Graphics are the enemy!

There’s no surer way to bog down the rapid landing experience innovation/iteration cycle than to loop through the design department for every test you want to run. It’s inefficient. And inefficiency is the sworn enemy of rapid conversion rate improvement.

Landing experiences must be two things…

…stunning and cheap. Stunning in that they must be credible, on message, and the best user experiences on the web. Cheap in that an entire original experience must be produced in less than seven hours and iteration should be possible within minutes. If you exceed seven hours, you’ve invested too much in something that must be considered disposable. If a landing experience isn’t disposable, you surely won’t be willing to test and eliminate it if it fails. Think about it: if you have high-volume traffic, your experience could easily fail out of a test in less time than it took to produce it.

Rapid = ROI

If rapid creation and iteration leads to massive ROI improvements, then you can’t let anything muck up the works. Ba bye graphics. Nothing against Photoshop and designers, but looping through them every time you need a new button or a headline is anything but agile.

Workaround for quality and quantity

We workaround the graphics problem by creating highly designed reusable, dynamic Flash templates. This lets us loop through our design team far less often than if we produced the same elements using Photoshop. (It also makes our experiences much more SEO friendly in that their text is crawlable.)

Our account managers and content publishers can make changes to links, buttons, headlines, copy, even images without going through the design team. Yet the experiences appear highly designed and super polished because the Flash templates govern everything.

Using Flash objects reduces our design resource load by at least 60%. This lets us create original, multi-page conversion paths in less than our magic seven-hour time budget. And it lets us iterate and challenge champions in rapid testing — duplicate an experience, make adjustments to dynamic text and imagery and launch a new challenger — within a few minutes.

Graphics are inflexible and resource intensive. They are the enemy of rapid ROI optimization. Lose ‘em, speed things up and crank up your conversion rates.

Examples

Here are some screenshots of recent dynamic Flash-object based landing pages. All text and imagery you see can be dynamically updated without looping through the design department.

All of the text (including the button labels) and the images may all be quickly edited for rapid testing. No designer required.All text may be changed without a design loop. Even the circle images are placed as squares (dynamically) and are masked by Flash. The images and all the text (including the text and buttons casting shadows over the lifestyle imagery) may be changed within minutes. No designers, no Flash developers. Rapid = ROI.This one’s super cool. The images in the Flash carousel on the right are easily swapped in and out for testing — no XML, no developer, no designer. Once we have the asset library, we can test and test to find the optimum.Everything here can be affected without design or development interference. All text, the background image, the form — everything. Even the tab content (see below).

UX Notes: We optimize the user experience by eliminating Flash builds (no time-sucking animations) and by standardizing on the Flash 9 player (March 2009: 98.8% penetration versus 74% for Flash 10). Users will NOT upgrade their Flash player for a landing page!

Comments

[Michele]

So who created this system? Is it an in-house platform for your company or is it something offered by ion? Who creates the flash images in the first place?

[ion]

Michele,

ion developed LiveBall from the ground up. We provide it to our clients as a SaaS (software as a service).

In many cases, ion creates the Flash templates, although any Flash AS3 developer can create LiveBall-dynamic objects.

Any non-technical person can affect the content -- images, text and links -- in the Flash templates. They just need a web browser (and LiveBall).

Thanks for reading!