Social media in its broadest sense is the opportunity for people to have a conversation in various places and in a variety of ways. It covers linked in groups, facebook, myspace, virtual communities, slideshare, flickr, dig, delicious, you tube and various blogging platforms like twitter and wordpress etc

By these various platforms your average Jack (or Jill) can broadcast a “word of mouth” conversation to thousands all over the world. For brands it enables creation of a loyal community, being closer to consumer opinion and innovation. Handled well, brands can create a stronger emotional engagement for users with lasting reach. This means better bottom line results, whether measured by traffic, sales, retention or recommendations.

As the use of social media becomes more mainstream for companies, we often come across it during user testing sessions. Below are my three top tips for getting the best user experience from your social media activities.

Bunnyfoot’s 3 C’s of social media user experience;

Community:

• Take the time to know your community / users. This will ensure you engage them with appropriate use of social media.
• Know what content they are interested in, why they have joined your community and then ensure they are rewarded with appropriate content.
• Don’t miss an opportunity to innovate always be thinking how you can use social media to make their lives a little easier e.g in the case of a cooking TV channel, provide the option for the shopping list to be texted to a phone or link directly to online shopping where they can order all the ingredients immediately.

Conversation:

• Make sure there is relevant and up to date content, which means dedicating resource.
• Don’t socially squat. Having a share link to your twitter account or action to join your facebook page is not a conversation or strategy for growth.
• Be real. We ran testing last month where the ‘Discussion’ area was, in fact, a pre loaded Q&A section, not in real time and not what was expected. Furthermore the facebook page offered little value to users, so they had no reason to either ‘like’ it or suggest it to their friends.

Content:

• Be relevant. If your social media strategy includes the use of blogs or TV channels make sure these are relevant to your user group and the most effective way to get the message across. We ran some testing on a site for 13-16year olds – they immediately engaged with the videos but switched off after a few seconds when they realised the content wasn’t interesting to them.
• The length of videos should depend on the context, however generally best to keep them as short as possible.
• Allow interaction to ensure people can skip in the video and comment on its value.
• Don’t clutter or overload the page with calls to action if you want to use the channel as a driver to purchase products.

We’ve spent the last month working with a number of charities (gratis) to help guide improvements on their sites and we’d like to share a quick process for generating ideas for your website quickly and cheaply.

Time required: 20-30 mins

What you get: Ideas for prioritizing content and page layout to maximize engagement with customers.

Overview

To provide an example we’ve used www.bunnyfoot.com to show how you can use this activity to enhance the design of your site. Remember, this is a top exercise if you have NO research budget and aren’t exactly sure how to start prioritizing content for your customer groups. This exercise is relevant for any type of site, and we find it a great starting point when thinking about initial designs and improvements.

Disclaimer:

This is a kick starter activity; it’s not a complete high performance engine and shouldn’t be used as one. This is no substitute for engaging with your customers, but rather a great starting point in helping you to create customer journeys and prioritise your site content. Use this activity as a means for generating some good ideas quickly.

1. Think about the content your customers need

Your customers are getting to your site, somehow. Step 1 is to think about who they are (in the case of Bunnyfoot these could be a prospective customer, an existing customer, a competitor, a job seeker, a journalist and so on). List all the potential customers and then next to each customer type ask yourself, “What are they looking for?” (to continue our example with Bunnyfoot, information needs of our customer groups could be Case studies, Contact details, Company History, Services, etc).

2. Sketch the layout according to content priority

Once you have identified the needs of each audience group, you can start to count the number of instances where customers are looking for the same content (e.g. a prospective customer, existing customer, competitor and job seeker could all be looking for more information about services; this would result in 4 counts). Once you have counted up the instances of cross over, a pattern for content priority will emerge.
Once you have the counted priority, pick up a pen and paper and start to sketch out your content according to priority. ANYONE can do this, you don’t need to be a designer, and your sketches certainly don’t have to be pretty. The purpose is to think about how you’re going to give your customers the information they need.

Sidenote: We often undertake usability testing of hand-drawn screens; it’s a low cost and effective technique we use with our clients. With a limited budget, there’s nothing to stop you taking these initial designs to representative customer groups and getting some feedback.

3. Try some detailed pages using the same method

After you’ve finished with the homepage, go on to explore other key pages. We’ve shown an example of what our new case study page could look like. To create this we thought of what the story of a case study was and what are the most interesting aspects people need to find out about. For our site ROI was top priority followed by a summary of the brief the services used, the team involved, the process/services used, example output and a client quote. It’s natural for other ideas to be generated at this point, for example we’d like to add the feature for people to comment on our case studies and the approach taken on the original brief.

Conclusion

Going through the exercise helps with the content and layout, and will also aid insight into navigation and user journeys to tie different content together.
 After 20 mins we have a good idea about the customer groups and their information needs, and we have some initial sketches to take to our customer groups. Ultimately, many of these sketches will be thrown out – we don’t expect our new site to end up looking like it’s been drawn on a flip chart. However, many of the ideas generated during the process will be included in the end design for some low budget but effective quick-wins.

• Is the creative going to make consumers look at the brand and the product?
• Which creative will have better brand recall?
• Which creative has the clearest marketing message?
• Under realistic circumstances will the key messaging get through at all? Do they get the message from the limited time exposure?

Historically, answers to the above have been difficult (or impossible) to obtain. Account managers and clients have had to rely on their own judgement and results from generally expensive focus groups. Both give limited insight into what customers will really do.

Focus groups can produce some good insight when used in the right circumstances. They give the consumer a voice, but they don’t give insight into the consumer mind or emotional attachment. Unfortunately what the mind thinks, the voice often doesn’t say. Consumers can’t always tell you how they will behave, instead you need an alternative approach to see how consumers actually behave with your product and/or campaign.

A quick example.

Of the two designs below which would you sign off?

And now? – with looking at the eyetracking heatmaps produced by testing with real consumers (the hotter the spot the more the consumers looked in that area).

Changing where the model looks changes consumer behaviour. In the advert where the model looked at the product (instead of out of the page) consumers spent a proportionately longer time looking at the product name than the strap line. For this ‘cued’ advert subsequent recall tests showed that the product name was also more frequently remembered.

Well yes we know its a trivial example – but you get the picture. Subtle changes can change behaviour substantially – and it is only by measuring the real behaviour that we can tell this.

Eyetracking provides a new and sophisticated form of consumer testing that can easily match the cost of your focus groups and provide insight into what your consumers do, think and recall about your product and campaign.

Test real impact

Give us a single or a range of creatives and we can provide you with key insights into what people really pay attention to. You can use this information to choose between a set of competing designs, or to drive improvements in an iterative fashion.

Our tests will show you the effectiveness of the portrayal of your brand and key messages under realistic conditions – we place the designs in the most appropriate setting and test what people actually do.