Any fool can wireframe … getting it right is the trick.

A while back I wrote WTF is UXD in an attempt to explain what user experience design is, as response to bewildered looks from clients, colleagues and most of my friends and family. There’s still ambiguity around job titles, blurring the edges of user experienced designer, interaction designer, information architect and web designers (or to make it doubly-Dutch confusing UXDs, IXDs, IAs and web designers) and, in line with Ryan Carson’s “‘UX Professional’ isn’t a Real Job” there are a lot of charlatans peddling half-baked wireframes and someone else’s personas as website panaceas. However, against Ryan’s tech-heavy list of UX capabilities (I don’t have even a passing knowledge of JavaScript, but I’ve been making / saving companies A LOT OF MONEY over the past decade), Jared ‘UIE’ Spool lists the ‘Five Indispensable Skills for UX Mastery’ as:

• Sketching
  (my article:Drawing on walls: Lo-fi prototype sketching’s quick, cheap AND good)
• Storytelling
  (my article: Once upon a time – storytelling techniques for communication)
• Critiquing
  (my article: Comparing apples with bicycles – reviewing the big picture experience)
• Presenting
  (my article: Presentation is a skill, not a human right)
• Facilitating
  (must blog about facilitation, to mirror the Royal Spool flush of articles)

But there are some core attributes that set aside the common wireframe monkey from real, proper, actual user experience professionals and these are very very simple, yet very very potent and to be frank, not everyone has them:

Adding value: If you’re not understanding where to add value or remove waste it really is just boxes and arrows. This is the biggy. If you’re not focussing on this, you really are charging money for old rope. You’re just pongo-pongo pictor vulgaris*. Stop reading and go and start adding value – you disgust me.

Relationship management: Including the areas of presenting and facilitation, any UX worth their salt must be able to articulate, demonstrate and even defend, in necessary, their work and approach with clients, suppliers, co-workers and even recruiters. Trouble is, clients come in all shapes, moods, capabilities and prejudices, so in the morning you could be shining the bright light of enthusiasm onto the hitherto ignored facilities team for your intranet project, and spending the afternoon convincing The Board that you’re right, because you’ve done the research and the testing and they’re just making it up on the spot while answering someone else’s emails on their Blackberries.

Experience: Sorry kids, this is one you can’t buy, qualify in or (unless you’re unusually talented and which case you have no need of my sagely wisdom) bluff. I’ve sometimes thought that interaction designers grow up to be user experience designers, widening their scope from the page to the big picture, but this again is just terminology (death threats or outrage to the usual address please). But experience is essential. While trying to help a friend get into the digital biz, a recruiter once said to me “there’s no such things as a junior user experience role”. When someone asks “how” and you answer, you’d better have a “because” to back it up. If you haven’t put the years in, experience can be borrowed from the knowledge of others, so keep learning. You may start, but not stop at “Don’t make think”, so keep creaming blogs, books, podcasts and blagging your way into conferences.

Enquiry: While experience gives you oven ready parboiled solutions ready to finish off in workshops, you will NEVER know as much your users, your clients, their employees – the subject matter experts. Your job is to be as good as you can get as being a UXD. I’ve worked with clients in engineering, banking, pharmaceuticals, gardening blah blah blah .. the point is, I never understood as much my clients about their businesses, but I knew how to get them to tell me what I needed to know.

Get it right: Don’t be precious about getting negative feedback. Take it on the chin and change or defend. Do the research. Build up the experience. If it’s not right, you’re not worth your money.

And lastly, adding value. Again.

You DON’T need working technical knowledge of layout languages or computer scripts. You simply need to be able to understand your objectives from your clients and colleagues and find the right solutions. Whether that be some wireframes and a site map, or the education of entire team and the overseen production of working prototypes and stakeholder engagement workshops – who knows. Well, frankly, you – that’s your job. Forge relationships, enquire into the organisational goals and audience’s needs and produce remarkable products, processes and services, whatever they may be and however they may suit each individual project.

Be bold, be bloody, and be bloody bold while you’re at it.

Add value. That is all.

The Long Dog.
*Pongo-pongo pictor vulgaris: The common wireframe monkey.

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

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

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.

In the Lord of the Rings, Sauron (baddie) tries to hunt down the hobbit Frodo Baggins (goody). Despite dispatching nine undead warrior-kings, armed with magic swords and mounted on dragons, they fail to find the diminutive bumpkin, travelling on foot on first trip outside his village, with only his gardener for protection.

Why?

Apart from making a very short story where Evil triumphs over Good, it was because Sauron depended on assumptions: that people would always use the features of his product – a magic ring, conveying invisibility and all round magical artefact to be used by the wearer’s to bring about world-changing events. But Frodo didn’t want to use the ring (much).

The same can be said of websites and intranets:  features sound great and they cost money so they’re poured in, papering over the cracks of uncertain design; vanity content waffles about the extent of the fabulous products and welcome messages with grinning, gurning director’s portraits make grinning, gurning directors feel warm and fluffy.

Result is users can’t find the things they need, content and pages begin to spread to cover all possibilities and your competitor’s site is only a back button away.

Another example of assumptions (outside Middle Earth) comes from a supermarket chain who wanted to sell more baby products. The chain assumed the demographic was young women, full-time mums, shopping during the day time and thought of moving baby products near whatever was selling to women. After some research they actually found the main buyers of nappies (diapers) were men, aged 25 – 35, on their way home from work. Change of thinking? Hell yeah – the nappies / diapers were moved nearer to the alcohol, and beer sales sky rocketed. Clever business people … gullible Daddies.

Before you build your website based on weeks of sniping between marketing and IT, while the graphic designer doodles on paper and wonders about iPods, do these things…

• Remember Columbo gets the murderer by asking questions, not by telling his boss he’ll grab the first dodgy looking guy
• Find out about current and target users (these may be different groups)
• Find the middle point between business objectives and user needs: objectives definitely won’t be met if users’ needs aren’t
• Find a way to get out of doing things because they’re the director’s ideas (medicine that works is based on science – the rest is just pot pouri and placebo water)
• Don’t start with big design ideas or funky tech solutions, go back to the basics of what you’re trying to do and for who and work up from there
• Try out your ideas while they’re still on paper before developing beautiful and expensive failures
• Don’t always try to think outside the box … people need and like boxes
• World-conquering Lords of ultimate Evil should hire fewer magical henchmen and spend the gold pieces saved on hobbit-centred research
• Never … never assume you’re right

The Long Dog

Her wicked sense of humour doesn’t conceal her no-nonsense attitude and she’s a true digital professional, able to move between the often immiscible worlds of tech, comms and business strategy. She’s run intranets for some of the worlds best known brands, is a keen sportswoman and all round fun person to be with. Ok … that’s her ego massaged enough – here’s 60 seconds with one of best Intranet Managers I’ve met:

LD: How long have you spent working with intranets?
CS:Since about 2000. I’ve been an Intranet Manager since 2005.

LD: Do you have a technical, communications background or something else?
CS: Maths! I did Maths at University which then led onto HTML training. For anyone who knows me they’ll know my laugh wouldn’t really suit an accountancy environment.

LD: How many employees has the largest intranet you’ve worked on served?
CS:Reuters intranet served 25000 staff and had about 1.5 million pages. And as all things go, it was the smallest team I’ve had.

LD: Top three key things an intranet must do, to be a success?
CL: (1) Have a staff directory on it, (2) be consistently available (and by this I’m referring to serving all offices and avoiding outages), (3) have at least one tool the staff can brag about.

LD: Top three common points of failure for an intranet?
CS: (1) Intranet builds led by people who only care about technology and not what the user actually wants from it, (2) not getting investment into good servers and even more importantly backup servers, (3)
Wikis – That’s totally un-pc of me to say but I’m not a fan at all: Making it easier for users to add content doesn’t mean they’ll maintain it.

LD: Jakob Nieslen or Jacob’s Cream Crackers?
CS: Cream crackers – is that a description of me?

LD: If you weren’t managing intranets what would you rather be doing?
CS: Pro Tennis player

LD: Did you set out to be an intranet manager?
CS: No! I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. My second job was at Unisys and I was randomly picked within the team to go learn HTML and build the financial services marketing team a website. It was love… [I suspect 'love' to be an exaggeration of sorts - Long Dog]

LD: Top three challenges for running a good intranet?
CS: Buy-in, budget & lack of control. It probably all really comes back to buy-in. It really shows that in the current financial state of the world those senior managers who have seemed to be bought in still look straight to the Intranet team for cost cuts.

LD: What do your friends and family think you do for a job?
CS: It varies, I’m not sure anyone really gets it! I try and tailor my answer and obviously stop talking as soon as they glaze over. I have been known on occasions to say I’m a PA just to avoid further questioning! I have several friends who refer to me as their clever friend, very flattering. I think maybe it translates as we don’t understand what you’re saying so it must be clever.

LD: Who should manage an intranet: IT, Internal Comms, HR or someone else?
CS: I think if you’ve got a person leading it who has both IT knowledge and comms/strategy knowledge then you can run it from IT or Internal Comms. My advice to anyone though is never never run it out of HR. Ideally if you have a company strategy team the Intranet would sit within it.

LD: Top three survival skills for intranet managers?
CS: (1) I bake cakes and give them to IT – it’s definitely helped me get a few databases built faster or for free! (2)
The ability to stop, clear your mind and try to imagine how a certain user would deal with something or want something, (3) Patience …

LD: What do you look for in someone working for you, on an intranet?
CS: Drive and personality. You’ve got to be able to talk to anyone and everyone if you’re going to succeed in such a cross functional team. I think drive is key to delivering and keeping the customer happy. I want people in my team that I can send to a meeting on their own and know they will represent the team at the same level I would.

LD: Software or information architecture - which is more important?
CS: Ooh that’s a hard question! I guess if you’re IA is great you can kind of cover up for useless software but if your IA is bad it doesn’t matter how good your software is.

LD: Best or worse intranet story
CS: We were clearing old sites off the intranet by backing them up onto an external hard drive and then deleting them. Highly technical method obviously. We managed to deleted a site which turned out to contain a buried folder with the sales figures database in it. This was their daily reporting tool and held everything!!! I found out the next day it was missing, had that moment where your blood runs cold, re-uploaded the site and looked at the data. Only to find the data was miraculously up to date, to the minute … we never did figure it out …

LD: Finally, any tips for struggling intranet workers or managers?
CS: Go out and see as many intranets as you can. And don’t be afraid to say no to a senior manager

More about Claire on her Linked In profile.

The Long Dog

Question: I’ve heard a lot about User Experience Design (UXD) recently, so in 3 words define the role of a User Experience Designer

Jason: Sure … just after some initial waffle first.

I still suffer under other people’s misapprehension that I’m the IT guy who’s come to sort out their technical solution. Of course, if you happen to be one of the IT guys or gals who really HAVE come to sort out the technical solution, I’m the woolly-brained consultant who doesn’t know how to deliver and implement a technical solution.

So, apart from sitting on my sofa and churning out ranty blog posts, what actually do I do as a UXD – a User Experience Designer?

I’m going to answer this in two ways – firstly as a analogy, and then in the true spirit of online social sharing, I’m going to send you to someone else’s blog – rather than just rip it off and try and claim the glory, before being inevitably found out, and my reputation, what little there is left, dragged through the digital streets and be pelted with virtual fruit for my plagiarism.

Building a digital presence (that’s websites, mobile sites and intranets, to thee and me) is like building a house and the UXD is the architect. Graphic designers may be the interior designers and the IT crowd can be thought of as the skilled builders, plumbers, electricians.

I, the UXD/architect am responsible for understanding the needs of the business and its users / future home owners, creating concepts and designs based on these and translating those designs into plans that the IT crowd/builders can comment on and ultimately make happen, with the graphic designers / interior designers creating beautiful visual metaphors … and other lovely stuff.

The real skill of the UXD comes in finding creative and valuable answers to questions and being able to communicate these concepts and plans to the other ‘construction’ parties, and being able to articulate the benefits of their ideas to influence their stakeholders.

So … it’s analyst, inventor and promoter (hmmm … must use this again), but what are the actual outputs?

For this, I hand you over to author and UXD extraordinaire, Peter Morville, and his excellent article User Experience Deliverables.

Ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba … That’s all folks.

The Long Dog (with thanks to Mel Blanc)

I saw recent a Tweet by one of my peers, along the lines of “Broken link on my intranet not my fault, but still getting complaints in droves”. My response was “Inform the owner of that content there’s a broken link, tell them the content will be removed if the link isn’t repaired or removed then follow through with your threat.”

I don’t know if she took my advice.

Having managed and designed intranets and websites for global brands, the last thoughts stakeholders have is often about ongoing maintenance and governance. Trouble is, with no robust ongoing support your beautiful new baby gets ugly pretty quickly.

Websites need to be thought of as rose gardens: careful design, expert creation, then managed by a professional who knows what they’re doing and who is empowered to make decisions about when to allow growth and when to prune back hard.

Also, like a rose garden, the downside of a lack of management is rambling and exponential organic growth, but the knock-on results of this for a website are measurably worse:

- Poor findability of content
- Duplicated or contradictory information
- Poor user experience reducing conversion rates and subsequently reducing turnover
- Lack of trust in reliability of content
- Lowered employee efficiency (intranets)
- Abandonment of tasks / journeys – for a commercial website, this means the visitor may be switching to your competitor.

For a while I ran a global intranet for about 20,000 employees and before I arrived content was rarely removed. After some polite but unambiguous refusals to publish new subsites and the removal of whole swathes of unmanaged or substandard content, people began to value the intranet more, respect its governance and as a result put in more effort or at least seek assistance with new content.

To manage this intranet Intranet Section Managers were created – employees deputised with metaphorical tin stars because of their existing accountability for sections, expertise, or willingness to take on a new challenge. Also the accreditation of intranet publishers was made mandatory and required attendance of a two day training course. In 12 months the benchmarking ranking for the intranet went from 36th out of 36 FTSE 100 / Fortune 100 to 8th.

You want practical advice?
- Work out the ‘how’ and ‘who’ of site management BEFORE you launch … that’s BEFORE you launch … afterwards is like herding cats
-Empower someone as the overall person in charge who can and WILL make decisions about the commissioning, editing and removal of content
- How you structure your governance, central / devolved etc, depends on what will work best in your organisation.
- Build the governance to fit the organisation, don’t try and bend a model that won’t work or it’s cat herding again.

Intranets: Encourage the development of a wider community of practice to support, inform and provide volunteer lookouts for problems and champion your intranet in your organisation. Get the support of heavyweight seniors – otherwise your Intranet Manager is a toothless watchdog.

Overall … while governance is often seen as consuming time and money, in the end it’ll save a load of both and produce a site of much higher quality.

Now … go bring law and order to the badlands.

The Long Dog

Working out where we’re stacked in the great deck of life’s Top Trumps is difficult, and exploiting our strengths and shoring up our weaknesses (I refuse to say ‘areas for improvement’) is only easy if you’re sure of what these are.

Socially extravert people often seem to get along easily in life, whereas those less forthcoming can sometimes be overlooked. But … to get along in life as an extravert means you also have to be interesting. Just putting yourself about and getting in people’s faces isn’t enough, there has to be some value for the other person – fun, attraction, gaining new knowledge, personal advancement, whatever – otherwise you’re just a party bore with too much to say for yourself.

I heard recently (sorry – no source to reference) that the young people who were most sociable on Facebook were also the most sociable in real-life. To gain followers on Twitter or new friends on Facebook you have to have something to offer. Twitter’s definitely about quality, not quantity. Along with many others, I can’t stand the messages from allegedly interested followers who tell me they know the secret to $10000/day earnings (not to mention offers by Amlene242 and her ‘hot housemate’) – it’s an obvious scam. Sure there’ll be numpties out there who’ll go for it, but for us norms it’s just more spam.

Then why bother mixing in this world of get-rich-quick, appendage enlargement, tedious old school friends (there’s a reason we’ve not been in contact for the past two decades) and other social fluff?

For me two: playtime and work.

I won’t bother you with why and what I like to waste my time doing with online chums (though I do have a surprisingly large zombie army on Facebook), but I do want to talk about work…

Once upon a time there was a freelance web, digital and communications professional (‘Me’, for those slower on the uptake) who went to an interview for a short contract. The brave professional donned his suit and buckled on his A3 portfolio of valiant previous work and journeyed to the Big City to seek his fortune. When he arrived at the Palace of Digital Marketing, the person he met took one glance at the still valiant portfolio case and said “Oh, you won’t be needing that, I just want to know if you think this project is feasible and if you want to do it”.

It turns out that the nice man at the digital recruitment agency had given me a glowing reference. The client had checked out my profile on the business networking site Linked In. They called over a colleague who’d worked at somewhere I’d worked at a few weeks earlier and that colleague made a call to his old work buddies and asked “This Jason Buck, he any good?”. Thankfully, I’d done a good job and been nice enough to work with, so … unless I’d turned up drunk or naked, I’d already got the contract before I’d walked through the door, all on the basis of social networks, online and real-life and making myself a sociable enough person.

Story number two – and trying to avoid self adulation – is about a remark made by a respected comms professional who referred to my participation on a forum as being valued by people who felt they had quality information when they had a ‘Jason Buck answer’. It seemed I’d built a reputation just by contributing to something that I found interesting.

This isn’t about me blowing my own trumpet (if I could do that, I’d be in a circus – ba-boom-tish), but more to demonstrate why I really do value les enfants terribles Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and this li’l ole blog. Gossip and tittle-tattle maybe, but it puts food on my table.

This week’s advice is simple: In a time of economic uncertainty, budget cuts and redundancies go out and mingle with your species.

- Make friends and enjoy yourself. If you’re doing good work, that’ll be remembered, but so will you as an individual
- Offer value for your professional friendships
- Treat online relationships in the same ways of sensibility and playfulness as real-life
- Be gregarious, but be yourself
- Check out my article I just don’t get Twitter (and the comments!)
- Enjoy … life is not a dress rehearsal.

The Long Dog

“The hardest part of a thousand mile journey is the first step” traditional Chinese proverb

Over the last four years most of my clients have been in London. Friends and colleagues balked at my one and a half hour train journey, but now I’ve really moved to the countryside and my journey’s even longer: A 280 mile  (450km)drive + 40 minutes on trains round trip weighing in at roughly nine hours all in.

Why do I do it?

Because I only do it one day a week. The rest of the week I work from my cottage in the rolling English countryside.

In this age of household broadband, social media and good quality mobile phone reception, there are few reasons why I need to be in an office, except for occasional face-to-face or kick off meeting. Thankfully my current client is enlightened, so I can work from home, avoid unnecessary travel and food bills (never mind the money I’m saving on razors) and work surrounded by home comforts. The client’s basic requirement is that I do the work they want me to, to the standard they want me to and trust me to get on with it.

UK employment law now says that employers need to consider flexible working arrangements and with a young child and a partner with ongoing health issues, for me flexible working is a necessity and not just a luxury.

But … for anyone hoping to spend their working days lolling on the sofa, languidly wafting their fingertips near their laptop and watching Jeremy Kyle / Manga / Frasier reruns (delete as appropriate) there is one vital (but often overlooked) thing you need to get grounded in reality … you still need to do the work you’d do, if you were sat at an office desk.

Some less fundamental, but equally important considerations:

Can you do your work remotely?
Not all jobs can be done without regular face-to-face interaction. If home working’s your goal, make sure you do the sort of job that employers or clients are happy for you to do on your own.

Recall distance
If you do need to suddenly get into the office, how long will it take you? The only reason we didn’t move to a perfectly lovely lighthouse keeper’s cottage on the remote, but internet connected Scottish Isle of Raasay was the 6 hour round trip to Inverness or three DAY round trip to London. The more flexible you can be, the more relaxed your employer / client can be. Also, as I write this, I’ve had a call from home to say that my partner’s unwell, so I’m rushing back home to help and look after our son. Long journey, but it does mean I’ll be there tomorrow as well (and I’ll only charge my client for half a day got today. See … flexibility).

Tools
Make sure you’re kitted out for working remotely. I now use skype for audio calls and as soon as I can find my camera I’ll be using that as well (although I suspect this is more about my client wanting to have a nosey round my new house), I have a broadband connection at home and a mobile dongle so I can move around and work anywhere. As well as the ubiquitous email, I use a lot of social sites for communicating with my peers and doing research, primarily Facebook and LinkedIn.

Setting expectations
Be clear about how you want to work, and understand what you employer / client expects of you. There’s no point arranging one day a week, to be instantly called in for an extra two days. Conversely, you need to compromise – remember, this is about getting the working conditions YOU want, so give a little to gain some more.

How do I find it overall?
On the day I get up at 4:30am to do my nine hour commute – knackering. On the other days it’s relaxing, inspiring, less stressful and I get to collect the eggs from my chickens and see my son grow up.

Signing off in uncharacteristic tranquillity,
The Long Dog