We’re excited to be participating in a new campaign, mentioned in the Dayton Daily News yesterday.

It’s called Get Up Montgomery County, and its mission is to improve the health of kids ages 2 to 12. The project involves a variety of media efforts designed to encourage parents to make healthy choices for their children — choices like serving five fruits and vegetables daily, cutting out sugary drinks, limiting TV time, and helping kids get an hour of exercise each day.

We’ll be building the Web site for the campaign, getupmc.org. The site will feature health information for users and list of events people can attend to help them stay fit.

Ryan and I, the head honchos here at Atomic, both have growing kids — and we both know how hard it can be for working parents to make healthy choices for their families. It’s all too easy to stop at McDonald’s on the way home from work — or skip a trip to the park in favor of crashing in front of the TV.

We’re thrilled to be participating in this new program, and thank Public Health Dayton, and the CareSource Foundation for giving us an opportunity to help with this important cause.

In our previous post this month, we talked about usability – the importance of making sure your site is easy to use and navigate.

Just as important as usability is persuade-ability. Designing a persuasive site goes beyond making sure users have the ability to perform certain tasks. It involves creating a site that encourages them to perform those tasks.

Persuasive design expert Andrew Chak, in his oldie-but-a-goodie Submit Now, discusses one of the most important elements of persuasive design – ensuring that your site addresses customers at all phases of the buying cycle. Chak categorizes these folks as either browsers, evaluators, transactors, or customers.

Mega-retailer zappos.com owes its huge success ($1 billion in 2008 sales) in part to how well it addresses these four unique audiences.

  • Zappos makes life easy for browsers by letting them sort shoes using a huge variety of filters – so you can view only wide shoes, for example, or animal print shoes, or Mary Jane-style shoes, or clog-style shoes with 2 ½ inch heels … you get the picture.
  • They help evaluators by providing detailed information about each shoe a customer is considering. You can view a pair a shoes from 8 different angles; find out if you should order your standard size, or a half-size up; review 8 to 12 additional specs about the shoe, such as weight and composition; and read extensive customer reviews (often as many as 60 or 70 per product).
  • They helps transactors by making the buying process simple – and the return process simpler, as Zappo’s loyal customers love to rave about.
  • Finally, Zappos helps customers with services like providing an online catalog of past orders, stretching years back – and sending personalized emails a year after your purchase asking if you’d like to order a fresh pair of the same shoes.

Many elements influence the persuasiveness of your site, but a good place to start is by asking this question: Is my site talking to my four critical customer groups?

Want our opinion? Contact us anytime.

How usable is your site?

If you asked your customers to discuss the fine points of web usability, you’d probably get a blank stare.

But would your customers recognize a site with poor usability? You bet. And by recognize the site, we mean leave the site – immediately.

Usability is about creating websites that make life easy for your users. So they stay on your site, easily moving through your navigation, easily finding how to contact you, easily making purchases.

Unfortunately, too many sites make life tough for their users. We won’t go into all the ways this can happen, but here are a few of our pet peeves.

  • Confusing navigation. Too often navigation is structured from the perspective of the company rather than the user. For example, we recently tried to register our kids online for summer camp. First we tried Registration, then Programs, then Events. Nada. Finally we took a wild guess and tried Classes – under which we found summer camp. Do you really want your customers to play guessing games before they can buy something?
  • Links that don’t behave predictably. Web users have become accustomed to certain navigation elements behaving in certain ways. We expect to click on your logo and be directed to your home page. We expect to click through long content using Previous and Next buttons. When we can’t do these things we get frustrated with you. We lose belief in your site.
  • Hidden Contact Us information. There’s nothing more frustrating than searching fruitlessly for a company’s phone number or address. First you look for a “Contact Us” page at the top. Then you look in the footer. Then, with increasing annoyance, you start digging through pages with names like “Our Firm” and “Get to Know Us.” When customers are at the critical moment of converting to a sale or seeking more information, it should be incredibly easy for them to contact you – not incredibly annoying.

So many elements go into creating highly usable sites; several basic checklists are available online. But all of them are based on a focus on the user – what she is looking for, what she expects, what she needs from your website and your company. Without that focus, all is lost.

Want to talk about your site’s usability?