Designing Websites That Appeal To The Senses

Taking Advantage of The Experience Factor

We read the newspaper, we watch television, and we listen to the radio, but
we experience the Web; this is what makes 'The Website' one of the most
powerful marketing tools available to today's marketing executives.
Unfortunately conventional wisdom has stifled the 'experience factor' on
most website presentations.

Traditional circulation based advertising biases and pitch-mandated direct
mail practices from metric-minded agencies have limited businesses' ability
to take advantage of the Web's capacity to provide a more active, creative,
and penetrating sensory experience aimed at furthering marketing objectives.

As consumers of information we all filter what our mind considers
irrelevant. When we go to a website we quickly recognize where banner and
text advertisements have been placed and proceed to ignore them for the rest
of our visit. Even television ads are becoming increasing less effective,
even as their cost increases. Yet people will watch and even look forward to
creative, entertaining advertisements that capture our imagination and
inform our ability to make better decisions about what we buy and who we buy
from.

Does Anybody Really Know What Works?

It is easy to rely on after-the-fact number crunching and projected
head-numbing statistics to justify how marketing campaigns are constructed
rather than on the less predictable but more relevant elements of psychology
and human nature. But do numbers really tell the true story, or are they
just protect-your-butt justification designed to ease everyone's mind when
it comes time to commit to a budget?

Take the entertainment industry for example. Here is an industry that can
tell you how many people watched a particular television show on a per
minute basis. So if these and the other cerebral-cortex-boggling figures are
so telling, why do networks have such a hard time delivering programs that
people will watch; or do they yank new potentially successful shows
off-the-air based on their initial numbers before they ever have a chance to
find an audience?

Television is such an expensive medium, its practitioners have come to rely
on seemly safe, tried, hackneyed old formula, knowing that it is easier to
sell sponsors what used to work, even when they know there is little chance
of it working again.
The fact is nobody really knows what combination of stories, writers, actors
and producers is going to capture the publics'
imagination.

So what does this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything.
The Web is not an expensive production medium and that allows marketers to
experiment with different techniques and creative.
Unless your Web-business is a circulation-based advertising model, there is
no reason to limit your creative marketing to worn-out concepts and
number-based incentive formats that for the most part, no longer work.

Sensory and Experience Design Concepts

The essence of good advertising and its big brother marketing, is creative
story telling; stories presented effectively, inform, persuade, and
penetrate our consciousness based on their ability to tap into our sensory
experiences. There has developed over the last few years two new approaches
to design that acknowledge this powerful aspect of human nature: Sensory and
Experience Design.

The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in everything
from product development to package design. When we talk about SenEx Design
we are talking about how real people react to their experience with products
and marketing presentations.

We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and
taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and
vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over looking
for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't looking they may even
have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the specifications listed
in the brochure, but they still go to the showroom, kick the tires, run
their hands along the shinny new paint, smell the leather interior, and take
that sucker for a test drive to see how she handles. It's all about
experiencing the product through our senses - it's that sensory experience
that becomes imbedded in our memory.

To date most companies have lagged in their efforts to implement these new
SenEx marketing communication approaches on their websites due to their
obsession with search engine optimization issues that focus on the volume of
traffic rather than the quality of the marketing message. Business seems to
be stuck in a circulation-based advertising and mass-market mindset that
runs contrary to the Web's niche market 'Long Tail' nature and its ability
to communicate by presenting information that appeals to a variety of
senses.

Search Engine Optimization Issues

No one will argue with the desire of website owners to attract large numbers
of viewers to their sites. But this desire has spawned an entire industry of
people claiming to be able to provide website owners with the holy grail of
search engine
optimization: making it to the top spot in an organic search on your
favorite search engine.

Not everyone willing to pay for an S.E.O. expert to optimize his or her site
can be number one in an organic search. And of course there is the issue of
paid search placement that trumps organic searches.

As fast as search engine optimization experts develop ways to beat the
search engines, the experts at the search engines change their algorithms,
and my money is on the guys at Google.

When it comes to search engine optimization consider the following important
issues and questions:

1. Do the search engine tactics employed on your site degrade, obscure, or
in some way diminish the ability of your website visitors to quickly find
the information they want?

2. Do these search engine tactics impede your ability to effectively deliver
your marketing message in a way that attracts attention, triggers relevant
sensory experience, and embeds your message in your visitors' memories?

3. Do tactics like outbound reciprocal links and inline body-text links send
people away from your site when you want them to stick around and hear what
you have to say?

4. Do you have excessive repetitive copy-text on your site aimed at being
indexed by search engines rather than read by people for clear concise
understanding?

5. Have you reduced your complex message or instructions to a series of
bulleted points that confuse rather than clarify?

6. Do your search engine tactics concentrate on the volume of traffic rather
than the quality?

7. Is the traffic you're attracting leaving your site as fast as it's
arriving?

The lesson we should learn from SenEx Design concepts is that websites need
to be designed for people not search engines.
Delivering a clearly understandable marketing message is achieved by tapping
into the psychological and emotional responses triggered by sensory
experiences. That is how you need to communicate to an audience separated
from you by the vast expanse of the Internet.

SenEx Web Design Using Audio and Video Techniques

People are hungry for information. In today's fast-paced world the average
person needs to constantly upgrade their knowledge of ever changing and more
complex products and services. Things that were good for you yesterday today
are harmful; products that don't exist today will exist tomorrow. So it
doesn't matter if you are a homemaker, retiree, or a buyer for an
international corporation, the need-to-know is constantly with us and it
creates what Richard Saul Wurman has described as "Information Anxiety".

We just don't have the time to study everything we need-to-know or
want-to-know that affects our business and personal lives. We need the
information fast and in an easily digestible format.
And we need that information presented in a way that will make it easy for
us to retain it.

The power of Web-audio and video is their ability to illicit experiences by
presenting information in a linear narrative that appeals to the senses of
sound and sight. This ability attracts and focuses an audience's attention
on the material you want highlighted; it presents that material in an easily
digestible format; it clarifies the meaning and significance of critical
details; and it penetrates viewers' consciousness so that the information is
retained.

The following types of audio and video SenEx Web-presentations can be used
to deliver a variety of material:

1. Web-commercials and Email Campaigns
2. Special Promotions and Product Offerings 3. Product Descriptions and
Overviews 4. Testimonials and Reviews 5. How To Instructions and Tutorials
6. Frequently Asked Questions and Q&As 7. Expert Lectures, Analysis and
Opinion 8. Background and History 9. Personality, Staff, and Business
Profiles

Conclusion

We all have something we want to sell: a product, a service, a plan, an
idea, or even ourselves. And anyone who has ever run a sales department will
tell you the best way to sell is through human interaction and the best way
to emulate that on a website is with Web-audio and video that uses Sensory
and Experience Design techniques to deliver the message.

About The Author: Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website
design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit
http://www.mrpwebmedia.com, http://www.136words.com
http://www.sonicpersonality.com.
Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.