The best way to learn about your customers is to conduct a case study. A definition of a case study according to Wikepedia online says, “A case study is a research methodology common in social science. It is based on an in-depth investigation of a single individual, group, or event to explore causation in order to find underlying principles.” In plain English it means conducting research to find out what the problems are and offer a solution. Sounds easy right?

You want your customers to be able to relate to your products/services, right? You want to show that you have something to offer them, kind of going to “what’s in it for me?” question.

There are many types of case studies that you can do, but today I will talk about a technique you can use to present information, called personas. In a few words, persona is a model of your company’s most important customer.

Personas are archetypal users that represent the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics. They act as ‘stand-ins’ for real users and help guide decisions about functionality and design.

Personas identify the user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behaviour, and bring users to life by giving them names, personalities and often a photo.

Although personas are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real users. Some form of user research is conducted before they are written to ensure they represent end users rather than the opinion of the person writing the personas.

How to create personas

• Interview business stakeholders that interact frequently with users. These people have had hundreds if not thousands of interactions with end users and are already conscious of users’ behavioral patterns. Respect the wealth of knowledge your business stakeholders hold and get them involved early on in the persona research. This helps to build their buy in to the persona technique.

Start writing the personas by adding details around the behavioral traits. Select details from your research, such as working environment, frustrations, relationships with others, skill level, and some demographics. Give each persona a name and a photo, unless your organizational or team culture is better suited to the more generic personas.

• Review market research and interview your organisation’s market research specialists. Once again these people have frequent interaction with end users and are trained to pick up patterns in attitudes and behaviours. They may not have created personas before, but if you ask the right questions you’ll gather useful information to add to your research data.
• Survey users and business stakeholders using quantitative methods. This is a good way to gather large amounts of demographic data and to identify trends in skill levels and tasks performed. However it cannot replace direct interaction and observation with interview subjects as there is no way to tap into the users’ subconscious beliefs and attitudes.
• If you are designing a web site, talk to friends and family that are users of the current website or potential users of the new website. Chat to people over dinner parties or at the pub. This is not rigorous research, but some research is better than none.

Personas are a useful tool to use throughout the project, from deciding upon the functionality to include in a release to evaluating the end product. Teamed up with other user-centered design tools and techniques, such as task analysis and usability testing, personas will place you in good stead to deliver a useful and usable solution.

For real life example of personas, CLICK HERE

If you need help doing research and creating personas, please contact us www.miiaweb.com

If you want to engage your customer and get them to learn something about your products or services, get them more involved. Creating interactive training videos is a great way to introduce your products to the world. You can make it a fun, hands-on activity. For instance, if a company designs software, they would want to create a demo on how to perform a certain task using the software. Along with showing them how to do it, have your users actually do it. Maybe a fun quiz at the end of the training video will engage the user more by allowing them to test their knowledge.

Here how you do it. You are probably wondering what tools to use. Like with everything, there are tons of tools to choose from, some are open-source, and some you have to pay for. But if you want a good tool with lots of features you want to go with Adobe Captivate. The reason why I recommend Adobe Captivate is because I’ve used the tool myself and I like it. The only tough thing to do is to figure out what you want your training video to contain, sort of build a storyboard first before you start creating the video. When you have everything in place, download the tool http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate

I am not going to lie when I say that this tool is expensive – $799 to be exact, but before you dismiss the idea completely, download a trial version and play around with it to see if you really like it. If you are in a business of building creative demos and interactive simulations, you should invest in a good tool such as Adobe Captivate.

If you are an educator or  a trainer, this tool is for you!

Here are some frequently asked questions from Adobe’s website regarding Adobe Captivate:

What is Adobe® Captivate® 5?

Adobe Captivate 5 software is a rapid eLearning authoring tool that lets almost anyone create and maintain complex content like software demonstrations, interactive simulations, branching scenarios, and quizzes, without programming. Its intuitive user interface and extensive feature set lets users craft richer content, be more productive, and deliver their eLearning virtually anywhere.

Who should use Adobe Captivate 5?

Adobe Captivate 5 is ideal for eLearning professionals, educators, trainers, technical support managers, and sales and marketing professionals who need to rapidly create and conveniently maintain a variety of training materials and demos without learning programming or having to outsource the task to professional developers.

What kinds of training content can I create using Adobe Captivate 5?

You can create most types of simulation-based or interactive eLearning content with Adobe Captivate 5, from simple SWF versions of slide-based presentations to complex scenario-based, soft-skills training, and from software simulations and demonstrations to quizzes.

What are the new features in Adobe Captivate 5?

The new features in Adobe Captivate 5 include an intuitive and highly productive user interface consistent with popular Adobe applications; support for popular video formats like AVI, MOV, MPEG, and FLV; the ability to create rich animations; Object Styles and Master Slides for global formatting; the ability to host projects on Acrobat.com, an Adobe CS Live online service*; and more.

For more information on new features, visit the Adobe Captivate 5 features page.

Enjoy!

Say for example, you have an employee (let’s call her Jenny) who works as an administrative assistant. Her hourly pay is $12 per hour (plus benefits). You ask her to write up a Policy & Procedures document since you now have a total of 5 employees now, you want them to be aware of all the company policies. Jenny is not too familiar with writing policies and procedures and takes 4 hours to write the document. She gives you the final rough draft and you find a lot of mistakes – misspelled words, inaccurate information, etc. You give Jenny back the document and she spends another hour correcting it. All in all, she spent 5 hours creating the document. At that point you have spent $220 paying Jenny in salary & benefits, spending 1 hour reviewing the document yourself (let’s say you earn $50/ hour yourself – at least), and having Jenny edit the document.

Then you give the finished (or what you thought) document to your HR person Linda, and she spends another hour correcting the information.  You pay Linda $24/hr (plus benefits).  So then Linda approves the document and gives it to your web designer Ray to publish to the Intranet website (whom you pay $19/hr, plus benefits).

You proudly go back to your office and happy that you just saved a ton of money by writing the policies and procedures document in-house. Where in fact, you have spent $304 in salary fees !!! But if you would’ve hired a professional to write the document, it would only cost you $200 bucks – a savings of ($104). But since you made your employees write the document, they had to shift their other projects, thus costing you more money – can we say thousands of dollars?

Miia Communications prides themselves in creating great policy and procedures documents, contact them today for a FREE price quote info@miiaweb.com

1. There is a Vistaprint logo on the back

2. You are not planning to use your own logo and graphics

3. You don’t mind the plain paper

So if you wanted shiny instead of matte cards, that’s extra. If you wanted to include your own logo, that’s extra. If you wanted to have text printed on the back of the card (in color), that’s extra. Not to mention you pay $6 for shipping (cheapest and slowest).

I also ordered a magnetic car decal from them and the quality was very good. The size is kind of on a smaller side – even if you choose a Large, but the colors and graphics looked great.

I highly recommend these guys if you are on a budget and just starting out your business.

P.S. I am not promoting this company by any means, just wanted to share my personal experience!

Happy shopping!

Think about the products that your company sells. Are they full of bells and whistles? Are they so “cool” that people talk about them non-stop? If that’s so, then how come your business is slow? How come you’re not making as many sales as you like? Maybe it’s not you, maybe it’s your product. Have you asked your customers what THEY prefer to see? Did you do research to see how emotionally connected your customers are to your products? When was the last time you visited with your customers face-to-face? These sound like tough questions – and they are!

What you want is a User Experience professional who will help you analyze your customers and find out what they REALLY want to see in your products. What drives (or what motivations they have) to make a purchase?

This might be the right step in the right direction for your business. So why wait?

Yesterday, I received an email from a woman who says she wants to create a survey, but doesn’t know where to start. She is not sure what questions to ask, what tools to use, how to go about setting it all up.

We have put together a tutorial on survey design. Download this helpful tutorial and email us with any questions you might have.

One thing blogging and good copy writing share is a conversational style, and that means it’s fine to fracture the occasional rule of proper grammar in order to communicate effectively.

There are other mistakes that can detract from your credibility. While we all hope what we have to say is more important than some silly grammatical error, the truth is some people will not subscribe or link to your blog if you make dumb mistakes when you write, and buying from you will be out of the question.

Here are five mistakes to avoid when blogging and writing web copy.

1. Your vs. You’re

This one drives me insane, and it’s become extremely common among bloggers. All it takes to avoid this error is to take a second and think about what you’re trying to say.

“Your” is a possessive pronoun, as in “your car” or “your blog.” “You’re” is a contraction for “you are,” as in “you’re screwing up your writing by using your when you really mean you are.”

2. It’s vs. Its

This is another common mistake. It’s also easily avoided by thinking through what you’re trying to say.

“It’s” is a contraction of “it is” or “it has.” “Its” is a possessive pronoun, as in “this blog has lost its mojo.” Here’s an easy rule of thumb—repeat your sentence out loud using “it is” instead. If that sounds goofy, “its” is likely the correct choice.

3. There vs. Their

This one seems to trip up everyone occasionally, often as a pure typo. Make sure to watch for it when you proofread.

“There” is used many ways, including as a reference to a place (“let’s go there”) or as a pronoun (“there is no hope”). “Their” is a plural possessive pronoun, as in “their bags” or “their opinions.” Always do the “that’s ours!” test—are you talking about more than one person and something that they possess? If so, “their” will get you there.

4. Affect vs. Effect

To this day I have to pause and mentally sort this one out in order to get it right. As with any of the other common mistakes people make when writing, it’s taking that moment to get it right that makes the difference.

“Affect” is a verb, as in “Your ability to communicate clearly will affect your income immensely.” “Effect” is a noun, as in “The effect of a parent’s low income on a child’s future is well documented.” By thinking in terms of “the effect,” you can usually sort out which is which, because you can’t stick a “the” in front of a verb. While some people do use “effect” as a verb (“a strategy to effect a settlement”), they are usually lawyers, and you should therefore ignore them if you want to write like a human.

5. The Dangling Participle

The dangling participle may be the most egregious of the most common writing mistakes. Not only will this error damage the flow of your writing, it can also make it impossible for someone to understand what you’re trying to say.

Check out these two examples from Tom Sant’s book Persuasive Business Proposals:

After rotting in the cellar for weeks, my brother brought up some oranges.

Uhh… keep your decomposing brother away from me!

Featuring plug-in circuit boards, we can strongly endorse this server’s flexibility and growth potential.

Hmmm… robotic copy written by people embedded with circuit boards. Makes sense.

The problem with both of the above is that the participial phrase that begins the sentence is not intended to modify what follows next in the sentence. However, readers mentally expect it to work that way, so your opening phrase should always modify what immediately follows. If it doesn’t, you’ve left the participle dangling, as well as your readers.

Good luck!

Courtesy of http://www.copyblogger.com

As you can see, proofreading is VERY important. True story, I was once browsing this event planning website. I was interested in what type of events they planned and what type of services they offered, so I decided to look around their website. I clicked on the About us page and was shocked to see so many misspellings. Words such as “conference, meetings, consultation” were all misspelled. How embarrassing for them! If I needed an event planner I would want one that could spell – at least. Why would I want to trust someone with planning a party for me if they can’t even spell the word “consultation”? What if they make mistakes on the paperwork or on the invoice? Or order invitations with misspelled names on them?

Having error-free documents and website content is crucial!!! Many people ignore it. But they don’t realize that this hurts the company’s reputation and as we know a website is the face of the company – you only have one shot to make a good impression. Having grammatical errors in your documents and on your company’s website makes you lose credibility. It’s not only embarrassing, but also a big distraction for the reader. If they stumble while reading, they are more likely to get frustrated and leave your site for good.

So think about it, proofreading is not very expensive. Take the time to hire a professional to edit your documents/website and save yourself and your company from humiliation.

For new businesses

So your business is setup, you got your Tax ID, your licensing, and your bank account. Now it’s time to get customers and make some money! But wait, have you considered the following questions:

1. Did you send out a Press Release to let everyone know of your new business?
2. Did you setup a Website for your business?
3. Did you write up a Policies & Procedures document (especially important if you hired staff)?
4. Did you create a Brochure, Flyer or a Newsletter to send out to your potential clients?

……just to name a few.

When you start your new business, you know what to do, get a permit, get a tax ID, but no one tells you what things you need to grow your business.

We offer a FREE 20-minute consultation (valued at $100). We sit down with you and tell us about your company, and we put together a plan for you and tell you what the next steps are.

With so much competition out there, you want to be ahead of everyone else.

For existing businesses

If you are currently in business, you need to make sure your documents are up-to-date. Have you updated your Operations manuals or Policy and Procedures in the last year? Does your website contain updated information on your products and services?

Visit http://www.miiaweb.com/consulting.html to register for your FREE 20-minute Consultation!!!

Some of the categories that you can include are:

• Layout – how many columns do you want your site to have?
• Colors – what colors do you want the site to have? It’s a good idea to incorporate your company colors such as from your company logo.
• Content – how many pages do you want/need to have? A standard website contains at least 5  pages – Home / About  / Services  / FAQs / Contact
• Dynamic or static website – do you want HTML or a Flash site with animation – research to see which one is best for your type of business

It’s easy to get lost, so the best thing to do is to create a plan and stick with it.

If you need help with website content, please contact us –