User Interface Engineering

There’s a saying that “Every kiss is a promise”. Every time you kiss someone, you’re setting some expectation for the future. You’re together…and you’re dating/going out/seeing each other (or whatever they’re calling it nowadays). It’s kind of like a girl wearing a boy’s varsity jacket: everyone knows that those two are an “item”, as my mother would say.

I’m listening to Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg right now (in their session: Creating Persuasion Architecture Online), and Bryan is telling us that, like a kiss, every banner ad is a promise. When you view a banner ad, it is setting expectations about what you should find at the other end…when you click it.

But most banner ads fail to deliver on their promise. Or, rather, most landing pages fail to deliver on the promise made by the banner ads. Most are disconnected with the ad that sent people there, often changing the subject, style, or mood of the ad. This change is detrimental to success. Conversion is all about consistency, consistency, consistency in message. The Eisenberg’s preach this message rather…consistently.

The Eisenbergs (who, as brothers, seem connected at the subconcious level…they finish each other’s sentences with amazing clarity) suggest that the failure of many banner ads isn’t caused solely by the difficulty of the medium, but also because they’re created by different teams or people who don’t create a compelling, seamless experience.

Many banner ads, it seems, aren’t very good lovers. Their promises, for the most part, mean very little.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Experience Design, Marketing & Branding, UI11 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.