Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox post “Bridging the Designer-User Gap” is almost a follow up to the “Myth of the Genius Designer” which I consider one of my favorites from him.

Red emphasis mine.

….There’s a big gap between designers and the majority of users. …. Generally, if you’re a member of a design team, you are not representative of the target audience. I don’t care if you’re the interaction designer, the graphics artist, the information architect, the writer, the programmer, or the marketer. All of these people:

• know too much about the product (be it a website, intranet, application, phone, whatever);
• are too skilled in using computers and the Web in general; and
• care too much about their own baby (so they can’t imaging visitors bouncing after scanning the homepage for 30 seconds — but that’s what outside users do).

- Jakob Nielsen

(more…)

Former Technorati CEO David Sifry has launched Web Hot or Not?, a Hot or Not site for websites.

It’s fun-cool, and has been done before, but it spooks me out in the world of multivariate testing and conversions optimization.

What’s hot:

Studies have shown that sites get only 50 milliseconds to give an impression to users. This site may help us learn what sites are attractive and appealing in a new way. The trouble is our assessment of any site is based on the context of that site, and how it was found. Personalized search results further refine these buckets of intent so the site is more likely to be found by certain people.

What’s not:

Anyone involved in web marketing knows that only through testing can we achieve the beauty of conversions and success for the site owner. To skim over websites and vote entirely on how they appear free from any other information (e.g. the search, PPC or organic, inbound link, intended audience, etc.) is to miss the point. It’s true, often “ugly” landing pages outconvert snazzy flash-based slot machines 3:1. Why encourage sites that look pretty but may not perform or worse, distract business owners from testable designs? I hate to see ego-designers who spend entire web budgets on snazz before knowing if the approach is right.

Bill Dotson called out a great article about professional service firms. It’s spot on about how such firms approach their website. They want the partners in the firm to like it - after all, partners agree on the marketing budget, so why not get them involved in the design? Surely someone who works day-in and day-out in a given industry is the best one to help design the site? Well, sortof.

The trouble here is intuition in this area is very flawed. How web surfers will react to your site is hard to know in advance. It’s always nice to have a web designer and SEM who knows something about what to expect in terms of lead generation and PR value of any site, but in the end, customers will tell you exactly what is right and wrong with their actions.

What types of things are your professional service customers wanting to see on your site on their first visit?
What types of online services should you offer to keep people coming back and enhancing your reputation?
What landing page content does the best job obtaining new customers from other firms?

The most experienced person on staff is probably the one who can help a lot with goal setting and priorities - but possibly not pixel tweaking. Having a professional assist you with the definition of that goal, analytics to measure progress, and a good suite of testing solutions rounds out the approach.

The good news is that many professional service firms are full of people who are analytical and who want to please the customer - so the testing mechanism makes sense.

The bad news is that most web designers are selling emotions to the staff to win the bid at any cost.

During 2007, my firm received hundreds of inquiries for services. The vast majority, perhaps 80% were in the “just make me a website like this one” camp. Many were carrying a previous designers’ handiwork with them in complete wonderment of how such a large investment could fail to produce results. As an design-by-testing developer, this pattern was highly discouraging.

The confusion among businesses about what is required to develop a web business is widespread.

“We just want to find someone to put up a site like our competitors’ ” was a very common request that, to me, is a horrible way to approach the problem. I think it is often a panic reaction to the competitor’s first-mover advantage or to a drop in ones site performance. It is too easy to assume that a snazzy site is also meeting the needs of the customers and reaching full potential. Intuition has its place, but you could be very, very wrong. Even experts get this wrong much of the time. I have evaluated the analytics data from some hot-shot designs and found exit rates over 80% and time-on-site under one minute for most visitors.

Unless you intimately know the market, which most web designers do not, designing “from the hip” is an irresponsible way to spend clients’ money. Every web developer worth their salt should be doing rudimentary testing of a business’ feasibility before heading down a given design path if one could even begin to achieve high conversion rates.

You can, to some extent, predict customers’ movements if you observe through testing and extrapolate the results into the larger design. Observation requires a laboratory, even if it takes the form of analytics on a screen. Lightweight page development with good experimental design can serve that role. While the sample sizes are often too small to achieve “true” statistical validity, even pseudo experiments with repeatable results can help you get into the right quadrant.

Why is it that small to medium businesses have not embraced the value of experimentation in web design and marketing? What has caused companies to embrace the myth of the superstar web designer or the fire and forget web marketing program?

Testing the idea’s potential before spending huge amounts of effort on web development or SEO is critically important, yet rarely done. I received at least 20 requests in 2007 for people wanting to do gift basket websites and at least 20 wanting to sell personalized products (as resellers of the same corporate gifts catalog!) None of these entrepreneurs had even considered the landscape in which they wanted to be painted was full of others doing exactly the same thing and the over-crowded search results pages served as direct evidence.

I am giving much thought to how we might do a better job packaging this story for future clients. I encouarge your ideas in the comments.

Related: conversion rates for some online retailers.

I thought about how ridiculous this product was. It was a good idea to get all the charge-ables together in a single place. It was not a good idea to do it all on paper and never test the feasibility. But it clearly doesn’t work in the real world. The solution? Shall we redesign it so it really works? Nahhhh…Let’s SELL IT ANYWAY!