The Stairwell

If a picture aspires to be worth a thousand words, then a pictogram wants only to replace about 4.

We've developed an array of icon libraries for clients over the years, so we enjoy the challenge of saying a lot with a little visual design. An icon or pictogram must be: descriptive, clear, distinguishable, memorable and simple. It must draw upon the universal visual cues encountered every day by every person on the planet to be effective. Even a library of 'smiley-faced' emoticons must explore and represent universally recognized facial expressions so the end-viewer is never confused about their meaning. This is far more challenging than it at first appears and designers who deal in this craft for public transportation, highway systems, street markers and public buildings (and, oh yeah, web applications!) deserve a lot of credit for minimizing the chaos of modern living.

PingMag.com, an expatriate community web site based in Tokyo published a little while back a great blog post about the nature and value of pictograms to foreigners (and other illiterati) navigating that foreign landscape. My favorite is the one at left here - not only does it warn of oncoming bicycle traffic, but it also appears to have inadvertently depicted a 'pickpocket' in the act. To view the entire blog, click here.

Billups Design is proud to be a Chicago agency. We love our city. So from time to time we like to report on what's going on around town.

The newest sport in Chicago these days is pontificating on Chicago's chances for winning the Olympics in 2016. Observers point out everything that occurs in the city as being good or bad for its Olympic hopes: the marathon, crime statistics, skyscrapers lit up to say '2016', Mayor Daley's latest tax hikes, etc. But there might be a channel that Olympic Committee members are checking out that matters more: Chicago blogs.

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"It's all about the follow up."

As a group servicing large e-commerce accounts, we've spent years working on ways to minimize abandoned shopping carts for our clients. We developed more streamlined information flow, posted clear order and shipping policies, special promos for online purchases and tried to minimize the number of clicks necessary to finish the order, among many other things. But the truth is, no one can ever get cart abandonment to a net zero. It's human to err, and shoppers are human.

Reasons for dropping a purchase aren't always a product of frustration with the site. Perhaps they ran out of free time before finishing the purchase, or needed to check a credit card balance first, were interrupted by kids, etc. So the opportunity isn't in negating those behaviors, but in following up after they've occurred in order to convert the dropped purchase.

This is the area where innovative marketing can have the greatest impact on converting dropped items. A great article put out recently by The e-tailing Group, entitled, 'Avoiding Cart Abandonment', (November 7) addresses the focus online-retailers should be placing on resurrecting online transactions that were dropped, and thus improving overall sales. They note that according their latest research only 1 in 10 e-commerce sites follows up a dropped shopping cart transaction with an email reminding the customer about the item and a chance to buy it again. Of those who do, the average time elapsed was 6 days. Too long.

Some sites which do, and have been, investing research into the area of maximizing returns to dropped carts include smartbargains.com, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, drugstore.com, Ebay and Amazon.com (usual suspects) and 1800flowers.com. They use various strategies to bring the buyer back to the dropped item in the email, including shipping specials, personal greetings, reduced prices on the item, an image of the product, and clear policies on when a product will be cleared from the site.

We expect to be doing more work in this area in 2008 and we are convinced it will improve even further our clients' online sales. If you want a copy of the article, send me an email and i can forward you a text version (on behalf of e-tailing.com).

But you can't gift this one. It's still too early, as the idea is only in concept stage, but it demanded to be shown to Stairwell readers. Santa, can I have this?

http://abductionlamp.com/