Okay, so I know the topic of “The Web is Going Away” has already been covered in this blog just a few weeks ago by Heather Herr…but I couldn’t resist writing my own perspective on the matter. If I may be so bold as to summarize what Heather said in one line: “The Web as we know it is dying or already dead.” I’d state my one-liner perspective a little differently: “The ‘Web’ as we know it is not going away, but it is certainly taking a backseat to other ways to experience digital presences.”

The shift towards Internet over Web as I see it, is a matter of changing the perspective from users consuming “Web Sites” to preferring “APIs and Thin Clients.” Thin Clients can consist of a smart phone app, an app on your Blu-Ray player, or even a Web Site.  In fact, most of the apps on your smart phone are likely thin clients to an API, such as your Facebook app, Twitter, Foursquare…all except your whoopie cushion. The paradigm shift moves the user interface entirely to the thin client, with only enough programming logic included to communicate with the API of the application to store and retrieve relevant data. Maybe this diagram makes more sense…

Some companies have really embraced this paradigm of creating a strong central idea that’s manifested in several user experiences, most interestingly:

• Netflix
• Twitter

Netflix has built a disruptive entertainment business based on the initial idea of a massive selection of content at a great subscription price, with the only significant inconvenience being that you had to plan your selection a few days ahead. They’re now, however, in the process of removing the last obstacle to total market domination by building a more comprehensive collection of on-demand movies available in their Instant Queue. The ’2005 Web Wisdom’ strategy would have probably revolved around driving all users to a single Web presence where they can manage their queues, as well as watch their movies. Instead, the Netflix ecosystem now consists of one centralized queue management and video streaming API, and thin clients built on:

• Blu-ray players
• TVs
• Gaming consoles
• Mobile devices
• And of course, a full-featured website at netflix.com

If I think of a movie I want to see while I’m at dinner, I can just open up my Netflix Android app and add it to the top of my queue to watch later.

Twitter is an interesting example of this new paradigm because of both the simplicity and wild popularity of their core service. Twitter has taken the idea of “Share what’s happening in 140 characters or less” and turned it into an ecoystem consisting of:

• Simple and customizable SMS interactions
• Media-rich mobile apps
• An API with which cool applications can be built (by Terralever, of course)
• And a feature-rich website at twitter.com

As an example of how Terralever practices what we preach, we recently launched a Social Support Platform called Cisco Ripple, which revolves around one centralized API that’s manifested throughout several experiences:

• A Facebook application
• A Twitter integration
• A world-class website
• Unlimited possibilities of other applications and integrations

If you don’t want to get lost in this evolution of the Web, focus first on the core idea of your digital presence, and then consider how that idea should be manifested across the different experiences available to your consumers.

PHOENIX, Ariz. – September 23, 2010 – Terralever, one of the nation’s leading full-service digital marketing agencies, has announced the launch of its newly designed corporate website, showcasing the latest visual and functional innovations in experiential website design.

Prior to the launch, Terralever performed a comprehensive analysis to determine how visitors moved and interacted through previous versions of their site.  They also conducted research to identify significant trends in design and social engagement, all of which combined to create a new site that is both intuitive and engaging.

“Today, almost all content consumption online occurs as a pull, with the user defining their path,” says Terralever CEO and founder, Chris Johnson. “This site reflects and caters to that experience.”

One of the highlights of the new site is the company’s portfolio, highlighting Terralever’s depth and breadth of capabilities.  Known for helping some of the world’s most recognizable brands, Terralever will showcase some of its most recent work, including:

• Red Bull-sponsored motocross athlete, Ashley Fiolek – Ashley’s personal website has garnered FWA Site of the Day Honors, Dope Award, and the CommArts Award for the combination of a Flash interface built on top of a WordPress content management system.
• Moxy Vote – Recently featured on Fox Business News, www.moxyvote.com is a groundbreaking website that gives shareholders greater voice in boardroom decisions by facilitating information sharing among shareholders, advocate groups, and public companies.

Another big feature of the website is the focus on all Terralever employees and the company’s culture.  In a clear shift away from sites that feature only key executives, Terralever encourages all staff members to contribute to the company’s blog, interact on social media sites and provide input on digital marketing strategy.

“We’ve worked really hard to assemble a team of experts,” said Johnson. “Each of them contributes knowledge and skills from interests that extend far beyond their particular development language or marketing specialty. We’re proud of that, and we want others to see why we believe our team is truly unique.”

Facebook announced yesterday on their blog that they are finally making a Platform-wide migration away from FBML and towards standardization on IFrames as a mechanism for displaying content, on Canvas applications as well as Page tabs.  This is fantastic news for developers!  Particularly for Pages, where this kind of support has never been available, we expect that our abilities will grow to:

• Use of jQuery. As well as other standard web development libraries such as Prototype to provide compelling JavaScript-based user interactions.
• Provide no-click startup for Flash. Currently, Flash videos and other content must be clicked to start playing within these environments on Facebook.  Our contention that brands should be able to determine their user experience is finally taking hold, which is exciting.
• Provide Facebook accessibility for Silverlight. Previously, I thought that we might be able to shoehorn Silverlight content into Facebook via a loophole in which an IFrame could be loaded when an image was clicked, but Facebook eventually closed that hole. With the FBML support for Silverlight completely non-existent it left developers who wanted to target Silverlight stuck between a rock and a hard place until now.

What does this mean for brands seeking to leverage Facebook to connect to end-users?  Easily, it’s a far more interesting and engaging user experience.  This great news allows for brands to be able to further express themselves within the Facebook interface, but the fact remains that a substantial number of users prefer Facebook’s far-more-egalitarian user experience over a site like MySpace because of its clean interface. Users also prefer the surfing of Facebook because it doesn’t necessarily mean being inundated with someone’s music choice upon landing on any particular page.  I believe that for brands to continue to be successful and viral on Facebook once this change comes forward, they will need to be respectful of that distinction and avoid click-to-play content only when content of an immediate nature (such as a limited-time offer by a brand or a time-sensitive event) is impending.  We hope to be able to make similar content, such as the live broadcast of the Red Bull Stratos mission, available via the Red Bull Page on Facebook.

Other Changes

In addition to this change, which should be coming in the next couple of months, Facebook has continued its migration towards full support of the new Graph API, which includes deprecation of uncommonly-used REST API methods and the requirement of OAuth for Canvas and REST API access.  They have also cleaned up their developer documentation and moved the list of Preferred Developer Consultants. With the standardization of IFrames as the primary interaction medium for Facebook applications, it will also standardize the way developers work with Platform, as the list of XFBML and FBML elements become basically the same.

We look forward to seeing all of these changes implemented and standardized, and very much look forward to being able to work with our web-standards technologies (like jQuery!) when marketing our clients.  It will be exciting to see the new interactivity that brands will be able to leverage before the end of the year.

Did you see the Wired article The Web Is Dead, published Tuesday? The basic premise is that the web is falling from grace, to be replaced by… The Internet. Confused? Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff make a case that the World Wide Web is being replaced by applications that we access through our mobile devices and through internet sites such as Twitter, Facebook and the New York Times. The difference between the web and the internet, as laid out by Anderson and Wolff, is the language they are coded in: web = HTML; internet = interactive code languages such as Java, Flash, Ajax and HTML5. Most sites you and I interact with are coded in these other interactive languages.

A flurry of tweets by user experience strategist, Robert Hoekman, Jr (@rhjr), made me take a second look at the article. He made several key points about the web vs. internet question, but it was his fourth point that is essential to understanding user experiences with online properties.

“Most people don’t know there’s even a difference between the Internet and the Web. And they couldn’t care less.”

That point resonated so deeply I might have thought a tuning fork had been struck in my cerebellum. Set aside the fact that I’m a web professional. As a user, I have little concern for the technical makeup of the websites that I visit. I care what I find there and how I might use that content. My functional expectations differ by site because my motivations differ by site. While on Wikipedia, I’m not really concerned about interactivity because I’m there to consume information on a topic. All I really want to know if the article I’m reading actually has the information I need. While on New York Times, let’s assume the news item I’m reading is supported by a photo gallery. The interactivity of the album may augment my understanding and appreciation of the total piece, but again, my primary motivation may simply be to consume information. Compare that to YouTube, my intent is different. I want to watch video. If the video is good, I’ll probably want to share it. I may even expect to browse several videos until I find one worth sharing. YouTube supports this by dynamically recommending other videos to watch. Online multi-player gaming requires even greater interactivity as my characters and those of the people I play with need to reflect play commands in real-time. But as an average user, I don’t register these levels of interactivity. I act or don’t act based on my motivations, and I assess site quality according to how well it satisfies my functional expectations.

Now think about your online presence – does your customer care if you’re part of the web or the internet? As Robert says, they couldn’t care less. What they do care about, is that you provide them with the interactions and experiences they seek when visiting you. The question, then, is what experience do you customers seek when they come to your web and social sites? Do you know?

You can read the rest of Robert’s response to the Wired article on his blog, sliced.

Today I start a 10-part series discussing Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. In each post I’ll discuss a topic and give examples so that you can keep your users happy go-lucky during their website adventures.

So, here we go…

Part 1: Visibility of System Status

Jakob Nielsen: The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback with reasonable time.

So, what does that mean?

It means that when a user interacts with your site, they need some sort of visual cue indicating that the system is working or that what they’ve done is either correct or incorrect. There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking on a button and not getting some sort of immediate feedback or response that something is, in fact, happening.

So, what sort of feedback can you provide?

There are a lot of different types of feedback that you can provide for your users. Here are a couple of examples…

1. Displaying loading, searching or progress indicators when users when information is loading on the screen.

At times they can look more like this…

Priceline’s full page feedback tool serves multiple purposes: entertainment, confirmation and marketing, but its main task is to provide a visual cue to its users, letting them know that the site is working hard to find their results. Obviously, having a whole page dedicated to a status indicator is not always necessary, but in Priceline’s case, it provides a clean, organized transition to the next screen.

2. Letting users know immediately that what they’ve entered is either okay or not okay.

Picnik.com does a great job of this. During their registration process, they let you know immediately if the username you’ve chosen is available or not. How annoying is it to fill out the whole registration form, hit submit and THEN find out that the username you’ve chosen isn’t available? What a time suck to sit there entering and submitting until you find something available. In Picnik’s case, you know right away.

This sort of immediate validation is just as amazing and helpful when filling out any type of form. Letting users know immediately that the email address they just entered is in the wrong format, is invaluable to their experience. Let them fix it right away and get on with their business, which may be purchasing a product from you.

There are more…These are just a couple ways that you can ensure users are “informed about what is going on” while browsing and interacting with your website.

How do you ensure that your users are comfy and confident?

We have been working closely with a client to develop a reactive response protocol for identifying reviews from dissatisfied customers, addressing their concerns, and delivering service corrections. After four months of active listening, we found the majority of negative reviews occur on two consumer complaint sites; of 118 issues identified, 54% appeared on PissedConsumer.com, and 16% appeared on ConsumerAffairs.com.

There are three basic types of consumer review sites:

1. Consumer Reviews and Ratings – These sites are distinctive in that they require contributors to rate the business, often on a scale of poor to excellent, or 1 to 5 stars, as part of their written review. Built around the idea of customers helping customers, the rating gives a quick read of the company, while the written reviews detail strengths and weaknesses, and dole out advice. Consumer rating sites often allow users to rate the helpfulness of the reviews they find on the site, thus shepherding the overall trustworthiness of the content. Examples: Yelp or Rate It All
2. Consumer Awareness – These sites were developed to provide objective third party reviews of product or service strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide general consumer education. Many of these sites have grown out of long-standing, well-reputed publications that have been trusted by consumers and journalists alike. Example: Consumer Reports and Edmunds.
3. Consumer Complaint Sites – Unlike their digital cousins, complaint sites have only two purposes, to provide consumers with grievances a soapbox on which to vent, and to profit from those grievances.

Businesses battling the parasitic effect of consumer complaint sites find themselves up against a daunting challenge. For starters, their names can instill a sense of paranoia in a consumer before they even read a review, for certainly nothing on pissedconsumer.com can be good. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to most visitors, consumer complaint sites are for-profit entities. They generate revenue primarily through advertising with Google AdWords and other ad networks, they sell business reputation management services, which I’ll touch on again later, and Pissed Consumer even goes so far as to charge users to feature their complaints. Called preferred positioning, the site promises greater visibility by other consumers and better chance of being contacted by the company for resolution in exchange for “a small fee”. I find it hard to imagine any consumer would pay for this so-called service; although I suspect a competitor might see it as a viable defamation tactic.

While I am no fan of these profit tactics, my greatest concern with consumer complaint sites is that in this age of customer-to-business dialogue facilitated by social media, consumeraffairs.com and pissedconsumer.com effectively amputate opportunities for true dialogue.

ConsumerAffairs.com does not provide a response mechanism for companies that want to reach out to, and solve the problems of, dissatisfied customers. Nor do they provide the ability to comment on individual postings. They have one form: a complaint form. Businesses who wish to respond to user reviews are instructed to use the complaint form. All complaints are screened by moderators before publishing, and my experience has been that company responses do not get published.

Pissed Consumer allows commenting, which provides businesses with the opportunity to respond within the thread to both the complaint’s original author and others who have commented on that thread. Unfortunately, comments are not tied back to user accounts, even when a user is logged in at the time of submission. This prevents readers from viewing other activity by the author. Notification of follow-up activity is also wanting. Both businesses and users are forced to manually search for responses to their posts.

ConsumerAffairs.com and Pissed Consumer do promote reputation management as premium services, enabling businesses to respond directly to consumers, but they are secretive about the features and benefits of these premium services. To find out more, I had to fill out a contact form and wait to be contacted by a sales representative. When Pissed Consumer called, I quickly discovered that they would not talk to me because they “don’t do business with agencies”. Pissed Consumer will deal only with the actual company that complaints are against and require a signed non-disclosure agreement before discussing any of their premium services. I advocate that companies manage social and customer service internally for greater authenticity, but agencies help clients by vetting service prior to recommending them. If you won’t talk to me, I cannot, in good conscious, recommend your services to our clients.

I’ll admit it, I felt affronted by this exchange with Pissed Consumer, but I hope that you are too. As businesses adopt social media to deliver customer service, consumers will begin looking carefully at how companies are responding to negative reviews. I firmly believe that sites that don’t provide a response mechanism do a disservice to customers who are looking to answer the question “if I have a problem, will the company help me resolve it?”

In March of 2010 the e-tailing group and Power Review performed a study that found that one half of Internet users research online before making a purchase. This makes sense; with information at our fingertips it would be silly not to research a purchase first. In the same study it was reported that 49% of customers will leave a site if there is a lack of user-generated reviews. The study made it clear; purchasers want to see reviews.

The interesting part is that despite the importance of customer reviews in the purchasing decision, a majority of companies are still putting Facebook strategies higher up on the priority list. In-fact, according to the e-tailing group, 91% of companies either employ or plan to employ a Facebook fan page in 2010, while only 85% plan to implement customer reviews on their site.

Even more interesting, the “2010 Social Shopping Study” found that customer reviews had a strong influence on over 70% of respondents and the purchases they make. At the same time, only 25% of respondents felt that Facebook had a strong influence on their purchase decisions. In fact, the survey found that social media sites were the least likely place for customers to do research to aid in their purchase decisions.

The customers have spoken; if the question is ‘to buy or not to buy?’ they want to see some reviews.

I use the internet a lot. I’m browsing daily, reading articles & blogs, shopping, socializing, researching, paying bills, etc. etc. So, I come across usability issues pretty often. I’m even more prone to noticing these annoyances because it’s my job, which makes it that much more painful. However, I make it a point to learn from these instances. I see an issue and I immediately commit it to the “Don’t ever do that” portion of my memory. So, I’ve decided to start sharing. What’s the point in keeping it all to myself, right? I figure this could be a way to get these usability faux pas out in the open so that history will stop repeating itself. At the very least it’ll make me feel better and we all may learn something along the way. So, here I go….

A story about abandoned towels.

I’ve been thinking of getting new towels for a while now, but the frugal side of me has me waiting for a good deal. So, the other day, as I was browsing my money saving blogs, I noticed a post regarding a great deal on Ralph Lauren towels at Horchow.com. For those of you that don’t know, Horchow is a mail order only division of Neiman Marcus (with the exception of their Horchow Finale Stores—only 3 to be found).

Now, I don’t recall the exact sale price of the towels, but I know it had to be cheap to grab my attention. They were probably $6-7 a towel, and being Ralph Lauren, I knew (or assumed) that they’d be good quality. My mind was made up. I was getting new towels and I was super excited.

So, I went to their site to get my new towels. Everything was smooth sailing at first. I was able to efficiently navigate their “Pottery Barnesque” site to find the towels section and locate the product I was looking for. No problems there. There they were. My inexpensive Ralph Lauren towels.

With all good deals there must be sacrifices.

Now, you have to understand that when you’re shopping frugally, especially on a deal as good as this one, you may need to make sacrifices. In this case the sacrifice would be on the color. I knew I couldn’t be picky, but I wasn’t going to pay any money for something that wasn’t going to match my home. However, white, tan, brown, cream or even a nice shade of green would have been fine.

Here’s a “representative screenshot” of the Ralph Lauren towel product page. The actual page no longer exists because they have sold out, but I assure you this page will do.

It looks like any normal product page. Nice, big product photo, product name, description, price per product type, etc. There are things I would improve about this page, but overall it’s fine. However, the main issue with this page is the product color representation. There is none. The only list of available colors is located within the drop-down menu next to each product type (i.e. Bath towel, hand towel, wash cloth). In some cases, such as offering a product that only comes in red, green & blue, this works fine. However, when you have colors like papyrus, khaki, and crystal, it get’s a little more difficult for users to find what they’re looking for by process of elimination. They shouldn’t have to work that hard anyway.

Roadblock: which color is Larkspur?!

So, this was my problem. The listed color names were too vague and confusing. They were, white, bay leaf green, khaki, papyrus, meadow, primrose, crystal, sachet, petal, coral, larkspur and chili pepper. To add to the complexity, only 2 of the colors were still in stock and I had no idea which one belonged to which color in the photo. All I knew is that there was one color (a bright blue color) that I definitely did not want to get, even at this price. So, I was stuck. I tried to find answers via their online chat, but after about 20 minutes of my time, they were unable to help me.

In the end, I ended up leaving the site without purchasing anything. I abandoned my towels. That one blue color was too bright for me to take the risk and I wasn’t confident enough to make my purchase. I was pretty upset. I really wanted those towels. They would have looked great hanging in my guest bathroom. Just not in that color.

So, what could have made my shopping experience more successful?

It’s easy. One simple addition to the product detail page. All I needed were some text labels on the product photo to represent which color was which. It may not be the prettiest of all product photos, but it would have gained them a sale. Even in the less complex example above, labels would have been nice. The color options for that product are: truffle, fern, celeste and blush. Again, I eventually figured it out after thinking it through, but I don’t want to think. I want to buy. And I’m in the emotional state to buy. In my mind, I already owned those towels. I’m the best type of customer and, as a retailer, you need to take advantage of that. Don’t distract me with silly things such as thinking or guessing.

To take it a step further, they may even want to think about changing the color names to be more user friendly. Such as, brown, green, blue and pink. That may not be so simple for all products, but in this instance it would make things easier.

How many people are “walking away”?

Now, I’m sure they’re not crying about losing my $28 or so dollars, especially since they apparently sold all of the towels anyway, but I can guarantee you that there’s an even smaller possibility that I would have paid full price to play their guessing game.

So, we have to ask, how many sales are they losing because of this issue? How many people just give up like I did and “walk away”? I can guarantee it’s a lot. If a web saavy customer like myself gives up, then it’s easy to presume that there are others. So, make sure to keep the customer in mind when designing and refining your website. Make things easy and quick and intuitive. If you keep those few things in mind then you’ll be a step ahead of your competition, these instances will be avoided and you’re sales wont be impeded. Guaranteed.

Small Update.

After browsing through a few more of their towel selections, I did find another group of Ralph Lauren towels with a color chart. It’s a nice added feature but way too far down on the page. I have my resolution set to 1440×900 and I still missed it. The most common resolution these days is 1024×768, which means those users will have to scroll even further down than I did in order to find it. So, keep the important information above the fold. Don’t force your users to search for what they need because they may not do that. If I had seen this on my original visit then I would probably be the proud owner of some new towels, but it wasn’t on the product page I was viewing. However, it would have been nice if their customer service could have pointed me here.

Your turn.

Sachet. Primrose. Larkspur. What colors do you think of when you read those? A Terralever color expert will be reviewing your answers later this week.

(Not really. We don’t have one of those.)

Since business fan pages have gone on the rise in the last year or so, there have been some great campaigns focused on gaining fans for those businesses. I’m sure you’ve noticed that there has been a large amount of businesses offering FREE goods to consumers in exchange for their fan-ship. I mean, who wouldn’t simply click a button and become a fan for a free bag of Oreo cookies? I did. I still don’t have my cookies, but all I had to do was become a fan. So, the time and energy investment for me was low while the outcome could possibly, maybe, fingers-crossed, be high for me and my family. No loss there. But what happens when these campaigns go bad and the experience leaves a bad taste in consumer’s mouths? Social media backlash. Companies typically want to avoid social media backlash of any kind. It’s quick and painful and it’ll hit you in the face before you know what’s coming. So, to avoid this, a social media campaign needs to be thoroughly planned out. If a campaign is poorly planned and managed, it can create a horrible experience for all those involved.

Let’s use this mornings Incredible Edible Egg (IEE) disaster as an example. Being the frugal consumer that I am, I heard through my online money saving network that starting at 10am EST, IEE was offering a free BOGO (Buy One Get One Free) coupon to the first 30,000 people to become fans. Simple, right? Click a button. Fill out a short form (which was pretty much filled out for you). Click submit. Coupon is emailed to you shortly thereafter. FREE eggs. So exciting!

Now, I have to tell you that as an experienced “become a fan” promo goer I am typically not optimistic about these sort of things. 30,000 coupons sounds like a lot, but when you’re dealing with a pot of over 350 million active Facebook users only 0.08% of them are going to get the coupon. I can pretty much guarantee you that if it was promoted well, there were probably over 30,000 people patiently waiting at their computers for the clock to reach “go time.” Everyone loves free stuff. Especially in this economy. So, chances were that I was not going to get a coupon, but I gave it a shot anyway. I figured I would have my answer in a few seconds and be able to get on with my day either way, right? Maybe not.

Here was my IEE BOGO coupon experience and an example of how things can quickly go terribly, terribly wrong.

At about 8:10am MST I clicked on the link, went to IEE’s Facebook page and became a fan. However, instead of being taken to the coupon sign-up page, I get this:

Now, because I work in, on and around the Internet all day long, it was clear to me that IEE hadn’t planned for all 30,000 (or more) users hitting their server at once. But to the average everyday Facebook user the experience is perceived much differently: The Incredible Edible Egg is broken. They hate me. They ran out of eggs. They scammed me. It’s a fake promotion. Really, they’ll come up with anything and they’ll tell people about it. This is why it’s best to avoid these perceptions completely.

So, I headed over to their fan page to check out the status of things. Their wall was already filled with comments from angry coupon-less deal goers that were being turned away by their server issues. Within 10 minutes they had hundreds of wall posts related to the promotion. Most angry, some calm and a few funny ones that included the expected egg related pun like, “Well, this didn’t go as EGGspected” or “Looks like the yolks on us.” Har har.

What’s amazing is that, even though they were angry, some fans were still trying to get their coupon 3 hours later and posting about how much of their day they’d wasted trying to get this coupon. They must really love eggs.

In attempt to keep diffusing the situation, IEE had been posting updates every now and again asking people to be patient, but at this point the damage had already been done. The experience IEE provided had not fulfilled fan’s visions of 12 free eggs all nestled away in their fridge for future enjoyment. And trust me, there’s no easier place to express your anger than a forum where you can post your feelings and run away with no consequences. Especially when you get a mob of people doing it at the same time. And it all stems from the fact that users feel entitled to receive what you said you were going to give them and it’s completely unforgivable if they don’t get it. Especially if it’s free.

So, when moving forward with a simple social media campaign like this, make sure you plan out every minor detail. Make sure that the user’s experience is fast, simple and easy. Let them get in and out without any hassle so that they are compelled to leave a positive message on your fan page and possibly even pass along your promotion to their friends through their many social media avenues. You want and need them to pass it on to make your campaign more successful. And ensure that you plan for worst case scenarios so that your promotion doesn’t die within the first two minutes of its launch.

I’m sure that IEE will recover from this incident. They’ll get the system working again and will probably have to give all of their fans coupons, well beyond the 30,000 they originally intended. Once they do that, everyone will be happy again and IEE will be able to live a more enjoyable existence. But, with better planning and guidance IEE could have saved themselves the heartache by doing it correctly from the start and keeping everyone happy all along.

Here are some of my favorite posts:

User Experience, also commonly known as UX, is a term not to be taken lightly when it comes to online marketing. It is also a term that I believe is highly misunderstood and often confused with terms such as Usability and User Interface Design.

So, what is User Experience?

Simply put, User Experience is a term used to describe the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system. In Terralever’s case, that would be a website or web application but it also applies to a consumers experience using, let’s say, an iPhone, car, dishwasher, airport elevator, gas pump, mail box, office chair, etc…

It’s easy to see why User Experience is often confused with Usability and User Interface Design, after-all, they are both very important elements of the User Experience as a whole – It’s the synergy of many elements that makes up User Experience. This includes Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Human Computer Interaction and Human Factors Engineering, just to name a few.

In online marketing, the perfect User Experience can result in conversions, leads, sales and ultimately success – The question is, have you planned ahead for your customers’ User Experience?

For a more in depth view of User Experience Design check out: www.montparnas.com/articles/what-is-user-experience-design/