I heard on the radio this morning that “billions have been lost over the last year through people updating their statuses rather than working”. I’ve heard similar things before and frankly I don’t agree.

A couple of years ago I was asked by Melcrum Publishing to write something about the use social networking sites by employees and I suspect this debate will carry on for years. The simple and credible sounding argument is this: If people are spending time on social networks instead of working, the business is not getting any value from that employee for that time.

Strictly … empirically … it’s true. But it ignores the bigger picture of getting more long term value from your employees by creating more engaging working environments. The fact that jobs and even departments for employee engagement exist is testament to the need for engaging employees. Research shows that money doesn’t motivate in the long term. Being an engaged employee in an agreeable working environment does. Some years ago, studies showed that allowing access to evil employee-time-stealing sites like Hotmail and Yahoo! actually lead to a small increase in productivity in some areas. It was found that, on the understanding that access was only allowed during breaks, people did exactly that – and while they remained at their desks, checking on their evil productivity-leaching webmail, they actually continued to do more work.

Ok, maybe not scientific, but I think the real issue is a management issue: If your employees are spending too much time networking then either you should see their work suffer and this can be addressed, or they just haven’t got enough work.

I once worked at <a global brand that shall remain nameless> that had had all the DVD drives removed from the desktops that staff were issued with. When I asked to borrow the department’s DVD player (oh yes), it was explained to me that this was a security issue (even if staff were using USB sticks to take work home with them), but more importantly to prevent people watching films when they should be working. You’d think you’d notice someone spending two hours staring at their screen, earphones in, and smirking at the funny bits and generally not doing any work, but apparently not. It only made me wonder why my bag wasn’t checked for books in case I might be reading novels at my desk instead of working.

There are reasons (apart from basic human rights) why we no longer work in Dickensian penury, silently seated at desks, fearing the fines and corporal punishment meted out by our employees. Allow people their email, their quick bit of networking, their texts (that’s phones as well as books), their chats over the photocopier and expect them to do the work that needs to be done. If they’re wasting time sort them out or make sure they’ve got enough work to do.

If you employee adults, treat them like adults and you’ll get a grown up attitude to work.

The Long Dog.

PS – This doesn’t count as social networking … this is work.

In which the Long Dog praises the extinction of animated webpages, only to find there are still monsters in the deep.

In the beginning there was black courier on a grey screen. Then came JavaScript and Flash and the grey wastes of the internet burst into moving colourful landscapes. Unusable, inaccessible and frankly downright irritating landscapes, but nonetheless the animated interface was born.

Before people were thinking about why they creating websites, back in my early days they mostly thought about how cool their site could be. Somewhere back in the late 90s I had this conversation:

Long Dog: So, tell me about this new customer extranet your manager has asked me to design for you…?

Marketeer: Well, if we could have these three triangles, like in the new logo, sort of spinning out of infinity towards you, out of the screen, sort of vwoosh! and be there for people to click on, yeah?

Long Dog: I’m sure we can do that, but let’s talk about the guts of the site first: What’s this product and why are customers logging in to an extranet?

Marketeer: If they could, like, spin in – the triangles – and sort of hover, then people could click on them to get into the site.

Long Dog: Ok … yes … but let’s think about the content and the structure – what’s this site ‘for’?

Marketeer: [pause] Can we do the triangles…?

Sound FX: Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! [sound of reloading] Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!…

Fade to black. End scene.

To be fair, I sent him back to his manager with a list of questions and never saw him again. But ‘the triangles’ are burnt into my memory.

Anyway … with the .com bubble bursting and businesses asking awkward questions about ROI for websites, suddenly people got interested in usability and even user experience. Now, it’s nice to think that the internet’s design dark age is a comically naive part of the industry’s necessary evolution, but I’m both horrified and masochistically pleased to say that there are still plenty of animated interfaces and home pages out there – and their owners still haven’t got the joke.

Here’s three favourite baddies and then one actual goodie that breaks all the usability rules and gets away with it.

Just Like Sugar
My all time favourite. Oh yes. Now, this product may be a perfectly good artificial sweetener, but what has happened here? Apart from the seemingly unending and inescapable flashing, moving, zooming art-vomit that is repeatedly hurled at the screen, there’s fuzzy audio, hidden ‘skip intro’ links and well … just check it out for yourself. Really – it needs to be seen to be believed. And then try the ‘real’ homepage – really … you’ve got to see this (thanks to @AnalitycsGirl for sending this in).

WARNING: Contains loud audio and flashing imagery.
Tip(1): You may need to refresh the page up to four times to get it to load in its true majesty
Tip(2): ‘Skip intro’ is in the footer links, below the fold on most browsers, should you wish to move foolishly attempt to escape the onslaught.
Site: http://www.justlikesugarinc.com

Leo Burnett
Yes it’s beautiful. Yes it’s a clever piece of animation and interaction, but come on Leo Burnett, shouldn’t you know better? The fixed navigation at the bottom of the screen feels like an apology for the whizzy stuff, unable to show the site’s navigation choices all on the screen at the same time – something that should have hinted that if it needs propping up, it doesn’t work. Maybe that’s why this agency were recruiting digital consultants a couple of years back to train up their offices in user experience. While this is a masterpiece of design, making it difficult for people to click on links through to your content and laying an automatically playing voiceover is going to get your site back buttoned quicker than a poultry farmer accidentally landing on a site that isn’t about the same sort of large male chickens he expected.

Tip: Be quick with your clicks, as the navigation actively drifts away from your mouse pointer. Go figure.
Site: http://www.leoburnett.com

Hema
Seeing the Dutch homewares company’s home page first off I was really impressed. Fun, brilliantly executed and what a great way to get people to see your wide range of products. But then I tried to click through to a product to find out what happened next. Ah. You’d have thought that for the money they must have spent, they could forked out a few extra Euros to make the products clickable? Apparently not. So Hema – what are you selling, flash movies or homewares? A quick check shows me that the navigation and other links aren’t clickable either and the site takes away your control of what part of the screen you’re looking at. Um…? Beautiful, but for a site that describes itself as an “online winkelen” (“online shop / store”) it fails to deliver actual value to the user or, ultimately, the business (thanks to Simona Ecker-Zach for sending this in).

Tip: Let the site load and don’t touch anything – just wait a little and watch the pretty things happen.
Site: http://producten.hema.nl

Poisson Rouge
Now this is lovely. Remove all labelling, text navigation, add automatic audio, provide no clues as to what’s clickable and what’s not and you’d normally get a dog’s dinner of an impenetrable, unusable, inaccessible visual mugging. But follow these rules for a entertaining, educational site for early and pre-school kids and you get a masterpiece of exploration, rich interaction and fun, multilingual learning. There are no rules here. Just go, play and figure out what you’ve got to do. Who knows, you might improve your mental arithmetic, shape recognition, or even learn a few words in French, Greek or even Chinese. They reinforce Jared Spools usability mantra “it depends” and come up with something really good.

Tip: Just play.
Site: http://www.poissonrouge.com

Summary
Animations are great to show actual movement or to provide visual cues, or just for plain entertainment, but please, please … PLEASE … fit animation form to function, as eye candy doesn’t increase profit.

The Long Dog

It is very difficult to say the phrase “Have you seen anyone in an orange hat” without sounding like you’re either drunk or undergoing elocution lessons. The orange hats idea was something I came up with in university, where between the two options above it was unlikely I was undertaking elocution lessons at the time.

It works like this: In our lifetime we must see millions of people’s faces but never consciously remember them. Their physiognomy registered on some deep and inaccessible part of our brains, but unless there was a good reason to remember them, they were stored in the cerebral equivalent of the draw we all have, filled with chalk, Ping-Pong balls and unidentifiable keys. Wouldn’t it be interesting if somehow it were possible to get everyone who we had ‘perceived’ to wear an orange boater when in our field of vision and, on that hat, have a label saying where and when it was we’d seen them? Just think how many orange hats we’d start to see springing up around the place – just for us.

I’d worked out that this could be done through magic – not parlour tricks or acts of illusion, but actual, proper physics ignoring real magic. Sadly, I’ve still yet to work out how to bend the rules of reality, so instead this has become my fantasy augmented reality app.

For those that don’t know, augmented reality is a way of viewing the real world with contextual information added and viewed through a screen or heads up display systems (HUD). These were characterised in films like Terminator where Arnie’s baddy cyborg could view the world around him with additional information added to his field of vision (gun types, potential threat levels from random bikers – that sort of thing), but these days it’s more mundanely applied to adding things like competitor price details and nearest other vendors, when viewing bar codes or recognisable objects on the screen of a smartphone.

Although it’s still relatively new, the value of augmented reality is to add contextual information quickly sucked from remote data sources and present it in easy to understand ways alongside the object itself rather than searching the web and doing a manual comparison or depending on our own knowledge to phrase an enquiry, where augmented reality can supply new information we couldn’t have known to ask about. My (then) four year old son was also kept amused by my friend’s iPhone as he used its camera to scan a room where only through the magic (there it is again) of the device he could see fairies floating around as if this really were a true-seeing device (you have to keep up with the fairies when they float out of view) and zapped them.

So … have you seen anyone in an orange hat? Sadly, there is still a certain amount of magic necessary for this application to work – either that or some very sophisticated face recognition software and keeping an iPhone strapped to my forehead to record all that I might perceive.

Still, any very clever and very bored software geniuses out there are welcome to have a crack at it – just remember your old Long Dog would love to see the results and know just how many people DO wear orange hats, around the world.

The Augmented and Orange Hatted Long Dog

Internet banking – when good experience goes bad.

“Improvement means deterioration” – Hutber’s law

This is supposed to be a case study, but as I’ve been a customer of this bank for some years, a certain amount of disappointment is bound to creep in. So, before I begin the rant, the main messages here are:

• An inconsistent user experience confuses users and may cause them to abandon their activity and seek alternatives
• Customers don’t care how your business is organised and want the different areas to behave similarly within the mental model your brand has created
• Adding greater levels of complexity may help security, but will also stop people from using your service
• Your competitor is only too happy to poach your disgruntled customers

I joined the UK’s Co-operative Bank because it has an ethical investment philosophy. Yup, I can be an armchair eco warrior and tut at all the awful things going on in the world, safe in the knowledge that my money doesn’t finance any of them.  But maintaining customers’ brand loyalty is a fickle thing when the user experience of online banking goes down the biodegradable compost toilet.

As a user experience professional, there are always irritations with websites and I just have to bite my tongue because (a) sometimes they’re not THAT bad and (b) they’re not my client. The Co-Op’s personal internet banking service has been fine – even ‘good’. But like a number of banks they’ve adopted the use of a card reader device for making online payments. If you’ve never used one it’s the size of a pocket calculator, you insert your debit card, enter your PIN, enter the code the website’s given you, and then enter the code it gives you, back into the original website. So that’s three codes, a card and a card reader. Some banks use this when a customer sets up a payment to a new recipient, but the Co-Op requires it for any payment beyond shuffling money between your own savings accounts.

What do other customers think about the card reader?

@smorgasbord Preposterous. Fails to consider context eg making a quick payment during lunch hour will require a card reader left at home.

@Profb I’ve seen said handheld from Barclays and would leave the bank if they made me use one.

@gzj I think its s**t & negates the whole point of online banking in the first place. Tell them to stop over-complicating everything!

@misslaula They suck! That is all.

Apart from breaking the user’s journey on the site to include offline devices and offline interaction, the level of total security needed before I can make a payment becomes overbearing, especially when compared with that needed to make a payment from the Co-Op’s internet business banking.

Personal: Sort code; account number; first randomly selected digit from security code; second randomly selected digit from security code; random piece of personal security information; PIN into card reader; input code into card reader;  output code from card reader. Total = 8

Business: User name; password. Total = 2.

As @smorgasbord also points out above, whereas I used to quickly do my banking wherever I was, I now need to carry the card reader around – and I’m definitely not going to use it in a client’s office. The personal result of this means I’ve missed another company’s credit card payment, been charged, ramped up more debt and probably received a black mark on my credit record.

Continuing in my online/offline theme, as the user experience becomes the brand experience, after my third phone complaint about the compulsory use of the card reader my promised 24 hour call back to hear my concerns came 48 hours later and, like the card reader,  while I was at work, so couldn’t answer and never got to speak to anyone.

If this is about creating a secure online banking environment rather than belt, braces, pegs, staples and helium balloons attached by strings to trousers in an effort to keep them up, surely the bankers are clever enough to work out a more elegant solution? Hmmm … maybe history tells us not and maybe they should employ some good user experience consultancy (I know I’ve got a few choice words for the industry).

So … Nationwide … I understand you don’t use these card readers … tell me about your online services…

The Long Dog

I firmly believe the true user’s / customer’s / audience’s / whatever’s experience is that of ‘the big picture’ – or at least that the big picture has a direct impact on a user’s experience. Just because it’s a Norwegian Blue with beautiful plumage doesn’t make up for the fact the parrot is dead. Clear as mud? Thought so.

The user experience (UX) isn’t just about websites. Working out whether the buttons are labelled correctly or the journey through the content is smooth and direct is core to interaction design (IXD) but only part of the UX big picture.

Ok. If you’re booking flights on a budget airline’s website your tolerance for mistakes or a lumpy UX is going to be much higher than for booking a week’s sojourn on The Orient Express. Why? Because you’re human and your expectations of the website performance are based on your perception of the brand. The budget airline possibly spending five times more than the luxury travel option on their website means nothing – budget airlines are acceptably rubbish while the Orient Express is luxury, sophistication and service second to none. End of story.

An agency once commissioned me to review the customer experience of the top five UK multichannel retailers – organisations who sell across multiple channels – in this case online, in-store, catalogue and phone.

I’ve often heard someone isn’t ‘comparing apples with apples’, in other words unfairly comparing different things, but that’s exactly what I was asked to do here. I might as well have been trying to compare apples with bicycles. I had no idea how to do it so I invented a way. As a starting point I used Jakob ‘self styled usability guru’ Nielsen’s ten general principles for user interface design and bent them to my will – or rather converted them to blend across all channels, applying a simple five point measurement:

1. No problems
2. Cosmetic problem only
3. Minor problem – low priority fix
4. Major problem – high priority fix
5. Catastrophic problem – imperative fix

It’s pretty dull stuff, so you can check the list out as an excel table here, but definitely worth a look if you’re trying to work out how to compare dissimilar parts of the big picture experience. The thing to understand is that while you’re only thinking about a website, your user arrives with a lot of baggage:

• The brand. Not just logos and colours – what doest the target audience expect from the brand and how do they expect to interact with it?
• Have users had experience with physical products or services? This will influence their expectations of how the site will behave
• Communications: This is huge. Understand how the audience is communicated with. How will this affect users’ entry points to the site, what they expect to find when they get there, who the comms has been targeted at and … well … just make sure comms and your work are on the same page
• Make the brand and user experience seamless
• Objectively test with real users – they’ll give you honest and surprising feedback that is correct, beyond your best and most educated guesses

The eventual report I wrote for that agency was 150 pages long (130 longer than they first imagined – but I did tell them it would be tricky) so I ‘m not going into any more detail here. Happy, as always to answer questions and reply to comments, but this little lot of heuristics should get you thinking.

Think big picture. Think … holistic experience (dude).

The Long Dog

Make it easy on yourself, save time and show the client something inexpensive. Sound good? Then lo-fi prototyping is the way to go. To be honest, “lo-fi prototyping” is a very fancy way of saying start with rough sketches before putting effort and client’s expense into beautiful high quality prototypes or wireframes.

I’m not going to teach you to suck eggs, as by this point, you should be able to use pens and paper but there are a few tricks that’ll make things work for you:

• If you can’t draw, make your concepts simple and use them as presentation aids or aide-mémoire rather than standalone documents
• If you can draw, don’t get drawn into the trap of spending just as much time producing things of true beauty that a client will want to take a red pen to (teacher style)
• Unless you’re producing a creative concept that needs lots of colour, keep it to monochrome with a few highlights – it’s quicker and clearer
• Aim for simplicity and clarity: If your sketch is getting complicated, it might be time to rethink what you’re trying to communicate, or that you might actually need to do some digitally produced pieces
• Get the client involved. If you can run a workshop where the client helps draw or modify sketches they’ll articulate more – and love you more too
• Lo-fi is quick, easy and – from a client’s perspective – cheap. Never underestimate the power of inexpensive in these financially strained times.

As well as sketches for presenting ideas, like the image on the right showing initial lo-fi andeventual funtional wireframe, I’ve also found lo-fi techniques excellent for experimenting with different interaction designs. And in English, what I mean is that if I’m trying to work out how buttons, drop downs and other ‘things that do things’ work on a webpage (before handing it over to a terribly clever techie to actually make happen), bits of paper and rough sketches do very for trying out ideas.

But…

For my favourite lo-fi design and workshop tool is Magic Whiteboard. Not one of those electronic smart boards, but flipchart sized sheets of wipe-clean plastic film that stick to just about any surface, by static. Trying to work out how to fit a lot of information into a few screens, brought about a series of sketches that I photographed and plopped onto PowerPoint to make a presentation flick book. And I can tell you, demo-ing these, with a colleague doing the page down, while I ‘clicked’ on the radio buttons and drop downs on the screens makes for quick and fun prototyping. Open the 350kb PPT and page and downin slideshow mode to see what I mean.

Now got get some of your own fat pens and get scribbling.

The Long Dog.

Part 1: In which a snowy day and poor mobile website usability result in near truancy.
Following 6^th January ‘s closure of my five year old son’s school because of bad weather, the next morning, as instructed, I checked the website of WessexFM, our local radio station, to see if the school was open or closed.

Avoiding waking the household and balancing the possibility of extra sleep against the anticipation of a bored boy bouncing off the walls while I worked, I used my phone to check their site. On a page clearly titled “School closures” I found my son’s school listed. Not to mistake yesterday’s information as today’s I checked at 07.30, 07.45, 08.00, 08.30, even 08.45 and reckoned that was pretty good responsible parental checking.

Those familiar with ‘having a Daddy look’ will not be surprised that following a late morning call from the school I checked the main website on my computer where the ‘open/closed’ status was instantly visible on the right of the screen and my son was hurriedly dispatched to school.

As you can see from the image, there’s no clue there was a status off the mobile screen to the right, so I’d taken this to mean that the school was still closed. Damn, bugger and bumhandles.End of part 1.

Bestselling author and self-styled ‘usability guru’ Jakob Nielsen wrote that the mobile web of 2009 was like the desktop web of 1998. With web enabled mobile devices becoming more available to mainstream consumers, users expect the same service from websites on their phones as they do from their desktops. When they don’t get it they’re just as likely to lend credence to the adage that “your competitor is only a back button away”.

Generation Y’ers who’ve never known life without the internet don’t see why mobile sites can’t be as good as desktop sites – after all, it’s Mum and Dad who are in offices or staying in, worrying about their children all evening, who’ve got time to spend sitting at desktops. This is the generation whose fear-mongered parents have bought their little darlings phones. While they’ve done it to offer late night taxi services to preserve their own sanity as well as their offspring’s safety, the web generation are using these devices to access web on the move (or at least from street corners and secret park-based cider dens). The time has run out for organisations to ‘get round to sorting out their websites’ and now the race is on to make sure they’re mobile accessible as well.

Back to the story…

Part 2: Where feedback is acknowledged and everyone lives happily ever after.
In attempt to keep my son and heir’s school record unblemished I emailed his teacher with the details of my mistake and the promise to contact the wicked WessexFM and tell them of their hanus crime. Which I did, fully expecting the usual silence as my complaint fell spinning into a void of corporate complaisance. I was pleasantly alarmed when the Station Manager himself emailed me this:

“I have spoken to our web team and here is their reply…………

‘We’ve had a look at this and agree it could be interpreted incorrectly on a small device and have made a few changes…

• The “Closures” page now reads “School Status”
• We’ve added a line of text to the page highlighting that the page is offering both “Open” and “Closed” information
• On the main schools status we’ve added a filter so only open/closed schools can be viewed

These updates are in place now and will hopefully make it clear for anyone using a mobile to look at the pages.’

I sincerely hope that your son doesn’t incur a truancy mark as it is clear that this was an innocent mistake.”

How quick was that!??! Checking the emails I can tell you:  Four hours. Not only did they willingly accept user feedback, but made simple changes that improved the whole user experience. It’s these little tweaks that remind me of the article “How one button cost a website $300 million”. End of Part 2.

And the morals of this story?

• Explain it’s you that messed up and your son doesn’t get into trouble with his teacher
• Mobile website usability is still poor.
• Users: Don’t trust sites browsed on your mobiles unless you know you’re using the proper mobile version.
• Designers and developers: Make sure you use ‘liquid layouts’  so that they expand and contract to fill the size of the user’s browser; don’t depend on mobile device’s scroll bars to appear (they don’t always); detect if users are accessing the site through a mobile and present the information appropriately.
• User test and amend your work – Repeat until it works properly.
• And lastly … a round of applause for WessexFM, for listening to a concerned father / listener / user and being smart and agile enough to make changes to support your website’s users. Bravo!

The (mobile) Long Dog

“Expert opinion comes highly priced and chiefly ignored” – The Long Dog 2009

On and off, I’ve been freelancing for a decade. In that time I’ve had some great clients and recruiters … and some not so great. So here are some observations and tips from my world.

Getting the gig – standing out from the recruiting hopefuls crowd.
Recruiters see hundreds of CVs (résumés) a week, so why are you special? Sadly most recruiters don’t care if you live or die (unless you can make them money). They also copy/paste your details into a database and whoever’s CV meets whatever they’re searching for gets the gig. Just like Google. Best bit of job application advice I got was from Nick at Zebrapeople – apply SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to my CV. What are the words and phrases recruiters searching for? ‘Experienced and accomplished consultant’? Or ‘IA,  UXD, interaction designer with 5 years experience’ / “Internal communications professional specialising in intranet and online communications”?

I’ve also asked previous clients to provide recommendations on my Linked In profile. When I send my CV to new recruiter or client, I also send a separate document with these recommendations copy/pasted in. Know what? They read them ever time and don’t have to be bothered to click on links to websites.

Expectations: How much should you lie to your clients?
‘Not at all’ is the simple answer.  Get found out – you get fired and a bullet hole in your reputation. “Under promise and over achieve” is a maxim I’ve often heard. People are constantly surprised by your ability to cough up the goods faster than was imagined. It works fine. Until, that is, some smart arse promises more and still delivers. And yes, I’ve been that smart arse. What did it get me? Extensions to a contract that lasted nearly 18 months. Nice.

Just be realistic, make sure you can deliver what you promise, actually deliver it and when it’s needed put some extra work in. But make sure your client realises this. When I was 20 I worked in a department store, on the management training scheme *snore*. I was a little too modest (no, really) and my manager / mentor would say “When you’ve done something  good tell me! If you don’t tell me, someone else will show me what they’ve done and why should I think you’re any better?”. Doesn’t mean show off, just make sure people realise when you’ve done something good for them and they’ll appreciate it.

Win battles, don’t fight wars.
If you’re a freelancer or consultant, you’re not the Director in charge. You’re paid to provide expert knowledge and to argue the case if necessary. If your client chooses to ignore your advice because they know better (and a lot think they do), then you’ll have to decided whether to fight your corner or let them send in the Light Brigade and see what happens. I’ve had to present my feeling on a  real shocker of a project. I wrote a polite, but honest one page report which was presented to the board, considered and then ignored. I wasn’t happy, but there’s a point where your opinion becomes a problem. May I refer you to the recent sacking of drugs advisor to the UK government because of his unpopular opinion? Ok … so … find the balance between your integrity and your desire for the continuation of employment and don’t let pride get in the way.  Or move on – that’s the joy of freelancing.

Be nice: People like nice people … and re-employ them
I had an odd conversation with a colleague once who angrily complained that “it seems to be the people who are all smiles and ‘nicey nicey’ who get listened to round here”. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that despite his academic qualifications and that he’d run his own 2 man agency, he was aggressive in meetings and no one was listening to what he said because they were too busy worrying about him.

We all like nice people so, without being fake, be nice. It’ll make it easier for you to communicate with your client and if something goes bad, they’ll see you as a human being, not just a resource. Being nice – much underrated. Just think: Who would you prefer to be working with?

The rest? Work it out for yourself – that’s why you get write “experienced” on your applciations.

The Long Dog

From the fairy tales of our earliest years to the soap operas, newspapers and box office hits of our maturity, we humans love stories. But it’s not just about adventure and a happy ending. Stories are a medium through which we communicate and mentally store information in a handy recall framework of associated items.

“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact”. Robert McKee, screenwriter.

It’s easy to dismiss storytelling as something for kids and I wouldn’t recommend starting your corporate presentation with ‘Once upon a time there was a brave little CEO…” but as a technique for engaging audiences and conveying information it’s as good today as it was thousands of years ago.

The fact stories follow a narrative, building up layers of information and associated items (first this happened, then as a result that happened) helps us create a linear mnemonic – one that photographic memory performers use to connect and remember huge lists of seemingly unconnected items.

Used as a communication tool, stories and storytelling allow us to lay out a message in a clearly accessible form that we’re all familiar with.

“Rapport is created between the storyteller and the audience. They feel that they are actively involved, rather than just passively listening”, Lindsey Warnes Carroll, comedian and story teller.

Our brains and basic cultures have changed little since the days of hearing the news, learning about the latest religion/King/invaders and keeping in touch with our community through stories. In fact, traditional storytelling is enjoying a renaissance with storytelling festivals like Beyond the Border, held in the grounds of a cliff-top Welsh castle, on the increase.  And now there are even companies like The Story Tellers who “help business leaders engage their people in strategy, vision, values and change”.

But you don’t have to be a pro who’s spent years learning the art – we tell stories all the time: “Have you heard? She was with HIM last night at the bar and then…”.  Engaging stakeholders, communicating the progress of a project, concepts for design or delivering an unpalatable message, we all engage with this medium without thinking – it’s how we’re taught as children, how we consume news and entertainment: it’s our common culture as a species.

Some principles:

• Beginning THEN middle THEN end. Build up to the ‘big issue’ from the beginnings so your audience can start with simple concepts and add the detail – like Lego.
• Make sure the end has a real end. A joke without a punchline doesn’t work. Make sure your story builds to the main point, deliver that point, then finish or move to a new and different thread. Unless you’re very good, don’t try to carry several threads at once – people will get lost.
• Use a narrative to plan your presentation material (yes, I do mean PowerPoint slides amongst other things).
• Make sure you include details if you’re introducing new ideas. Don’t be afraid to stop the narrative and explain. E.g. ‘for those of you who don’t know what social networking is…’, or, ‘And the sword he held was carved with sigils and signs of a dark and unnatural nature…’, depending on your subject matter and audience.
• Stories can be spoken, written, pictorial or use just about any medium for their production. The importance is in the structure, building narrative and communication of the message.
• Experiment with stories that don’t yet have an ending and allow or use the audience to discover and create as a collaborative exercise. Remember those ‘choose your own adventure’ books? On the internet, a user’s journey through a website doesn’t always follow a prescriptive path, but is … wait for it … hypertextual.
• Enjoy the telling of the story and your audience will enjoy the story too – no matter how potentially dry your subject – believe me, I’m delivered some stats stories in my time that could have bored people into an early grave, without improving the engagement through storytelling.

“And they all lived happily ever after. The End.”

The Long Dog.

In the old days, just having a website was enough. Anyone other than your local pottery or cleaners of Oriental rugs who didn’t have a website was missing out. But these days, don’t sites have to try a little harder to get our attention?

A colleague was recently concerned that her organisation wanted to use PDFs instead of html pages for their website as “they are easier to maintain”. If this doesn’t shock you to the core please, please, PLEASE keep reading. If it does shock you, then read on in the smug knowledge that you’re already enlightened. Simply having a website doesn’t mean you’ve arrived / communicated / sold / answered or whatever it is your website’s supposed to be doing.

Facebook and MySpace aren’t the be all and end all, but they demonstrate how non-professionals create web pages, upload videos and images, create links and indulge in a bit of viral marketing. So why doesn’t every web site? Static text copy and a nice piccie in the top right really isn’t cutting it any more.  Regardless of organisations’ budgets, when users visit a site they expect the best. Any less is seen as failure and competitors are only a back button away.

SEO consultancy Fresh Egg’s Lee Colbran used the example of someone putting together flat-packed furniture. When the paper instructions aren’t any good, people could check the website. What they’d really benefit from is a ‘how to’ video. Wouldn’t we all? But wouldn’t it also offer some really high value, sticky content for customers?

Apart from nearly exploding about my PDF beleaguered colleague, Neontribe’s Harry Harrold told me that “we build video howtos into all our website bids now – written documentation is just too dull to be useful.”  Jay Ball, Creative Director of advertising agency Banner has also found that video in online ads gets way more responses than any other online media.

People like to be engaged – don’t disappoint them with shoddy budget content.

As well video, there are Flash animations, interactive Ajax pages, polls, user generated content, live chat and everything else that creates a rich user experience that’ll beat the pants of ‘text and piccie in the top right’.

Talking of pants, one of the best examples of rich content is Knicker Picler’s dressing room who use recorded videos of models who ‘cat walk’ lingerie outfits you pick. No, it’s not ‘adult’, but it might not be suitable for everyone to view at work. But it is really smart and shows how far rich interactions can go.

@haydens30 however has a point, “SEO needs one page/one subject to be effective, dynamic content and personalisation may not get the Google Juice they need”. There’s also your audience to consider.

User Experience practitioner Karen Stanton suggests”…older people don’t need rich ux. They need information as easily, as accessible as possible. [It also] depends where they’re being accessed, broadband speeds, internet cafes, libraries etc…”.

So again, here we are back at the inescapable conclusion that we must design for our users. Relying on ‘easy’ only answers short term budget issues. Use rich content to answer your users’ needs not the IT or Finance department’s needs.

Now … about those new pants…

The Long Dog.