ll take work, but make the effort to establish consistent and effective messages and standards for your websites.  The end result should be simple; the error message tells your visitors what went wrong, helps them over any barriers, and lets them get on with their business.

 

Ensuring Equal Web Accessibility for All Is Our Specialty

Americans are more reliant than ever on the Internet as their primary source of critical information and communication. When disaster strikes, news happens or inclement weather is on the horizon, the quickest access to the most information is just a mouse click (or finger tap) away. Continue reading after the break ...

Getting Smarter About Brainstorming: This Month from the Idea Forge

Discover How the Gamestorming Technique Adds Structure and Fun to the Ideation Process

 

Are your team Brainstorms suffering from idea drought? In our latest Idea Forge, we take a look at some of the practical implications of Gamestorming – a technique that ups the ante for the process of generating big ideas. We caught up with UX Architect Larry King at a workshop where he explained this technique and how he’s used it in the field. Watch to see how Gamestorming harnesses the power of Structured Play and learning theories like Distributed Cognition to help you seek out unexpected solutions to specific business problems.

At ICF Ironworks we’ve used Gamestorming both internally and with clients, often at the Strategy Phase of interactive projects. Some examples:

• Helped Define an Approach to Social Engagement. Worked with an insurance industry client to hone their social media strategy through games like Cover Story, which helps envision end goals, and Affinity Map, which assigns ideas into meaningful groups.
• Found New Ways to Encourage Community Content. Created a variety of custom games like Brainwriting and Associative Barriers for a membership association client to explore ways to engage users online and encourage the development of community content.
• Lots of Other Uses. We use it internally as well for problem solving– some favorites are the 3-12-3 Brainstorm, Campfire, and Ethos Logos Pathos.

For more on Gamestorming, make sure to check out http://www.gogamestorm.com/ from the authors of the book “Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers.” You can see some of the latest Games submitted by readers as well as the new Gamestorming iPhone app. 

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Idea Forge is a series from the ICF Ironworks’ Interactive group that highlights practical uses for big ideas in User Experience design. For the latest thoughts hot off the forge, follow our blog at fitandfinish.ironworks.com 

Celebrating Social Media Week!

With Social Media Week 2012 coming to a close we like to share a few thoughts on how we’re shaping our digital strategies today! We’ve addressed social media on Fit and Finish before but for this post we want to share three focal points to identify before putting together a digital strategy.

The Last Post About Social Media You’ll Ever Have to Read, Ever

Or Why Still No One Is Reading Your Tweets About Grape Jelly

A classmate from grad school recently shared a link to the page below with the caption “Saddest Twitter page ever.” The concept was a Twitter feed from Smuckers Jam, which pointed only to the obvious conclusion, that no one wants to read a Twitter feed from Smuckers Jam.

Or do they.

For those of us who work with clients everyday creating digital strategies, one of the most oft' heard questions--and one asked with the most trepidation--is “what should we be doing for social media?”

At best, this is a savvy admission that brands and organizations in the 21st century can and should use "social" as an important arrow in the marketing quiver (check out Harvard Business Review's take).

But here's the problem. The term Social Media, in and of itself, does not mean anything. You don't need a "social media." What you need is a digital strategy that supports your organization's overall brand promise. Maybe you need a place for "Knowledge Sharing." Maybe you need a place for "User Collaboration." But you don't need a place for "Social Media." 

When you think about social media, chances are you think Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare. Most recently, you think Google+. While those are potential items in any digital tool set, your social strategy can be much simplier than that. Often, it is a comprehensive approach made up of smaller components, things like:

• Comments from users on your site’s articles or content you’ve posted
• Ratings or “star” systems for your services or products
• Testimonials from users on your services
• Blogs or Columns written by some of your employees on topics relevant to your brand
• Forums or Q&As for users to come together to have discussions with you or each other
• Facebook Pages, Twitter feeds, Youtube Channels, and everything else.

So if we're going to stop saying "Social Media," how do we know what to ask for instead? Here are some guidelines to follow, once and for all, to figure out what social media means to you:

1. Never fight a land war in Asia. What’s the biggest reason your "social media" campaign is failing? You’re fighting the wrong battle. Fearing being left behind, too many brands charge head first, bayonets flared, into some social foray without a true sense of why they are there or what they are trying to achieve. And then what happens? Winter sets in, the campaign fails, and history remembers you as a short person.

There is no point in having a Facebook page just for the sake of having one, or a Twitter feed just because you want one of those dynamic feed thingys on your homepage. It only makes sense if there is a clearly defined need. Which brings us to #2:

2. Carefully match the social medium to the social need. Ironworks recently worked with the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) on their web-presence re-design. APTA is a good example of an Association harnessing the power of Twitter. In addition to the main APTA feed, which is carefully monitored and frequently updated, they also have feeds for their professional journal as well as advocacy and groups like students. These are aggregated on the homepage, giving users a sense that multiple conversations are happening at once. As a result, followership is high, and upon launching their new site, a major source of feedback was members writing @ the Twitter channel itself.

3. Not sure of the social need? Ask about it. The start of any digital strategy engagement should focus on gathering data to determine users' appetite for social interaction, and in what areas. Bring tools like surveys, focus groups and competitive benchmarking to bare. Looking at existing site analytics and getting a handle on “offline” user conversations will also help. For example, are lots of people discussing your brand on a listserv or third party site other than your own? What are those conversations like and why are they there?

4. Give offline conversations a place to live. Everyone hates taxes. And yet, Turbotax harnessed social interaction by giving a home to all of the disparate conversations taking place online about completing your taxes. While the topic of tax preparation may not seem like a social thing, this smart approach unites users in a way that is useful and underscores the brand. H&R Block has a similar Get it Right Community. 

5. Determine if you have the community in place to support social interaction, then plan around it. The United Services Automobile Association (USAA) is a great example of a site that started conversation around its core offerings. Using the power of a community of service members and their families, they allow users to rate product offerings and accumulate points for site participation. The risk of such an approach is always “will it be used?” In the case of USAA, the answer was "yes" thanks to an intuitive read of their audience.

6. There is no “auto-pilot.” You cannot, repeat cannot, launch anything social and expect it to run itself. Your brand must be there every step of the way responding, interacting, encouraging (and rewarding) participation. Yes, this means more work for you. And this may mean doing things you are not currently comfortable doing.

Here’s an example. Redfin, arguably the best User Experience out there now for real estate, has a highly-used agent rating system. Every time someone buys or sells a house, they are asked to post feedback and a star-rating. These ratings are aggregated over time to reflect the average score for each agent. Now do these user reviews just write themselves? No. Redfin has to work for every one. After any customer completes a transaction, they send emails asking for feedback, and Redfin agents personally write clients to ask if they would mind completing the survey. This approach has a big effect on engagement, and the site has thousands of reviews as a result.

7. But wait, I work at a law firm. Are you saying I, too, can enjoy the benefits of online social interaction? Maybe. It depends on determining who wants to listen. While clients of law firms may have little interest in tweeting about recent legal experiences, there are other areas systemic to the business of all firms, such as recruitment, that may lend themselves to a social approach. Check out Wilmer Hale's careers page for a good example. Likewise, legal research and thought leadership are increasingly trafficked locations on some firms’ sites that encourage sharing and commenting.

8. I hate people. Should I bother defining what "social media" means to me? Sure! Some of micro blogging's most popular personalities are also its greatest curmudgeons. Just follow @youlookgreat or @whitewhines.

So there is your list of ground rules. “Social media” is not just another line on a project plan or an afterthought for post-production. It is, if worth doing at all, an intrinsic part of a digital strategy that puts fire behind your overall brand promise. If done right, it can deliver great impact at relatively minor cost. If done poorly, it can do more harm than good.

And that is why if you are a Jelly Company whose goal is to get people excited about Grape Jelly, you have to do more than just create a Twitter page.

Or then again, maybe its just time you Tweeted about Strawberry.

Webinar Recap: Know What Works - How Testing Can Save You Time, Increase Conversion, and Improve Morale

Today, organizations still make far too many decisions on their website based on imperfect information, with no way to measure effectiveness. With proper data collection and analytics tools by way of A/B and/or multivariate testing, experiments can be a powerful way to help your organization make better, more informed decisions.

In a recent Ironworks and Sitecore webinar, “Know What Works – How Testing Can Save You Time, Increase Conversion, and Improve Morale,”  Geoff Harper of Ironworks and Peter Fogelsanger of Sitecore walked attendees through real-life scenarios on how A/B and multivariate testing can help your organization:

• Save time by building a consensus around a solution using hard data
• Optimize user experience by understanding what solutions best meet the requirements of your audience
• Determine the effect of changes to your website by testing a portion of site visitors to mitigate risks

Using Sitecore's built-in testing features, we demonstrated how easy it is to get started with A/B testing. Once you’re ready to get started, always remember to A/B test often, measure, rinse, and repeat.

Questions? For more information about A/B and multivariate testing, please contact Geoff Harper, Manager of Research & Measurement on the Interactive team at Ironworks Consulting.

View Webinar Recording: “Know What Works – How Testing Can Save You Time, Increase Conversion, and Improve Morale”

Ironworks 2011 Interactive Summit

 Stepping Back to Look at the Biggest Issues Facing Clients in the Year Ahead

Is your web design "Responsive" enough to look good on tablet displays that haven't been invented yet? Do you have an analytics plan in place to capture usage data beyond the "page" level? And just what exactly is your digital strategy for 2011? Interactive teams from Ironworks' multiple offices met this month to discuss answers to these questions and more. Join us as we recap our latest thinking on Web and Mobile Strategy, Responsive Design, and Analytics.

 

To learn more about responsive web design as mentioned in this video, please see our related blog post, “The Future of Web Design Will Be Responsive”.

Rethinking the Medical Association Website - Part 1

New ways to engage your members.