Non-profits need to use big data and mobile to present clear messages in 2016

2015 has seen charities gaining increased confidence to streamline, simplify and even surprise. With increasing demands from an ever increasingly digital savvy audience, standing still has not been an option.

The larger charities are capitalising on ever more sophisticated opportunities gained from insights and improved team working and systems.  The best of the medium to small size charity websites are finding cost-effective ways to improve experience such as featuring user-generated content.

There are a host of encouraging trends in the sector, but these ones stand out to me due to their take up across the sector and positive impact are: 

1. Clarity of message

It would seem that many charities have pared down their offering on key pages to focus on core content and calls to action.…

It's best to test these 4 design elements before using them across your site

It’s real easy to jump on the band wagon and employ design and usability elements that everyone else is using. But have you done your research to see if those elements could be detrimental to your conversions? Before you leap, here are a few elements that should be considered before implementing them.

1. Rotating Picture Sliders

Slids or carousels, often used on a home page can make a dull site feel more flashy and active. And they make the most of a websites limited space above the fold by displaying several messages. Perfect. Right? Well, not exactly. A study by usability expert, Jakob Nielsen , revealed that participants found it extremely difficult to answer even the simplest of questions when it came to the marketing messages in rotating picture sliders or carousels. [video width="692" height="479" mp4="//www.smartinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/2016-01-11_14-54-58.mp4"][/video] Participants simply couldn’t grasp each message when…

Your menus may be letting you down. Here's how to perfect them

When businesses are looking to understand why their websites aren’t performing effectively or reviewing options to convert more visitors as part of a CRO programme, they should take a hard look at the different types of navigation they are providing. If some visitors can’t find their way around a website, or more importantly find what they are looking for, then a pretty website is useless to them. The primary and secondary navigation menus are the key to getting visitors effectively around a website. Without an effective navigation menu in place, businesses risk confusing and frustrating their visitors. More importantly, they risk losing conversions and sales. So how do businesses keep that from happening? This article will go into detail on how to create an optimal navigation menu that effectively helps visitors find their way around.

Choosing Buttons

To start, businesses must choose buttons that will be…

When businesses use eye tracking data to help them design their website they could be missing vital information about their web visitors

Eye tracking studies are undoubtedly useful. Let’s get that fact out-of-the-way first. These specialist studies show exactly where people look on web pages and as a result web designers can ensure that specific elements are positioned for maximum visibility. But are these studies as valuable as they might seem? In this article I shall explain why eye tracking studies have limitations which companies should consider when they are building their websites. What you’ll discover in this article is: How eye tracking works What eye tracking tells you What eye tracking does not tell you The major flaw with eye tracking Filling in the gaps of eye tracking The place of eye tracking in marketing

How eye tracking works

Eye tracking can be performed in various ways, but generally small cameras track the movement of the pupils as…

Getting the website design style balance right

There’s often a preconception that designers and digital strategists do battle on a daily basis, but in our experience, this is simply not the case. Great websites require both sides to debate their points to reach the best conclusion – a healthy balance between design, functionality and persuasion. There are many different page types which make up a great website, each requiring a different strategic and design approach. In this blog post, we will look at a sample of pages from both perspectives with a view to finding that sweet spot where both are balanced and both combatants are happy.

The Homepage

Creative-led design example

This is where you grab the viewer’s attention. This may be your only chance to keep the new visitor on your site / side, so you need to be direct and achieve an…

A review of usability best practice for UK Universities

I worked in Higher Education for 14 years, so I found Wedcredible's Education Report 2013 extremely interesting, since their survey benchmarked the websites of 10 UK universities to assess their online user experience. With changes over the past few years, with higher UK fees and more demand on universities and FE Colleges to provide a positive experience for home and overseas prospective and current students, from the first and every ongoing touchpoint - it's increasingly important to engage and provide a good experience throughout the customer lifecycle (from enquirer - applicant - student and beyond to alumni). Students or at least their parents are paying customers with 'set expectations' and the HE market is very competitive multi-nationally and domestically, as the government changed regulations and opened up HE provision to more providers such as FE colleges.…

Using Adobe Edge Reflow for RWD

In a recent blog post we wrote an article on the importance of taking a content-centric approach to responsive web design (RWD) in order to future proof your site from the endless stream of new devices of various shapes, sizes and resolutions. In this follow-up MMT Digital’s CTO, James Cannings, talks about new tools to help in this process. James spoke about this approach passionately at Internet World earlier this year. Everybody we speak to (or has responded to our blog posts) agrees with the responsive approach in principle, but there are problems with many implementations... The reality is that many responsive websites are still built with the key breakpoints set at device specific resolutions (e.g. the pixel width of an iPad in landscape mode) rather than setting the breakpoints where your content 'breaks' (or just doesn’t look great on…

Sharing screengrab tools (including how to screen grab a really long post with a single click)

I mark a lot of student marketing assignments. It's good to see students using visuals, but I'm often surprised at how many are still using "Print Screen" to do a full screen grab when what they actually want is just a  section of a page. So here, I share three of the many screen grab tools that I use.

1. Windows Snipping Tool

This is an under utilised tool that comes free with Windows. The screen grabs below are  self explanatory as to the steps involved:

   

With this tool you can highlight text or underline/circle etc:

…

Match personas, content changes and stages of the buying cycle to help you nurture your leads

In my last post, Personalisation 101- How to increase customer engagement and conversion rates, I introduced the main types of personalisation available to make your site more customer-focused. In this post I'll expand on this by recommending approaches to segmenting your audience and making sure that your website’s personalisation directly meets your overall business objectives. I will show how to: Use business objectives to define measurable actions Identify the weaknesses in your website Create personas for your core audience types Use a Digital Relevancy Map to plot specific actions to personas and buying stages Create a wireframe to translate this knowledge onto your webpages Test and measure personalisation.

Making actions meet your business objectives

The first step is to lay the foundations for personalisation. To make a business case for personalisation you need a clear map of what personalisation…

Building a website that predicts the future (sorry no lottery numbers included)

You will have heard a lot about responsive web design (RWD) over the last 12 months, everyone seems to have an opinion about this hot topic. This post discusses the issue from a different viewpoint, showing the importance of creating responsive websites for devices yet to be invented. Often posts on responsive web design explain what it is and the benefits of this approach. Here, however, we focus on the best, and in our opinion the only, way to design a responsive website to avoid this problem...

Responsive design has gone the way of the Discman!

As with other web technologies, the more popular and common responsive web design becomes, the more we expect from it. Let’s have a bit of nostalgia to make our point.

For those…