Mint Digital

By some fluke 3 sites have rolled off the production line at the same time:

Adopt an olive tree at Nudo Italia.

Buy lovingly designed jewellry at Advanced Jewel-Craft.

Start a firm with the advice at Business Bricks.

“SaveMyAss is a personal assistant that keeps your girlfriend or wife happy by sending her flowers on your behalf, on a regular but semi-random basis.” - http://savemyass.com/

The one bit of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style that is widely remembered is ‘Omit needless words’.

I’ve often tried to apply this principle to design.

It’s nice to hear a different perspective. Yagoda notes (quoted in the fab FT magazine), Strunk and White’s “implicit and sometime explicit goal is a transparent prose, where the writing exists solely to serve the meaning, and no trace of the author - no mannerisms, no voice, no individual style - should remain.”

“We think of shopping as basically an application of search” says Jan Pedersen at Yahoo (quoted in John Battelle’s new book. Cracking excerpt in the FT).

It reminds me of Marc Andressen saying years ago that Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers”. It sounds right but its going to take a while to figure out what it means.

The Click #17

We recently completed a project for a telecoms/ISP client comparing their website against its competitors.

Their main motivation for commissioning the project was the fear that other websites might have clever functionalities that they were missing.

We found something else.

User after user just wanted to see prices. No one cared about Company X’s white paper: ‘A vision for the future of telecoms’. No one wanted Company Y’s site personalisation options.

If a user is scanning a page, a price catches the eye and shows that something is for sale.

But that’s not all.

Web usability ‘guru’ (’bore’, some say) Jakob Nielsen puts it well: Price is the most specific piece of info customers use to understand the nature of an offering, and not providing it makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of a product line. We have miles of videotape of users asking “Where’s the price?” while tearing their hair out.’

The price hiding impulse
Most of our clients are nervous about displaying their prices.

I know the feeling.

With the initial draft of the Mint Digital site, I tried to be up front about our prices. I was advised by wiser heads that it would limit our flexibility.

But I wish I had stuck to my guns. The web has increased the pay-off from clarity.

Even if you can’t be totally clear, you can give some indication.

Our friends at Natural Training mainly do bespoke training for big firms. It is hard for them to state a price as every course is a one-off. However they also run open workshops – fixed price group training for individuals. They’ve recently added prices for the open workshops to their site (which gives all potential clients their bearings) and a prominent quote request form for bespoke training.

It has made a big difference to their response rates. Their conclusion: ‘prospective customers surfing our site want to find out as much as possible before making contact’.

I need to drink my own medicine
I’m keen to make the Mint site follow this advice. While writing this Click I’ve hatched a plan. If my partners agree we’ll launch it next Click. Read next fortnight to be the first to hear about ‘Mint: take it or leave it’.

Welcome, sports fans! Suggest the best new slogan for our banner and we’ll invite you to watch the cricket from our roof on Sunday.

Either leave your slogan in the comments or email andy@mintdigital.com.

NOTE: THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED

(Note: the view from our roof is blocked by the video replay screen. With a bit of luck you may be able to squeeze along the roof. Otherwise, it is pleasant to watch it on TV and hear the atmosphere.)