Markiter

www.markiter.com

Where to find Graphic Design?

For a lot of small businesses, the internet is the new way to connecting and communicating with their customers. First impressions can make or break a sale, and so how do you find great logo, website or brochure designs if you aren't technology savvy? You're in luck, as there are a lot of great options available. Check out 99designs.com or crowdspring.com. These are great options to get design work done at low costs.

How it works:

- you start a contest by saying, "I've got $200 for a new logo"

- during the contest, different designers will provide you with custom logos for you

- you pick the one you like best, and the winning designer gets the $200. You get full ownership of the design for your business.

What's Great About It:

- you get to see a bunch of designer's interpretations of what you're looking for.

- you can provide feedback, or tweak designs as you like

- only pay for what you like

Often, you'll get hundreds of potential designs to choose from. How do you decide? There will definitely be a couple that really resonate with what you're looking for, but how will you narrow it down to the winner? Enter Markiter. With Markiter, you can create a custom focus group to help you narrow down ideas and get feedback from real people to comment on the designs. How does Markiter work?

- Upload a couple of your favorite designs.

- Describe what you want the logo to convey about your business.

- Ask the questions that matter to you. "Do you like the color scheme?", "Which one do you like, and why?", "Would you use a service like this?"

- Click Start.

And in a couple hours, you'll have a nice report with everyone's feedback. Armed with this information, you'll have more data points to make an informed decision. If you're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars for a design that is going to represent your business, spending $10 to gather custom feedback makes a lot of sense. Check out our Case Study to see how we helped a construction firm launch their new site with our Instant Focus Groups.

7 Japanese aesthetic principles to change your thinking

 

A few aesthetic principles that you can consider when working on a design.  Inspirational.

Seven principles for changing your perception
Kanso (簡素) Simplicity or elimination of clutter. Things are expressed in a plain, simple, natural manner. Reminds us to think not in terms of decoration but in terms of clarity, a kind of clarity that may be achieved through omission or exclusion of the non-essential.

EnsoFukinsei (不均整) Asymmetry or irregularity. The idea of controlling balance in a composition via irregularity and asymmetry is a central tenet of the Zen aesthetic. The enso ("Zen circle") in brush painting, for example, is often drawn as an incomplete circle, symbolizing the imperfection that is part of existence. In graphic design too asymmetrical balance is a dynamic, beautiful thing. Try looking for (or creating) beauty in balanced asymmetry. Nature itself is full of beauty and harmonious relationships that are asymmetrical yet balanced. This is a dynamic beauty that attracts and engages.

Shibui/Shibumi (渋味) Beautiful by being understated, or by being precisely what it was meant to be and not elaborated upon. Direct and simple way, without being flashy. Elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. The term is sometimes used today to describe something cool but beautifully minimalist, including technology and some consumer products. (Shibui literally means bitter tasting).

Shizen (自然) Naturalness. Absence of pretense or artificiality, full creative intent unforced. Ironically, the spontaneous nature of the Japanese garden that the viewer perceives is not accidental. This is a reminder that design is not an accident, even when we are trying to create a natural-feeling environment. It is not a raw nature as such but one with more purpose and intention.

Yugen (幽玄) Profundity or suggestion rather than revelation. A Japanese garden, for example, can be said to be a collection of subtleties and symbolic elements. Photographers and designers can surely think of many ways to visually imply more by not showing the whole, that is, showing more by showing less.

Datsuzoku (脱俗) Freedom from habit or formula. Escape from daily routine or the ordinary. Unworldly. Transcending the conventional. This principles describes the feeling of surprise and a bit of amazement when one realizes they can have freedom from the conventional. Professor Tierney says that the Japanese garden itself, "...made with the raw materials of nature and its success in revealing the essence of natural things to us is an ultimate surprise. Many surprises await at almost every turn in a Japanese Garden." 

Seijaku (静寂)Tranquility or an energized calm (quite), stillness, solitude. This is related to the feeling you may have when in a Japanese garden. The opposite feeling to one expressed by seijaku would be noise and disturbance. How might we bring a feeling of "active calm" and stillness to ephemeral designs outside the Zen arts?

via http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2009/09/exposing-ourselves-to-...

Leveraging Mechanical Turk for Market Research

If you are interested in learning more about Mechanical Turk and it's suitability for use in market research - an expert is @andres_ferraro (on twitter).  We heavily used his research in vetting possible solutions for a good audience, statistically speaking.

Thanks for publishing research on this dynamic new medium, and thanks for the note Andres!

In response to:
andres_ferraro said...
Troy, delighted to see Markiter leverage the Amazon Mechanical Turk and quote my dissertation to explain its makeup. I had never seen that 100,000 cents research from Kobin and Kawashima, what a uniquely clever way of showing validity and reliability! Thank you for a well-written article.

A look at A/B testing - The problem with Google Weboptimizer

Markiter believes strongly in the value of A/B testing, and using real data to make decisions.  However - the issue can be much more complicated than at first glance.  Many people will put up two designs and test with Google Weboptimizer and go with the better converting option.  The problem here is that you are only discovering the local maximum for conversions - and have no way of knowing how well that compares against the global maximum.


A quick analogy will help make things more clear.  If you want to climb to the top of a mountain in a snowstorm, you will keep heading up until you are at a peak.  However, you could just be still on the side of the mountain on a small peak and nowhere near the top.


A great example of this in action is illustrated at:

http://www.blastam.com/broadcast/2008/12/google-website-optimizer-test-we-did...  

They ended up taking the losing option from Weboptimizer and tweaking it to get to a far better result.  This case study illustrates the importance of looking beyond the local maximum.


Markiter aims to help you solve this problem.  By providing simple A/B testing with candid feedback, you can perform a study like this on any media.  It could be website mockups for similar results to the example - or it could be posters or demo videos.   Think of the possiblities for using real data to make more educated decisions about media!

Markiter and Mechanical Turk

Markiter currently uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk as the primary method for engaging voters for testing campaigns. Mechanical Turk is a web service created by Amazon.com based on the belief that there are certain things that humans can do better and faster than a computer. Image recognition is a perfect example; a human can easily tell what products, or items are in a picture much more accurately than a computer can. This is why Amazon's official IPhone application currently uses Mechanical Turk for one of it's key features. An IPhone user can take a picture of an item, send it to Amazon, and Mechanical Turk workers will identify the item, and return the product detail page on Amazon that best resembles the item. Wired magazine has some more information about it here.

There have been numerous studies done to validate our beliefs that Mechanical Turk is the perfect venue to leverage the wisdom of crowds for market research purposes. The main concerns we had before selecting Mechanical Turk on behalf of our customers were the distribution of voters, and the quality and accuracy of voters. Let's take a look at the independent research we were able to uncover for each of these.

Voter Distribution:
A study was recently done to study the distribution and demographics of Mechanical Turk voters. Here is a summary of their findings. You can read the full study and see more graphical breakdowns here. 

  • 75% of voters are from the States, and not a third world country
  • Almost 50/50 distribution between male/female participants
  • Large majority of voters were between 21-40.
  • Over 50% of Mechanical Turk voters have a Bachelor's degree
  • The income distribution of voters mirrors the income distribution of the US


Take a look at the some real Mechanical Turk workers, and the experiment to find out more about them:

<img src="http://www.markiter.com/media/images/faces_of_mechanical_turk_small.jpg">

Enrique Andres Ferraro from the University of Liverpool did an extensive study into the characteristics of Mechanical Turk, and concluded the following: 

"We conducted an analysis of worker’s demographic characteristics with a sample of 1428 workers, which we contrasted and compared with the US Census of 2000. Our study reveals that The Amazon Mechanical Turk attracts workers from all segments of a population, largely in proportions matching the population from which they were drawn, and that the system represents a portal through which market research can be conducted easily and cost-effectively without incurring some of the sacrifices in validity inherent in captive panels or indirect online research."

You can see his full dissertation here

Voter Quality:
One fundamental question about Turk that raises concern is this: "How do you control the quality of the responses? 
Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima have answered this question. Exhibit A: Their Ten Thousand Cents project 

<img src="http://www.markiter.com/media/images/tenthousandcentsbill.jpg">

They broke a $100 bill into 100,000 segments and asked Mechanical Turk workers to draw their piece of the bill. With no validation on the submitted picture, its clear that a large majority of responders followed through with the requested task. While it is true that a few people that did not do their part, this experiment goes to show the normalization power of crowds. Despite the few exceptions, the sum of the overall community will point you down the right path. Applying this community to market research provides a powerful value proposition. 
This is no different from traditional market research. There are bound to be a few people that don't take the time to answer questions correctly, or randomly fill out surveys, but market research is still extremely valuable because removing the outliers gives you a clear picture on the general populations views and opinions. 

Finally, we put in several controls to minimize the risk of poor responses. We restrict participants to an approval rating of over 95% on Mechanical Turk. That is, participants in your campaign have a strong reputation for completing the task. In addition, we also restrict participants to only vote once, so they cannot skew the results.

A/B Split Testing with Markiter

<img src="http://www.markiter.com/media/images/mbp_top.png">

In any business, market research is essential to determine what marketing materials, products and general media presented to your audience is successful. Direct snail mailers would split test flyers they send out, even then the costs were outweighed by the benefits. 

The online business environment has made this type of testing substantially cheaper and easier. A/B testing has some great benefits, since it measures actual behavior. You can determine what resonates with the user in the real world, where as traditional surveys try indirectly asking respondents questions in order to try to make some hypothesis about what they would like. 

However, many online A/B tests have a few limitations. There needs to be a clear and measurable action such as a sale to determine success. Many systems like Google WebOptimizer tend to be primarily used by e-commerce sites to test sales pages. However, this is only a piece of the puzzle for most online sites. There are many other goals such as user retention, enjoyment and approval. 

Additionally traditional online A/B testing systems only work for fully implemented and running sites. In order to test a few variations, you must completely implement these different sites as well. It is difficult to expose customers to different experimental designs during the creation process. 

Markiter strives to achieve all the benefits of A/B split testing, at the same time reducing the limitations. By providing the user with a direct opportunity to compare two pieces of media Markiter is not limited by tracking through sales. Additionally, you do not need to have a fully implemented website in order to leverage A/B split testing through Markiter. You could compare anything at any stage of the design process - even a few pictures of sketches you created.