The Official Fluid Blog

Social Design Principle #4 – Participate in Active Listening

Utilizing social design principles to improve a customers shopping experience has the potential to bring tremendous benefit to a company and its customers.  However, no matter what conversations take place, there are two key components essential to the fourth principle: active listening:

• Maintain your commitment to having conversations – companies must be dedicated to maintaining their social channels to keep content fresh and new.
• Admit your mistakes, and do something about them – part of having authentic conversations is being prepared to accept negative feedback and to do something about it.

Maintain your commitment to having conversations.
Social Design is only powerful when the content is new. Customers will not participate in a conversation if there are very few others or if the thread is old.  If there is little or no activity, then people are not likely to participate.  Therefore, companies must be prepared to maintain their blogs, video and photo galleries, Twitter broadcasts, Facebook groups, and whatever myriad of social technologies they choose to pursue.
More importantly, companies  need to mean every word they say.  If a company promises to modify a product or improve a service in response to an upset customer, they must do so. Engaging customers then failing to follow through and deliver on those promises damages the company’s brand, reputation, and credibility.

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Social Design Principle #3 – Appeal to the Unique Individual

Social Design can recommend products in a smarter, more relevant way that appeals to your customers’ unique individuality.  It is more powerful to present a customized list of items “We think YOU will like…” rather than simply presenting “Related Items.”

Previously we discussed the value of customer reviews as a source of unbiased product information, but in some cases they may be puzzling or less useful to customers. Reviews may have less value when shopping for certain types of products. Books, movies, clothes, and shoes are often reviewed based solely on personal preference. While one person may love a movie, another may hate it.  With this in mind, how do customers find or know what is relevant to them?  Making better connections between customers and products requires a better recommendation system to identify items that will appeal to the unique individual:

1. Personalize the Recommendation– Present recommendations in a context relevant to the individual, and they will be more likely to engage with your products.
2. Build Customer Reputation – Encourage participation by allowing customers to earn a reputation for themselves in the context of the rest of the community.
3. Give users a “Me” page –Give customers a unique space dedicated to content meaningful to their shopping habits. This can be a valuable tool and help inform purchasing decisions.

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Social Design Principle 2: Encourage Authentic Conversations

Previously we identified how important it is to deliver unbiased information to consumers and cited the Amazon Effect as evidence.  Authentic conversations promote products, get valuable customer feedback, and establish a presence and a voice for your brand.  There are many methods, but the two most common are:

• Maintain a blog – Blogs are great for engaging in dialog with customers and initiating ways to discuss products, services, and future feature development.
• Use Authentic Advertising – Promote products in an unbiased, authentic way.

Start a Blog
How can a company initiate authentic conversations?  First, start and maintain a blog.  It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it’s familiar to customers as a way to interact and communicate with both the blog authors (the company) and other blog readers (the community)!   Make your blog a window on your company and reach out to customers.  Engage them, and ask them about both their good and bad experiences with your products and services.

“When you have authentic conversations with people, you learn enough to actually improve your product with them, freeing you from the need for the hard sell.  No longer will you have to convince people your software is worth it, because by working with the very people you’re selling to, you’re guaranteeing a valuable product.” – Joshua Porter, Designing for the Social Web

Some retail web sites place their blog on the homepage of their store.  Woot.com, an online retail web site features one discounted product per day on their homepage, and they present it in the context of a blog post.  This product is then advertised via RSS and Twitter feeds, and the blog post attracts hundreds of customer comments and even more exposure every day.  This daily blog guarantees a constant stream of fresh, new content and drives return visits.

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Yesterday, we discussed the key elements of packaging design, including messaging, presentation, structure, and brand artifacts. Using our “Oil of Olay” package as a case study, we highlighted the consequences of the “barrier to entry” that is created when packaging fails. Today, we’ll discuss how the design guidelines for packaging design apply to the practice of interaction design using another case study.

First and foremost, think about your web site as your “packaging,” and design accordingly—do not create a barrier to entry that separates customers from their end goal and hinders conversion.

When we reconsider the previously discussed factors of packaging design in this context, they align nicely with some familiar elements and ideas of good usability. We’ll review our packaging design principles in a new context below. As a case study, we’ll use the Rich and Skinny brand jeans site (http://www.richandskinnyjeans.com/RichAndSkinny/).
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The other day, my mom sent me to the store to purchase a new skincare product made by Oil of Olay. I set out on my errand and procured a small tube of mysterious serum, sleekly packaged in distinctive, sculptural, plastic packaging. When I returned home with the goods, however, we made an amusing and shocking discovery:

We couldn’t get the package open.

Mom tried. I tried. No dice. Pliers were used. Even larger pliers were used. Finally, with a mighty tug, I yanked off the package’s lid—and in the process firmly socked myself in the eye.

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I spent some time evaluating search boxes and their functionality, trying to come up with a list of best practices in use by Internet Retailer’s (IR) Hot 100 e-commerce websites to determine how these successful sites stand up to my challenge. Having never truly pondered the best practices that one might employ for the familiar white space found on most sites, I came up with a list of criteria and used this list as a framework to quantify IR Hot 100 sites on their best behaviour. Values were assigned to each feature to determine total values overall, where a site could score up to 21 points.

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Social Design Principle 1: Encourage Information Sharing

The average person is bombarded with 500-3000 advertisements per day.  With so many ads surrounding us, it is not surprising that people to receive them with distrust and skepticism, “Of course an ad is only going to tell me what the company wants me to hear!

Traditional advertising, as done in the 1940s and 1950s, is more effective when there are only a limited number of brands from which to choose, but as Barry Schwartz wrote in The Paradox of Choice, this is far from the case today.  The industrial age has resulted in hundreds of brands, and social applications are a highly successful technology we use to help us efficiently sift through all of this information to find what is valuable and meaningful.

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At Fluid, we leverage new and innovative technologies to set our clients apart from their competitors.  Recently our clients have been asking about “social” features more often. “Social” is the latest buzz word flitting back and forth in the media, and it has caught the attention of both retailers and agencies . “Social” is a term that carries weight: The numbers we see on Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr are hard to ignore.  Retail companies are now looking for ways to make “social” features work for them, too.

A large part of the fun in shopping is being able to do it collaboratively.  Friends help inform our decisions about what we should buy. They give their opinions on fit, help pick out the perfect pair of shoes, and they are a part of what makes shopping fun.  Unfortunately, this desired social interaction has largely been lost as stores move online, and while the fun one has when shopping with friends cannot be wholly replaced, social design continues to introduce new ways to improve the collaborative nature of the online shopping experience.

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Without further ado, I present to you Fluid’s Canine & Feline Department:

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