For some, simply looking at a site in a foreign language is daunting, never mind the thought of testing it. So, let’s say your client wants to use a single template to create the same site but in various global regions/languages. Here, I’ve put together some pointers to help guide the way.

To start, I’m using both REL Software Web Link Validator and Inspyder InSite, as they have some different abilities and in certain instances one is just easier or faster than the other. With any luck, the English site will be complete, so you can use it as a point of reference. Otherwise, open your regional site in one browser for testing and another to utilize Google translate.

Now for the fun stuff:

1. Links function, but are they going to the correct destination?
To an extent, testing this obviously requires human intervention. But, let’s say I’m testing a German site with a .de extension, and I need to validate that all internal links stay on the German site rather than going off to .com (or the English version).  

a. Simply run the link report excluding external URLs, elect to view all pages processed, do a search for .com (or something like us-en — whatever directory or extension is being used to distinguish regions). If both regions are sharing a CSS and imagery, then exclude the directories like */images/* and */themes/*. It will probably require a little finagling to match your specific scenario, but you get the idea.

b. Mailto. View all mailto protocols in a single step to confirm email addresses are updated accordingly.

2. Regional languages
My link checkers also have a spell checkers that enable you to select from several languages. So my goal in this exercise is to make sure all text has been translated from English to German, including the copy within Flash, meta data, javascript and buttons.  

a. The first thing I’d do is set up the project by excluding proper names.

b. Run your test, then throw out all the German words that came back as misspelled, as I wouldn’t know if they were really misspelled anyway (that’s what the translation partner is for). Go ahead and add them to the custom, project-specific dictionary, in case you have to run the same test again later.

c. Next, consider that some German product and business names may be in English and not recognized as a proper name by the tool. We don’t want to go translating things like business names, so add those to your custom dictionary, too. 

d.    Be aware:

i. Unless you have a character recognition software in your bag of tricks, you will have to manually check the copy on images like .jpg, .gif and .png. With these tools though, you can select to view specific file types, so at least you don’t have to click through each page trying to ascertain both what’s an image and which images have copy on them.

ii. Copy that overruns its boundaries: With translated sites (especially German) you will almost always find text that runs outside of its container. I’ve found it most effective to scour each page manually for this. Same deal for Flash, btw.

iii. Copy that’s easy to miss: dropdowns and success/error messaging. For whatever reason, translators like to overlook copy within dropdowns as well as webform success/error messaging. The spell checker should catch the dropdowns. But the validation messaging can be a little more complicated, and this is another aspect that I’ve found most effective to test manually.

e. Compile your results, and back to the translator!

There’s a lot more to do, but hopefully this will get you rolling in the right direction. And to think these tools are called “link checkers” ….

 

For years, social media and ecommerce have been reaching in the other’s direction, and we’re beginning to see social commerce in its infancy. Social networks have become a major way to improve the shopping process and increase your customer service. Many companies have found social-media success through old-fashioned, real-world sales practices.

Facilitating Consumer Interaction

It’s old news that friends, family and peers influence consumers and their purchases most. That’s true online, too. In a Click Z study, 81% of respondents said they’d received advice from friends and followers relating to a product purchase through a social networking site, and 74% found the advice to be influential. Encouraging and moderating this exchange of ideas between customers helps create an important, productive environment outside of the shopping experience.

Dell manages several different Twitter feeds designed for people to discuss niche subjects and products, and has empowered consumers with IdeaStorm, an online forum where Dell talks directly to their customers. Dell gains meaningful insight into what their customers are looking for and is able to provide superior service by incorporating those ideas into future product launches. Since its inception, IdeaStorm has received more than 10,000 ideas from customers and Dell has implemented nearly 400 of them.

Real-Time Customer Service

Social networking enables companies to be constantly connected to customers and gives them endless opportunities to appease and impress. Customers no longer have to wait in long lines or listen to muzak while being placed on hold to have their problems solved. Connected and responsive companies are able to solve customer issues in real-time, as they’re happening — creating a happy customer who’s more likely to give positive word-of-mouth referrals (through social networks of course).

Southwest Airlines has become quickly reputable for addressing issues via Twitter and has hired a seven-person staff to manage their efforts. They field tweets that are directed to them or indirectly about them, provide a fun, personalized responses and follow-up with disgruntled customers. Sometimes they are even able to fix problems while the customer is still in the terminal, putting out a potential fire before it starts. Real-time responses create goodwill among content and unsatisfied customers alike.

Establishing a Human Connection

In the past, ecommerce was missing one of the essential elements of the sales process — customer interaction. Having a human face behind the brand establishes affinity and instills a sense of comfort and trust. You might not be able to shake hands through the Internet to seal the deal, but creating a warm, personal online profile can do wonders for you brand.

The CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, manages the company’s Twitter in an honest, hilarious and transparent fashion (even his cat has a Twitter account). This unconventional, laissez-faire approach is being met with positive responses, and literally millions of followers. The human element brings life to the brand and goes to show that people will do business with a likable salesman in any setting.

So thank you social media, for allowing companies to exercise these tried-and-true sales practices in a new, efficient and prosperous medium. Because of these early success stories and the growing popularity of social networking, social commerce is and will continue to be a force to be reckoned with. As consumers become increasingly sophisticated online (and as more moms join Facebook), it will be crucial for companies to maintain strong, dynamic presences on social sites.

As mobile phone adoption rates climb and network speeds rise, it is becoming increasingly important for consumer brands to engage with their customers via their mobile devices. According to Mobile Marketer, 90 percent of adults use at least one mobile device. Consumers now expect their favorite stores to offer mobile websites that enable them to perform basic functions such as locate a store, find out about hours or call directly. They expect to be able to donate to organizations via their mobile devices.

Non-profits are adopting mobile sites even faster than commercial companies because they can reach a larger percentage of their constituents. As a point of comparison, an iPhone application targets only 15 percent of the United States smartphone sales, and 9 percent worldwide. Mobile websites allow you to reach a broad range of smartphone platforms.*

East-coast supermaket chain A&P just launched a mobile SMS couponing service in March 2010 as part of their in-store loyalty program, to help engage their customers with their brand and offerings via mobile, and drive in store traffic.  

It is becoming increasingly obvious across many sectors, especially non-profit and retail, that mobile should be used to extend services to customers or constituents, not purely for entertainment value. At Springbox we are working on several service and information-oriented mobile sites this spring – we will share the results with you here after they launch!

*Source: Mobile Marketer: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/research/5955.html

 For more insights from Liz, follow her on Twitter: @lizmoise

When HBO debuted its HBO Go online service, it set a new standard for online content distribution. Teaming with Verizon FiOS for a video-streaming service, HBO has laid the groundwork to ensure subscribers can access content on-demand. HBO’s parent company, Time Warner, reached out to its current viewers with a tactic undertaken to prevent losing them to competitors’ sites such as Netflix, Watch instantly, iTunes, and Hulu. This growing trend in television and media industry proves that content is being shifted to the world streamed entertainment.

Along with music players and cameras, non-cable TV households are experiencing a growth spurt due to consistent technological advances, meaning as long as you have a broadband connection, you’re set. This said, with the growth of companies grabbing their piece of the online market share, what would this do for online marketing? Simple:

• Online content is subjected to attachments of marketing tailored to specific audiences.
• The fifteen or thirty-second preview or pop-up banner you see before your movie or music video is just the beginning of marketer’s attempts to proactively sell branded content online. For example: Hulu has seconds of “limited commercial interruptions” every couple minutes.
• Interactive pre-, post-,or mid-rolls can include fields for zip codes, games or anything that involves engagement.
• Overlay is becoming more popular – text or graphics can appear along the bottom or top, with an option to expand or close.
• Companion ads can be banners that appear beside the video players, which coordinate with a pre-roll ad or overlay ad.

In conclusion: As fast as movies, music, and human interaction go via cable plug, so will ads.

 

This year’s SXSW Interactive Conference was the largest yet, with the number of attendees surpassing both the Film and Music portions of the annual Austin event. One of the trends we noticed was panel discussions about game mechanics. It turns out the same principles that go into a great game are also very effective for engaging, retaining and building a community for your users.

Two panels that concentrated on this topic were led by Stephen Anderson, an Experience Design Strategist from Dallas, and Andy Baio, CTO of Kickstarter, based out of Portland, OR. Both panelists talked about the importance of creating goals for your user that align with your business goals and encourage users to follow a desired path and become more engaged. They also discussed the power of behavioral psychology, particularly in the form of feedback loops, loss aversion, collection impulse and even guilt. Some of the examples cited included:

Gowalla & Foursquare: Both of these apps have turned everyday life into a game where you can score points or deals, achieve new levels (you’re the Mayor of your local Starbucks!) and compete against peers. These apps have become stars in what some are calling the Badgefication of the Internet. Jesse Schell offered some almost-dystopian insights on the “real-life-as-a-game” concept at DICE 2010.

Amazon Mechanical Turk: This was an example used by Baio that didn’t seem obvious to me at first. Amazon Mechanical Turk utilizes a global network of people working on HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks for businesses and developers.

Baio had used the service before for audio transcription, but felt weird about taking advantage of cheap labor from people whose demographics and status he knew nothing about. Was he contributing to child labor abuses overseas?

His solution? Use the Mechanical Turk to help him find out. He created a task where he paid people to take a picture of themselves with a description of why they do it. What did he find out? 75% of the people are in the United States, more than 50% have bachelor’s degrees and over 60% are female.

What surprised him, though, was the reason a third of the people gave for their participation in HITs. They did it for fun! He realized that they were actually approaching it socially, similar to an MMO. It offered them tests and tasks to accomplish, they liked communicating with other Turkers and their success was measured in cash.

The Obama Campaign: No administration has leveraged the power of the social internet like the current one. During the campaign, supporters were encouraged to participate more by having ranking systems where people could level-up and see how they compared to other supporters in their state.

What Makes a Good Game Experience?* 

*This information is borrowed from Andy Baio’s presentation: Gaming the Crowd

Using Game Mechanics to Engage New Users

More and more online communities are leveraging gaming principles like feedback and goals to help guide new users through their site, making them feel more comfortable and connected to content. For example, LinkedIn provides metrics on your Profile Completeness and offers suggestions for what your next steps should be. Positioning a user’s profile in this way makes it seem more like a quest or mission rather than just filling out information.

On Mint.com’s dashboard, you’ll find this same concept applied to their Financial Fitness scoring system. It charts your personal financial fitness and provides a list of monthly tasks that will add to your Financial Fitness score. More central to the Mint model is how they display your monthly budget. At a glance, users can see where they are on budget (in the green), risk going over-budget (warning! yellow!) and where that shopping trip to Anthropologie, or picking up the tab for your friends when you went out for sushi put you over for the month (red, red, red!)

Ultimately, these kinds of principals can keep your users from feeling overwhelmed and give them incentive to stick around.

Building a Rich Online Community

While there are plenty of games that can be played solo, it’s always going to be more fun with other people involved. Community in games allows for opportunities to share, compete and achieve a level of prestige among your peers.

ThisNext is a social shopping site that leverages all the major concepts of game mechanics to build an enthusiastic global community. In exchange for things such as making quality recommendations on products, frequent contribution and reaching out to other members, a ThisNext user is rewarded with improved ranking among the community, giveaways for tagging content and ultimately prestige and VIP rewards. They even have the potential to become a Maven or an Expert Maven within the online community. What ThisNext has done is create a MMO-like system that doesn’t involve any great challenges, it just asks for a users time and commitment.

This same approach is what makes for some of the most successful Facebook apps (think Farmville or Flixster).

Game Fatigue

While applying gaming principles to interactive experiences can foster collaboration among your users or provide them with a sense of achievement, as these concepts become more popular in various user experiences, there’s a risk of burnout by users. If everything starts requiring a certain degree of time investment or carries a certain level of guilt over how much a user participates, then it could turn off users. So look closely at your business goals versus your users’ goals and figure out what makes the most sense.

 Additional Resources 

• “The Art of Game Design” by Jesse Schell
• Putting the Fun into Functional by Amy Jo Kim  
• The Art and Science of Seductive Interactions, Stephen Anderson's 2010 SXSW Presentation
• Building Web Reputations Systems