Visually-Aid Navigation – Differences Between Boys and Girls

Boys and Girls are different.

Aside from the obvious differences in our anatomy and behavior, there are other rather not obvious differences between our two genres.

While working in the new design for Hacienda Tres Rios interior pages Idida and I decided to implement a rather more visually-aid website navigation. Tabs and drop down menus are evil when over used, aside from the fact that overusing tabs indicates that you are indifferent towards your visitors needs and goals, but that is another story. The two chosen pages to implement the new navigation were:

• Restaurants & Bars
• Weddings & Honeymoons

Both pages have an even amount of traffic at the Hacienda Tres Rios website. We implemented our visually-aid website navigation about 6 weeks ago. Today I am showing you the heat maps for the last 4 weeks.

I implemented reinvigorate 4 months ago and it has been a joy ever since. I am able to see what our website visitors are up to and how they react to our interaction enhancements. However, this difference between Boys and Girls, was not foreseen. The two pages have an even amount of traffic but there audiences are not the same, and this is significant. Visitors in the weddings page click in links more, while visitors in the restaurants page prefer to click on pictures.

I was expecting people to click in images, because that is what I do.

My father once told me, the day you open a store choose products for every one, not based in your personal taste but in what people might like. He was right.

When I decided to implement this graphically enhanced navigation, I had no prove whatsoever that it will work. There where no analytics, studies or hard data to support my case. However the confidence that Ariel Castro has always invested in our E-Marketing team led us towards the implementation, we both knew it would work the minute we saw the interaction.

Happy holidays to everyone. 2011 is not only a new year, but the start of a new decade, a decade for success and evolution. God bless you and your families with joy and health.

Below you can find screenshots of the heat maps.

Having a web site is a full time job

If you want to get something out of it.

Web sites that sell

I happen to love sales and marketing more than chocolate, that may be cause my grand mother was in sales, both my parents are, and working in the beautiful Cancun, Mexico most of the time you are surrounded by a sales environment.

Every now and then I see fascinating things that should be shared with the world  in order to inspire the business people out there to replicate and improve the models. The Internet is the marketplace of a global economy, there is market for everyone who knows how to get the best out of it. That is the reason I am writing this series. I hope you enjoy them, share and provide some feedback on them.

If you think you are being a clever marketer, you are doing it wrong.

When I first started developing web sites back in 2002 I was naive. I was under the impression that doing something different meant to use elaborated words that no one else was using, I thought that the web was missing fashion and style, and that for some magical reason, I was the one who was meant to make it right. Sadly, I was wrong.

Being clever when developing your site’s content is one thing, using the wrong words that no one is searching for is in the other hand… A stupid thing to do. I spent some time doing the latter myself, only to understand later on that all my work was worthless, I want to give you a word of advice here: Use common sense.

The logical way of thinking is the best possible way to start your site, whatever is it that you are doing, do not try to be as original that no one ever get to know who you are and what is it that you are saying. If you need some help on learning to write for the web you can get some good advice on Copywriting tips for online marketing at CopyBlogger.com, that is one of the sites that I use and visit the most these days.

Practical Example

Lets say that you are starting a new Day Spa in Aspen. You want to provide some super cool sort of service and you want people to know about it.

Ask your friends and family, or even strangers –Choose people that fits your market–  the following question: When you want to look for a Day Spa, how do you google it?

If you happen to master the understanding of how people googles, you will become a start in the Internet marketplace. There is a line where we all come together, may be a word or a phrase, use this phrase to elaborate your keyword vectoring, the content of the blog in your site, and the product pages too.

Keep away from talking about technicalities of the massages or the products at your spa if it is not relevant to your business. Talk about what is relevant to the people that is looking for your product, in other words, provide value to your visitors.

Keep your customer always in your mind. He is the one that is looking for you, for him to be able to find you, you gotta make it happen. Focus on your main business, not in details that no other but the therapist may be talking about –unless of course your day spa offers some sort of training. Focus on what is relevant to your business: Your customer and what he wants.

In order to sell you need to be noticed. In order to be noticed on the Internet, you got to understand your target market.

Tags: websites that sell

You cannot change the world if no one knows you. By Whitney Hess

Whitney Hess, is a great girl, who shares super cool information on the web, she is a User Experience Design based in NYC, she and Jared Spool, are two of the most motivating persons out there.

Basically what she says is that wee need to put more work on what we are doing, talk about it on our personal blogs, and twitter, also be networking with people in networks like linked in. Most of the times our worst enemy is ourselves. Keeping us from reaching our goals.

The opposite of networking is Not Working, is one of the great quotes of the presentation.

I hope you find it useful as much as I did.

Regards,

Iaax Page

The Myth of the Genius Programmer. Google IO

I loved this talk, it takes an approach on software development and project management, that resembles the extreme programming methodologies. Although Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Susman, actually do not do pair programming, but code review instead, they know that is very important for the health of a software project to have more than two eyes looking into pieces of code that get committed to the Project Repository, the fact that failure happens and the quick iteration are also related to the extreme programming world.

We can learn so much form the perspectives shared in this  Google video, in how to approach collaboration in Open Source Software Projects.

I hope you enjoy the talk as much as I did.

Regards,

Iaax Page.

Twitter trend #googlefail, should talk about real google fails

I do not hate google

This post is inspired by the new Google Wave coming out soon, which I consider to be a heavily elaborated desperate measure to start generating realtime content so google can really tell you what is going on every second!

1) Heavily elaborated

Heavily elaborated, cause it needs to be everything to everyone, it is a twitter-like system connected to Picasa Web albums, and Google mail. So What is it? A new way to communicate with each other, or a way for someone to own every little piece of information regarding to you?

2) Desperate Measure

Google is being trying to provide real time search since twitter started skyrocketing, ok, they can’t do it if they do not own twitter, so the answer is Lets make Wave and fuck twitter and the users and the world, lets make our own twitter, so twitter goes down to the ground like the useless little crappy piece of web app it is! Hahahahaha dream about that Wave. Twitter rules!

The #googlefail trend

I repeat I do not despise Google, in fact I must be indirectly responsible of several thousands of people using it, I started telling every one how good it was back in 1999 or 2000, I used to said: Ask Dr. Google, he knows everything!

I am tired of Google trying to be everything to everyone. Instead of developing a faster browser, which actually is an anorexical safari version on crack,  an operating system for devices -Well that last one is not that bad, motorola, nokia, and the other players they were not getting it right anyway-

Why instead of  Do not evil try Do what is right!

Who in freacking hell is doing what is right anymore? MicroSoft?, Apple?, Oracle? And Yahoo? where are you?

Is it a fact that Google is the Internet? I do not think so! lets look at two major Google Fails

And least but not last Knol!

Seriously folks, when was the last time you did search the web for something finding a KNOL result above a Wikipedia result?

I’ll try Wave when it comes out to the public and then update this post!

Iaax Page.

Revisited, thanks to my Editor Ramon Cambeses

Customer is always right

Sales articles main image

Customer is always right, it is our job to help them discover what they want.

Every time a man comes into our shop asking to get a project done, they pretty much know what they need, it is responsibility of the sales professional to understand the customer, and then based on a deep analysis of his needs sell the appropriate solution.

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. –Steve Jobs, Apple CEO.

Its a common thing to hear that Henry Ford once said: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said Faster Horses.

People is well aware of their needs, in the times when Henry Ford was building an emporium, they new they needed to get from one place to another faster. Then it is perhaps logical to assume that the current transportation means can be improved in order to meet those needs, changing the transportation from horses into model 5′s was innovation!

People is reluctant to change, and both things are equally inevitable.

Ford knew he was right, he needed to change the paradigm of cars into something better, into something new, for this he decided to prove himself and his customers, how a horseless car was in many ways better than the traditional transport means, he sold the world into the idea of a modern vehicle.

Therefore, if we analyze the plot of the story, we could conclude that not only shall we expect our customers to be reluctant to change, but that a sale will be made, either we as the experts sell our customer into the idea that a modern product will serve better his needs, or he sells us into the idea that he only needs a small set of changes to his current solution.

I am not trying to get you to upgrade all your customers, the purpose of this post is to help you understand that we the sales professionals are entrusted by our customers to help them get the best possible solution. Also, to remember that you are the sales professional, it is your responsibility to sell your customer into the right solution, to expect and face his reluctancy, to prove how much benefit will come from making the right choice, it is not the big commission check you are going to get at the end of the month, it is all the subsequent checks you are going to be making for the rest of your life from the referrals of your current customer.

Never compromise your principles, developing low quality products for couple of bucks may seem such a great deal when we are young and unexperienced, but it wont bring the big cash in tomorrow. It is better to refuse a sale when you know that you customer does not fully understand what he needs, than just taking his money once. However, before turning any proposal down you should make everything in your power to convince your client to commit to your suggestions.

Iaax Page

Tags: Customer needs, Sales

I want to be an interaction designer!

First of all Let me start by pointing you to Allan Cooper blog, where you will find everything you need to know about Interaction Design.

Wikipedia’s definition for Interaction Design is: The discipline of defining the behavior of products and systems that a user can interact with.

In other words, interaction design is a behavioral design. How the product will beahave in response to its use. Many people believes that interaction design is just another way to call User Interface Design, which is nowhere near the true meaning and purpose of the discipline.

An interaction designer may suck as much as I do for user interface design and still handle to help developers, and designers develop great products. Cause the purpose of interaction design is to think of people, how people interacts with the products, and design the behavior of the products in a way that they resembles a “considerate human being”

You and I, we have all used products that were built to make our life easier, that were made to help us achieve our goals faster, to make us more productive, and nevertheless we know that sometimes this “products” are nothing but a fucking nightmare to use, they frustrate us,  using them to achieve our goals is worst than the good old way. Hell! We sometimes even think that they design this products to makes miserable! And that, is not a funny feeling.

Most of the time this products behave in a way that resembles the bureaucratic crap they were developed at, where some salesman promises impossible things in improvable times, and pointed the development team to do exactly what the client wants, without taking into consideration that, the client and the user, most of the times are not the same person. This kind of story ends were we play the part of the clueless victim, who just happened to be chosen to use a product that was developed without taking into consideration that what we want is to “Do great work”, leading to the doom of the project.

Well, none of that would ever happend if the team responsible for developing the product woulded use the services of an Interaction Designer, to guide them through the dark path of the so called “clueless user”.

The Clueless user is the upcoming post IT support crew hang on to your pants cause I will be coming hard on you!

This is the kind of work that I have been trying to develop recently, nevertheless my first attempts failed to identify that the key purpose is not to draw pretty prototypes, it is to think of the user, and how the user will use the product. Perhaps I was biased by some environmental eventualities, however, that is no excuse. After two more meetings with the company I am developing the prototypes for I understood what Alan Cooper meant when he said, you can never let the user take design decisions, and used the tool he talks about in his book about face 3, I asked my client: What problem are you trying to solve with that feature?

Jesus Christ, I promise it felt like if I was the greatest of the Interaction Designers for about 2 minutes, after he finally told me what the “pain” really was. My client started to tell me everything what he wants to offer to their users, and then I had it, I finally had it, the solution was in the back of my mind, and I just needed to draw it.

After that meeting everything has been more productive, my prototypes seem to meet the functionality that my client is looking for. I am getting more empathy with the different kinds of users that this product will have, I get to understand their goals, so I am capable of developing solutions that will help ‘em meet their needs.

All is based on one single keystone that I have been reading a lot for the past few years, specially and particularly in the book by the Dr Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly effective people: Mutual understanding.

I found a way for my client to tell me what he wants, and a way to tell him how what I am doing for his product will help users achieve their goals, and therefore, help him. I am telling you, there is no better feeling than knowing that your work will matter.

Coming up next: The clueless user and the IT support tiny gods, or The revenge of the users!

This is your host Iaax Page, thanks for takinf the time to read this post, I hope you keep coming back for more on Technology, Marketing and Sales!

Announcing the Interaction design series

Hey fellow readers, I am pleased to announce that finally I will be posting a series of articles which aim to present you with a full description of what Interaction Design. I know you are gonna love this cause we are gonna present content that will help you be a better post by post!

Tags: About Face Series, Interaction Design

Bullet proof social media marketing strategy!

I was reading the article Building complementary services: A powerful long-term social media strategy at dosh dosh, it exposes a lot of insides on the social media marketing approach, as you may have noticed by the title, I like it cause it is actually very good, it tells you that if you do want to succeed, you have to provide value, and it does not come easy, it is definitely worthy reading if you are interested in the web as a mean to help your business grow!

Along with the article 7 ways to be worth following on twitter, and several other articles that for the lack of time I have not placed together yet. However, I promise I’ll make a list of those that I find the most worthy reading and post it.

Iaax Page.

“Publicity is giving someone a reason to Talk about you.” -From the dosh dosh article, I did love that quote.