According to Jupiter Research, 73% of marketers aren’t doing any testing whatsoever, with 49% having no plans to do so. Before I share 4 compelling reasons why you should be testing, let’s look at some of the reasons why marketers aren’t testing:

• Lack of resources (in-house talent, budget for tool or consultants)
• Lack of tool (now with Google Website Optimizer this is less of an issue)
• Lack of buy-in from upper management
• Lack of ownership of the testing process
• IT bottlenecks
• Lack of understanding of the value of testing / don’t think it’s important
• Not sure what to test, how to prioritize testing opportunities or how to take action on results
• Lack of understanding of tools or testing methods

Despite these challenges, serious Web marketers should push to overcome them and get testing capabilities because testing is the only way to truly know what works and what doesn’t for your site based on the combination of your industry, customers and product mix.

The content of any website is paramount to a site’s success.

High quality content, regardless of whether the site aims to inform, entertain, or sell a product, will increase the site’s likelihood of converting visitors. But beyond providing high quality content, a site also needs to organize that content in a way that makes it accessible to visitors.

Prioritizing your content is one of the best ways to make sure your visitors are finding the information you want them to find, and that they want to find. But figuring out what content is most important and how to arrange it to reflect that can get confusing, fast.

In many cases, designers and content creators feel like it’s all important, and should all get equal billing. But that’s not doing your visitors any favors. You need to get to the root of what’s most important to them, and then provide that in the most user-friendly way possible.

In a nutshell, my provocation began with the question: if clients only pay for the things they can’t do themselves, what does that mean when we work in a real-time, social web world?

A bit of context first.

We’re all familiar with this behaviour now, sure. Its relevance in terms of client-agency ways of working is perhaps even more obvious: ‘baton passing’ doesn’t work. The old linear model where there were distinct lines between client and agency are now blurring:

Many of us may baulk at the idea that ‘Creative’ sits as a shared task… but thinking about brands marketing themselves in a social web context – where the content is often real-time and personal – how many brands are exclusively outsourcing their voice on Facebook and Twitter, say (and/or will continue to do so)?

With all the blurring and collaboration, not to mention the warp speed with which we all need to work, comes a need for agencies to keep an eye on the value and difference they bring. To repeat: Clients pay for the things they cannot do themselves. Add economic pressure to the mix and you cannot help but think that too much duplication is unsustainable.

Creative agencies, take note..

With a minimum amount of data, it gives you a sense of how a match unfolded. Created for the soccer brand Umbro, the chart shows each and every match from the first round. For each match, the green bars show completed passes, blue triangles show shots attempted, and the red dots show goals scored. That's it.

Many users who interact with websites everyday still don't have enough knowledge to actively explore a content-rich site. Even if the IA of a site was architected exceptionally well, a user lacking confidence could still find it difficult to use. This would likely have to do with perceived risks associated with interacting with extraneous page elements. Understanding this principle is what makes sites like google so popular and user friendly.

Although there are some legitimate examples of malicious activities being carried out by accidentally interacting with page elements, the biggest reason users dislike interacting with elements they're not confident about, is that it could cost them time. Remember, time savings is at the forefront of many users minds. If interacting with a banner could cause the brewer to crash, it would be better to avoid banners. If scrolling down a page causes my mouse to unintentionally expand a bunch of drop-down lists, it would be better if I didn't have to.

Conclusion

Stop being chained to conventions. Lets assume 3 things: 1. You know who your user is. 2. You know what you want your user to do, in a prioritized list. 3. You've read this article. With these assumptions, you can start doing something important:

STOP FOLLOWING EVERYONE ELSE

This post represents a foundation of understanding user needs & applying cognitive sciences to user experience. With some of the techniques I've talked about, you can think about revolutionizing how users interact with your brand online. Remember, before the introduction of the mouse everyone was interested in optimizing keyboard input.

Final thought - If designing for the lazy allows us to access the masses; lets figure out a way to make the lazy even lazier.

Line25 Sites of the Week for July 2nd 2010

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs that I stumble across during my every day browsing. In this week’s collection, we have designs from LaunchList, Riddle, Camera+, Christopher Calicott and Untorock.

LaunchList

View the website

Riddle.pl

View the website

Camera+

View the website

Christopher Calicott

View the website

Untorock 2010

View the website

As companies understand the importance of users to their success, they move from viewing UX designers as problem solvers (“how will we present all this information in a understandable way?”) to a more deep, interwoven process (“what information should we present to the user?”) and further on to a strategic view that is part of their business vision (“what is our next product?”).

In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find a highly curated selection of guides, tutorials and visual samples collections that can greatly help you in understanding better what makes a great web site design and to how to distinguish a design that work from a cheapo, splashy, all-smoke-and-no-fire design template.

What is important to understand in fact is that the web design principles and best practices are not useful just for blogs, but also and even more for any kind of content-driven or service-driven website that you may want to build.

For example a few critical items that most new web sites have to take into consideration are:

• Above the fold: People should feel at home immediately when they land on your site. They do not have to scroll down to see where they are, who you are and what you have to offer them.

Page legibility: Do not pretend to be Monet. Virtuosisms in web design is beautiful to see, but they it is not required. What really counts is whether your web page communicates clearly what you have to offer in a handful of seconds.

Loading speed: Each and every design component you add on your web pages (widgets, plugins, Flash elements, etc.) contributes to slow down the overall load time of your content. Remember that speed is now one of the ranking factors that Google uses to rank your website inside Google search engine result pages.

Simplicity: Stay simple. Do not throw as much content and calls for action on your pages as you possibly can. Start by focusing your design layout on a few, valuable content items and then gradually guide your reader in discovering more of it.