If they’re not breaking guitars, their pilots are missing airports, or they’re berating people that are trying to help them.

Well, we have one more reputation disaster to add to the list, courtesy of American Airlines.

You may recall the open letter web designer Dusting Curtis wrote to the airline. In it, Curtis suggested that AA was losing millions because of its poorly designed web site. He even went as far as suggesting a new design for the site.

Shortly after, one of AA’s designers took it upon himself to reply and explain the complexities of AA web site design decisions. His reply was open, honest…radically transparent.

American Airlines has allegedly fired him for it!

This may have happened back in May, but it’s only just come to light that the AA designer was apparently fired an hour after he wrote his reply.

AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot. From what I have learned, they also threatened him with legal action if he spoke to me again. Apparently he broke his non-disclosure agreement by discussing the design process at AA.

OK, so maybe he shouldn’t have broken his NDA with the airline. But, maybe AA shouldn’t have been so near-sighted and pedantic about its employee policies. Surely the airline is aware that it’s industry hardly has the best reputation for caring about its customers. Heck, even Jet Blue–the poster child of airline awesomeness–has screwed-up royally in the past.

In some ways, you can’t blame American Airlines. It is completely ignorant of how customers want to interact with the airline. We don’t want to hand flight attendants slips of paper that say “well done”–something AA encourages me to do as a frequent flier–we want to engage with the airline. We want it to do better, and we have ideas. Ideas about clean blankets, baggage fees, and yes, web site design. How does AA marry its apparent openness on Twitter, with this crackdown on a real employee that wants to help?

Yes, you should have guidelines in place, but those guidelines should be designed to encourage thoughtful customer interaction, not prevent it! If we hear that you’re firing employees because of their transparency, how are we supposed to take your official social networking efforts seriously? What, do we now assume that everything that is shared on Twitter or Facebook is nothing more than sterile, PR sanctioned, sound bites?

The airline industry may well be the very last to “get” the concept of Radically Transparent. When they do finally have that “aha!” moment, we’ll know that we’ve finally entered the age of open, honest, dialogs.

Andy Beal – AA Platinum Card Holder; Million Mile Flier.

(via)

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The problem, as Nielsen sees it, is that companies follow too much what the hot trends are, and as a result create sites that are unnecessarily complicated or offer little benefit to the average user.

An Ajax shopping cart, for example, may be abandoned because users don’t know how to work it, which can be "deadly for e-commerce sites."

The general crux of Nielsen’s argument seems to be that the average open-Internet user either isn’t that bright (well, sophisticated might be a better word) or at least has less incentive to appear bright.

Though a couple of sites, like Amazon, have made community features work for them via consumer reviews, Nielsen argues that communities work better for company intranets in general, where there is shared interest, no anonymity, more accountability, and less participation inequality (where only a few contribute while the majority do not).

And then there’s this gem: "Employees are pre-vetted: they’ve been hired and thus presumably have a minimum quality level. In contrast, on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to."

In short, the masses are asses, a law passed down since the days of Aristotle. But he might have a point.

Nielsen also warns against making changes to a business site based on the success of "atypical" Web 2.0 sites. Adding Facebook features, for example, may do little to help the bottom line. "[M]ost of [Facebook's] features are worthless for a B2B site that, say, is trying to sell forklift trucks to 50-year-old warehouse managers."

He recommends, then, focusing on the user-focused basics like clear pricing, product photos, and detailed specs, among others.  
 

How to describe visitor behaviour?

Before changing the site layout, it is important to understand the nature of human behaviour on the website. It helps that certain known patterns apply to human behaviour, such as:

• people hunt for information, using words as clues
• people follow a funnel to conversion
• people flow like water, when released on a website

In essence, the metaphors used to describe human behaviour stand on known natural principles, such as animal instincts and a flow of water. Let’s look at them in more detail.

Hunting for information

When a predator stalks its prey, it uses its senses, such as smell and sight, to find the victim. It follows the trail of paw-prints, spots of fur and blood to track the target.

Humans are very similar: they use words, related to their target (be it a product, an article, or a person’s name) to find what they want.

This fact is emphasized by people reading from top to bottom and from left to right, which creates a top-left triangle of attention. It means that in order to get noticed, you’ll need to use the words your people will recognize as useful in the top-left part of the page.

Read more about:

• Information foraging
• Web portals and scent
• Scent, Search, and the Pursuit of User Happiness (audio and PDF of a presentation on designing for scent of information)
• Getting confidence with every click
• Web Page Design: Implications of Memory, Structure and Scent for Information Retrieval (large PDF) from Kevin-Larson and Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research
• Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (from Jacob Nielsen)
• a very short summary of the above
• A 2001 Wired article: Hot on the scent of information
• Design Secrets of Highly Successful Website

The concept of a funnel is less wild and more down to earth. Here, visitors are compared to water and the funnel represents the pages they visit.

The upper, broader part of the funnel is the entrance page and the bottom part is the page of the final conversion.

The intermediate funnel part is pages a human visits before converting.

The different, in my opinion, lies in that in general, the visitor path may not be linear, because people click on the link that they think will answer their needs most – and people are different. But the funnel theory splits the visitor stream in many springs and guides them with relevant clues, aka in a funnel.

Read more about:

• Advance Funnel design considerations
• Conversion Funnel Folly, Part 1
• Conversion Funnel Folly, Part 2
• Conversion versus Persuasion: What’s Your Challenge?
• Design Your Website for Increased ROI

Water flow

The water flow concept, which I introduce here (or maybe introduced by someone else elsewhere), is based on the fact that water flows the shortest way to the downside. The concept is not different from the other two, but it describes as clearly as the scent trail theory the attitude towards the trail: a visitor only goes where it sees a need to go.

In the water theory, people are compared to springs, which go where they can, and when they can’t go somewhere (no path), they just return to them main stream and flow another way.

In general, this is no vastly different from the two above, but I prefer to see it this way.

The details
All the models, however simple or complicate they are, are based on a couple of principles that people follow:

• the visitor goes where he sees a possible continuation of his visit: a link to a useful resourece/product/action
• if the visitor doesn’t see a way to continue his walk from the page, he goes to the previous page to try another way
• the visitor follows the above principle until he either leaves the site (and thus goes back to the previous useful source) or converts
• people scan from top to bottom, from left to right
• people not read, but scan: quickly check if there’s anything interesting on the page and proceed with their journey
• since people scan, the text should be readable and properly formated for reading from the web page
• you should use the simplest words available: your site should be understood by your every visitor
• the words you use on your site should be relevant to the visitor, he has to identify himself with what you have to offer (or visa versa)
• use of call to action, motivating the visitor to proceed (usually, to the most useful pages) helps guide the visitors further

In essence, you should provide the people the words that they will recognize, associate with themselves and use them to find what they want on your website. Formatting the text, combining the call to action with links should help draw attention to the most relevant pages from the current page.

Read more about providing clear click path.

This goes in line with providing various paths for various kinds of customers, such as researching, comparing or buying, as well as different types of people, such as thoughtful (use facts, well-written articles, figures, graphs) and emotional (call to action, various benefits, etc).

You can read more about various types of customers from the Eisenbergs:

• Various character types
• Personas (more, more and more)

When to think about visitor behaviour
Obviously, the sooner you take into account how people view websites, the better off you’ll be. As it doesn’t take long to understand the basic idea of hunting for information, you’d rather implement such website usability concept before you build a website. 

It may be hard to redesign later, not to mention it’ll take more time and you’ll have other issues at hand.

In essence, designing for natural consumption should work best: it involves clear information, no distractions and positive user experience.

It also goes inline with various values that you provide to your visitors. The more valuable your website/product is to the people, the more likely they’ll stick around and do what they and you want.

Rounding up

Ideally, you need to at least think about the way the information is presented on the website (site, page structure/layout). You can rewrite the text later. In fact, you will have to test your website copy and rewrite it for better effect, so you can simply focus on the page layout first-hand.

But what you need to do as soon as possible is to make it obvious for your visitors where to go next.

How long until search engines are the biggest affiliates on the web? And when they do that, will affiliate marketing still be looked down upon the way SEO and domaining are? Better yet, will we have any way to know who is buying the ad or how it is priced?

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Here are some of the examples Rand gives…

1. Furniture vs. at Google
2. Luggage vs. at Google
3. Laptops vs. at Google
4. SEO vs. at Google
5. Web Design vs. at Google

Ok, so Rand does admit that the results from Del.icio.us are not perfect, but does suggest that they’re good enough to take on Google.

I tend not to agree with Rand on this one (friends can disagree you know). I think Del.icio.us is great for finding resources or information pages and is also better at finding fresh content, but I don’t think it’s better than Google, when it comes to product or service related search terms.

That said, Yahoo could be doing a lot more with Del.icio.us than they currently are.

What do you think? Do agree with Rand that Del.icio.us is a “Search Engine That’s Already Better Than Google?”

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Recently, a few prospects had been weighing our services against the services of a vertical vendor and asked me to explain why they shouldn’t go with a Web design and Internet marketing company that focuses specifically–in these cases–plastic surgeons or law firms.

It’s a great question. I think there are times when it makes sense to go with a vendor who specializes in your industry. An accountant whose clients are all service providers, or a business coach who works exclusively with small business owner would be the type of vertical vendors who I’d be interested in doing business with.

Similarly, if you’re an innkeeper, you might want to work with a laundry service that has a lot of inns as customers, and if you’re a restaurant owner, you might want to choose a vendor with a proven track record of increasing online takeout orders.

I think these examples help you with behind-the-scenes issues. No one’s going to compare you to your competition and make a buying decision on what laundry service you use. (They may not return if they find blood stains on the underside of their pillow, but that’s a different story.)

However, when it comes to design or marketing you need to differentiate yourself.

If you want a new logo for your business, going to someone who has designed logos for most of your competition is just plain boneheaded unless you’re a third-world counterfeiter. Not only that, your logo designer will probably feel that you want something similar, since that’s why you called her in the first place.

People looking for services, be they plastic surgery or law firms, will often visit several sites before making a decision. If your site looks like everyone else’s, it won’t stand out. However, if yours has a different approach, different colors, a visibly different style, you will be remembered.

For Internet marketing, the case is even more clear cut. If a vertical Internet marketer has already created a search engine optimization plan for your competition, how will you rank higher they they do, given the same advice and information? When everyone in your industry zigs, you need to zag.

However, a vertical marketer can’t zag. Their competitive advantage is that they know your industry. That they have institutional knowledge. That they know or have even created the conventional wisdom. However, that’s a competitive advantage for them, but not for you.

If they’ve created Web sites and Internet marketing campaigns for a large enough percentage of your industry, that part of the market is over-saturated. You need to discover your own niche within your industry and compete against the homogenized majority. That’s the benefit of working with a horizontal vendor.

They won’t know your industry as well as you do, or even as much as the vertical vendor. However, they bring proven ideas from other industries that will be new ideas in your industry. They are the cross-pollinators.

Am I biased? Well, duh! The reason we don’t go after one market is that I find it to be intellectually unstimulating. Just thinking about focusing on one industry or business type makes my synapses fire slower. I love taking an idea I discovered while working on a jewelry Web site and reworking it for a biotech provider…and vice versa.

If you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a risk-taker, if you want long term sustainability for your business, the last thing you want to do is position yourself as a me-too company.

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Creative Suite 3 brings together Adobe and Macromedia products that will give designers and developers a number of options for print, Web, mobile interactive, film and video production.

 There are half a dozen new configurations of Creative Suite 3 that include Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium and Design Standard editions; Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium and Web Standard editions; and Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium. The final product is Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection, which combines 12 design and development applications.

Creative Suite 3 is compatible with Intel-based Macs along with Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista. Users should notice an improved performance running Creative Suite 3 on Macs with Intel chips and Windows hardware.

"Creative Suite 3 is the biggest launch in Adobe’s 25 year history and a milestone for the creative industry," said Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer at Adobe. "This release reflects the powerful integration between Adobe and Macromedia and how our products bridge the gap between designers and developers."

"With new workflows that streamline collaboration and impact the development of rich content, designers and developers now have the creative license to engage audiences across virtually every medium."

Creative Suite 3 will begin shipping in April and worldwide beginning in the third quarter of 2007.

Adobe shares rose to $43.95 this morning on the news that it would be shipping its Creative Suite 3 in April.  This afternoon shares fell to $42.79

Some of which we haven’t seen before and others that have been improved a great deal. To get a break down of the various versions and what is included in the products along with prices check out this CS3 editions table here.

It has been confirmed and announced that there are 6 different versions of Creative Suite 3. The versions are the CS3 Design Standard, CS3 Design Premium, CS3 Web Standard, CS3 Web Premium, CS3 Production Premium, CS3 Master Collection.

The Master Collection comes with everything but the price tag matches that, it is a whopping $3000. For myself I think that Web Premium or maybe even standard will be more then enough for me.

There are a lot of the programs that I won’t need necessarily in some of the other packages.

The software of course comes with all of the popular programs and a few more.

One of the features that is being talked about the most is the ability to export out of programs like InDesign or Illustrator into XHTML for use with Dreamweaver.

This major innovation takes a giant leap towards seamlessly allowing designers to better develop web sites. Previously that feature had only been with Photoshop through slices. Hopefully we will get a chance to test this innovative idea out soon.

Dreamweaver is also going to have an online community forum called CSS advisor that will be constantly updated and give helpful hints to developers from experts.

All a big effort from Adobe to match up with Microsoft’s Expression Web Designer which enforces standards very heavily. I’m assuming and hoping that once we get our hands on Dreamweaver CS3 that it is web standards compliant and it breaks away from some of its legacy scripting.

Adobe has decided to drop GoLive and Audition from the Creative Suite packages and develop the products as stand alone items.

Throughout the packages the bulk of what is in them are Adobe InDesign, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 Professional, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute, After Effects Professional, Premiere Pro, Encore, and Soundbooth. Which have all been upgraded and made to run on Windows Vista and Intel Macs.

So all of you Apple fans with the Intel Macs can now use the Creative Suite and all of the Windows Vista people can of course do the same. At least when July 1st comes around.

You can check out Adobe’s webcast on their web site for more information about the launch.

Be sure and check out the CS3 editions table to see the prices and whats in the boxes. You can also pre-order the packages from Amazon right now.

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You weren’t expecting that last part were you?

I wasn’t either. But this post on effective news article design proves it.

Newspapers have had trouble transitioning from print to the Web. They’re used to doing things differently.

Me, too. I still write difficult, dense copy. See. I still like serif fonts better, too. I also have a pen collection and a wall map fetish. Because I’m old school sometimes.

Well, most of the time.

Laura Ruel and Nora Paul (link above) interviewed people from Nielsen/Norman group about readability and user satisfaction and comprehension.

They said users spent more time reading wordy content, but remembered 34 percent less than when they read really tight copy.

That’s because of the way people read on the Internet. It’s the same reason designers on the Internet use sans serif fonts –so you can read faster.

"If a user is comfortable," said Nielsen researcher Tara Coyne, "not hindered by clutter and superfluous words, and can scan the main points, he will get the summary of the article quickly and easily."

Superfluous is superfluous, but it’s not her fault, she’s an academic type. It’s also otiose, but we’ll just call it ‘excessive,’ because it’s easier.

Ruel and Paul said people don’t really look at pictures, either, unless they’re pictures of real people and not models. People like pictures that give them information. They skip pictures that are just there to be pretty.

Also, women might be telling the truth when they say size doesn’t matter. All the men in the eye-tracking study fixated on George Brett’s…strike zone. But women didn’t. Not at all.

So, add this to the other things we know about Web copy and design. Here’s a short list to help you remember, bulleted and subtitled like it’s supposed to be.

20 Things To Remember For Good Web Copy

1.    Tight writing. That doesn’t mean bad or easy writing.

2.    Copy of about 600-800 words is better for SEO and catching the long tail of search.

3.    Title – Subject – Support, in that order, like subject, verb, object.

4.    Titles should be snappy and informative – clickable, but clear.

5.    Leads (first sentence or paragraph) should get to the point. Tell the reader what the article’s about first thing.

6.    No fancy, wordy intros where it’s not clear what you’re talking about. 

7.    Information beats fluff every time. Pretty is for books and newspapers (and only sometimes).

8.    Information does not beat style every time. Style keeps people awake.

9.    Sans serif fonts are easier and faster to read on computer screens.

10.    White space is awesome – even better than big, pretty pictures.

11.    Content should be scannable.

12.    Think in bullets and subtitles.

13.    People like lists.

14.    Pictures should be specific and informative, not generic, decorative and ad-like.

15.    Photos should be relevant to content.

16.    People in pictures should look friendly and approachable (and have their whole head).

17.    Photos should be full body if possible (so guys can check out packages and stuff).

18.    Spell stuff right. It makes you look smarter.

19.    Grammar IS important. Unless you’re not really a professional.

20.    Online press releases should be even tighter than Web copy.

Currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Writing degree, Jason Lee Miller received his bachelor’s degree in Communication, emphasizing in script writing for mass media. Jason is also certified in print journalism by the Kentucky Press Association.