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Article Title: Designing Websites That Appeal To The Senses
Author: Jerry Bader
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Taking Advantage of The Experience Factor
We read the newspaper, we watch television, and we listen to
the radio, but we experience the Web; this is what makes 'The
Website' one of the most powerful marketing tools available to
today's marketing executives. Unfortunately conventional wisdom
has stifled the 'experience factor' on most website
presentations.
Traditional circulation based advertising biases and
pitch-mandated direct mail practices from metric-minded
agencies have limited businesses' ability to take advantage of
the Web's capacity to provide a more active, creative, and
penetrating sensory experience aimed at furthering marketing
objectives.
As consumers of information we all filter what our mind
considers irrelevant. When we go to a website we quickly
recognize where banner and text advertisements have been placed
and proceed to ignore them for the rest of our visit. Even
television ads are becoming increasing less effective, even as
their cost increases. Yet people will watch and even look
forward to creative, entertaining advertisements that capture
our imagination and inform our ability to make better decisions
about what we buy and who we buy from.
Does Anybody Really Know What Works?
It is easy to rely on after-the-fact number crunching and
projected head-numbing statistics to justify how marketing
campaigns are constructed rather than on the less predictable
but more relevant elements of psychology and human nature. But
do numbers really tell the true story, or are they just
protect-your-
mind when it comes time to commit to a budget?
Take the entertainment industry for example. Here is an
industry that can tell you how many people watched a particular
television show on a per minute basis. So if these and the other
cerebral-cortex-
have such a hard time delivering programs that people will
watch; or do they yank new potentially successful shows
off-the-air based on their initial numbers before they ever
have a chance to find an audience?
Television is such an expensive medium, its practitioners have
come to rely on seemly safe, tried, hackneyed old formula,
knowing that it is easier to sell sponsors what used to work,
even when they know there is little chance of it working again.
The fact is nobody really knows what combination of stories,
writers, actors and producers is going to capture the publics'
imagination.
So what does this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything.
The Web is not an expensive production medium and that allows
marketers to experiment with different techniques and creative.
Unless your Web-business is a circulation-
model, there is no reason to limit your creative marketing to
worn-out concepts and number-based incentive formats that for
the most part, no longer work.
Sensory and Experience Design Concepts
The essence of good advertising and its big brother marketing,
is creative story telling; stories presented effectively,
inform, persuade, and penetrate our consciousness based on
their ability to tap into our sensory experiences. There has
developed over the last few years two new approaches to design
that acknowledge this powerful aspect of human nature: Sensory
and Experience Design.
The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found
in everything from product development to package design. When
we talk about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people
react to their experience with products and marketing
presentations.
We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound,
touch, smell, and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch
people shop for fruit and vegetables; they pick them up,
squeeze them, turn them over and over looking for flaws, smell
them, and if the store keeper isn't looking they may even have
a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the specifications
listed in the brochure, but they still go to the showroom, kick
the tires, run their hands along the shinny new paint, smell
the leather interior, and take that sucker for a test drive to
see how she handles. It's all about experiencing the product
through our senses - it's that sensory experience that becomes
imbedded in our memory.
To date most companies have lagged in their efforts to
implement these new SenEx marketing communication approaches on
their websites due to their obsession with search engine
optimization issues that focus on the volume of traffic rather
than the quality of the marketing message. Business seems to be
stuck in a circulation-
that runs contrary to the Web's niche market 'Long Tail' nature
and its ability to communicate by presenting information that
appeals to a variety of senses.
Search Engine Optimization Issues
No one will argue with the desire of website owners to attract
large numbers of viewers to their sites. But this desire has
spawned an entire industry of people claiming to be able to
provide website owners with the holy grail of search engine
optimization: making it to the top spot in an organic search on
your favorite search engine.
Not everyone willing to pay for an S.E.O. expert to optimize
his or her site can be number one in an organic search. And of
course there is the issue of paid search placement that trumps
organic searches.
As fast as search engine optimization experts develop ways to
beat the search engines, the experts at the search engines
change their algorithms, and my money is on the guys at Google.
When it comes to search engine optimization consider the
following important issues and questions:
1. Do the search engine tactics employed on your site degrade,
obscure, or in some way diminish the ability of your website
visitors to quickly find the information they want?
2. Do these search engine tactics impede your ability to
effectively deliver your marketing message in a way that
attracts attention, triggers relevant sensory experience, and
embeds your message in your visitors' memories?
3. Do tactics like outbound reciprocal links and inline
body-text links send people away from your site when you want
them to stick around and hear what you have to say?
4. Do you have excessive repetitive copy-text on your site
aimed at being indexed by search engines rather than read by
people for clear concise understanding?
5. Have you reduced your complex message or instructions to a
series of bulleted points that confuse rather than clarify?
6. Do your search engine tactics concentrate on the volume of
traffic rather than the quality?
7. Is the traffic you're attracting leaving your site as fast
as it's arriving?
The lesson we should learn from SenEx Design concepts is that
websites need to be designed for people not search engines.
Delivering a clearly understandable marketing message is
achieved by tapping into the psychological and emotional
responses triggered by sensory experiences. That is how you
need to communicate to an audience separated from you by the
vast expanse of the Internet.
SenEx Web Design Using Audio and Video Techniques
People are hungry for information. In today's fast-paced world
the average person needs to constantly upgrade their knowledge
of ever changing and more complex products and services. Things
that were good for you yesterday today are harmful; products
that don't exist today will exist tomorrow. So it doesn't
matter if you are a homemaker, retiree, or a buyer for an
international corporation, the need-to-know is constantly with
us and it creates what Richard Saul Wurman has described as
"Information Anxiety".
We just don't have the time to study everything we need-to-know
or want-to-know that affects our business and personal lives. We
need the information fast and in an easily digestible format.
And we need that information presented in a way that will make
it easy for us to retain it.
The power of Web-audio and video is their ability to illicit
experiences by presenting information in a linear narrative
that appeals to the senses of sound and sight. This ability
attracts and focuses an audience's attention on the material
you want highlighted; it presents that material in an easily
digestible format; it clarifies the meaning and significance of
critical details; and it penetrates viewers' consciousness so
that the information is retained.
The following types of audio and video SenEx Web-presentations
can be used to deliver a variety of material:
1. Web-commercials and Email Campaigns
2. Special Promotions and Product Offerings
3. Product Descriptions and Overviews
4. Testimonials and Reviews
5. How To Instructions and Tutorials
6. Frequently Asked Questions and Q&As
7. Expert Lectures, Analysis and Opinion
8. Background and History
9. Personality, Staff, and Business Profiles
Conclusion
We all have something we want to sell: a product, a service, a
plan, an idea, or even ourselves. And anyone who has ever run a
sales department will tell you the best way to sell is through
human interaction and the best way to emulate that on a website
is with Web-audio and video that uses Sensory and Experience
Design techniques to deliver the message.
About The Author: Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia,
a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and
Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebme
http://www.136words
Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.
Please use the HTML version of this article at:
http://www.isnare.
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