I remember a grad school course in Mass Communications research that made me think it would be hard to ‘measure’ advertising results (Grady Course Listing). 15 years in a creative service business have help prove that in more detail. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that the UI work we do definitely effects results in a measurable way. I just think that companies and service firms struggle with the need to Quantify results that are probably more Qualitative.

Innovation and creative thought are the foundation of the next generation business ideas. As addressed in this Business Week article, as more and more ‘thinking’ jobs move to less expensive labor around the globe, design will become more central to successful business operations.

Cultural differences and varying tastes around the world give us all the opportunity to keep those creative positions in-house. The result is that “Design” can be your business differentiator.

Customer-focused design and development works. It works for web development as we have learned that if people understand your graphical interface, your application is far superior to many competitors.

Customer-focused also works for products. One of our favorites books on the topic is The Design of Everyday Things. Mercedes-Benz created seat adjustment controls shaped in the L of a seat to allow intuitive adjustment without taking your eyes off of the road.

Have you seen the new IBM marketing campaign? Simple Drive-through Whole page spreads in national newsprint. Outstanding creative behind a classic American brand. And the message? SIMPLE – from a company with more complex solutions than most of us can imagine.

According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life report 42% of US homes now have broadband access and over 73% of respondents (147 million adults) use the internet. The vast majority of those users shop. They shop for health care, or new consumer electronics or filter information feeds about their hobbies – but they shop.

Corporations large and small have put their wares online in the hopes of selling products and services through the inexpensive medium. They have spent millions of dollars to ‘promote’ and market through search engine optimization and keyword buys. The larger players have gone to great pains to ensure their marketing message is on key and logo perfect.

But have they invested in their Experiential Brand? The most important brand trait online is the user experience.

Experiential Brand is what people think of your company. Not if the corporate color chart was used correctly, but if the actual web interface allowed users easy access to the information THEY were seeking. Are you helpful and easy to use (read – do business with) or are you aloof and difficult to understand (and generate less sales as a result)?

Ultimately every company who wants to deliver goods and services online will have the commodity of transactional technology to handle the sale. But the truly successful online ventures will have experiential brand tendancies that make their site the preferred venue for those transactions.

At Vialogix, our belief is that despite the enormous amount of money spent on Internet-enabled tools, the vast majority of web applications have under-served their users by not putting enough emphasis on ease-of-use.

Today the technology has become a commodity. Flavors change (Ajax, PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc) work gets shipped offshore and more companies try to push more info through the lower cost channel of a web browser. But the vast majority of “technology” companies still don’t value the Last Mile enough to make it actually work for the end users. Very few companies have studied the costs associated with NOT making a preferred interface.

Here is the start of a list we give to clients who ask for user-focused book recommendations and knowledge transfer. Standing on the shoulders of giants…..

• Don’t Make Me Think By Steve Krug

• Designing for Web Standards By Jeffrey Zeldman

• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web By Jesse James Garrett

• The Design of Everyday Things By Donald Norman

• Designing Usability By Jakob Nielsen

• Designing Visual Interfaces By Kevin Mulley, Darrell Sano

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites By Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville

• Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed By Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir

• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative By Edward Tufte

Archived 2001 Vialogix article originally published in The Charlotte Business Journal

Your VCR madly flashes “12:00.” (Still.)

You watch as the elevator doors rudely close on an approaching rider because you couldn’t find the “Open” button in time.

With a grumble, you abandon your corporate intranet and take 20 minutes to search out an answer from a knowledgeable coworker.

Sound familiar? If so, you’ve suffered poor usability and lack of customer-focused design.

Internet design lies at the intersection of application design and multimedia design. In one capacity, the Internet is a forum: a place where businesses, organizations and individuals share ideas and present information to a worldwide audience. The Internet is also a tool, a way for people to interact, conduct business and shop. Web sites usually need to be both.

It’s not the New Economy. It’s not the Old Economy. It’s the economy: simple supply and demand. Success in business has always been about solving customers’ needs with services or products for which they willingly pay. But during the past five years, the markets forgot that simple principle. Demand was so inflated by fear, uncertainty and lack of knowledge that supply couldn’t keep up.