Interaction Design for Return On Investment (ROI)

Web sites play a major role in determining whether someone ultimately interacts (or even transact) with a company. One would assume that organisations are super focussed on ensuring that their online properties are designed to capitalise this, thereby maximising their return on investments.

Strangely that is not the case. Our experience indicates that very few sites are designed with ROI in mind, and most under-perform relative to the impact that web design has on their organisational performance. We argue that websites should be viewed as investments, and that the design process of online properties should be subject to the same level of discipline used when evaluating other more traditional investments.

We help organisations understand that the way they often think about web or interaction design is why so many web sites end up in the sorry state they do. The reality is that many companies see their online properties (and the people who work hard to design them) as a cost centre and seldom as a potential profit centre.

You have 0.5 seconds to make a first impression online...

Do you like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

Here are some designs. Some were awarded "best of web" and others "worst of web". Let's see how long it takes you to find out which are which...

There clearly is an interplay between our emotional reaction to a webpage, and our conscious thought process. "Consumers apply both holistic (emotional) and analytic (cognitive) judgment in the decision to buy a product." So that feeling you evoke in users through a "clean, professional design" can have a halo effect on their buying judgments (Fogg 2003).