FullBleed

Illustration by Jim Starr

At your local supermarket, “shelf life” represents the length of time a tomato, cup of yogurt, or carton of eggs will stay fresh and desirable. Some foods last longer on the shelf than others, thanks to a combination of ingredients and packaging. When a company wants to extend the shelf life of a food product, it will often create a new form factor that holds up better over time.

Shelf life is also a crucial concept in the design world. When you kick off a new web design project, you must assess the shelf life of your project.

Will it be a quick-hit, six-week campaign that is timed to fly with other coordinated marketing efforts? Is it a task-based application that will help the staff of an organization work more efficiently for months or even years? Understanding the shelf life of your project before you start designing clarifies — to everyone involved — the criteria with which to evaluate and refine the design.

The Learning Curve

While any experience should be easy for users to understand, its intrinsic learning curve should be appropriate to the amount of time they will spend with it. In addition, the learning curve shouldn’t obscure the ultimate goal of the experience.

Marketing experiences typically are focused on brand awareness, acquisition, and conversion. In light of the ubiquity of advertising today, users should be able to recognize instantly the purpose of the experience as well as the desired response. They can’t be expected to learn a new kind of behavior or interaction model just to achieve the task. In addition, the marketing experience needs to be engaging: Grab the user’s attention, hold it, and channel the focus to the ONE main task you want to achieve in the ad, micro-site, or banner.

The likelihood of a return visit to a marketing experience is low. You must take advantage of the moment you’ve created to get users to your campaign and keep them engaged. Highly ornamented distractions, alternate paths, and obnoxious design patterns all serve to get in the way of the main task. More than likely, users were not setting out to visit your site. One bump in the road, and they’re off your site and back to their original intent.

Applications afford designers a bit more leeway. They typically do more than one thing, so the initial presentation has to present those choices clearly. From there, though, there is an opportunity to clearly and cleanly communicate how to proceed. Users are expected to learn, interact, succeed, and then return. With each return visit, they will handle the application more efficiently.

Because it provides more than one path, an application can be designed with multiple users AND multiple engagements in mind. For example, the initial learning curve can focus on the app’s most common, essential features. Return visits can slowly reveal more advanced ways to interact with the product. Since an application is intended for a longer shelf life, the designer can create multiple paths of learning and success. The added bonus is that these paths, if designed correctly, can support users’ increasingly sophisticated engagement with the app.

Engaging vs. Usable

The disparate goals of marketing and application sites may require different tactics for success, but designers of either needn’t sacrifice usability to win engagement. To engage the user in a marketing site, the experience must be an extension of the brand by using core attributes like colors, voice and tone, and imagery. The marketing property should support the brand by demonstrating the desired outcome and identifying where, on the site, users can achieve it. No company wants its brand associated with phrases like “hard to use” and “confusing.” Remember, users have made a choice to be on your site. One click too many and you’ve lost them … likely never to return and with a bad impression of your brand.

Applications are not always a choice for users. Yes, some decision maker somewhere may have chosen to purchase access to it, but most of your users will have its purpose and use dictated to them. This provides the designer the benefit of time. To increase the likelihood that users will complete a task, the designer can include elements such as wizards with numbered steps, instructional text, and links to help and support sites. Your users will take the time to read and use these assets because their goal is pre-determined. These tactics, far too time- and resource-consuming for a marketing experience, make it easier for them to achieve that goal and to get through the process more efficiently.

Investment

The amount of time invested in these efforts also varies based on purpose. If a short-shelf-life marketing project has one goal — such as convincing users to sign up for an email newsletter — you needn’t invest in secondary navigation, breadcrumb trails, or even multiple pages. Create the shortest path to finding the form fields, and your task is complete. This focus reduces the scope of the engagement across the discipline spectrum and provides faster results for your clients.

Applications are more labor intensive. Given that they’re more complex, you will benefit from conducting research up-front to understand your target audiences, their pain points, and the ways they currently go about overcoming those pain points. This initial investment returns a leaner, more efficient, and more usable experience that translates into greater product adoption and sales.

Summary

The shelf life of your application determines the best way to design it and how long you should spend doing so. Short-shelf-life marketing projects should focus on ONE explicit goal — like click-throughs, purchases, and raising awareness. A web application endures significantly longer; it requires up-front research and design time to ensure its user experience supports the application’s purpose efficiently and repeatedly.

When setting out on your next project, ask yourself how long the project will live, and then focus your efforts in proportion to that shelf life.