The colors you choose for your website affect how much your visitors like your website. You probably could have guessed that, though. It turns out that cooler primary colors make websites appear more orderly to users, which in turn can lead to users thinking that your site is more aesthetically pleasing and more usable, which in turn can make your site look more credible and trustworthy.

Researchers at Michigan State University did a study of how color choices affect user impressions of websites and their findings came out in the recent issue of the Journal of Usability Studies in a paper titled “An Empirical Investigation of Color Temperature and Gender Effects on Web Aesthetics.”

According to the study, using a cool primary color such as blue for the top part of the page and/or as a global element will make websites look better organized and aesthetically pleasing to users; using a cool color as a secondary color on the page boosts the website’s appeal over a warm color as a secondary color.

Attractiveness matters. Users often think that sites are easier to use when they are more attractive. Of course, the right color scheme to use also depends on context–what type of character you want, your users’ expectations, how the rest of your marketing materials portray you or your products.

This paper makes for a good read. It is good to read some research into how color affects design, and in its literature review, it points out a number of other papers that may be interesting.

Can Borders take on Amazon? Borders recently parted ways with Amazon and started their own online store. This move allows Borders to shape their own online identity and to stop enriching their competitor. However, can Borders be successful on their own?

Amazon is not successful only because they sell a whole lot of stuff. Certainly, they do, and the name “Amazon” springs to mind for many people when they want to buy books online. Rather, Amazon has successfully harvested hours of free labor from their customers by getting them to rate and review books (who doesn’t check out the reviews before buying something?). Using Amazon to shop is valuable because so many other people have used it–the network effect at work.

In addition, their affiliates program lets bloggers refer their readers to Amazon to buy books. This arrangement makes Amazon money, and the blogger gets a commission. Amazon also offers an eCommerce API, letting people make use of Amazon’s product data and functionality. These are important factors in Amazon’s success, but this post will just focus on the customer reviews and ratings.

So what’s Borders to do in order to compete with Amazon? There’s nothing on their home page that explicitly tells me why I should buy anything from them instead of from Amazon (or anyone else). The prices seem comparable and it’s hard to improve on the quality of Amazon’s customer service–you buy a book and it just shows up at your door. As I mentioned earlier, Amazon is full of ratings and reviews, whereas Borders is full of unreviewed and unrated merchandise.

Borders has an advantage through their bricks and mortar stores which they are clearly trying to use. Their website makes the implicit promise that your experience in a physical Borders location will be extended onto the web. For example, Borders stores regularly get authors and musicians to visit and promote their work. They seem to want to bring this experience to their website through video.

Their “magic bookshelf” is also a bid to bring the experience of browsing shelves online. Actually, across the whole site, Borders has clearly got to supply an equal or superior user experience, and the “magic bookshelf” is probably part of this effort. Usability and good design are areas where they could try to take the advantage over Amazon, although it appears that they have chosen not to do so.

Borders also hopes to entice shoppers with their rewards program. I can’t really speak to how well this will work since I’m not a member, but I include it for the sake of exhaustiveness.

Will these strategies work? We shall see how well their physical stores support the website. I propose that ratings and reviews are a decisive factor. Borders should try and encourage the people buying things at their stores to then hop online and review the things they just bought. Another idea would be to set aside time for the staff at their stores to go online and write reviews. This would give their staff another outlet for their love of books, music, or movies, and would help get the ball rolling on their website. As a customer, looking at the reviews on books would be like going into the store itself and chatting with an employee and getting a recommendation. They can have reviews from real people that exist at an actual store in addition to the reviews from Some Random Person on the Internet.

It’s going to take time to build up an amount of ratings and reviews comparable to Amazon, and on top of that they must convince reviewers that it is worth doing it on the Borders site. After all, why spend your time adding content to a site if you’re already invested in another one and you’re not even sure this new one’s here to stay?

Every day, when I take the walk from my USPS mailbox to my recycle bin, I wonder about the role of a catalogs today. A recent catalog from Cabela’s, an outfitter offering over 200,000 outdoor products, offers an interesting new way to use print catalogs to support online sales.

Back in the day, catalogs used to be exhaustive tomes offering lots of details about each product variant. Think of the iconic, encyclopedic Sears Catalog – people got enough information in them to purchase Sears Catalog mail-order homes!

Now, I might page through a print catalog, but I’ll use the website to place an order. But, I’ll admit it, even as I don’t like getting and then recycling catalogs, I will visit a website and make a purchase after seeing something offline. I do want to limit the number of “unsolicited” catalogs I get, and so I recently joined CatalogChoice, a free service that lets me reduce the number of print catalogs I get in my mailbox. With CatalogChoice, I can enter in the customer # and address and ask to be unsubscribed from the print catalogs I want to stop coming.

I just got a fascinating catalog from the outdoor outfitter Cabela’s. This one I won’t stop. Cabela’s has an immense selection of fishing, hunting, camping, and boating gear. They also have large retail outlets, I’ve heard that Cabela’s here in Dundee, Michigan is our #1 tourist attraction due to the sheer volume of visitors it draws to the state.

This catalog is unique and designed entirely to complement my habit of doing most of my research online. Instead of filling the catalog with words detailing product features, they’ve set the catalog up as a teaser to draw me to their website. The catalog consists of photographs of featured products, including action shots of the products being used. They do include some basic info, such as prices and a couple of feature highlights. Instead of giving me long product codes or SKUs that I would have to squint at and type into a search box to find the product on their website, the catalog provides recommended search terms for locating the product via in the site’s search. For instance, for the tent in the image below, the catalog urges you to “search: guide tent“. Plus, the print catalog shows user reviews, selected from the reviews on their website.

I think this is an exceptionally cool and smart print catalog, so I called up Cabela’s main office and spoke with David Draper, a Cabela’s representative. He said that Cabela’s releases around 90 catalogs a year, of which 89-or-so follow the more traditional catalog format. He said this “internet catalog” (what they call it) is a new effort for them, and that it is specifically targeted to online consumers. The inaugural issue was mailed within the last week. He couldn’t speak to our individual case, but the catalog could have been triggered by an online transaction at cabelas.com or by an opt-in from a transaction at our local retail store in Dundee.

I’m fascinated by this very effective use of a print catalog to draw me to their more comprehensive online e-commerce site. I’d be interested to know how successful this catalog is at driving traffic and sales at cabelas.com, and if Cabela’s has put in place some tracking to monitor use of the recommended keywords in their internal search and follow-on purchases after that, essentially to measure the return on this effort. I’ll also be watching to see if other vendors emulate this style of catalog.

Happy Memorial Day to those of us in the U.S. I hope this long weekend kicks off a great summer outdoors for you and your families.

(Disclosure – Pure Visibility has no business relationship with Cabela’s, though I’m a retail customer)

There are some SEO problems we see all the time. Websites that display text in images instead of html, using language that doesn’t match the way people talk about what the site’s about, vague words used for headings and link text. These are missed opportunities to tell search engine crawlers what a site is about. A lot of the really key parts of SEO aren’t secret; Google Webmaster Central is foremost among many sources for free tools and information that can help make a search engine friendly site.

But still, people code, design and write for websites in ways that really hurt their chances of getting good search engine rankings and the site traffic that those rankings can bring. The other day, I thought of paintings by Mark Rothko as a fine art example of a common SEO problem. Some of Rothko’s famous works include Untitled, No. 18, and of course, Untitled.

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Why does your business exist? Why should your potential customers choose you over anyone else? What differentiates you from the competition? The people coming to your site may not even know who you are. You’ve got to get this all across to the user immediately, before he or she decides to pass your site by.

After all, when users come to your site, they make a snap judgment about it–whether it has what they want, whether it is trustworthy, whether it is pleasing and easy to use. They scan the pictures and the text to figure out whether this is the site they’re looking for. Good design and good web writing helps people find and learn about your product. Have you given the same attention to your brand? Read More

According to the National Adult Literacy Study, the average adult in the United States reads at a 7th grade level. This study, if it is to be believed, indicates that that when texts are beyond the reading ability of the reader, they give up.

Are we writing text for our websites that is too complicated for our users?

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Radio buttons, by their very nature, have only one option selected at a time. For the sake of consistency, it is important to have a default option when presenting the user with radio buttons. The current four candidates for U.S. president all have contribution pages on their websites that let users choose a contribution amount through radio buttons, but none of them have a default option for the contribution amount.

They not only misuse the radio button–they miss an opportunity to anchor users’ expectations for how much they ought to contribute to the campaign. Read More

Today was looking like a good day. I had a few fun projects on my docket and the weather in Michigan was breaking records for January, 61 degrees! But my day was going to get even better very soon.

Arriving at the downtown Ann Arbor offices of Pure Visibility, a little sleepy eyed and still nursing my first cup of coffee, I sat down, booted up my mac and went to my iGoogle home page. Looking at my rss feeds I spotted Barack Obama’s name in the Web Creme feed. How odd I thought. I’d been to his site before and found it to be functional at best with well coded CSS and SEO. Overall I thought it was nice but nothing extraordinary. When I saw the feed, curiosity made me click and what a surprise! Barack Obama’s redesign (www.barackobama.com) took my breath away! Excellent composition, a beautiful palette, and calls to action made the designer in me excited. I have built plenty of sites in my years and this one really hit home. Here are some of the highlights.

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