Sherri and I went to Test Case II last night at Microsoft Nerd Center. Josh Porter @bokardo, author of Designing for the Social Web, and a Performable co-founder moderated last night’s audience as they provided feedback for Lightning Landing Page Evaluations. EventBrite, Doink, and RiotVine It was great to hear they were the up for the challenge. A last minute volunteer also put their site up for feedback: Laura Finton put up OneForty.com and received some valuable first hand feedback as well as why customers value the site. Tom Summit of Genotrope was sponsor, host and comic relief (as usual!)
Here are a few things that I think are well worth repeating:
- Do a Five Second Test on your site with people who haven’t seen it before. Its those first impressions that make or break everything!
- There is a difference between a home page and a landing page. Home pages are usually richer than landing pages. Landing pages have a particular focus - usually onboarding and promotion.
- Putting up phone numbers can give a sense of security.
- Be careful when creating a question in the mind of the reader. You don’t want to be in a position to have to predict what they’re thinking. Make sure you have enough information but not too much….
- Do Show/No Show Testing. A form of A/B testing, you put up certain graphics to find out people’s impression of them.
- Social Proof is important if you’re demonstrating that you have a social platform. Show faces, stats, people who are attending, etc. Show your volume. Get it out there!
- Test your landing page on different types of people and roles: People using the solution or similar one, people new to your concept, etc. They all are thinking differently about you right now.
- Word Clouds from searches give you great fodder for micro messages or tag lines.
- Highlight what you’re rating. If you’re asking users to rate stuff, be sure to show what’s top rated - perhaps even lowest rated.
- Focus completely on the purpose of the landing page and don’t put in anything that doesn’t need to be there.
One data point / new story outted last night: Go to www.oneforty.com/pistachio and check out some new upcoming features from OneForty. It has Laura’s profile and all of the iPhone applications she uses. I believe this gives folks insight into what she values - primarily because it matches information she’s willing to share about herself with what iPhone applications she feels she needs. Lots of ideas can flow from this!
Lastly, I want to give huge props out to someone willing to put their site up to open audience scrutiny. It shows they want to improve and focused on hearing what people have to say. Check these sites out!
