You know what you want to say, and you know exactly how you want to lay it out. Great, you’re about half way home. Copy and layout are the first part of presenting your information, but maybe not the most important part. Before your audience begins to read and react to your information they see it in color.

Color creates audience responses by stimulating emotions and communicating on levels other than reason and intellect. It can excite, impress, entertain and persuade, but color can also create instant negative associations. It’s a good idea to be aware of how the majority of people respond to color and use this information in your choice of colors. Use the guidelines in the chart below to help you choose the colors that are most appropriate for the message you want to get across.

Color Chart (suggested meanings) (Launch a ColourWheel - requires Flash 5.0 or greater)
The chart below represents several meaning for color. Each color may represent another emotion to you. Use your best judgment when dealing with color and make sure to get feedback on the colors you use.

Red	Aggressive, strong & heavy
Blue	Comfort, loyalty & security
Yellow	Caution, Spring & brightness
Green	Money, health, food & nature
Brown	Nature, aged, & eccentric
Orange	Warmth, excitement, & energy
Pink	Soft, healthy, childlike & feminine
Purple	Royalty, sophistication & religion
Black	Dramatic, classy & serious
Gray	Business, cold & distinctive
White	Clean, pure & simple

When choosing colors for your design, remember a few rules for mixing colors. The human eye cannot focus on red and blue at the same time. Trying to read red type on a blue background or vice versa causes extreme eye fatigue. Your audience will not be receptive to your message if it hurts them to read it. Never, ever use blue type on a red background and even worse, is red type on a blue background.

Most colors go well together with members of the same "family". Warm colors of type, such as red, brown, orange and yellow look better together in combination warm colored backgrounds; cool colored type like blue, green, gray and white with cool colored backgrounds. Using color families generally makes for a more appealing presentation, especially for large amounts of information.

Contrast is fun and can be used effectively to accent information and draw attention to items. In general, keep the contrast low. Too much contrast makes your work difficult to digest. For type, keep the contrast reasonable no matter what colors you’re working with. If your background has a value of, say 20%, and the type has a value of 80%, it presents a subtle look that's easy on the eyes and is graphically appealing. Avoid the extremes.

Courtesy of Chris Jackson

The paralysis of choice and how to improve sales and customer satisfaction (...or less is more)

by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

Some time ago, Barry Schwatz gave a talk at Google on "The Paralysis of Choice: Why More is Less". The talk was illuminating in that it dispels some myths about providing choices to customers. While the lecture was a general one on how providing choices affect decision-making and sales, I will try to show how the general principles help a web designer / programmer improve his sales and customer satisfaction.

Some General Principles on Providing Choices

Before I mention how the presentation impacts the webmaster and programmer, let me briefly summarize some of the salient points from that talk. Note that what follows is my own interpretation of his message, with my own words and clarifications, based on a vague memory of a video of the talk and coloured by my experience running thesitewizard.com. It is by no means a comprehensive summary but merely a distillation of the points pertinent to this discussion.

• When Customers Have More Choices, They Buy Less

  Many of us labour under the impression that providing customers with a wide selection of products of a certain type increases customer satisfaction. After all, we think, if we provide them with 200 brands of peanut butter, they are more likely to find a brand that suits their taste. Schwatz cites surveys done in supermarkets that showed the reverse. When customers were presented with a huge selection of brands of a certain item, fewer customers bought the item than when fewer brands were displayed. The wide selection led to a paralysis of choice - the customers could not decide which brand to choose. As a result, they went away without choosing any.

• In Decision-Making, People Often Simplify using the Wrong Criteria

  Schwatz also cited a study that showed that when presented with many choices, where making a choice required juggling many complex criteria, people often subconsciously simplified the criteria by focusing on one. The criterion they chose was often the wrong one.

• More Choices Leads to Greater Dissatisfaction Because Expectations are Raised

  When people have more choices, they expect more, because they expect that they will be able to choose the exact item that meets their needs perfectly. As a result, when more choices are given for a product, the chances of dissatisfaction with the product is higher. When no choice is offered, people either have no expectations or their expectations are lowered. I suspect they probably figured that since they had no choice but to get that particular item, it was unlikely to be perfect. They thus prepared themselves to accept a product that was merely "good enough".

Presenting Visitors and Users with Choices: A Webmaster's and Programmer's Perspective

How do Swatz's points, which are derived from the brick and mortar world, translate to the virtual world of the web? The points below are my own take on how we can use those principles to design a website that increases sales and end-user satisfaction. Note that many of the points below also apply in some part to the design of software, both online software, like web applications, and offline programs, like those that run on your computer at home. Hence they also apply to the programmer.

• Reduce the Number of Choices and Decisions that End-Users Have to Make

  If your site requires people to make decisions or choices, you might want to see if you can reduce the number of choices you offer. I don't think you need to remove all choice and decision-making from the equation though - offering a few choices may be useful, since your end-users are likely to have some differences in needs or taste. However, offering, say 30 varieties of a particular product may be an overkill for most products. The people visiting your site are not likely to want to spend half a day reading different 30 product descriptions to try to distinguish between them.

  You should not make the removal of choices as a matter of policy though. Examine each of your products or services on a case-by-case basis. Remember that certain types of choices do not bewilder users. For example, if you are a commercial web host, you will probably offer several packages differentiated only in the amount of disk space and bandwidth they offer. The more expensive packages allow users to store more files and support heavier traffic. If the differences between packages is only a matter of scale, and this difference is clearly stated and easily understood by your users, the selection should not pose a great hindrance to them. Even in this case, though, you probably should not have too many packages on offer.

• Provide a Product Comparison or Version Comparison Chart

  If you have a few varieties of a particular product, it is always handy to provide a product comparison chart. List the features of your products in each row of your chart, and indicate whether it is present or absent in each of the products you sell. For example, you might have a product comparison chart like the following, comparing Widget A and Widget B.

  Features	Widget A	Widget B
  Can sing and dance	Yes	Yes
  Can play the drums	Up to 2 drums	Up to 20 drums
  Can strum the guitar	No	Yes
  Can cook and sew	In your dreams	Yes
  Price	Free	You can't afford it

• Select Useful Defaults that Apply to Most People

  In an interactive website or software, it may be useful to pre-select useful defaults that apply to most people. For example, where relevant, thesitewizard.com's various wizards supply defaults which most people will want to use.

• Simplify the Interface: Prune Unnecessary Options or Tuck Them in an Optional "Advanced Options" Section

  Sometimes it's not possible to remove options without crippling your product or service. In such cases, consider tucking away options which most people won't need in an Advanced Options section. For the average end-user or visitor who does not use the advanced options, furnish useful defaults. Your main section will then be less cluttered, which also has the advantage of making your site or software seem easier to use.

• Avoid Paralysis by Making Recommendations

  One way to avoid paralysis when you provide many choices is to make recommendations. Ideally, of course, your recommendations should be based on what you think the end-user would want to use. Make some assumptions about the type of visitors that come to your site and what most of them want. Then recommend the particular product that you think will suit most of your visitors.

• Avoid the Paralysis of Choice by Providing a Simplifying Criterion

  Alternatively, you can provide a simplfying criterion. The idea here is to avoid the problem of users using wrong criteria to make purchase decisions on your site. As Schwatz had observed, users tend to choose the wrong simplifying criteria when confronted with too many choices. We want to avoid that by giving prominence to a particular criterion which you feel is important. Highlight the importance of that particular feature above the plethora of other features.

• Different Target Audiences Have Different Levels of Expectations and Competence in Handling Variety

  Finally, before you simply apply everything here as a blanket rule in your site or software, remember to examine your target audience and product. A site catering to a specialist audience must be designed differently from one catering to the general public. The number of choices you offer, the types of choices you offer and even the way you present those choices will differ depending on how competent your target audience is at handling those choices.

  Furthermore, not all choice is anaethema. Remember, what we are mostly dealing with here is choices of a particular type of product, such as 200 brands of peanut butter. We are not talking about choices of degree or scale: for example, you can't simply sell only size 6 shoes. Neither are we talking about choices of different products: for example, if you are a hardware store, you cannot say that you want to improve sales by reducing the choice of screwdrivers to only Phillips screwdrivers. A Phillips screwdriver is a different product from, say, a regular screwdriver.

Conclusion: Making More from Less

When confronted with too many choices, people are often crippled by the large number of variables they have to juggle to make a decision. Using some of the tips given in this article, webmasters and programmers can make their site/software more usable, improve customer satisfaction and perhaps even increase sales by avoiding this paralysis of choice.

Copyright © 2007 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.

Is your Website Design driving away your customers? Some basic usability tips for commercial websites.

by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

Following my article on Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Friendliness in Web Design where I discussed the importance of looking at the usability and search engine visibility of a website, I have received countless messages from visitors to thesitewizard.com asking me to review their website. While I do not have time to answer such requests individually, I decided that an article outlining some glaring usability flaws that I have found in a number of websites in general would be helpful. This article thus deals with the myths and fallacies commonly believed when designing a website to sell a product or a service.

Make It Easy for Visitor to Check Your Price List

Some websites try to hide the price list for their products. Some of these sites only display the price of the item after you hit the "Buy" or "Order" button, or worse, only after you have created an account on their site. Others have a price list, but bury the link to the price list somewhere deep in their site in a place not easily accessible from the main page or the products page.

I'm not exactly sure what the reason behind this is. Possibly, they think that if the customer does not see the price until they click the "Buy" or "Order" button, they will be more likely to buy the item. This reasoning is fallacious.

There are many types of visitors arriving at your site. Let's take the case of the window shopper. If they see something noteworthy on your site, they may make a note of the price so that they can return later if they want the item at some point in the future. If the price of the item cannot be easily found on your site, do you seriously think that they will thoroughly search the site just to find that elusive price tag? Or do you suppose that such a visitor will click the "Buy" button, just so that they can find the price tag at the end of the process somewhere? Or will they go through the bother of creating an account, revealing their personal particulars, just to find the price of an item?

Like the serious shopper, if they cannot find the price, they will simply go to another site. Remember: this is not a brick and mortar store we're talking about, where you need to take time and put in effort to travel to another store. On the Internet, your competitor is only a click away. And the search engines are more than happy to yield thousands of other sites selling the same type of goods or services as you. I realise that there are some brick and mortar stores (usually small concerns) who think that if they don't put a price tag, the customer has to find out the price from a sales person, who will then have the opportunity to persuade him/her to buy that item. Whether or not that is a good idea for a brick and mortar store (and I can think offhand of some types of customers that you will lose even there), it is a bad idea for a web store.

No matter how you look at it, every customer and potential customer will need to know the price of a product. Even the corporate customer buying for his/her company works to a budget. Making it difficult for your visitor to find the price list is a quick way to drive a potential customer away. As has been observed by many usability experts - the average Internet user has the attention span of a flea. If they can't find what they want within the first few seconds of glancing at your page, they will leave. And your competitors will be more than happy to attend to them in your place.

Provide Descriptions and Pictures for Your Products

I realise that the new web designer is beset with contradictory advice about how best to design their site. One set of such conflicting advice is the requirement to be brief and to-the-point so that you can catch that Internet visitor who will only give your web page a few seconds glance before deciding whether to stay or go elsewhere. Contradicting that is the requirement that you describe your products in depth and place pictures of your product, or screenshots if yours is a software product.

The best way to resolve this, I think, is to take a leaf from Amazon.com's book. For every item they list on their search results for a query (they have too many products to have a straightforward "Products" page), they usually have a brief description, a thumbnail picture, the price and a link to buy the item. If this brief description interests you, you can click the link and get a longer description and more information about the product.

A product page for each product, with a long description and pictures of the product, is indispensible. This is particularly so if your product is expensive, or has plenty of competition. Your long description and pictures of what you're selling is what cinches the sale. Potential customers will use the information on that page to decide whether or not to buy the item. They look at the page and compare it with the what is said about your competitor's product. It is thus in your interest to mention all the salient points about your product or service on that page. Think of it as the web equivalent of a salesman promoting a product to a walk-in customer.

An informative and detailed product page is not all you need. You also need to place your "Buy" or "Order" buttons both at the top and the bottom of the product page. If your product page is especially long, spanning many screenfuls, you may also want to consider placing additional buttons somewhere in the middle of the page. Do not force your customers to scroll to the bottom of the page before they can buy the item. You may have suffered countless hours drafting the description of the page. Do not pass the suffering to your customers by requiring them to read it all before they can order your product. Some customers are easily convinced, or they come to your page having already decided to buy. Make it easy for them to get to where they want to go within your site.

Allow Your Customers to Browse Your Site in Any Way They Choose

Have you ever encountered a "live" salesperson who drones on and on about a product, giving you little chance to jump in and tell him/her that you have already decided to buy the product? "I'll buy already!" you want to shout, but the guy insists on finishing his tome on the product.

Such a person, in real life, is probably seldom found. However, I have visited many websites that practise this very sales tactic. One characteristic of such websites is that the site has very poor navigational facilities. You cannot easily access other pages on the site except through a sequence of choreographed steps that the author has planned. First you have to read his introduction about the product. Then after a very long exposition on the first page, you are graced with a link at the bottom that takes you to a second page. Again, you have to endure the sermon on the second page before you can find the link to move on. Even if you have already decided to buy the product, you're forced to go through the whole sequence of steps before you can buy the product.

Such websites are reminiscent of the high-pressure sales tactics employed by some salesmen, and give visitors a bad taste. The usability of such sites is low, and the design of the site discourages impulse purchases.

One of the basic rules in selling something on the web is that you should not force your customers to click through many pages before they reach the "Buy" or "Download" button. It is never productive, leaves a bitter taste in some visitors' mouth, and drives off others. Sure, you may convince some people to buy the product after they read it all, but you are also convincing others that you're the sort of person they don't want to do business with. A website is different from a "live" salesman. People can leave any time during your sales pitch. And they do. Most people visiting a site to buy something are not there to read a long exposition. They are there to get a product. Delaying that purchase can only hurt your business. When I say that you need to give a product page with a detailed description about your product, I don't mean that you have to force everyone to read that detailed description before they can buy. Always provide a shortcut to the order form for your visitors.

Mandatory Items on the Site Navigation Bar

For a commercial site, certain links should be accessible from every page of your website. The easiest way to do this is to place them on your navigation bar. If you don't know what a navigation bar is, take a look at thesitewizard.com. On the top left of every page is a series of buttons which give you access to the main pages of the site. Your navigation bar need not be on the left side as mine is. You can put it at the top, the right or the bottom as well. However, the following items should always be present:

• Products: this is a link to a page listing all your products. If you have too many products to fit into one page, you may want to create category pages that are accessible through the main product page.
• Order Form: this should point to your order form.
• Price List: as mentioned earlier, a price list improves the usability of your site, and ultimately your bottom line.
• Support: you should place a link to a page which provides ways that your customer can contact you.
• About Us: since you are selling things, you should have an "About Us" page that tells your customer about you or your company.

Conclusion

On the Internet, customer service starts with a usable website. How you design your site will determine whether your visitor becomes a paying customer or your competitor's customer.

Copyright 2007 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.