Measuring the Influence of Design: Improve profits from the Art of Persuasive Design

Persuasive Architecture Means Measuring the Ability of Your Site to Sale
With some experience, design can be used to strongly influence customer behavior on your site. Whether customers buy, signup, come back or offer testimonials about their experiences is all a matter of persuasive design. Now that part is pretty straightforward, though not easy, but what is often understated is that to a greater extent the influence of design can be measured online and quite effectively.

Measuring the influence of your design
Because site design is far more than colors, flash or graphics, getting customers to do more of what you expect them to do should be your goal. Design can be a statement about the strength and value of your business or conversely, it can punctuate where it is weakest. These painpoints can and should be measured almost daily. Measuring the influence of design on customer interactions has become easier with every technological advance forward from the legacy of logfiles through Webtrends or Urchin to the flagship of web analytics in Coremetrics . What we used to call facts about your site were really based on statements of subjectivity about design. We'd make comments such as, I don't think. We believe. Our experience shows..".

Web analytics has begun to take the guesswork out of site management it helps site owners measure, manage and realize greater return on their investments, faster. But tools only carry you so far, the results are often in what and how you measure. Site owners now use statements about conversion to describe the success of their web sites. Successful conversion begins at the first point of customer contact typically revolving around the homepage.

Measuring the influence of your design is easier than you think. Understanding how you can influence customer behavior is the key to improving your business over time. You may be interested in measuring leads, sales, registrations, pay per performance or signups. The first step is easy. What can we help you measure next?