Design: February 2009 Archives

I don't remember when I found Wordle but as soon as I did, I bookmarked it thinking it would be fun to play with. As many bookmarks do, it sat there for a while, untouched, until I thought I would dump some content in there and see what came out. The results were actually pretty interesting.

Wordle allows you to dump a body of text into it and then pulls out the most common terms from the data. For example, we had a ton of user feedback about GotVMail's website and service--over 4000 submissions organized into 'promoter' and 'detractor' categories. When I dumped those two sets of data into Wordle, I was able to see which terms appeared with the most frequency. The bigger the term is in the Wordle "cloud," the more it appeared in the data. This allowed me to see quickly what the two data sets had both in common and what they didn't.

Below see a quick Wordle image I created from a draft document for new user help content. As I expected the word "extension(s)" was the largest, followed by "greeting" and "edit." Think about the text data you have that would benefit from being inserted into Wordle--what patterns do you identify and do you find it useful?

At GotVMail, we love testing and optimizing our website. A small investment of time generates significant returns in conversions and revenue. We also learn a lot about our customers and how they interact with the site.

Recently, for one of our test plans, we wanted to optimize our site's sales funnel (each step of the main website navigation). Starting with the first step, the How it Works page, we decided to test the flash video. For the past few years, we've used the video to educate visitors how our service works. It took months to develop, had a custom soundtrack, narration, graphics, the works - and cost a lot of money to make. The two minute video got great feedback in terms of branding. Everyone loved it.

We tested the video we had come to love against a very simple graphic that explained the service in three easy steps: One number - multiple extensions - tons of free advanced features.

The test ran for two weeks with half of the visitors seeing the video and the other half seeing the image. We quickly saw some significant results. The simple image resulted in a 10% increase in visitors getting to the next step of the sales funnel and yielded an 18% higher conversion than the video. So, less work, lower cost, more orders. Not a bad concept.

Do you have a multi-step sales funnel on your site? Ask yourself how you can educate visitors faster and quickly get them to the next step.

I've written a number of blog posts about our culture and core ideologies. Most recently, I wrote about how to keep these values top of mind and visible, and this graphic came to mind. Trying to visually represent all of these important concepts, link them with our longer term goals ('big hairy audacious goal' or 'BHAG' for short) and to ultimately show how interconnected it all is wasn't an easy task.

In order to take such an abstract concept and make it concrete, we worked with our graphic facilitator to create an interesting graphic that we've since used in company communications, a goals worksheet, and our wiki.

Starting from the left, the core purpose is the first concept, then we integrated all the core values around an apple core to give it some visual appeal (apple core, core values--get it?). Each core value has a few actions or notes next to it remind us exactly what it is.

Our brand promise is next and highlights the four concepts that are most important to us as a company. Finally, tying it all together is our long term goal, or "BHAG" as Jim Collins called it, one million influential entrepreneurs as customers. This creates a very powerful graphic with visual appeal while still communicating very important concepts which are at the core of what we do.