Editors note: In his first article for Think Vitamin Rob Smith looks at his top five themes for e-commerce for 2010. Whether you are considering starting an online shop or have one that isn’t performing as well as you would like these valuable tips will help you on your way.

Purchasing online and e-commerce has been growing at a rapid rate for many years and during that time things have changed massively. From online merchandising to order management to delivery, things are constantly evolving.

This article is aimed at giving what I believe are 5 important themes in this area over the next year, and what you can do to help yourself or your clients prosper.

1: Focus on Growth and Existing Customers, Not New Ones

The number of online customers has been growing at a fantastic rate over the past decade fueled by the widespread adoption of broadband. This has resulted in an ever growing number of new potential online customers.

Due in part to the recession, and in part due to the slow down of broadband adoption as it reaches near ubiquity, the growth of potential customers is predicted to slowdown in 2010. This has the net effect of new customers being harder to acquire due to reduced amount of overall growth, and more people targeting these new customers as online retailers keep appearing every day.

This leads to the need to focus more on how well we do with our current customers. Examine your customer contact strategy and ask these questions:

• Do you regularly communicate with your customers?
• Have you segmented your database into groups of like minded people?
• Do you then send targeted messages to those segments?
• Have you increased your average reorder rate in the past year?

These questions will give you a good insight into how well you’re doing with your current customers. The time has come to step up your activity to try and retain and grow your current customers.

All the time other online retailers are targeting your customers to try and win their business. You need to work hard to keep building relationships with your customers so they don’t even think about looking elsewhere.

Bodon (a UK online and catalogue company) do a good job of email marketing and customer care, including emails like ‘You haven’t shopped with us for a while and we miss you’. These do a really good job of reconnecting with the user.

2: Tie your Channels Together

Customers will no longer accept (without damage to your brand) discrepancies across your channels. If you’re a bricks and mortar retailer then you need to be able to tie your online offering to your offline offering to ensure customers are not disappointed.

They should be able to order online and pick up in store an vice versa. If you have a telephone mail order element to your business that should tie in with your online business to allow order tracking. There are many more examples, but the bottom line is this:

Customers are becoming channel blind. They see all your ‘ways to order’ as being interlinked and interchangeable.

Here in the UK, Marks and Spencer (a “national treasure” of a retail company who have both bricks and mortar shops and online ordering) have done a good job of tying their channels together. You can order online and get it delivered to home, work, or to a store.

You can return items to a store or by freepost direct. It all makes the experience more congruent and feels like you’re dealing with one helpful company. Argos (one of the biggest UK retail companies) also do an excellent job with the ability to reserve items online for store pickup.

Gap, on the other hand, do a poor job. There’s been little investment in the online channel for the UK and Europe, you can’t even purchase online at point of writing, let alone reserve or see what stock is available.

3: Mobile is Coming

I know, it’s been coming for years. However it’s widely believed that smart-phone adoption will reach a critical mass in the next 12-18 months. What does that mean for us? Customers will have access to the internet or at least a much richer media experience via their phones. People generally always have their phones with them. On the train in the car, the office, at home on the sofa. Many more people have phones than laptops.

What does this mean for e-commerce? Will people really shop and look through entire catalogues to order? Maybe not. Will they bob on their phone to track their order? Maybe. It’s all about context and how they are using their phone to communicate with you and your service.

Some companies are already striving ahead. Pizza delivery companies like Dominoes and Pizza Hut are doing well in the space creating applications and mobile focused websites to help with ordering. It’s important to note that we don’t mean iPhone applications here. It’s a combination of applications and mobile focused websites that are the key. The iPhone is still not a massive % of the mobile space.

Other notable successes in this area are Amazon and Interflora. Some notable failures are Tesco (UK supermarket chain), Sainsburys (UK supermarket chain) and play.com (online entertainment retailer) – all without a whiff of a mobile site on my iPhone.

4: Focus on Form as Well as Function

A lot of e-commerce sites have become very good at getting the basics correct. Good, clear statements about delivery, stock availability and product information are becoming much more commonplace. Checkouts are getting easier to use and less cumbersome.

There’s been a positive focus by most major retailers over the past year to really improve the customer experience in this very functional way. If you or your clients have not got a lot of e-commerce best practice in place then you need to do so before you rapidly fall behind.

Now has come the time for these retailers, as well as smaller retailers, to invest more time in the form side of their sites. By this, I mean the visual merchandising and guided purchases. There’s a lot more that can be done by bundling “like” products together, allowing people to purchase packages of products as opposed to just one.

A good example of this would be a retailer who delivers products for the home. More needs to be invested in tieing products together via well photographed roomsets where people can then quickly and easily purchase items they like from that room. Especially if the brand is stylish or well regarded this approach can work very well as people very often like to reflect the image that a particular brand projects.

This can of course be done by smaller retailers as well. Electronics sites could easily bundle TV starter sets together or the ultimate HD kit . Not enough is being done to intelligently link single products together to form a more cohesive whole, and a better buying proposition.

Good examples of this are starting to crop up in many places but there’s still a lot to be done. Glasses Direct (online glasses retailer) do an interesting virtual mirror (even if it is only for Windows), Next (large UK retail brand for clothes and home) have a lot of videos showing models on the catwalk, and tobi.com even has an augmented reality dressing room focusing on the product and it’s form and connection with user, rather than the function of selecting and checking out.

Watch this YouTube video to learn more

5: Tweaks, not Wide Spread Overhauls

This is a theme for many normal websites, not just e-commerce sites, and revolves around tweaking and gradually evolving, instead of scraping and starting again. It’s a habit of the web industry, especially if you start working with a different agency or developer, to be tempted to throw out your current site and start again, and do that every two-three years.

This is incredibly expensive in comparison. The return on investment of an entirely new site without changing any other aspect is normally quite low, especially in the short term. It is wise to heavily evaluate what you will get from a new site. Why can’t you just refresh your current one, or just tweak some of the functionality and processes to make it more up to date for your customers’ needs?

Very often, a concentrated and considered approach to optimising your conversion rate can help your sites profits much more than a complete site overhaul. It’s not as sexy, and it’s not as exciting for either side, but it’s Return on Investment is normally far in advance.

Good ways to look at how to measure conversion rates can be heatmaps, user testing (either face to face or remote), and looking deeply into your analytics.

Amazon are the king of small changes done overtime making big overall differences. They continually evolve what they do but at a slow pace. The thing is, they do not want anyone to notice anything is changing – big overhauls will cost Amazon millions of abandoned carts due to everything now being different. To learn more about this read “Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart”.

Conclusion

A lot, as ever, is changing in e-commerce as it does every year. Customers are becoming more sophisticated in the way they use technology and the way that they shop. The better the experience they get from your site the better you will be at cutting through the noise of countless other retailers.

It’s really easy to start an online shop, it’s pretty tough to start a really good one. Make sure you have the basics sorted out first before looking towards future themes and cool technology. If it’s hard to pay on your site then all of the above should not be your focus. If on the other hand you’re now looking at ways to eek that extra bit of conversion and customer delight out of your site, then these are for you.

Photo of Alex Hunter by http://www.alexdesigns.com/. Used with permission.

I’ve been lucky enough to make public speaking part of my career. It’s something I love doing and enjoy every second of, but that’s not the case for everybody. For many of you, the thought of standing up on stage fills you with vomit-inducing fear.

But I can’t stress enough how important it is to be able to clearly articulate your thoughts to an audience in an engaging manner, whether it’s a handful of your co-workers or 2000 people at a tech conference.

If you’re trying to get a project green lit, pitch your idea to investors, relay your experience to a group of bright eyed young developers, or rally your employees, keep the following few tips in mind.

1: Rehearse

Again and again and again. So you know every detail of your talk, all the slides and the order in which they appear. Practice in front of a mirror or even video yourself. This is the best way to find potential tripping points, inconsistencies, and also gives you a chance to weed out the crap jokes.

But more importantly, it will make you so comfortable with the content that you won’t need notes or prompts and you’ll appear conversational but knowledgeable.

2: Don’t repeat what is written on your slides

It’s painful when a speaker reads verbatim what is written on each slide. Give your audience some credit, they’re going to be pretty good readers so you don’t need to help them out. Your job is to give context and detail to the one or two lines (at the most) on a slide. Or in some instances, vice versa; I often use slides to add a quick parenthetical note to something I’m saying to the audience.

3: Don’t overload your slides

Further to the last bullet, nothing is uglier or less appealing than a slide with 15 bullet points and a graph. It’s confusing, cluttered, hard to understand and of no value to anyone as a presentation aid. In my recent keynotes, over 80% of my slides only have one line OR graphic/chart on them.

Sure it’s more clicking for me but this isn’t about me, it’s about the audience, and simple slides help you guide the narrative in a clear, concise way.

4: Make eye contact

This may sound like a no brainer but so many speakers spend their time looking at their feet, at their slides, at their notes – anywhere but the audience. If you don’t make eye contact with the people you’re talking to you end up looking like you’re talking to yourself, just like the guy you avoid sitting next to on public transport.

5: Know your audience

I spoke at a two-day tech conference recently and was scheduled to speak on the second day. This turned out to be a huge advantage for me because I spent the whole first day following the (substantial) Twitter traffic surrounding the event and I noticed some interesting trends in the audience reactions to speakers and their content.

As a result, I spent several hours that night retooling my presentation to better suit the audience – I like to think my keynote went down well the next day.

6: Move around

As a speaker, I loathe standing behind a podium when I speak – it feels like I’m preaching down from the pulpit and as far as I’m concerned public speaking is about conversation not lecturing. Also, a podium is physical barrier between you and the audience making it much harder to connect with them psychologically.

So wherever possible get out from behind that podium or lectern, get out on stage, move around, gesticulate and really CONNECT with your audience.

7: Don’t read the script

Reading word for word from a prepared script is the fastest way to put your audience to sleep. It’s also lazy. Don’t do it. It’s perfectly ok to have some notes jotted down which you glance at from time to time but anything beyond that is a disservice to your audience and to you as a speaker.

8: Slow down

It’s really easy to rush through your content and speak very quickly, especially if you’re nervous. It’s much easier for an audience to engage with your content if your delivery falls into a natural rhythm. Try to pace yourself and remember to punctuate your speech with pauses to emphasise key points.

9: Make ‘em laugh

Humor is my most powerful tool when I’m giving a presentation. I almost always try to get a laugh within the first 60 seconds of a talk. It relieves the collective tension in the room almost immediately and helps ease the transition into the bulk of the content.*

10: Be passionate and energetic

I learned this from the best, Mr. Gary Vaynerchuk, whose energy on stage is completely captivating. Look, chances are if you’re standing up in front of people giving a talk, you know what you’re on about – and if you know what you’re on about, you’re probably passionate about the subject.

So make sure you project that passion during your presentation! Raise your voice when it makes sense, be effusive, throw your hands up in the air when you’re making a point! That type of energy is totally infectious and your audience will appreciate the effort.

*A note on swearing during presentations. Those of you who have seen my Future of Web App keynotes might have noticed that I punctuate my talks with some occasional swearing. This is a calculated risk on my part and certainly not something I do whenever I speak at conferences.

Hell, if you did at work you’d probably be fired so I strongly suggest you suss out your audience before you drop F-bombs during your Quarterly Sales Review with the Board of Directors.

That’s the theory, here’s the real thing

Ed: The following video is of Alex’s presentation from Future of Web Apps London 2009.

Regular readers of Think Vitamin may know that Carsonified, the company behind the blog, also run a number of web related events in Europe and the USA. We thought you might like to know that we recently launched our free to join event affiliate program. Here’s how we describe it on the web site:

The Carsonified Affiliate Program allows you to earn money. Every time a ticket to an event is purchased thanks to someone clicking on your affiliate link or banner we pay you £20. Sell five tickets through your site and earn £100, sell twenty and treat yourself to a new laptop.

Here’s Ryan to tell you a bit more about it:

You might wonder what Ryan is pointing to in the video. He’s referring to the new page on our web site dedicated to the affiliate program.

On it you will find all you need to know about how to sign up to the program and will also be able to grab banners for all of our upcoming events including:

• Think Vitamin HTML5 Online Conference
• The Future of Web Apps Dublin
• The Future of Web Design London

If you have any questions about the program please do get in touch via e-mail: affiliates@carsonified.com

Visit our new affiliate web page to find out all you need to know.

Strategy. You hear about it all the time. One must have a strategy/work on a strategy/follow a strategy and so on. Business types like to say “strategy” a lot as it sounds big, complicated and important.

And it is important, but there is no need for it to be complicated. Quite the opposite.

At the heart of it all “strategy” is just about having a plan for the thing you are working on. Or as Wikipedia puts it “a strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal”.

Getting the Strategy Right

If there is ever a time to look at what’s important in a project, it is early on, in the strategy stage.

Let us assume that your client doesn’t have a strategy for their next web project.

Before you build, design, code or write anything you need to think about what the project needs to achieve.

This is in part because strategy can mean almost anything, depending on the needs of the client, the size of their audience and ultimately the goal of your client. And it will mean different things at different times during the life-span of a project: you may have one strategy to launch with, another for the ongoing management of the site and so on.

Thinking the project through, seeing how one thing leads to another on the way to the project’s goal is a very healthy thing to do.

The one thing all strategies must have in common is that they tie in with your client’s overall business goals. (You’d be surprised how often clients themselves forget this simple fact!) If it doesn’t, the client will never be happy with your work even if they were the ones who ignored the business goal connection.

That’s why you should be thrilled when a client asks for your help in developing their web project strategy (or asks you to help them find someone who can create it for them).

It is an excellent opportunity to make sure that you, or the people you choose to collaborate with, create a to-the-point strategy that helps the client reach their goals and in the process makes you look like an absolute star who deserves lots more commissions.

Strategy as a Sales Tool

Before we continue, you may wonder if you really need to bother with all this strategy stuff. The answer is yes you do, especially if the client asks you to help craft it.

A strategy, even one that is just a paragraph in length, shows that you have understood the task at hand. It shows the direction you will take the project, and it is an effective way to put your client’s mind at ease.

How to Do It

A good web strategy should always cover the following five points.

1. What you are doing
2. Who you are doing it for
3. Why you are doing it
4. How you are doing it
5. When you are doing it

Here is an example:

Your client, the Think Vitamin Dairy, tell you they want to sell more of their orange flavored Think Vitamin Milk.

To make sure you have enough information to cover the five points above you ask the client loads of questions, including:

• Who currently buys the Think Vitamin Milk?
• Why and how do they buy it?
• When do they drink it?
• What do they think of it?
• Have the sales changed over the past year, if so how and why?

The client tells you that Think Vitamin Milk is mostly gulped by web people who like the energy kick they get from it. They buy it online in crates of twelve bottles and according to their tweets some of them have started drinking it when they go hiking in the Cotswolds on the weekends.

After a spot of thinking you come up with a plan, a strategy, which suggests the client invest their budget in creating a smartphone app to reach a new audience instead of buying advertising. You flesh it out with a few pointers:

• Think Vitamin Dairy should build an iPhone app aimed at ramblers to help them plan hiking trips – The Think Vitamin “Think Hiking” app. (A new audience, with existing customers mixed in is golden.)
• The app lets users plan hikes and share them with their friends to get everyone ready for the excursion (virality – always a good thing!).
• The app would show where along the trail the energizing Milk can be bought and plot the local independent dairy farms who provide the cow juice. (If you like hiking you probably care about food sustainability too.)
• The app is supported by a small teaser and signup site that, after the app has launched, displays tweets from hikers and shows where the most popular trails are.

Instead of throwing money at advertising, the client’s milk brand would be known for a very useful app that is associated with good friends, good times and days off in the country.

There it is, a good simple and easy to understand strategy tied to the goal of selling more orange flavored milk.

In Conclusion

Strategy is important, but it’s not rocket science. It is really just about having a plan.

The more you work with strategy, the more you learn and the more you will want to learn. You will find new ways of approaching old problems, and it can be just as addictive as the work you are already passionate about.

This post was all about the basics, but to be honest that’s where many clients and us web creators go wrong. Get the basics right, and keep your eyes open and you will become an even better web professional in no time.

Best of all, the more comfortable you get with the strategy portion of your work the better you will be at understanding the client’s needs and the more valuable you will become to them.

Editors Note: In his first article for Think Vitamin Matthew Smith, Principal Designer at Squared Eye Design, discusses the benefits, risks and infrastructure required to work effectively with fellow freelancers.

Working Alone

Working alone can be great. There’s a pleasant autonomy of knowing exactly what you’re  doing and when. There are few unknowns. You work directly with the client and don’t have to worry about managing others.

In the past I’ve done everything from branding, strategy, IA, design, front-end dev, and CMS integration on a single project. These days, if I’m working alone, its usually providing PSDs to a client who has an internal dev team or something similar. I love it!

These projects are less complex than my collaborative projects, so life is simple. But if I limit myself to the size  and quantity of projects that I’m able to complete all on my own, my business will stagnate. If I am unwilling to pursue entrepreneurship and management, I will forever remain a technician.

Be a Jumbo Shrimp

Growth isn’t for everyone, but for me it’s a matter of defining my future. I want to be a Jumbo Shrimp — a big presence in a niche area. I don’t want to simply design interfaces for the next 30 years; I want to change the world – even if only in a small way. Growth can magnify my ability to directly affect positive change.

Working Together

By partnering with other professionals, I can grow my business and take on projects that can’t be harnessed by one man. A huge beer one man can tackle, but a huge project is another undertaking all together. Forming partnerships with others can be overwhelming at first.

But with the right team and a poorly paid talented project manager, you can take on more challenging, higher paying projects. Bolster the success of your partnership (and avoid massive cardiac arrest) by setting the stage with a healthy understanding of the risks and the infrastructure required to harvest the bountiful benefits.

Risks

As with any great opportunity, you’ll find an inherent level of risk involved. The normal stuff applies — what if someone gets sick, eaten by a whale, or discovers that working for you is a level of ass pain they never before imagined? What happens if you have a different work ethic than others on your team?

No one to manage the project

A project lacking management can quickly descend into the hells of scope creep. When that happens, you may be forced to nominate someone Survivor-style to run point. Managing might not be their strong suit or even what they want to be paid for. This can lead to real frustration within your team, and if combined with alcohol and firearms – there will be blood.

Your team is flat

It doesn’t matter if its soda, tires, or teams – flat is bad. If you don’t know who’s in charge of your project, it’s destined for confusion. If you prefer stress and direct path to insanity, then I highly recommend no leadership whatsoever.

No consequences or incentives

If you don’t have a clear set of consequences and incentives to encourage your team to stay unified and on target, you’re likely to end up with a wayward child on your hands (I want those sweeties!). Recovering from team disunity or distraction costs valuable energy, which distracts from the project goals.

Infrastructure

There are a few areas that aren’t quite risks, if they are well defined and everyone has a clear understanding of them, they are as follows:

Choose a project manager

Once you’ve chosen the right PM, does everyone agree that he has the authority to tell them what to do, and when? Making sure that everyone is ready to receive instruction from your PM and that everyone trusts the PM is critical to keeping the project’s flow. If my PM told me to stop enjoying beer, I’d fire him, so your PM’s authority should have some boundaries.

Give your team a hierarchy

A flat system will cause confusion and delay. It’s important that there is clear delineation of responsibility and authority. Sometimes this may coincide with who brought the project to the table, or it may be defined by who is the better leader.

Whatever the case, make sure you have a clear chain of command. Let your PM define the workflow of your partnership. Ideally everyone has moments of overlap and involvement in every stage of the project so that you aren’t simply running a relay race.

Choose incentives or consequences to govern your team

Finding the right incentives and consequences helps you cover your risks properly to ensure that everyone has the right level of stake in the project and their reputation. Done well, this is a document that everyone can sign on to, so that if the project goes south because of someone’s error, it’s their agreement with the document that hands out the punishment – not one of your team.

For our partnership, one incentive/consequence is very simply the ability to be re-hired on the next project, or fired from the current one dependent on whether you’re meeting the project expectations or not. We also spank, though for some in our coworking office that’s an incentive, so we use it sparingly.

Benefits

You can now safely move about the cabin, you have a project manager on duty

A PM’s responsibilities and authority can give you room to breathe. It will also allow you to do what you do best — whether that’s IA, design, tweeting, or development. It also bears mentioning that your clients will experience a higher level of care and organization. And if you depend on word of mouth like we do, this is one of your greatest assets.

Organizational clarity leads to total work nirvana

Okay, that’s overkill, but you and your clients will notice the efficiency that grows from a clear structure of authority. It allows your team to operate as a congruent force with a head, rather than an unruly band of independent freelancers.

Great incentives and real consequences keep the house clean

I hate conflict as much as anybody. If you put together a solid document with both incentives and consequences, you’ll find your projects and your team keep clean and free from unmanageable conflict. Everyone on your team wants to succeed, make money, and have a big party when every project’s done – this will make it so much easier.

In Summary

Bringing a team of freelancer’s together to provide a solid end product to a great client is profitable adventure and a joy. The Blue Sky Resumes project was the most ambitious foray into collaboration for our team.

The experience had a high learning curve, some of which I’m hoping to spare you from. If you move in this direction, you’ll see failures along the way; it’ll be as tough as it is fun. But the work you’ll get to engage in, and the great people you get to work with are worth every moment.

Resources

To Read

• Army of Davids (Good business oriented abstract read)
• Noded (I’ve not read this, but ought to)

Other Collaborative Freelancers

• Sidebar Creative
• Analog

Coworking Is a Good Place to Start

• Coworking on Wikipedia
• Coworking Site

Does design of a sales page matter? Traditional reasoning says that the product always remains the same no matter how you dress it up on the sales page. So, one should focus on making the product more awesome rather than investing time to make it look awesome. Well, the reasoning sounds plausible in theory but the data says it is not well grounded.

Case Study

This post is about a recent A/B split testing case study where a redesign of a sales page resulted in 20% increase in sales. AquaSoft is a leading software company in the area of digital photo presentation. They have a complete portfolio of (desktop) software products related to photos – slideshow creation, desktop publishing, photo books, etc. Their software products can be downloaded for a free limited duration trial, following which a customer pays for the full version.

AquaSoft undertake more than 10 A/B tests per month using Visual Website Optimizer, an online A/B testing tool. They recently finished a test in which they tested their existing sales page against a new redesigned sales page. Note that this page wasn’t the free trial download page; rather it was a sales page where customers visit to actually buy the software.

Here is the control version of the page (click to view full version):

And here is the (final) redesigned version (click to view full version):

What’s different?

The pages are in German language, so let me point out a few key differences between the new and the control version:

• The new design gave a modern, fresher vibe on the page and had better contrast.
• The old design had two calls to action per product – one for instant download and other for purchasing software in a shrink wrapped box. The new design reduced the choice to primarily one option (instant download) and the call-to-action was also transformed into a snazzy button (as compared to a simple text link in old design).
• The new design was optimized to build trust in the customer. The sidebar in new design contained different kinds of guarantees:
  • Free lifetime updates and bonus software
  • Lifetime guarantee on the software
  • 24h/365 days support
  • Free customer login id
• The new design also incorporated a seal made out of their logo to provide authenticity to the guarantees

A key point to note is that AquaSoft did not change their product features neither their guarantee policy. The details were simply not present (or highlighted) on the old sales page.

Two phase testing

AquaSoft carried the A/B test in two phases. In the first phase, old design was pitted against a variation of the new design. Improvements started with about 50% but settled on about 35-40% after some time. They were very happy with the result but craved for more details because in this test they were measuring clicks into the shopping cart, not the actual sales.

So they measured the sales which showed an increase of 17.7% of actual sales. It also showed that the bounce rate within the shopping cart was somewhat higher in the winning combination but the overall increased click rate outtakes the bounce rate.

In the second phase, AquaSoft refined the winning variation by doing minor changes such as reducing whitespace and placing software names above their respective box shots. This resulted in a further increase of 10% in clicks on shopping cart button and the overall increase in sales settled to about 20% (up from 17.7% in previous phase). All results were statistically significant, so the 20% increase in sales is real.

What can we learn form this?

This case study has several lessons for all of us who are serious about optimizing online sales:

1. Design matters! If your sales page has a boring design, expect boring sales.
2. A/B split testing is totally worth it! AquaSoft invests time, money and effort into doing as many as 10 split tests per month. And that is because they understand what impact a successful A/B test can have on the bottom-line.
3. Some customers do abandon the checkout process! The next logical step for AquaSoft would be to optimize their checkout process but their payment system is integrated into a third party so it won’t be easy to set up a split test there.
4. A/B testing is best done in phases. Small improvements in multiple phases ultimately add up to give a significant boost to conversions.

AquaSoft summarized the key take-home lesson from this A/B test:

“Don’t think your website is good as it is. Always test, always improve. It’s a slow process but worth doing. Our concrete test results show that a clear modern design improves sales. Especially in the sales process, trust building is very important.”

For AquaSoft, A/B testing required one-time investment of design resources but the 20% increase in sales will hopefully continue for months to come. If AquaSoft can manage to get such a fantastic ROI, so can you. Think about it – is your sales page optimally designed? What elements can you test on it?

Beta Invite

To try out Visual Website Optimizer enter invite code ‘carsonified‘ when signing up.

Editors note: In this edition of “5 Questions for” Kevin Hale, co-founder of Wufoo, talks about how Wufoo came into being, their approach to new features, why they moved away from the Valley and how to bring personality into your web app. Kevin will be presenting a intimate workshop, “How to Change Free Users Into Paying Customers“, at Future of Web Apps Miami. Buy your tickets now.

Wufoo originally started out with funding from YCombinator. For those who might be considering the seed funding route could you share some of your experience and offer some insights into the process?

I have nothing but good things to say about YCombinator. It is no exaggeration for me to say that it transformed the lives of the founders pretty completely. They gave us introductions and opportunities that we would have been hard pressed to recreate solely on our own and it’s also been a gift that just keeps on giving.

The growing network of knowledge from the founders we interact with and have access to just by association is staggeringly resourceful and amazing. I actually try to do whatever I can to help give back to the program including giving free workshops or providing design reviews whenever we go out there and visit the newly funded batch of YCombinator startups.

The blessing of that program was that we were able to hole up in an apartment together and do nothing but craft Wufoo into existence. I think a lot of people forget the importance of just getting a chance at getting away from distractions. No girlfriends, no regular friends, no anything else.

Because it’s YCombinator and because it’s Silicon Valley, we met some pretty amazing people out there (CEOs, Investment Bankers, other entrepreneurs, Google/Yahoo employees, other young founders, plenty of reporters, etc.) and it lead to a round of Angel Investment in the end, which is what got us to launch and eventually profitability.

Ironically, one of the reasons we moved back to the east coast in April, was because we ended up making too many friends and were spending way too much time in meetings. We went back to Tampa to basically hole up again (for much cheaper living costs) and get our baby launched.

For anyone on the fence, it’s totally worth it and I hope you at least apply, because the application process alone is insightful (if not a wake up call) in terms of helping teams rehearse and focus their company’s message, product and direction.

Introducing new UI (user interface) elements to an app always involved an element of risk. How do you, as the person responsible for the Wufoo UX (user experience), go about introducing new features and responding to feedback from users?

Like most software teams, we do love making new features and releasing them to our users. Our goal, however, is not to create code that just checks off items on a feature list. Just to be clear, while I am the first person to jump start how an interface will look and feel, and for the most part, the last person to polish the details before they’re released, everyone on our team participates in the direction of our application, the testing of those new features, and maintaining them from a support point of view.

Because we’re a small team that desires to stay a small team, everyone has to wear multiple hats in our company and that includes manning the inbox and doing customer support every single week. One of the interesting side effects of having a company where everyone has to answer support emails, is that everyone has a stake in making sure application is as easy to use as possible. We actually call this approach to designing software Support Driven Development and it’s been really great for us.

The priorities and desire for simplicity and clarity are actually the result of people wanting to make their weekly support interactions as few and positive as possible. Getting a feature into Wufoo that adds unnecessary complexity is a big no-no in our company. In fact, we make adding any element to the interface the hardest thing possible in our design process. Every button, every word, every link, every switch is scrutinized to make sure it’s absolutely necessary and won’t generate a future support request.

Additionally, users are also really bad at both explaining what they need and what other people need. It’s just part of human nature to justify biases rather than consider needs objectively from the vantage point of what’s good for the community and the future of the app itself. This is not to say you shouldn’t bother with your users (or your designer’s intuition) when you’re building your product or considering new features.

I sincerely believe that users are the key (and intuition does help), but you have to realize that user interface studies have shown time and again that what you have to trust is what the users DO and not what they SAY, which is why getting an interface out there quickly and used in an observable way is crucial. After that, it’s all just successful iterations based on feedback from those on the ground.

Wufoo now integrates with many of the big name web apps out there. For those creating web apps today how important is opening up your data via APIs and offering quick and easy integration to popular apps?

First off, providing an API to users shouldn’t be put on the back burner because it’s difficult. Any good development team is going to be designing their app around some sort of structured framework or API system internally and so the logistics of providing public access, from what we’ve seen, usually revolves around jumping over the hurdles of semantics and documentation.

To me, what makes creating web applications really exciting and much more interesting than creating traditional desktop software is that it’s built on a foundation (The Internet!) that is inherently primed and geared towards generating vibrant ecosystems regardless of distance. I believe it would be a terrible mistake (not to mention a rather ironic tragedy) to spend time creating software that is literally built on top of networks and then isolating yourself from everyone around you.

With Wufoo, we’ve been doing our best to leverage that potential as much as possible and it’s worked out really great for us. So many of the services we integrate with like PayPal, Campaign Monitor, FreshBooks, Highrise, MailChimp and Twitter are valued brands to our users. Because they are run by really incredible companies, one of the nice side effects of that is when those products improve our products are essentially improving by association.

One of the methods, we’re most excited about is our new WebHook implementation that will allow any developer or application to make a Wufoo form forward a HTTP POST of all the variables collected to any web page they specify. The idea behind WebHooks has been around since 2006, but they’re really starting to take off now because of how easy the spec is to make the magic happen between two services.

The Wufoo interface is very fun and playful (in terms of the typefaces, logo, design, language etc). Was this a very conscious decision or just a reflection of it’s creators?

Definitely, a bit of both.

We knew that we were not the only form builders in this space, so it was really important to us that the difference come out in the personality of the product in addition to its ease of use. In the beginning, we tried to look at other interfaces for inspiration, but we realized quickly that we weren’t going to learn much about how to make something easy from Microsoft Access or Infopath. I actually still don’t know how to use either software to create a form.

The inspiration for our color palette, though, did come from our competitors. Everyone else out there at the time was using either some variation of cubicle blue or corporate gray to brand their product or service. It was really depressing to see so much software out there designed to remind people they’re making databases in a windowless office and so we immediately knew we wanted to go in the opposite direction and use a lot of vibrant colors.

My goal was to design Wufoo to feel like something Fisher Price would make. We were determined from the get go to make sure Wufoo wasn’t just going to be excellent at what it does, it was going to be fun, too.

As far as reflection goes, my background is fine arts-based, so my perspective on the Web is a bit different from most designers in the industry. I studied Digital Arts and Modern American English Literature at a very small private liberal arts college on the east coast of Florida.

The digital arts program was an interdisciplinary fine arts amalgam of computer science, art and music. Out of college I was into creative writing and electronic art. Graphic design, software interfaces, digital photography, video installations, sensor research, online storytelling, conceptual weirdness ‚ all of it excited me.

I initially was only interested in the Web as a medium for my art work, as an expression of myself. CSS was just a tool to help me express my ideas better. Yes, it separated my design information from my structural information‚ but I was mostly interested in the fact that it was easier for me to layer 57 pictures of robots on top of each other (I was very weird in college). To me, Wufoo was an opportunity to extend my experiments in that space–eliciting real emotions and the feeling of friendship through software.

As a subscriber to Treehouse (a downloadable web magazine) back in the day, I have always wondered why it stopped and if you have any plans to bring it back?

Well, you can thank Y Combinator and Wufoo for its discontinuation. Our goal with Treehouse was always to be a means to an end. When it was just the three of us and before there was even any hint of funding in the air, Chris, Ryan and I knew we wanted to make a company and make software around the ideas we had experimented with on our web development blog, Particletree. The problem was time and money.

Because I had a background in publishing and served as Editor-in-Chief of my college newspaper, I pitched to the guys that we could probably create a monthly PDF magazine about web development and use the revenues and time (I figured it should only take up 2 weeks a month to produce the thing if we developed the process correctly) to then make the software we always wanted to make.

We didn’t have a lot of money saved up at that time and so only Ryan and I quit our jobs to work on it full time while Chris kept his job in the government and split his paycheck with us. I worked out our editorial direction and design and Ryan built the digital download system.

All three of us had to solicit writers and write reviews and articles to fill up the 60 pages of content that we planned for each issue. I was responsible for the design content, Ryan was responsible for the programming content and Chris was responsible for the business content. It was actually a really scary and exciting time for us because it was a total gamble.

However, half way through our second issue, we found out that we were accepted by Y Combinator and that changed everything. What most people don’t realize during that period is that while we were working 16 hours a day building Wufoo out in California and trying to solicit funding, we also had to simultaneously create 4 more issues of Treehouse to fullfill the 6 month subscription obligations we promised to our readers. We were so exhausted by the end of it all that something had to give and it was, unfortunately, Treehouse.

We do, however, still have high hopes for the format and content we formulated with Treehouse and maybe, one day, it’ll be resurrected. You never know.

Think Vitamin is looking for an enthusiastic volunteer news editor to help contribute to the site on a weekly basis. The aim is to publish two weekly articles (Monday and Thursday) rounding up the hot news stories in web design, web development and web business. Essentially a list of hot articles with your opinion as to why they are important.

There will also be the opportunity to contribute feature articles and conduct interviews at Carsonified events. Ideally you will be based in the UK but it’s not essential.

In return for helping out here’s what we can offer:

• Free pass to Future of Web Design (London and US) and Future of Web Apps (London and US) events. Travel and accommodation not included.
• Entry to our event speaker dinners
• Option of writing feature articles for Think Vitamin

The ideal person will:

• Subscribe to far too many RSS feeds on web design and development
• Keep stupidly up to date on all things web
• Have an attention to detail
• Be opinionated on the important topics of the week

If you are interested, serious and are willing to contribute your time please e-mail thinkvitamin@carsonified.com outlining why you fit the bill. If you already have a blog or contribute to other sites please list examples.

Dan Benjamin recently blogged about his decision to venture into full time podcasting. We love to hear about anyone branching out and trying new things so we wish him all the best with his venture.

Two of his new shows solo shows are The Pipeline and The Conversation:

• The Pipeline, an interview show talking with designers, developers, writers, and entrepreneurs. Episode one featured Jeffrey Zeldman and upcoming shows will include Kottke, Storey, Vaynerchuk, Coudal, Mann, Siracusa, and many more.
• The Conversation, a live-streamed talk show featuring topical discussions, reviews, special guests, news with Christina Warren from Mashable, and, your calls, all live.

For his second episode of The Pipeline Dan interviewed our own Ryan Carson and discussed how he works, his inspiration, how he’s built such a strong personal brand, the Carsonified 4-day work week and unique offices, and more. You can check out the episode online: http://5by5.tv/pipeline/2.

We always try to bring you links to new and interesting content, let us know what you think in the comments.

Last week we published a review of Paul Boag’s new book “Website Owner’s Manual” and offered readers the opportunity to win one of six free copies courtesy of Manning Publications. To enter all you had to do was leave your best website owner’s tip in the comments. With over 50 tips by the deadline Paul’s job wasn’t easy.

Here in no particular order are the six winning tips for website owner’s chosen by Paul. If you have won please forward your full name and mailing address from the email you gave when entering your comment to thinkvitamin@carsonified.com.

1. Jackie
   My tip is – sometimes it’s OK to ignore tips :) But first, you have to do your research and know what you want to accomplish and who you are doing it for.

   Otherwise you won’t know which tips to ignore and which to follow in your particular project.

2. Glennette Clark
   My number one tip for web site owners is to have a content strategy.

   Oftentimes, content gets the short stick in lieu of design, when it should really be the other way around.Web site owners should know their audiences, know what they want to read, and know how to present it to them.

   Without some kind of upfront discussion about content, the web site becomes a place for pretty pictures and not an effective tool for building brands and building businesses.

3. Greg Wolkins
   My #1 tip is *Be Responsive*. Be eager to engage with your readers/customers/viewers. If someone leaves a comment, starts a discussion, has a question, etc, be sure to respond quickly. Let them know that you are paying attention and are receptive to their input.

   Even if it’s just to say “I don’t know, let me look into that and get back to you”. A site that appears to be abandoned will quickly be forgotten.

4. Cornelius Bergen
   My tip would be to never assume that once the site or a feature goes live it’s done. Your site will require regular attention like a garden.

   Every feature launched on the site is like a seed and without nurturing, it will die. And sometimes you’ll need to pull out things that are just wasting space.

5. Dan Millar
   My number one tip for website owners is don’t over complicate your site. Spend time at the start planning your content and functionality. Then sit back, read through, and strip out anything which isn’t absolutely necessary.

   Once the site is launched keep reviewing your analytics, if features aren’t being used either investigate why and adjust your architecture (if business critical feature) or strip it out.

6. Jeff
   My Tip is always keep the goal and the purpose of your website in mind, especially when adding features.

   If you keep your content good, and your site simple and easy to use people will come back again and again.