Are you working or social networking?
Posted in Communications, social media, web 2.0 on August 9th, 2010 by The Long DogI 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.

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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

“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.
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?