Optimize & Prophesize

Category: User Experience

  • Choice Kills Conversion

    Too often websites, landing pages and even ads decrease the odds of conversion by presenting considerations to users when they are already past the consideration stage and ready to buy. When confronted with choice user response will slow, users become unsure of themselves and many times they will fall off their task. As soon as…

  • R.E.M. Reshaping E-Metrics (or Revolutionizing E-Marketing)

    Marshall Sponder’s blog WebMetricsGuru had a post with comments from a recent Eric Peterson’s e-consultancy interview that caught my attention. The conversation is about the present difficulties for analytic vendors and display advertisers in the face of rich-internet applications (RIAs) and feeds as they continue to proliferate on the web. Sorry if I don’t shed…

  • Optimizing Your Content Pages

    https://s3.amazonaws.com:443/slideshare/ssplayer.swf?id=3622&doc=omma-new-york-when-every-page-is-a-landing-page-14215 This past week at OMMA New York I spoke to content providers. The session was titled “When Every Page is a Landing Page.” This indeed is the case and exemplifies the power of digital marketing (namely search) to deconstruct traditional forms of media and the long held practices around them. The idea of presenting…

  • Delivering Contextual Relevance Through Segmentation

    Mass marketing in the digital age means marketing to many segments of the entire mass. In fact, we all know the very idea of “mass marketing” is road kill. Technology allows us as marketers to understand the individual segments of our audience and deliver messages contextually relevant to each segment. In fact, segmentation is the…

  • Landing Page Optimization

    Leading up to my panel participation Monday September 25th at OMMA New York on Search and Site Design: When Every Page is a Landing Page; I’ll be sharing a deep dive into some methodologies for landing page optimization. This post begins to explore the role of the keyword query and how that informs landing page…

  • The State of the State: Afterthoughts on SES San Jose

    Online marketing and in particular search is still very much a nascent insurgency. I try to remember that. But at the end of this latest SES, after I had the chance to talk with the leaders in strategy, technology, analytics as well as reps from the engines themselves I walked away (once again) with a…

  • The Quality of Web Analytic Data. Or, why you need to be doing High Impact Segmentation

    Avinash Kaushik of Intuit had a great post recently on the poor quality of web analytic data. A side story to me was how much better the amount and quality of data we have for online marketing is over every other measured medium. As we look more and more towards this data and the quality…

  • YouTube’s need for Contextual Relevance

    TechCrunch has a piece on YouTube reaching the 100 million videos served a day mark. I guess this is good news for YouTube however, as much as I love YouTube I fear they are bound to fail as a revenue generating business. Online advertising success is predicated on what I refer to as contextual relevance.…

  • Website Optimization Advice

    I had the privilege to spend my day today doing something I love, observational research. I observed ten users spending 45 minutes each on a website. The site was a prototype that a client plans to launch soon. This is a very important launch and one that plenty is riding on. It didn’t go well.…

  • Microformats and Marketing 3.0

    Microformats may be the most exciting and important project currently being advanced in the next generation of the web. This is beyond Web 2.0 to 3.0. Yet, like many of the great web 2.0 advances it is rooted in ideas that have been around for a long time and microformats are already in practice. Technorati…

  • Relevant Design

    Made possible through the use of front-end and back-end web 2.0 technologies, Relevant Design merges the best values of persona based design with those of goal based design. Relevant Design is an executable platform with its own methodology to test and deliver targeted messaging to the goals of specific personas. Relevant Design creates unique rules…

  • Mind Hacks

    Found this courtesy of Bill Scott’s great blog. This is an example that we need to keep in mind that understanding how brains react is a key component to designing dynamic web experiences. Did you know we actually hear with our eyes? This is called the McGurk effect. You can check it out here. I’ll…

  • Simplicity and Ease

    If it’s simple it’s easy. If it’s easy it’s not difficult. If it’s not difficult you don’t mind doing it. If you don’t mind doing it you are more likely to like it. If you’re more likely to like it you’re more likely to do it again. If you’re more likely to do it again…

  • The Parts are Greater than the Whole Foods

    I watched a great report on user experience tonight on CNBC. Actually it was a profile of Whole Foods. In one segment, CEO John Mackey described their two stores in New York. While many other companies would execute strategy for New York consumer tastes singularly, Whole Foods has created different shopping experiences in Union Square…

  • Online Dating and Baiting

    The other night two of my close friends were discussing the pros and cons of online dating services. They both had some interesting observations about the product err, profile pages. 1. Women who put descriptions about themselves that seemed to be tailored to what men want to hear were unappealing. My buddies wanted the real…

  • Spastic Comcastic

    For the past 4 years I have purchased Major League Baseball’s premium cable TV package. It costs around $160 for the seasons and I’m sure my cable company Comcast and MLB are making a tidy profit. While it has been on my radar to order it again this season I just haven’t had a moment…