website redesign
Is the New Mint.com Marketing to Women Through Design?
The best marketing to women experts will tell you that marketing to “women” as a generalized category is usually less than ideal. It’s not about marketing to women, it’s about the female customer, and about seeing her real. And that means NOT marketing to a stereotype, which is something that I couldn’t agree with more.
But then where does that leave broad-based gender differences and reality-based demographic information? For instance, women make or influence 85% of all consumer purchasing decisions and control the finances in 53% of US households. Actually, to me, that last statistic seems low. If “controlling the finances” means balancing the checkbook and paying the bills, I’d bet far more than 53% of the household finances are controlled by women, either way, that’s a lot of checking accounts in female hands.
And that brings me to the new Mint.com redesign. Bryan Eisenberg turned me on to Patrick Sullivan’s analysis of both the old and new Mint.com websites over at his Edit Weapon blog. Great stuff to be sure, and his analysis turned me onto a miniature (and admittedly non-scientific) trend: most guys I talked to didn’t like the new mint redesign as well as the old (beloved) website. And yet the new site was outperforming the old site by 20% according to some accounts. What gives?
Well to me it seemed reasonable to believe that the new site might be preferred by and outperforming with female visitors rather than the tech-centric guys I was talking to. And in taking a closer look at the design, it seemed as if it lined up with some well-known broad-based gender preferences.
My guess is that guys prefer the old site because of the design cues and because of the buying mode they’re likely to be in when they are not in charge of a family’s finances. The old site:
- seemed dark even when it wasn’t,
- immediately directed your eye to bottom line benefits, and
- made it easy to either “Just Do It” or “Learn More”
All of these things seemed like they would appeal to faster decision makers who had a bit less (emotionally) on the line. The old site promised to “Put your finances on autopilot,” which is definitely a non-budgeted guy thing.
Comparatively, the new site:
- has a decidedly friendlier, lighter, and more open feel to it
- doesn’t harshly direct your eye, but lets you gather the information as you wish
- provides immediate credibility clues through prestigious magazine endorsements underneath the headline.
- explains HOW and WHY mint can accomplish great things for you within the first paragraph – and does so without visually “shouting” at you.
- lets visitors go beyond just “Learn More” to learn about benefits of concern to someone who has to handle a family’s budget or finances: “all your accounts in one place,” “easy budgeting tools,” “Find Instant Savings,” etc. Yes, this requires more brain power or emotional investment to navigate, but it’s clearly more compelling if you’re the one trying to stretch a family budget.
- Replaces “Put your finances on autopilot” with “How mint can help you live a richer life,” which - when you think of richer in it’s more suggestive or emotional connotations – also seems more broadly appealing to females in charge of the family finances.
So my question is, so you guys and gals also find this to be the case? Do your female friends prefer the new mint while your male friends prefer the old? Do you think my analysis is on-target or am I somewhat biased?
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Website Optimization vs. Redesign: The UFO Metaphor
Who would throw away a perfectly good UFO house?
That’s exactly what happened in Taiwan more than 20 years ago, as you can see from these Flickr photos.
Wow. An entire resort filled with UFO-style houses.
Abandoned.
Seeing this made me think of the websites that are abandoned each day, each quarter, by businesses that decide they need to redesign instead of enduring the less glamorous process of website optimization.
According to one blog, there are a several rumors as to why the “UFO house” resort in Sanjhih was abandoned. One story suggests that someone was killed there and the resort is haunted. Another is that the Taiwanese government outlawed bathing beaches in the area. But the most believable explanation is that the design was impractical; the resort is in a remote, windy area near the sea, and if the houses are indeed made of fiberglass as it appears, it would get incredibly hot in the summertime.
Form without function is art, not business.
In August of last year, Internet Retailer’s Form and Function survey of “243 chain retailers, catalog companies, virtual merchants and consumer brand manufacturers,” and found that…
60.3% . . . have redesigned their e-commerce sites in the past year, including 20.1% in the past three months and 14.3% within six months. Of the retailers planning to overhaul the look of their web sites, 74.7% expect to do so within 12 months and 28.6% within 90 days.
[…] “The pace of web site design is brisk because more retailers know that having an attractive site that makes it easy to find merchandise and make a purchase is a competitive advantage,” says Joey Lechtner, director of e-marketing services for Fry Inc., an Ann Arbor, Mich., web site design and e-commerce development company. “Retailers ‘keep up with the Jones’ [sic] and if their competitor redesigns a site, they notice and take action.”
A costly redesign? Just to keep up with the neighbors? What if these earthlings — these so-called “Joneses” — take their design cues from outer space? Sure, there are times when a website redesign makes sense, but if you plan it with human visitors in mind in the first place, redesigning each year would seem crazy.
And let’s face it. Maybe you don’t need a redesign. Maybe you just need to recognize that you’ve built a cool-looking-yet-impractical UFO house that would be fine if you just painted it white and installed solar panels, reflective glass and an air conditioner.
That’s my website optimization metaphor and I’m sticking to it. For now.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Is Something Wrong With Your Design?
I’m still settling in from my trip last week to the Internet Retailer Design conference. If you didn’t attend, you missed a great first-time show, so you’ll have to check it out next year.
Over 800 people showed up to hear the speakers and meet with consultants (like me) to evaluate their current websites — and some even discussed mock-ups and prototypes of new versions of their sites. My back-of-the-napkin calculation is that Internet Retailer gave away around $150,000 worth of consultations, but I’ll ask you the one common question I asked several of the companies I met with just for the price of spending a few minutes reading.
What makes you think the new design you’re working on is going to work any better than the one you have today?
I recall sitting with one of the most recognized brands on the Web and him pulling out his mock-ups. They felt that they had issues around how products were presented and how their navigation worked. They offered a complex menu with way too many options in their current navigation, and were hoping to improve it by using a top level menu with a javascript rollover.
“What research do you have that indicates that new navigation will work better than the current one?” I asked. He was honest and said, “None.”
So why don’t you test it?
Internet Retailer did a pre-conference survey and asked the top 500 retailers if they’re doing multivariate or A/B testing, and included the results in their Website Design & Usability Guide.
Amazingly, 76.7% of retailers surveyed don’t test!
Huh? Now that you can get A/B and Multivariate testing tools for free from Google, why aren’t you testing?
We’ve also found that it’s safer to roll out a redesign in stages, in order to avoid the initial drop in conversion that often results from a redesign. Why not roll this out as a series of tests?
If you need help, call us at 877-643-7244 (ext. 3316). We’d be happy to help you make more money before and after your redesign.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
