by Ron Richards, President, ResultsLab

The Moments of Truth for 3 kinds of people
and what can be done about these moments
to multiply results for publishers and advertisers

Developers:  Managers, architects,
designers, authors, editors, & webmasters

Poison & Nectar
Finding hidden poison language and pictures, and replacing them with nectar, can have a big effect. For example, imagine finding an element that’s been chilling mouse clicks and cutting response in half. Replacing that poison element with one that’s just neutral, you can double the clickthrough at that point. See The Multiplier Principle for a lot more on how amplifiers and attenuators work.

Most sites are riddled with such poison, and developers will immediately recognize it when it’s pointed out to them. In such cases, “the eraser is mightier than the pencil.”

The nectar is about finding the missed bets, where an element is good, but could be more grabbing, more urgent, more tapping into fundamental human desires, more of a learning gift, more likely to reset the standard and disqualify your competitors.

Stumble Removal
If users are confused about what they find or can’t find at your site, then many of them will eat up expensive time (on the phone or in e-mail interactions) with your service and support folks. They’ll burn your resources looking for answers to things that could have been clear on the site.

And for every confused user who persists, there can be 100 for whom “confused” means “outahere” -- forever. This costs you thousands of people who would have stayed in the site, drilled deeper or broader, and returned. See Link Architecture for the many roles of links, strategies, and examples.

Your content and graphic creators are so close to their creation, so immersed in their knowledge of what everything means, that they can’t see some of these stumbles -- in content and navigation.

Optimum Navigation
Navigation strategies are far from obvious, especially given the need to not just organize logically, but for persuasion reasons to highlight key elements on home pages, and early pages. It’s not unusual to have a half-dozen different ways navigation structure could be designed.

The best solutions often violate conventional wisdom. For example, it often improves results to use plain HTML links vs. image maps. That’s because it’s clearer that they are links -- due to their color, underline, and being surrounded by white space. Usually, breaking out of the image map graphic allows you more room to make the link language grabbing. And unlike image maps, the plain HTML link changes color -- helping the visitor tremendously to not get confused about where they’ve already been.  The shrinking list of unfollowed-color links just begs them to click some more. Having the proper mixture of image maps and HTML links is a high art.

Navigation should be so transparent that even an adult can follow it. Those over 40 grew up in an era when computers bit back a lot more. That resulted in their now feeling less playful and safe around computers. Before they click, they want a good idea of what will happen, or they’ll freeze and bail out.

Also, if they are highly paid and overloaded folks, they may feel great time pressure. So, if you have a lot of important visitors over 40, your navigation structure has to be simpler, and contain more guidance.

There are dozens of navigation strategies and principles that will multiply your results, with many of the key ones at Link Architecture.

Missing Pieces
At each moment of the visitor’s experience, there are certain implicit questions in the air: “Is this worth sticking with?”  “Which link(s) are worth following?”  “What about my qualm that...?” 

A mentor early in my career, Francis Mechner, said that great communication constantly prompts the audience/reader to pose a mental question, and then as if by magic, answers it for them. Eventually, the reader begins to feel, “They’ve thought of everything; they have all the answers.”  You can reach the point where the user feels the puzzle is clear, and feels there are no missing pieces.

It’s not that all qualms are removed; just that so many questions are answered that proceeding is a no-brainer.

And it is sometimes possible to change a situation where everyone has qualms into one where no one has qualms -- by finding a hidden re-positioning.  See Fundamental Human Desire.

Small Files Without Sacrifice
Everyone knows that small files download faster, but you also know there can be a grueling tradeoff.

As you crop, resize for fewer pixels and smaller pictures, and as you save with fewer colors in your GIF pallet or less quality in your JPEG compression, you reach that threshold where quality becomes unacceptable. In making such tradeoffs, designers may not think of many solutions, especially where the solutions involve other disciplines and other people on the team.

For example, how can captions make up for lack of picture quality, making iconic pictures acceptable?  What alternative picture concept would allow a smaller file?  How can fewer pictures do more work? 

The Qualifieds Rethought
The way for Web publishers and advertisers to think about qualifieds, efficiency, targeting, and waste are all radically changed in the context of Web-based economics and design opportunities, as described in my Empty Calories Paradox. It analyzes the tradeoffs involved -- regardless of what “qualified” means in your context.

It used to be obvious in traditional media that a content vehicle had to be careful to attract a high density of qualifieds. And it also used to be obvious that advertisers who attracted unwanted responses from lots of unqualifieds would incur devastating advertising costs per qualified exposure.  It also used to be true that they’d incur the costs of handling unqualified inquiries with all the attendant labor, phone money, printing, and postage. But with Web publishing, all that is radically changed for reasons that surprise even some of the most Web-savvy executives.

A few key insight are these: Usually it’s possible to multiply traffic while improving the percent qualifieds at the same time!  Even if the percent qualifieds get poorer, it’s usually possible to have the increase in traffic more than make up for a higher percent unqualifieds. In the later case, you need to know how to have the Web site help a user recognize themselves as unqualified -- thereby discouraging them from responding and preventing the conventional cost disadvantage of such a tradeoff.

Past Commitments
The politics of Website enhancement stops many organizations from doing things that would multiply results by several fold. Yet there are ways around the barriers of  “pride of authorship,” “not invented here,” “too hard/slow/expensive to change,” and “how do we know the improvements will really work?”

Here are some of the keys. Get improvement strategies from someone who can explain why, psychologically, each proposed change is likely to work. Have that person prove their power to multiply results -- by having them revise just a part of the site -- for example, just the grabber headlines and link language. Promise your insiders that they’ll be trained in the new concepts and principles. Engage in a fast-paced cycle of improvement, not a delayed master redesign. Our approach to such issues is described in ResultsLab’s Services.

Even if your competitors all have a weak presence for now, why not find ways to break the bonds of your past commitments so you can have the growth and profit opportunity that comes from increasing traffic by 2-5 fold what it would have been?

Courage
We hope you and your teammates will be inspired by the upside potential implied by your review of the 13 know-how giving sections of this site. (All linked from the Home page, and also in Improvement Insights.) That should convince your Web publishing team that you can enjoy big improvements in language, navigation, and graphics. 

Does it follow that your colleagues will welcome your plan to ask us, or someone else, to find the results multipliers? Not necessarily.

After all, it takes a lot of confidence and security to have your precious baby critiqued and improved.  And it may be world-class and successful already!  You could just rest on your laurels, and your existing rave reviews.

Know that some of the best improvements will have been totally hidden to all your insiders, yet once the problems and opportunities are pointed out virtually everyone will think “But of course, how could all of us have missed that?!”  You all missed it because you’re too close to it, and finding subtle leverage points is a high art and specialty, as described in What Clients Say.

Unless you’re used to delegating highly strategic and leveraged work to a consultant, this experience is likely to take some courage. It helps if you work with someone who has a reputation for being a supportive collaborator -- someone extremely good at naming what was already powerful, and why. Still, you have to be willing for others to build on your ideas, and go beyond them.

Diagonal Moves
Conventional wisdom says to change one variable at a time, to not make diagonal moves on your developmental chess board. I’ve read the maxim in many marketing, advertising, and research books -- and I challenge it, for many reasons.

The one-variable-at-a-time approach works when making small changes, if each of them is independent of the others, and there is lots of time to experiment one little step at a time. In highly competitive and entrepreneurial situations, those conditions don’t apply.

To improve Web publications and advertising, often the greatest leverage is in making an integrated change to several things at once. On our home page, you’ll read just such a case story, about how we achieved an initial 2.5 fold gain for NetscapeWorld.

The trick is to see the dozens of variables that make up the entire communication as an n-dimensional space in which you’re willing to move from one position (perhaps already well integrated) to another more powerful position (also well integrated).  See The Multiplier Principle.

Of course to pull it off you have you know -- down to the deep psychological principles involved -- how the new configuration is likely to work, and how to use your tracking reports and further analytical and creative work to correct and multiply further.  Testing is powerless without a great theory of what should work, and the ability to interpret the feedback.

You’ll find lots of examples of what works, and how it’s possible to improve on what’s already good in Grabber Development.

Team Skills
Your insiders will welcome collaboration with an outsider if they’re confident they’ll learn new career tools. Consider having your consultant not only fish for you, but soon teach the whole team to fish.

I usually start by becoming the acting creative director for whatever elements are the focus of my project. Typically your content experts, graphic designers, and web manager will know many-fold more about their specialties than I ever will. They need to support my work despite my (sometimes good) dumb questions; accept my leadership on strategy, architecture, and key language; and understand that temporarily my approval is required for changes in the area we’re working on together.

To make sure the team gets empowered, not undercut, an outsider should work in close collaboration, run workshops, and give lots of coaching by e-mail to team members. It helps if a lot if the coaching is one-to-one, without email copies to others -- unless the person involved has achieved a breakthrough and welcomes the before-and-after being shared in a team workshop.

1. Developers:  Managers, architects,
   designers, authors, editors, webmasters     < Above on this page
2. Your visitors     < Continued here
3. Your word-of-mouth allies

| Home | What Clients Say | Ron Richards’ Background |
| ResultsLab’s Services | How to Contact Us |

| Improvement Insights | Moments of Truth | Link Architecture |
| Multiplier Principle | Grabber Development | Fundamental Desire |
| How to Get/Use Quotes | Empty Calories Paradox |