Thoughts on International Domains and Usability
I responded to a question on Linked about the use of domains. Here is the original question:
I am about to start an internet marketing campaign in Canada for a product that I am importing from the USA. Their website (example) is www.CoolProduct.com, my question is: do I promote www.CoolProduct.ca, or www.CoolProductCanada.com, in my marketing? I have both registered, and one will have a redirect to the main site I end up using.
Here are my thoughts:
The focus of domain selection process should always be on usability. So, you may want to do some research on the most common used domain (whether it is .com or .ca). If .com is the most common domain, you will find that many users will mistakenly recall the CoolProducts part of the domain, and automatically assume it is a .com domain. If this is the case, I would suggest using CoolProductsCanada.com.
If, on the other hand, it is common and popular to use .ca domains in Canada, and other similar or industry brands are using a .ca domain, then the more “expected” domain would be a .ca and I would recommend going with the CoolProduct.ca domain.
The key is user memory retention — which one are they most likely to recall–and ease of use (easy to spell).
Another approach is to do some benchmark research or competitive analysis. If your competitors are using one or the other, that is an indicator. Also, look across industries or product lines to see what other retailers/marketers are doing.
The final thing would be to see if there is any research available on internet usage in Canada (or your particular country). This would give you the most factual data.
The LinkedIn user followed up via email with this thought: “If I get coolproduct.com to link to me for my Canadian customers, I think I am better off using coolproduct.ca as it is shorter and easier to remember.”
I would agree with his thinking in general there. Another key thing is he would have the need to brand the regional nature of your market (Canada only), so the .ca may do that best.
Why Voicemail Sucks!
I had a conversation for an upcoming article about what technologies I love and which ones I hate with business technology writer Grace Tiscareno-Sato . As I went through the mental list, I realized how much I dislike voice mail! There is a huge opportunity here for AVAYA or some other competing company to start marketing better alternatives (that I’m sure are out there). Considering how important team communication is to most corporate environments, I’m surprised large companies are not investing more in voice mail innovation. This could translate into huge productivity gains.
To me, checking my voice mail is as annoying as calling my cable company’s 800 support number. As some of you have read here before, I’ve had some pretty annoying and lousy experiences with Comcast and Verizon customer support. When you dial in to check your voice mail, I end up having to key in my ID & PW, then go through 3 menu levels to just listen to recorded messages. So, checking a voice mail ends up taking 5 to 10 minutes or longer.
Another part of the negative usability experience of using voice mail is that it forces me to go to it on its own terms, instead of the voice mail coming to me on my terms. What if I want to listen to the voice mail of my wife first, to know if I need to stop for some milk, and ignore the voice mail from the vendor that can be dealt with tomorrow? On top of that, when I have voice mail messages, I get this red light on my phone that teases and taunts me all day. it’s a mystery indicator that provides little value and provides little information. I would love to have a phone that can tell me who’s called (by caller ID or just the number), when they called and left the voice mail, how many missed calls I have — basically, some of the features we see on cell phones. On top of that, I would love a web or PC based voice mail system that lets me search voice mails — something like what the iPhone has.
Listen to your fourth voicemail message without listening to the three before it. Visual Voicemail shows you a list of all your messages — and who they’re from — so you can play them in any order you please
In short, most of the times I check a voice mail, I find that I have already returned a call or dealt with the issue, so the voice mail is useless.
But besides the usability flaws, I think another major problem with voice mail is that most people don’t know how to leave a concise and effective voice mail message. For some reason, people feel the need to leave a complete message fully explaining the reason for the call, and providing all the background or contextual details needed. All I want to know is who called, and hear a 15 second summary of why they need to speak to me.
Amazon.com "remodel" ux of the navigation bar
Read a cool review on Amazon.com’s new remodel of their navigation bar via the [Iai-Members] email. Jay Fienberg points out a nice improvement on the amazon.com logo home page link — a simple idea that anyone can implement on their own website.
Amazon has a new top of the page navigation that has, imo, some nice improvements over what they’ve been using for the past couple years.
As has been typical with most changes in the Amazon UI, only some users get to see this new nav right now. But, Amazon has a “remodel”
overview page with a screenshot:http://www.amazon.com/gp/events/gno/103-2180317-5339050
If you do see the new nav on regular Amazon pages, be sure to mouse- over the amazon.com logo / home link–I think it’s kinda-neat how they do the highlight state (the logo turns into a button with a faux hyperlink that says “homepage”).
Ironically, I was looking at the site for about 10 minutes before I actually noticed the new top of the page–the last few years have trained me to totally block-out the top of Amazon’s pages (as well as many of the other disorganized / strangely aligned feature zone
If anyone here on the list works at / for Amazon and is responsible for this: congrats! I know Amazon tends to manage its UI / user needs as a collection of autonomous fragments (each under the thumbs of the testing-metrics-bureaucracy), and it’s great to see a more cohesive design and set of changes being pulled together into a more unified communication / experience.
Jay
>
>> as in
>>> Jay Fienberg
>>>> http://jayfienberg.com
Second Life IA Summit Redux: Session Two
It’s going to be my first time attending a Second Life event. I already checked into Second Life, and “teleported” to IAI’s Info Architecture island to check things out.
Next in the IA Summit Redux series is Peter Morville’s “Information Architecture 3.0.” Peter will deliver a 60 minute version of his
preconference workshop tomorrow — free of course — on the IAI’s Info Architecture island. He’ll draw on stories, examples, case studies, and discussions to explore the future present of information architecture.Check out Peter’s avatar, to make sure you’ll recognize him:
http://www.findability.org/archives/000181.phpFriday, July 27 at 12:00 noon Pacific Time Info Architecture island
(http://slurl.com/secondlife/info%20Architecture/39/100/26)
Update: The speech is done, but some avatars are “hanging” around and doing further Q&A.
Tarquini : Blasting the Myth of the Fold
This was an interesting article for me as I come from a Journalism background. This article is a must read if you are involved in web layout design. It deals with the classic battle to place all the “good stuff” above the fold, which usually results in a crammed and cluttered layout.
Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.
Advertisers currently want their ads above the fold, and it will be a while before that tide turns. But it’s very clear that the rest of the page can be just as valuable – perhaps more valuable – to contextual advertising. Personally, I’d want my ad to be right at the bottom of the TMZ page, forget the top.
The biggest lesson to be learned here is that if you use visual cues (such as cut-off images and text) and compelling content, users will scroll to see all of it. The next great frontier in web page design has to be bottom of the page. You’ve done your job and the user scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page because they were so engaged with your content. Now what? Is a footer really all we can offer them? If we know we’ve got them there, why not give them something to do next? Something contextual, a natural next step in your site, or something with which to interact (such as a poll) would be welcome and, most importantly, used.
Tarquini makes an interesting comment in her own comment section thats important: content is still king.
Milissa Tarquini
65 Reputation points
Posted 2007/07/24 @ 09:02AM with +0 votesChris – you’ve got it right. The content is the key. If it’s good, users will follow it – and I think they will follow it even if they haven’t been to the site before. The design of the page is important of course, and great design can support that great content. But if the content isn’t good, well, then I certainly hope users aren’t scrolling to see more of it…
Update: Jacque at Silas Notes commented on Tarquini’s article and affirmed the importance of content to get users to scroll below the fold.
The key to successful web layout is therefore not to cram your content above the fold, but to write compelling content that will entice the user to want to scroll to read more.
Conversation by Design
Found a real cool slide over at SlideShare.net on blogging and user experience. Its titled, “Creating an effective and unique blog experience.” Check it out.
I was really struck by his statement on slide 25 & 26:
“Stop calling yourself a blogger. Bloggers are one-dimensional. People aren’t.”
So true. As technology changes right under our feet, how much does our vocabulary definitions evolve and change to our own detriment? Perhaps that term, blogger, never had the right “value” attributed to it, and less so now that blogging has become a stronger medium and communication tool.
In The Mail: Communicating Design
I just ordered my own copy of Communicating Design, by Dan Brown. I’m trying to strengthen my skills in Usability and Information Architecture, and this book sounds like its just the thing for me.
Christian Crumlish published a review in Extra! Extra!, his company’s blog:
I probably learned the most from his discussion of concept models, because I have the least amount of experience preparing these types of documents and I’ve always found them to be somewhat intimidating. He explains how to build them up from granular bits and also helps clarify a number of different approaches to connecting the nodes in such documents. He also includes as an illustration a version of Bryce Glass’s after-the-fact Flickr user model, an instant classic of the form.
You can get your copy in the Amazon link to the left, or read more at the Communicating Design website.
Blog Discovery: Olga How, Creative Thinker
This is a new blog I discovered today–Olga How, Creative Thinker. I haven’t started to dig in, but the first page had some interesting thoughts on usability and human interaction.
Olga is an Information Architect and Usability Consultant. For 10 years Olga has worked in the Web industry including public sites, Intranets, Extranets, interactive television, and online communities. Her focus is in providing Information Architecture, Usability consulting, Interaction Design, and Community Network Strategy to create great Web Experience Design. She has a wide breadth of experience starting with design and producer roles to project management.
I’ve printed out her first few posts to read ofline later this evening.
How Wal-Mart sells CDs
Bradley Werner has an article over at iMedia Connection titled “The Wal-Mart Model for Video Advertising,” but what caught my attention was a section where he writes about how Wal Mart sells CDs.
Recently, a colleague was telling me how a few years ago, Wal-Mart installed machines in all their music departments that allowed customers to listen to the CDs they were interested in before making a purchase.
Customers needed merely to bring the CD to the machine, put on the attached headphones, scan the CD and listen to whatever tracks they chose.
As a consultant for Wal-Mart at the time, my colleague asked an executive why, if all the CDs were already in their database and accessible by search, the machines required users to actually scan the CDs.
“Wouldn’t it make sense to have all the CDs available through the touchscreen?”
“Nope. Once those CDs are in our customers’ hands,” said the Wal-Mart executive, “they’re half-way to the cart. This system helps get the CDs in their hands.”
Wal-Mart, or at least the inventor of those machines, knew how to interact with people. When it comes to online video, we too need to know people.
Makes you wonder if we sometimes make things much to easy on the internet? It seems to me that the lesson here is that the key to effective interaction is to understand human behavior.
Larry Chase's 9 Best Practices for Publishing an Email Newsletter
I found this while doing research for tonight’s LI presentation. I took out two of them that I didn’t think where relevant to non-profits or political organizations, but Chase’s summary really does give an overview of things to watch for when developing your email publishing.
Here is the inside track on what to pay attention to when publishing your email newsletter, and what to stay away from.
#1: What’s Your Agenda? Before your content, before your subscriber acquisition strategy, you must think long and hard about who your target audience is and what your agenda is with them. Is this a customer retention strategy for your existing clients? Is it a thought leadership gambit? Or is your newsletter designed to generate sales?
#2. What can you give them that they don’t already have? The trouble with most email newsletters nowadays is they blur together. Very few distinguish themselves. Look at what’s already out there and resolve not to reinvent the wheel. Do something fresh. If your core business isn’t publishing, you would do well to hire an outsider to help you ascertain what information you have that the rest of the world wants to know about.You may be best served by acquiring content from outside sources. If so, make sure it isn’t the “same old, same old” content that your target audience already sees somewhere else.
#3. Shop Around for an Email Service Bureau: Make sure they are solvent. Price is not the determining factor here. Yes, I know everyone thinks this is a commoditized service, but I don’t care. What good is it if you get the best price and the bureau goes out of business or lays off much or all of its tech support staff? Which brings me to another point.
Before signing on with an email service provider, get at least three recommendations from that bureau. Remember, they’re going to give you referrals that give glowing reports. So do try to locate some users or former users who will give it to you straight. Also keep in mind the email service bureau business is fraught with complexity, with more being added all the time due to authentication systems coming online. The point is, be tough-minded, but be reasonable. Put calls into their tech support lines to see how responsive they are. If you’re paying $9.95 a month to send one million emails out, don’t be shocked if there’s no tech support on Sunday evening.
#4. Pay Attention to Reputation: It’s imperative you protect your domain name reputation. Publish your SPF records and look into a reputation service like Habeas. Such a service is quite likely to increase your email deliverability, open rates, clickthrough rates and so on.
Click here to subscribe free to Larry Chase’s Web Digest for Marketers Email Newsletter
#5. Develop a Subscriber Acquisition Strategy: You need one. Why? Because people unsubscribe from email newsletters at the drop of a hat. People leave their jobs and change their email addresses, too. So unless you have a plan for getting new subscribers, you’ll find the size of your list shrinking before too long. The average churn rate nowadays can easily be higher than 30%. Hereunder are a few sub-tips for boosting your subscriber registration numbers.
1. Put your subscription box near the top of your home page. Seems obvious, right? But then why do so many miss this one?
2. Offer a juicy incentive. Over 20,000 people have downloaded my “Essential Search Engine Resource Guide.” This guide also gets passed along and serves as my emissary, which causes more people to subscribe.
3. Only ask for the email address at first. If you want more information about your subscribers, offer additional incentives within the newsletter down the road. Remember, each additional piece of information you ask for up front severely cuts down on your acquisition rate. On the other hand, some newsletter publishers will ignore this sub-tip, since more information makes for a more qualified list.
4. Display your privacy policy clearly and prominently. This is one of the most popular links on my site, along with the next one…
5. Display a sample issue. People like to see what they’re signing up for before they hand over their email address. I do. Don’t you?#6. Subject Lines Are Critical: Everyone is trying to get their inboxes down to whatever magic number makes them comfortable. Your subject line needs to stop the reader from the repetitive motion of hitting that delete key that gets them to that very short-term goal. Keep you subject lines short.
Many people (specifically in B2B) are using the Internet to find something out or learn how to do something. No wonder I see “How to” subject headers blow the doors off response rates. Real news works, too. The more specific, the better. In short, tell me something I don’t already know. Don’t try to fill me up with a bunch of self-serving corporate pap.
#7. Look & Feel: Make it easy for the reader to skim your newsletter. Let’s face it, most people skim email. If they really do slow down and read your newsletter, good for you. But assume your readers are pressed for time every bit as much as you are. The more control you give them, the more they’ll appreciate it, whether consciously or unconsciously. My Web Digest For Marketers is designed in short info chunks. You can helicopter around to your heart’s content without losing continuity. People love that control. If you force the reader into clicking too many times or filling out too many forms to get at what he or she wants, you will be dropped like a hot potato. It’s similar to being routed around and around on one of those annoying phone systems.
#8. Read Your Newsletter Out Loud: Sounds silly, right? But unless you’re comfortable actually speaking the words you write, your newsletter “voice” will come across as phony. In fact, try to have your newsletter come from somebody in your organization, instead of just your company name. Look, the Internet is a pretty impersonal place. One good way to get above this intense clutter is to be human, and to talk like one.
#9. Keep It Fresh: Each year, I usually introduce something new. Here’s an example. Time was when an issue of Web Digest contained the latest and greatest marketing websites that we found for you that week. In house, we called those issues, “Surf ‘n’ Turf.” But now each issue is focused on one thing and one thing only. It may be PPC, or Email Deliverability, or SEO, or Increasing Response Rates, et al. Both advertisers and readers alike love this editorial approach.
Summation: The Internet is not one medium. It’s a bundle of media. Email newsletters are one strand in that bundle. They’re an extraordinarily cost-effective way of decimating information because just about anybody you want to reach now has an email inbox.
When done right, publishing an email newsletter is absolutely one of the most efficient allocations of your online media budget. The trick is to do it right. If you need help doing it right, get in touch with me and I’ll work with you on a consulting basis to get your newsletter launched on a solid and profitable trajectory.
