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.

Soon after I joined  one particualt company, their intranet was benchmarked by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF). They conducted a number of usability tests, measuring ‘task completion’:  a number of commonly performed tasks (find the company org chart, download a particular form, find the contact details of a particular department etc), using employees to see, firstly, if they could complete the task and, secondly, how many attempts it took. The intranet in question was benchmarked 36th out of 36 FTSE/Fortune 100 and public sector equivalent organisations. Not good.

Over the next 12 months, while a long running IT acquisition project lumbered on, I redesigned the intranet publisher training, created a community of practice for these publishers and run two conferences for them, a governance structure had been put in place and I had spent a lot of time cleaning up and deleting content and whole sections of the intranet that were out of date, duplicated or, in my opinion, substandard in terms of usability or brand (it’s amazing how departments suddenly find resource to clean up their sections of the intranet when you tell them they’ve got a month, or you’re archiving the whole section to disc).

Now … while this all seemed good and there was a generally positive feeling things were getting better, I wanted to give some proof. The IBF’s next annual measurement of efficiency / effectiveness of task completion now put the intranet at 8^th out of 36 FTSE companies. Also, these usability metrics, matched against the traffic reports for how much time was being spent on the intranet suddenly gave me some real figures to show, in terms of what time employees were spending on the intranet was productive time.

The result showed a saving of 73 man years of intranet time or £8m/£13m in avoided salary costs for paying people to use the intranet and fail – check out the figures for yourself. 

While this demonstrates a definite and positive reclamation of wasted employee time, avoided cost is an intangible benefit and questions like ’so how much headcount can we lose?’ don’t really work. The point here is that each employee was wasting time each day on the intranet (never mind the additional time wasted calling some else to find the answer and have them look into the issue). This is reclaimed time for them to use on the work they’re employed to do. It’s like having a leaking water pipe. If you leave the holes, you lose water; if you plug the holes the pipe can’t carry more water than it was supposed to, but it does work to capacity.

And if employees aren’t working to capacity already, then you’ve bigger management and workload issues to worry about.

Back to the numbers, £8m/$13m is a considerably larger sum than I cost (no, really, it is) or was spent on the improvments, so not a bad little ROI methinks.

The Long Dog