What makes a brand, site, product, or message stick with consumers? User experience. For one thing, neuromarketing studies show us that combining congruent messages connecting to different human senses increases the likelihood that people remember the interaction in a positive way. For instance, I remember fashion designer James Perse because the first time I saw his clothes they looked like they would be soft and nice to wear- then I touched them, and wow, that fabric was so soft it was unreal. Thus, I remembered that designer. The same thing applies with users on a site. Lets say you sell shoes, and someone visits your site for the first time being directed from a search engine. Lets say they find your site hard to navigate and annoying to shop and explore options- you can bet on the fact that they won’t spend much more time on your site and they’ll be heading straight to Zappos. Basically, you need to be real and honest about your site or blog. Who is visiting? What are they looking for? How can I make sure they find what they need and their questions are answered as quickly as possible? Adding value along every consumer touchpoint from site entrance, to search, to checkout will distinguish you.
One does not have to be a programing genius to make their site fun and interactive along consumer touch points. In fact, There are plenty of tools out there than can accomplish this for you. New service sites launch every other day that make these once hard to use technologies easy enough to use for the average joe.
For instance, ThinkLink, an interactive image tagging site just released to the public today. The service does one simple thing: allows you to easily identify things in an image. Sounds simple enough and a lot of site already do this but the difference is that its quick, you don’t need to be a user, and you can tag any image with anything and then embed the tagged image to your site. No redirects- just pure juice wherever you want it to go. For instance, Elle magazine online uses it on their Finland consumer site to point out images in a site so users can simply mouse over them for more information- this service was not so readily available for the novice blogger. You can also find a good example on HobbyPrincess.com
So, if you sell a product, run a consumer product based blog, or photo site and you do not already tag your images to optimize user experience- then you should get on that right away and check out ThinkLink. See how it can improve the experience for your visitors.
