It was nice speaking with Ricardo Jimenez of Microsoft Cafe TV at the Arroba de Oro conference in El Salvador (more on the conference soon!). The intro is in Spanish, but I speak in English about the importance of social media tools and processes to facilitate collaboration INSIDE companies.

Here’s Ricardo’s MSDN blog and Twitter feed, and the Microsoft Cafe TV Facebook page.

What does your company use for internal collaboration?

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I’ve been discussing landing pages with several clients in the last few weeks, sharing some of the complexities and best practices in getting to high conversion rates. I thought I’d share some links to some overviews of tips for your landing pages for your banners, email marketing, paid search and more.

As you probably know, the first step to managing anything, especially online, is to measure it. Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer are two free, robust and valuable tools that are the foundation of any improvement program.

If you don’t know how many people are moving through your ads/site now, how will you know if these recommendations have any impact, better or worse?

One of my favorite resources is WhichTestWon.com a site that features different A/B tests each week. Both options are shown and you choose which one you think would be more successful in conversion, then after your vote, you get the answer and why… of course you get to see how other site visitors voted too. The past award winners is a treasure trove of examples.

This is a Hubspot presentation from a webinar, so there is a sales pitch there, but it’s also a really good high level overview of the concepts and basics. “Optimizing Landing Pages for Lead Generation and Conversion Webinar“.

A nice basic, short Slideshare presentation on “Landing Page Best Practices“.

“Landing Page Design & Optimization” with some good examples. An interview with the author that gives some additional perspective.

A good research-based presentation “Landing Page Optimization Study: Improve conversions on Lead Generation campaigns“.

A ton of info and detail on this Slideshare presentation, “101 Landing Page Optimization Tips“.

“Five Tips for Healthy Landing Pages” from the CEO of Offermatica, a testing company.

Finally, here is a really good blog post with some examples, and summaries of 5 more articles on landing pages “5 Must Read Articles on Landing Page Best Practices“.

What is your best tip for landing pages?

Via a quick post on the SuperWebAnalyist Blog from Ed Wu of the Web Analytics Association and Dell’s Consumer Online team come a great post on “numbers that lie” or at least don’t really offer any insights about online behavior.

In one of my new favorite blogs to read, analytics pro Avinash Kaushik shows how Averages, Percentages, Ratios and Compound Metrics (aka Calculated Metrics) don’t show much real insight, and can often be misleading.

As an example to combat the “fluff” of averages, you should identify your most important / interesting segments for your business and report those along with the overall averages. Distributions of tiers of activity also help wade through the numbers and get to real actionable insights.

See the rest of his very good recommendations here, including how to make use of the “Better Google Analytics” Firefox plugin that offers several advantages and updates Google Analytics.

Another great post is on his recommendations on establishing strong KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators for your website. (Not sure why there are 6 recommendations but 8 rules, but hey, who’s counting? What’s a KPI?

Measures that help you understand how you are doing against your objectives.

Although to some it’s obvious, unlike several of my past clients (sorry), you do need to set objectives for your web marketing efforts (some thing a little more specific and measurable than “have a cool website” and “make more money”) and then set measures to track your efforts in attaining them. How else do you prioritize your efforts?

Some of his recommendations are pretty standard, but his explanation of WHY they are good is worth a read. I’ve overviewed them here:

1. Conversion Rate, (pretty obvious) measures towards objectives
2. Average Order Value cross and up-sell measures (Yes, with segmentation and distributions!)
3. Days & Visits To “Purchase”, especially with relationship customers and products that are considered purchases
4. Visitor Loyalty & Visitor Recency, aiding in segmenting & targeting most valuable customers
5. Task Completion Rate, goes hand in making sites usable and fine tuning good content
6. Share of Search to better measure against competitors. Compete.com seems like an interesting tool to help

Follow Avinash on Twitter.

Are you actively managing your site’s analytics? What are you missing in your optimization of your sites efficacy and customer experience? Are you really capturing your share of market?

David Armano has a great info graphic on the evolution of organization/individual touchpoints on Flicker. I commented, what do you think?

Just read a pretty good interview with Cordell Ratzlaff, ex-Apple and ex-frogdesign and the new head of product design at Cisco.

Having just built a UX team at my former job, and now looking for new opportunities, I’ve seen first hand the specialization and fragmentation of roles in UX groups. I certainly understand specialization and a very focused approach to a career, but I agree with Cordell’s point about too narrow a focus by many people in the field. I have a heck of a time describing what some of these folks do… to some extent my own skills are a bit hard to define to someone not experienced in this field. That, I’ll have to work on.

One of my pet peeves is with the specialized labels that have evolved within our profession. We have user interface designers, usability engineers, user experience specialists, visual designers, interaction designers, etc. The distinction between these many roles is fuzzy and confusing to those both inside and outside the design profession. Personally, I blame the information architects for this — they think they need to classify everything.

Funny! Blame the IA’s, nice….
He also talks about the competitive advantage many companies gain from focusing not just on technology (what’s technically possible) but design as well (what’s desirable, efficient and productive). As I’ve been in sales/biz dev conversations with customers over the last few years, this topic is coming up again and again… technology is cheap, the experience and context will be the way a product gets sold and successful.

More and more companies appreciate the strategic value of design and see design as a way to solve business problems. This is a great direction for designers, but it means we all have to get more business savvy. There are a few things driving this trend. First, technology is a commodity. The cost of technology and the time to bring it to market are both decreasing. Technology leads are fleeting. Google launches a new feature. A few weeks later, you’ll see it on Yahoo. When technology and time-to-market are no longer competitive advantages, design — and the experience it provides to customers — can be a strong differentiator.

All emphasis is mine.

He makes a few other good points… on how to drive UX awareness in a large company that has a technology background. It’s worth a read, enjoy!

Google News is one of my favorite ways to get a quick overview of what’s going on with the world. However, once in a while, I click on a news article that’s interesting, but goes to a local news site… I think mostly local tv station websites. Since these sites were created to serve the local market, they generally don’t feel the need to note prominently where the station is located… i.e. what state they are in.

Here’s an example for “Fayetteville’s FayObserver.com”… I have no idea what state Fayetteville is in. I’m sure if I clicked around a bit, I’d see the state, but I think it should be listed clearly. Here’s an example of a newspaper site (my local) that sometimes breaks national news… the Austin-American Statesman. However, if you didn’t know it was in Texas, this page wouldn’t tell you.

It’s really an interesting evolution… local can now draw national attention and clicks. I’d suggest that managers that run local-oriented news sites take a look at who their users just might be… classic issue to be solved by user-centered design methods (and maybe a little web traffic analytics).

Does your site quickly give context to new visitors? Or do they have to be local or in your industry to understand anything?

If you are using Google Maps to check out cities in California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada or New York, you’ll notice a new option in addition to “Traffic, Satellite, Map or Hybrid”… “Street View”.

It’s a nice way to “virtually tour” places you’ve never been, or to see the neighborhood of an office you are heading to. Very cool!

Below is a screen grab of a street level video view of New York’s Times Square. You can move forward, back, turn around and down connected streets in the interface.

Some cities, New York at least, have 3D building views as well.

Of course there is also speculation on “virtual billboards” and other advertising in this video… I’m sure it’s coming…

I love this concept of a one page overview of a complex idea/process/step. Over at IAOneSheeters.com, they have 3 (so far) examples covering the basics of Wireframes, Heuristic Evaluations and Usability Testing. They are great for sharing with business people or other team members that don’t have an information architecture background… they cover the basic overview, some visual examples, benefits and how each adds value to a project.

I’ve been thinking of doing some work along these lines with some of the newest media topics that are hot… mobile marketing, social media, social networks and more. Anyone want to help?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been re-reading some of the old information architecture books from the mid- to late-90′s… from Clement Mok’s Designing Business, to Richard Saul Wurman’s Information Architects. It’s great seeing their early efforts, most of which are still amazing… they brought such order to very chaotic information. Subway maps, road atlases, information graphics, business process graphics… Tons of great examples and learning experiences in those two books.

As I’ve been looking over those, I’ve realized that my focus on information design has been mostly around electronic spaces, web, email, mobile, software… but it can also be about phone books, maps, directions to and from stores… it’s really a pervasive discipline. And if you look at some of today’s media, still an under-used one.
Even art can have an information design aspect to it: CNN profiles an interesting art project showing snapshots of people’s emotional experiences as they move through a city. Not just the streets mapped with a GPS, but how a person feels, heartrate, respiration, blood pressure and notes of what they did and saw.

“There are different ways of mapping the city that aren’t strictly about the practicalities or financial sensibilities that we usually guide our urban planning with”

At the artist’s site, you can download some data for Google Earth, and see lots more examples of UK cities mapped.

An good Ad Age article on some large companies using design personas.

Alan Cooper’s great book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity is really where you want to start reading up on personas and goal-directed design in general.

Also, Boxes and Arrows have several articles on their use, link goes to article mentions. I love that site.
Enjoy!