Read sample extract from Call-to-Action book

Buy from Amazon UK (don't be put off by the cover)

Call-to-action is by Bryan Eisenberg, ClickZ columnist and his partner , h I like Bryan's approach, because it is a counter to the still prevalent view that to improve a commercial web site's effectiveness, a usability study is all that is needed.

In reality, improving web site effectiveness is a matter of balancing USABILITY to enhance the users experience and make it easier to complete tasks (usability-led) and PERSUASION to deliver the right proposition and messaging to achieve the outcomes from user visits to get the return on investment from web site and e-marketing activities.

You can see his perspective from this extract:

"Many marketers expect usability studies to answer their marketing questions. Yet every usability study starts with a website as a given. If someone commissions a usability study, the website is the target .

Usability studies suffer from one major flaw: They never study the most important aspect of visitor behavior. The neglected aspect is the visitor’s initial impression of the website relative to other available choices — its competitors."

Bryan's approach is also firmly rooted in learning from the metrics available through web analytic tools from live users of the site rather than a small selection of representative users in a usability session. To be fair to the usability companies, some are starting to build this into their services, but its taken a while.

At Ripe Design, we work to improve conversion efficiency by balancing these four key skills:

• Usability – increasing ease of task completion through user observation and expert review.
• Accessibility – increasing the visual clarity and multi-device support of pages through compliance with accessibility guidelines. Search engine optimisation is another skill related to this.
• Persuasion – deploying appropriate branding, proposition, messaging and visual design to encourage the visitor to required outcomes. Triggered E-mail is an important tool to assist persuasion too.
• Web analytics – analysing current user behaviour to identify barriers to conversion and differences between visit intention and visit outcome.