Kicks and Kisses

Delivering a contextual ad as per Website User Persona plays an important role in success of the ad campaign. For example showing a MBA Training Institute ad to a 22 year old  Engineering Student on country specific popular social network site may increase its lead probability.

However there are few thoughts of mine which may play a significant role in success of these campaigns.

·     Creative graphic image: A graphic ad full of text and direct sales slogan does not work for me at least. I like the ads which unfold a story. The hidden element increases its usability. I tend to click more compared to ads which are full of text.

·      Animation: Excess animation can draw my attention to see the details of the ad but simply its distracting me from my primary task. I am here to read content, not to see the animation of the ads. These ads should have minimum possible animation with buttons like Replay etc. If a user finds it interesting one should always be able to play. 

·     Curiosity: While designing such ad one must pay attention that there should be an element of curiosity in the ad itself. It increases the chances of clicking on the same

·     Colors and Borders: I like ads which uses fresh colors. Like fresh green yellow, orange. The advertiser should use thick boundary around  graphic ad. Thick boundary may make it more usable.

·      Differentiating online ads from print ads: Generally advertiser hires ad agencies which converts their print ads into a online ad campaigns. There should be a differentiating factor in between.

·     Click by Mistake: The advertiser should not leverage users mistake to land him on a product

Page. This may hamper ad campaigns usability as well as publishers website usability. This is one of the annoying factor, I face. Sometime ad campaign displays links, graphics etc which tend user to click on it in order to get more information but unfortunately it diverts on a product page.

·     Choose a website which displays only one or two display ad on the page. To many ads on the website may divert the users attention which again decreases its usability

·      Display of ad in middle of the content: When I am reading a interesting content, I tend to

Ignore even creative ad which is being inserted between the content. Advertiser should select Websites, which displays the ads on the side by side to content. The website which displays the ads in between the content may impact its usability.

·     Landing page should only contain few sales / marketing elements. These pages should take minimum user info like its email address only. Or maybe the lending page shall display a

Informative version of the advertisement.

·      Landing page should also fulfill users expectation which was built around the ad There should be a relation. The lending page should build a trust factor. The landing page should also have similar creativity which was used in making the graphic ad. Often the landing page are full of information. While making a landing page advertiser shoud keep the goals in mind.

·     Leading to free Information: An Internet geek always look for free information on the internet. Leading to a PDF, Whitepaper, research paper for a technology persona might increase ad campaigns usability. The geek might further digg into.

·     Give more take less: Most of the ad campaigns ask or demand user to register/ signup/enter details/buy without showing much details. The landing page should show more of contextual free information without asking users information. For example a dating site ad campaign might display a gorgeous girl picture in a display ad. This might lure one to click on the same but the landing page would ask user to register. The landing page might have display a full dummy profile of the girl. There are always methods to take users info

   ps: These are my personal views

I have a Nokia 5220 ExpressMusic phone. It has dedicated music keys on the left edge of the display. One can play/pause/stop/change song from here. Even though I am a music lover and getting dedicated keys for music came as a boon to me but I rarely use these keys. I do not carry earphones most of the time. Its sound quality is very good such that everybody in a range of 20 meter can notice the same. Thus I don’t play in public space.

I keep its keypad locked when it is not in use. I am surprised that I can’t lock/unlock its music keys, Or maybe I am not able to explore how to do it. While Once I was driving my bike it started playing, may be somehow the music key got pressed. Once it happened to me in a office meeting and even in a movie theatre too.

The lock keypad feature should also lock dedicated music keys so that one does not press it accidently. Sometime it puts you in embarrassing situations. The mobile settings UI should facilitate user to customize the lock/unlock keys feature. If they wish to lock these keys with keypad lock feature, they should be able to do it

Bollywood movie “Dev D” was released on February 6, 2009. It has become a prevailing fact that one can download any movie using various P2P download software like bittorrent, bitcommets. Recently one of my friend Jubin tried it. He found the Dev D torrent file on the Internet and next day he completed the download. However the torrent file was not containing Dev D movie. It was a fake torrent of DEV D. It was containing an old Bollywood movie called “Chal Chala Chal”.

Jubin was quite frustrated with the prank someone played. This might be a prank or a well thought strategy from the movie owners who wanted to stop piracy at some extent. The idea of fake torrent might have stop online piracy of this movie significantly.

All the torrent websites has this feature which allows users to leave comments/ opinion about a torrent. There are geeks who spends significant amount of time and energy helping other Netizen to decide whether one should download movie using this torrent or not. These opinions generally suggest the movie print quality, authenticity, number of seeds etc. Probably any digital media owner should employ couple of internet geeks who can upload fake content torrent and authenticate the same via posting positive comments about the same

These are just assumptions but competitors can leverage internet piracy to significantly decrease revenues of any new releases. How about a competitor creating   pirated content torrent along with supporting stuff like subtitles files in various language.    

PS: I watched the movie in theatre   

The number of mobile users in India has topped 310m and increasing at the rate of 1m every week. Increasing competition bringing down the calling rates. In this scenario, Value Added Services (VAS) have become significant revenue source for mobile operator. These value added services are being provided to end users via SMS, MMS, Push Messaging, voice portals, WAP etc.

User is being lured by massive advertising and promotions to use these services. Sometimes operator do not tell the complete details of the service or if they tell the steps are so complicated that an unaware customer can’t understand. Users land-up paying money sometimes for nothing. Example: Reliance Mobile Launched a VAS called “Call me |93 231 33333”. The advertising campaign shows celebrities asking viewers to call them to know about their caller tunes and to subscribe caller tunes services (A caller tunes is some music instead of Tring-Tring which a caller listen while calling other user). When you call on such a number you hear some music (celebrities caller tune) and than a recorded voice “Hi I am Riya, like my tunes you can get one too, just follow the instruction coming up” Instruction: To set this as your ringback tone press 1. To choose many more caller tone dial 1234 and it goes. 

 Bad Design Details:

1. The voice portal design is such that it forces user to use the service. At every steps it asks the user to press certain number to continue. It leaves no options to exit, more info, help, and talk to customer care etc.
2. During subscription and after subscription the service/ service provider does not inform about “How to unsubscribe”. User has to call customer care. Even customer care executive don’t do it for a user. Customer care will ask you to send an SMS “UNSUB” to 1234 to unsubscribe.
3. It auto renews the subscription every month without calling / sending an SMS to user.
4. The usage cost of these services is as high as Rs. 6/- per minute (Like making an ISD Call).It pressurize one to make quick decision, this also increases the rate of errors.

In short it can be said that some of the design decision has being taken in order to maximize revenue. These design decision leads user to forcefully use the service or sometime leads to make mistake which increases the revenue to telecom operator.

I had written how embeds are a window into other peoples pages in this post: “Embeds are Octopussy“. Some of the things which I had predicted are now online. This screenshot from a youtube embed says a hundred words, so I’ll shut up.

I have got myself a new domain, rega.in. I have tried to make it a repository of all my posts in different blogs. From now on, any post I make in kicksandkisses will be mirrored there too.

Just back from the barber. While he was working on my hair, with massages in between, between bouts of sleep this thought came into mind. And this I have been seeing for around 2 years. Whenever they have to use the razor they’ll make you see that they are removing the old blade and throwing it in a container, which would have a pile of these used blades. The idea behind this is that they want the customer to know that he is using a brand new blade for him. So AIDS awareness has been good I think.
But what becomes a side effect is that each blade gets used only once.
Which means:

So the market dynamics for the razor blade companies whose main customers where the barbers would have changed in the last 2-3 years.

How to make users do stuff. To get them to check pending emails, comments, notifications?
My gmail has 150 unread mails. Now most of these are random mails which I don’t want to read. But still there is this momentary thought of marking them as read just to clean up my inbox. But the task of going through all the pages searching is a task I am not very fond of. So the task remains.
Similarly in facebook whenever a friend invites me for an app, a notification comes up. And the number of notifications which I haven’t checked has increased to quite a number. I noted today that facebook is taking a few number of tasks from the whole and showing them apart. These pictures will give a better idea.

And I realized how this is better than showing just “40 new notifications”, as I actually clicked on the smaller task. The comedy in this is both these links go to the same page even. Still people will click it. I think this is a lesson in human psychology.

Do you think big corporate websites should have a sense of humour? whatever you think some of them do. If you type “chuck norris find” and press “I’m feeling lucky” you would see what I mean.

Earlier I had written about Flickr’s use of pop culture lingo here.

via mayank

updated on 5th may ‘08 —-

on swamy’s comment i checked again and found this text at the bottom of the page

This page has no affiliation with Google
Created by Arran Schlosberg

and the “Support this site” leads to a page which says this

The goal of this site is to have the top Google ranking with the keywords “Chuck Norris” so that when these are searched for using the “I’m feeling lucky” function this page will appear.

So swamy you were right :).

What is kwippy? - a micro/nanoblogging webapp + IM status logger + social network

Why another microblogging app when there are already plenty out there? - There is twitter, pownce, jaiku, and 10 other similar ones. Though all of these promote small posts, each has a different kind of social network.

On twitter you mostly meet strangers. By strangers I mean people you don’t know in the real world. It’s like barcamp, or a conference where you go partly to network. You meet fellow bloggers, marketeers, and people from your field. Yes friendships may grow among them, but mostly there are subtle motives behind the tweets. From promoting your blog, selling your product, showing your expertise, etc.

Pownce is geared more towards file sharing, sharing media (youtube, mp3s) etc. And it has an AIR instant messenger kind of software which makes it a little closer to an Instant Messeger.

In kwippy, the whole focus is on the Instant Messenger. The friends list on the instant messenger is the most intimate friends list you can find, of all social networks. It gives the people in the list immediate access to your attention. People share their joys (i got a raise), sorrows (i flunked my english papers), their favorite links, and thousand other things through their status messages. And all these people also have a list of their closest friends on their list. And like in the real world when a real friend introduces you to another person, the chances that you hit it off are greater. There’s this trust thing which is automatic.

So there - kwippy has a social network which gets real friends, friends you could meet. And it stores all your status messages, which become your emotional timeline.

We have been working on it since some time, and now it is in testing. If you would like to check it out, and give your invaluable suggestions for improvement, either go to kwippy.com, or comment here.