Does Your Website Taste Like Chicken

There are many considerations when developing a web strategy for a site launch. When sitting down with clients during the planning phase, we go through a series of targeted activities that determine the plan for technology, content, design, marketing and measurement requirements. The end result is a site strategy blueprint which provides a detailed plan for how the project will be developed.

However, even the best planned site in the world can fail to serve up a compelling and persuasive user experience. Simply having a website is no longer a competitive advantage in itself. It is critical for organizations to create more than a passive website with nice looking graphics, well organized content and a sound technical architecture. The key to success is finding ways to differentiate the user experience and create remarkable ways for visitors to interact with your brand and content.

Creating Compelling Experiences

Proper planning and benchmarking are all part of the upfront process, but can you actually differentiate the user experience online? We'll explore five tactics that organizations are successfully using to create more compelling experiences.

1. Rich Internet Applications: Creating experiences with applications online can help provide useful tools and better user experiences. Technologies such as Flash and AJAX are making it possible to have highly interactive and responsive web features and applications. For example, Primal Quest decided that the conventional way of displaying race data online was not effective. So, we built a single screen Flash-based leaderboard that organizes thousands of data points into a usable and meaningful application. This reinvented the way users interacted with race data online and has become the envy of other competitions.

2. Online Video: The use of online video is exploding and quickly becoming a standard ingredient in creating compelling experiences. Online video once meant a choppy user experience in a postage stamp sized player. Chances were users did not have the right plug-in to view it anyway. Video can now be integrated seamlessly with your content. Flash video makes it easily playable for 90%+ of website users. For example, Siemens created a product microsite that integrated video in a creative way alongside traditional Flash animations. Corrigo had a more subtle, yet effective, strategy of putting embedding video on their product pages.

3. User Participation and Engagement: Look for ways to make the users interact with your site and be part of the experience. By raising the level of interactivity for users as they explore content, you can increase the engagement and make the experience more relevant. For example, PolyServe created an interactive ROI tool which allows them to input their own data and find out how much money an organization can save using its product. This is much more effective than telling a user the expected ROI.

4. Compelling Content: It is surprising how often content is overlooked as a part of the overall experience. Companies will shovel print content online with little attention to packaging it into something that is both compelling and persuasive. A little effort on copywriting can go a long way in differentiating your brand and site. Siemens took a unique approach to launching a product and wrote a fun and creative online game that led users through a series of questions. This content, combined with compelling multimedia, shattered the notion of how a Fortune 25 B2B company can reach out to its target audiences.

5. User Generated Content: Tap into the power and passion of your end users by creating experiences that invite them to contribute content. For example Farm Aid recently launched a successful campaign to promote their annual benefit concert, "Top of the Haystack." This site invited users to answer one question: What makes them the ultimate Farm Aid fan? The end result was more than 500 entries from their fans!

Beware of Competitive Benchmarking

Looking to your competition and peer sites is a natural part of the process. However, be careful to not let your competition define the boundaries and rules for your success. Yes, there are best practices and ideas to be gleaned from your competition. But just because the industry leader is giving away an iPod each month does not mean it works. When doing benchmarking, it is useful to expand your research beyond sites in your industry. For example, if you are a B2B company, look at B2C sites across disparate industries. Gather a wide sampling of inspirational, innovative ideas to meld with your own original thoughts and overall online strategy.

Final Thoughts

In the time it takes to heat up leftover chicken, you have just devoured some of the tactics we are using with companies today to help differentiate the user experience. There is a variety of essential ingredients that go into creating a website. But the important thing is to focus on your overall user experience. The web is no different than a menu in a restaurant: There are plenty of options out there. So look for ways to differentiate the experience so it is true to your brand, helps your users achieve their goals and gets them to "order" you time and time again.