Emotional Design and Donald Norman

Some of you might already have come across this brilliant man. Donald Norman has provided a lot of insight in how and why design works that can be used for a lot of purposes, and of course in marketing. The idea of Norman is pretty simple, really. He argues that good design make us feel better, and that is why we like the products. Good design also makes us happier, and a lot of studies have shown that we can solve problems better when we are happy. How is this relevant to products you might ask; well think about it. If a product is somewhat complicated and ugly, the users are less likely to understand how to work it. However if the product is complicated but has a nice design, then the users are more likely to try understand how the product works. By having a beautiful design, a product is more likely to ‘get away’ with flaws. People simply accept the flaws just because they become emotionally attached to the product. By now it is pretty obvious how this can be applied in marketing, on a wide range of different levels; from web design and branding to product design and advertising.

It’s very easy to get stuck on YouTube and go through all the Norman videos. Below you’ll find one of the shorter videos that gives a quick overview of Donald Normans ideas regarding emotional design.

That all for now folk’s!

Oh brother where are thou?

Yes, I know. I haven’t updated this blog in ages. I won’t blame it on lack of time, or anything else, lets face it, I’ve been too lazy to update it.

Previous posts on this blog were quite lengthy, and they took some time and research to write. That’s probably why I just stopped posting after some time.

I am going to change the structure a bit now however, and post more frequent about more everyday things that are related to my work at CPerspective, and the online industry in general.

Let’s see if I can keep the tempo up this time..

How is CPerspective Ltd Coping With the Economical Downturn?

During the last few months, one reoccurring question has been whether or not I – as the CEO of a smaller web company – have been affected by the economical downturn.  My spontaneous answer to this question is no, not a great deal (at least not yet). I have however seen trends in our clients spending routines and taken some security measures on behalf of CPerspective Ltd.

Since we work globally and represent three larger areas of online marketing (SEO, Web design and Online advertising) we have a pretty broad field of services as well as clients. This makes us very adaptive and dynamic to the clients need and the general ‘health’ of our industry.  If we see negative trends in one market, we can move our focus to another one temporarily. The same goes for our services. Because of the great deal of expertise we have in-house, we have never had any problems with working in a dynamic market; actually, I would say the online industry is always under such a rapid change that if you cannot adapt to it you would not be able to survive no matter what the economical situation is.

During the last 12 months CPerspective Ltd has undergone several changes and modifications. We have added and removed services and partners to our portfolio, changed our in-house routines and also our company profile to name a few. Our philosophy is, and has always been pretty simple; if we provide the clients with great solutions that help them grow their business, they will come back and keep making money from a partnership with us. This ideal has helped us to withstand even in economic hardship, because our clients know that their budgets are safe with us. It might sound big headed or boastful, but I would be lying if I said anything else.
Sure, the last few months we have seen that some client’s have been a bit more reluctant to spend as much as they did before on the same services. This has however been because other companies have lowered their prices, probably as a last desperate measure before collapsing. I would say most our client’s are pretty solid, and they know we are too. This has made our business go on pretty much as usual.

It’s nothing strange that most companies see a larger value in each dollar now, we do too. It’s better to be a bit cautious than to overspend and burn out the budget on bad and risky moves. For example a couple of measures we have taken in CPerspective are to not subscribe to any new services with monthly fees attached, to keep down spend on company electronics such as laptops, phones etc. and also skip a couple of conferences that we could live without attending this year.  We have also looked over our invoicing routines and decided to adjust them as well to put us as a company a bit more on the safe side.

Our measures have not been very extreme our unusual and our work goes on as it always has done (and I hope it will continue to do so). I am sure that most companies in our field will survive as long as they have a long term plan to start with, healthy company values and a dynamic team.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency

Illness, Easter and.. CPerspectives New Website is Up!

As you might have noticed I have been somewhat inactive on this blog during the last couple of weeks. The reasons are mainly work overload, a really bad cold and Easter holidays. However, I’m back now and hopefully I can keep posting useful articles regularly again.

During the last couple of weeks the CPerspective Web design team has worked very hard with getting our new website finalized and launched. This has as usually been handled by my friend and colleague – our in-house web design wiz – Anwar. I think he and his team managed to get a very neat site up for us. Check it out: www.cperspective.com

If you have seen our previous websites you’ll see that we have switched our approach somewhat. Previously we we’re really content focused and wanted to provide as much information as possible through our website. We re-evaluated this view however, much based on what Anwar suggested, and chose to instead focus on essential info and actual work we have done. We don’t want our website to be like a miles long sales pitch; that wasn’t really our idea with the previous sites either, they just ended up looking like that due to a somewhat excessive information load. Instead we want our site to be brief but informative. This is why we have chosen to present more visual statistics and through animations.

I think that it in many ways is harder to create a website and logotype for yourselves than to do it for someone else. If you create a website for someone else you can take a rather unbiased point of view while trying to figure out what style might be most suitable. However, when you create a site for yourself you become the spider in the web; you will not be able to transcend your company identity since you will be biased and entangled in it. You will also have to deal with all your coworkers opinions if you are in a smaller sized company. This will make it very hard for the web design team to decide what ideas are good or not, and especially when the ideas come from executives. It’s not always ‘ordinary’ people understand why something is not doable, and this could very well be one of the biggest headaches for any web design team. However, I would honestly give full credit to the CPerspective web design team as they managed their task extremely well.

All in all I’m very happy with our new website, and I hope it will be useful for all our clients and visitors. Visit us at www.cperspective.com.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency