Weekly round-up (Vol. 67)

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This week we’re looking at website conversions and take a trip back to the future. But first… whatever happened to Google Wave? Well, apparently not much and just last week, Google effectively canned it.

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RIP Google Wave – Mashable
Google’s revolutionary product that blends email, instant messaging, file sharing & wikis “didn’t get the uptake they’d hoped for & Google won’t be continuing to develop Wave as a stand alone product.” It only launched in 2009.

Here at Bluewire, we think the problem was the product’s contagiousness, or lack thereof. Many of us were saying that we either couldn’t explain it to anybody else or never understood it ourselves in the first place. If something’s too confusing to tell your friends about, how will the idea take off? As we know now, it doesn’t.

Did you or anyone you know use Google Wave and how did you find it? Could you explain how it works to anyone else?

Getting people to do what you want them to do!

Lessons Learned from 21 Case Studies in Conversion Rate Optimization – SEOmoz
How can you make more people buy? contact you? download your ebook? sign up for your seminar or subscribe to your newsletter? This article covers it all, from making actions more obvious & increasing credibility to split testing enticing headlines. And of course, it’s full of case studies!

If you’re as excited about this as we are, get in touch and let’s get started!

Read on for more detail on shopping carts and “gradual engagement” (getting more information from users over time rather than making them sign up or fill out their whole profile before starting):

Checkout abandonment on the rise – Econsultancy
A quick article about the main reasons why people abandon their shopping experience, often at the last minute after they’ve added items to their cart and are about to pay.

The most obvious ways to combat this are: provide information about delivery and all charges upfront and make shipping costs really easy to find! Having to wait for a manually calculated shipping cost from the store owner is also a huge barrier for many people who just want to click “Pay” and wait for their goodies to turn up. Making users sign up for an account when they might not ever buy from you again is also more likely to make them not bother at all than become a repeat visitor. And of course, they want it to be fast to checkout.

Sign Up Forms Must Die – A List Apart
This article is from 2008 but unfortunately, complicated barrier sign up forms are still far too common. Would you agree that you’d be more likely to engage and stick with something if you already knew what it did and had even experienced it? And then the account was created for you??

This isn’t talking about contact forms or newsletter subscription forms, though they too can definitely begin by collecting just a name and email address and get other details later, but rather when you need to have an account to use a web application like YouTube or Twitter.

Back to the future

Will Ferrell’s Tour of Tech That Never Took – Wired
I don’t know about you, but I’m often painfully reminded that 2010 isn’t quite like we imagined it’d be 50 years ago. Sure, the future’s hard to predict but you’d think we’d have underwater cities by now! And why can’t I just hologram into the office rather than commute in on a machine invented in the 1800s? Obviously Will Ferrell agrees with me…

Plus, what if our favourite social technologies were advertised back when the future was exciting?

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