Hopefully you’ve been following along with this series, and you’re acquainted witht the Competitive (part 2), Humanistic (part 3) and Methodical (part 4) buyer modailities, and now we’ll discuss the last segment, the Spontaneous buyer. The second most prevalent type of buyer, the spontaneous buyer is optimistic and impulsive. They search for immediate satisfaction, and are more willing to take risks than other buyer types. They are less likely to need a lot of the granular details of a product, but that’s not to say they aren’t looking for reassurances as to why your product is the best fit for their needs.

In bricks-and-mortar stores, spontaneous buyers are the reason there are so many products at the checkout counter (ex. candy). The reason is spontaneous buyers don’t always know that they want something until they see it. While their is no checkout counter online, you can still appeal to this market online using the same techniques. Large signs, bright colors, bold text and messages focused on savings tend to work with the spontaneous buyer.

While they tend to make decisions much faster then the other buyer modalities, they are still interested in things like product comparisons and customer testimonials. They will still shop around for the best deal, but they will move much quicker, spending less time on the small print. For this reason, it is important to use bolding and bulleting, with bursts and other elements that call out important info. They are also interested on how quickly they can get the product. They live in the moment, and want immediate satisfaction. They respond well to “overnight delivery” or “immediate access” type messaging.

As with my other posts, I will refer to the Market Sense blog on appliedproductmarketing.com for some great tips on marketing to spontaneous buyer:

Appeal: Drawn to top-rated items that are immediately available.

Website: Present summary information in easy-to-read charts. Leverage expert opinions and reviews.

Information Needs: Answer questions on why your product is the best solution for their immediate problem.

Understand: Why they should choose you. They want to know you are the best they can get at this time.

Process: They want to get to the end point quickly. By presenting the executive summary of the information they need to know, you can bypass buying process stages.

Time: They are poised to act quickly. Don’t burden them with unnecessary details.

Risk: They are not confined by convention. They may suggest creative solutions to help achieve their goals.

Decision: Need you be ready to act as soon as they make their decision. If you aren’t ready, you can lose them.

Below is another example from the same project as the other posts, this landing page of course being focuses on the Spontaneous Buyer Modality (click to enlarge).

If you’ve followed the complete series, hopefully you will notice the changes and can identify the elements that were used to focus on the spontaneous buying behaviour, including:

1. Lifestyle imagery of a casual woman at a computer, implying ease of use.
2. Bold text stating “Fast. Easy. Free.”
3. Bold colors and a bright red for the CTA
4. Large graphics for the screenshots of the product, as well as short descriptions of what the product delivers.
5. Repetitive messaging of “Free”. Spontaneous buyers (particularly online) respond well to the term “Free” (more so than terms such “bonus” or “plus”, etc)

Once again, the product and benefits are the same for each example, but carefully tweaking and adjusting colors, text, fonts and imagery can go a long way in targeting specific buying behaviours. You can find countless articles on Landing Page Optimization that tell you to test colors, and layouts, and messaging (which I obviously agree), but what will help even more is if you can identify the type of buyer you customer is and change those elements to target your audience. It’s not just about testing the messaging, it’s about finding the best messaging for your customer. Landing page testing should not only give you learning about how to sell to your customer, but also ABOUT your customer. Through improving conversion (and even lowering conversion), you can start to determine what kind of audience your page is attracting, and hopefully be able to adjust your page to fit.

That’s it for this series on Buying Modality, but I hope to do more testing and designing on Buyer Modality, and hopefully share some of the examples and results here. In the meantime, I hope my readers have gained a little more insight into Buyer Modality (what I like to call CHuMS), and are able to use that to create better focused landing pages in order to improve your landing pages.

Of course, if you are looking for any help with your improving your landing page conversions or any online marketing efforts, please feel free to contact me for more information at contact@spitshine-design.com. Thanks for reading!

Anyway, on to the list:

Google Analytics

Ok, to be honest, Google Analytics is not new really new to me. I’ve used for years when I launched this site. It’s a great FREE tool for basic Web site analytics. However, I’ve only used it just for the basics… there is so much GA can do! In my current position, I’ve dived deeper into the GA toolset, and encourage any Web designer to do the same. While it may not be as robust as some of the high priced analytics tools out there, it’s still pretty powerful, and a great place to learn the basics to prepare you if you need tomake the jump to the it’s higher priced counterparts.

Google Website Optimizer

A “sister product” to Google Analytics (along you can run one with out the other) Google Website Optimizer is another FREE tool from Google that allows for A/B and multivariate testing on your Web site. As someone who has worked extensively in online marketing and landing page optimization, I’m very excited to dig deeper into this tool and really see what it’s capabilities are. In fact, I’ve just recently set up my first A/B test, and hope to share that process here in the near future.

Coda

While not free, Coda is a great (low priced) text editor with some nice features, and some pretty useful plugins. Like many designer/developers, I was a regular DreamWeaver user, but as my developer knowledge grew I found myself using the WYSIWYG features of DW less and less, and for the past year and a half, used them rarely, if ever, and using just the code view of DW. Even thought I knew pure text editors were out ther, I never made the switch. Then I was introduced to Coda, and watched by DW software collect dust… I don’t know enough about text editors to say Coda is the best, but I found it a good fit for my needs.

J-Query

If you’ve read my blog before, you obviously know I’m a big fan of Flash (and like to think I know a thing or two about it…) Well, jQuery is a javascript library that allows developers to create a lot of animated effects where you’ll think it was done in Flash. The most common use of jQuery seems to be image galleries and animated navigation, but, as I’m slowly learning, there are lots of cool things you can do with it. Amont the many great things about jQurey is it’s free, easy to learn (and implement), and there are literally thousands of resources and tutorials. Flash still has it’s uses, but you might find jQuery is more suitable for a lot of things you previously thought you could only do in Flash.

Bronto

While it may not be the most robust and well-known email marketing software program out there, if you’re in need of an email marketing package, I strongly suggest checking out Bronto. Very easy to set up and use, and with some great tracking and reporting tools, I look forward to every email marketing campaign I send.

FogBugz

While it may have a funny name (that actually a struggle for some people to get used to saying…) FogBugz is a great multi-user project tracking tool with some great features to allow different users to easily communicate with each other on projects. I will say, I’m not sure if it’s the best fit for larger companies, but for smaller businesses with a lot of smaller projects that still need multiple user involvement, FogBugz is a great tool. Simple search functions to see where jobs are and who they are with, and nice email integration for updates and notifications, if you’re in the market for a tool to improve communication with your production team, definitely check out FogBugz.

That’s it. Six new (to me) tools for online design that I have found very helpful the last 6 months or so. As mentioned, I hope to put some more information about all of these tools (and others) on the blog soon, so if you’re interested in any of them, please check back.

Thanks for reading!

Some of the ones that I’ve used include:

kuler Create is a nice tool to from Adobe that helps create color themes. You can select your own colors and see what are complimentary colors, or you can create custom themes (and browse user submitted custom themes) to see how colors look when used together. Neat little tool.

FontStruct is a neat little tool by font retailer FontShop for creating, editing and sharing fonts. While the tool is very user intuitive and pretty powerful for a free access application, creating a full font family is still a long, tedious job. But, if you have a nice font style in mind that you want to create, a great tool to allow you to do it.

Dummy Text Generator is an extremely useful tool (especially when doing print mockups or proof of concepts) that creates dummy text (i.e. “lorem ipsum plorem”) for placement in mockups. It allows you to select a number of words or characters as well as the number of paragraphs to create a simple block of copy. Great for comping jobs when you don’t have final writing. It also allows you to go back to a writer with information about how much copy is needed for a job.

I’ll have to explore some of the other listed resources when I have more time, but I’ve found some great stuff from on SixRevisions.com, so I trust that this is another great list.

Level: This is a beginner lesson, but I will assume that the reader is familiar with the basic use of the Flash software including stage, timeline, drawing tools, property window, etc.

Version: I will be using Flash CS3 and AS2 (athough tut is compatible with earlier versions of Flash) and instructions are for the Mac. Windows users would use the PC counterparts for specific instructions on Flash Menu/Shortcut instuctions.

Description: The fifth part of a Flash tutorial on making a Flash game similar to the old BreakOut game for Atari. In previous parts, we created the movement for the paddle and the ball, set up the bricks and the script for collisions, added scores to our Flash game, and in our last tutorial, we set it up to go to a “You Win” screen. In this tutorial, we will set up a players “lives”, as well as what will happen when the player runs out of lives.

Demo:

(Refresh page if you don’t see the ball animation)

Let’s get started!

Let’s open up our Flash files from Part 4 of this game tutorial. While it’s not necessary, you may want to do a “Save As” and give your document a new name (“breakthru_game5.fla”). The reason you may want to do this is it might make it easier to review each part of the Flash tutorial later.

In our last tutorial, we set our Flash game to go to a new frame when the player “wins” the game (or clears the board). Now, we want our Flash movie to change if the player “loses” the game. By “losing” the game, we simply mean the player has run out of “lives” (or balls). So, the first thing we need to do is set up some new text boxes to display our players lives. This is done similarly to how we set up the score text in Part 3 of this Flash tutorial series. In fact, to get started, we are going to do a copy/paste of the text we set up.

Click on frame 1 of our main timeline (Scene 1), and be sure your “score text” label is not locked. On the stage, select both the static text box (where it says “Score”) and the dynamic text box (the box with the dotted line around it) (Fig. 1). Tip: It may be easier to select these if you lock all the other layers except your “score text” layer.

Choose “Edit > Copy” (command-C) to add these items to the clipboard. Add a new layer above your “score text” layer and name your new layer “Player lives”. Click on frame 1 of your new layer and choose “Edit > Paste” (command-V) to paste a copy of your text boxed to the stage. Position these boxes at the bottom right corner of the stage, aligned with your score text boxes. Double click on the “Score” text on the right side of the stage, and type the word “Lives”. Now, click on the dynamic text box next to the “Lives” text and in the Properties Panel (“Window > Properties > Properties” or command-F3) change the “var” text field to say “lives” (Fig 2). Last step is to click on frame 2 of our “Player Lives” layer, and right-click (option-click) and choose “Remove Frames” from the menu flyout.

We now have our Player Lives text boxes ready, so now we have to add the code that will dynamically change when our paddle (player) misses the ball (player life). On our main timeline, click on frame 1 of the “actions” layer, open the Actions Panel (Windows > Actions or alt-F9) and add the following code below the existing code:

var lives = 5;

This, as you probably could guess, sets our dynamic text box with the var name of “lives” to display he number 5, where 5 is the number of chances the player has to drop the ball before losing the game.

Now that we assigned a number of player lives, we need to add some script that tells Flash to take away a life when the player misses the ball. On our stage, select the white circle (ball). You’ll remember in Part 1 of our Flash game tutorial we set added some script that reset our ball if the player missed the ball. In that same section of code (the if statement towards the bottom), we need to add some additional code to tell Flash to deduct a number from our “Lives” text box. Add the bold, blue code below to your existing code (green code should have been added in part 1):

if (this._y > 300) {
_root.lives -= 1;
if (_root.lives == 0) {
_root.play();
}
_x = 150;
_y = 100;

dir = Math.round(Math.random() * 1);
speed = 10;
if (dir == 1) {
var Ang = 45;
} else {
var Ang = 135;
}
xspeed = speed * Math.cos((Ang) * Math.PI / 180);
yspeed = speed * Math.sin((Ang) * Math.PI / 180);
}
}

Explanation of the new code:

if (this._y > 300) {
_root.lives -= 1;

If our ball y coordinate is greater than 300 (goes below the paddle), subtract our “lives” by 1.

if (_root.lives == 0) {
_root.play();
}

If our “lives” is equal to 0 (meaning we have no lives left), then play our main timeline.

Go ahead and test your movie. On start, you should see that you have “5″ lives. Each time you miss a ball, you should see your lives go down by 1 number. If your lives goes all the way to 0, you should see frame 2 of your main timeline come up… but wait, it still says “You Win…”. Well, we don’t want it to say that unless we clear the board, so we need to make it say something other than that if we lose, right? Well, luckily Flash makes it pretty easy to do that.

—- ads by google —-

Click on frame 2 of the “You Win” layer in your Flash file. Select the “Congratulations…” text box, and in the properties panel, change the drop down to “Dynamic Text” and in the “Var” text field give it the name “gameOver”. You’ll notice that when you change the text box to “Dynamic Text”, the actual text in your box did not change. That’s because you can input text to a dynamic text box in Flash and have it display in your movie, but because it’s “dynamic” you can modify it using ActionScript code. So, since if the player wins, we want this text to read “Congratulations…” we will leave this. But, if the Player loses, we need it to say something else. We’ll add that code now.

Click on frame 2 of your “actions” layer, open your Actions Panel and add the following code below the existing code:

if (_root.lives == 0) {
gameOver = “<p align=’center’>Sorry, you lose! <br><br>Your Final Score Is:</p>”;
}

What this says is if our player lives is equal to zero, our dynamic text box should insert the text between the quotation marks. But hold on a minute… what’s with all the extra text here? Well, if your familiar with HTML code, you should recognize this as HTML markup language. That’s right, Flash can render HTML text in a dynamic text field! But, for this to happen, we need to tell our text box to render HTML code.

Click on frame 2 of the “You Win” layer, and select the top dynamic text box. In the Properties Panel, click on the “Render Text as HTML” button (the button with the angle brackets (<>) on it (Fig 3).

That’s it! I must say our game is looking pretty good right now, don’t you agree? We have our basic challenge of bouncing a ball into multiple bricks, we can keep score, and now we only have a certain amount of chances in order to accomplish our goal. Pretty cool. While this game seems pretty complete, there’s so much more we can do to this game, including adding a start screen, adding additional levels and making different skill levels. Study up on these tutorials, and hopefully you can figure out how to do some of these things yourself, but if not, check back soon as I plan to cover all of these steps in future tutorials!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you were able to follow along and create your own Flash game, and I also hope that they have given you a nice little primer for Flash game development. Good luck and don’t forget to check back soon to expand on our Flash Breakout Game!

Source files (Flash 8): Flash Tutorial: Breakthru Flash Game Part 5

So what do I mean by “sort of”? Well, I say “sort of” because I just put up a handful of design projects, definitely not the full scope of my graphic design portfolio, or all of my Web design and Flash development projects.

I still have quite a few items that I’d like to get up there, and I fully intend to, very soon in fact. Which is why I left the launch date of March 2008 (notice, I wasn’t specific as to what day in March…). But at least there’s enough up there to start to get my work seen by others.

I’ve really been enjoying looking at some of my older projects, even the student work that I’ve done, and see the good (and unfortunately not-so-good) work that I’ve done. I’ve seen some real progression in my work. I have even posted some graphic design projects from college, so check out the portfolio and see if you can see any improvement. I plan to post some more of my “older” work soon, as well as some new stuff I haven’t even finished yet, so check back soon for updates. And of course there are the design tutorials that I’ve been planning on doing, so hopefully I can get those up soon too.

I also say “sort of”, because this being a one-man show (in my spare time to boot), there are definitely some kinks to be worked out. But at least with things live, I can get things checked out, and hopefully have some others take a look and catch things I might have missed by staring at it too long. So check things out, and feel free to comment (constructive criticism is always welcome) and let me know what you think.