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

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

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

In which an artist, a farmer, a she-geek and an editor show how differently people use social media tools and how their lives really depend on them.

It’s easy to pigeonhole social media users as feckless, hormonal teenagers on the pull, or rabidly blogging armchair iconoclasts (hmmm … now I’ve written it, maybe I’ll use these as personas one day). In preparation for a recent presentation on social media I asked friends and contacts what and why they used social media. Not the most scientific method, but it did reveal four very different uses and attitudes to social media, which again reminded me that it’s not the tool (Facebook, Twitter etc), but the purpose that’s the real deal. With social media, you can’t just build it and they will come, but need to think about the intended audiences and their needs.

What’s really interesting is the different purposes people have: recreation, religion, work, education and life skills.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent – but otherwise, these profiles haven’t been edited. I’m not sure what conclusions one can draw, but I was surprised that the first four people I asked had such different uses:

Name: Jamie
Age: 37
Gender: Male
Relationships: Married, one child
Location: Surrey, southern England
Occupation: Editor
Tools used: Facebook, Linked In, Flickr, Yahoo! Groups, Twitter
Quote: “I access Social Media mostly when I’m at work, a quick glance at Facebook or Twitter every hour makes me feel like I’m at an informal friendly gathering rather than the reality of chipping away at the coal face”

Name: Hilda
Age: 49
Gender: Female
Relationships: Married with 2 children
Location: Southern England
Occupation: Homeschooling mum, veg grower, part time farm hand, peasant
Tools used: Facebook, blogs & forums (www.homesteadblogger.com, www.homechoolblogger.com, http://christianhomesteadwomen.wordpress.com, http://unltdworld.com, http://www.gentlechristianmothers.com, http://creativeliving.10.forumer.com )
Quote: ““Homeschooling, especially Christian homeschooling, is a far flung thing. To organise social events, educational events etc, I don’t think we could do it without the net.”

Name: David
Age: 55
Gender: Male
Relationships: Living with girlfriend and their 2 children
Location: Northern Ireland
Occupation: Artist and writer
Tools used: Facebook, multiple blogs
Quote: “ My blog is a kind of calling card, cv [résumé – US English] and portfolio that in a sense presents me to a marketplace. It also exists as an archive for posterity.

“I use FaceBook as a means for disseminating images which I consider to be within the real [sic] of my ‘art’ images and it also provides a platform for a certain kind of play with ideas. It offers material on which to ‘riff’ (improvise) and collaborators available to play.”

Name: Alice
Age: 26
Gender: Female
Relationships: Cohabiting with boyrfriend
Location: London, England
Occupation: Web front end developer
Tools used: Facebook, Twitter (2 accounts), Flickr, iTunes ( podcasts as well as music), RSS, Googlemail, calendars, addresses, World of Warcraft, Evernote, Things [sic], Dropbox
Quote: “People are tribal by nature. Now our tribe is global, we need better ways of storytelling”

Funny old world, innit?
The Long Dog

In some industries usability can mean the difference between life and death. In ‘Everyday usability: Why people don’t use things’ I looked at why some products are a success (the printed book) and why some fail (Edison’s phonograph), but what has usability got to do with tanks, helicopters and fighter jets?

Preparing for the first gulf war, American troops ran war games in the deserts of their homeland. To add to the realism, as well as combatants role-playing enemy soldiers, US helicopters were ‘dressed up’ to resemble Iraqi vehicles. This simulation was later blamed for some of the ‘friendly fire’ among American forces: The troops had been trained to recognise their own helicopters, albeit ‘dressed up’, as enemy craft. While it was the exercise that was flawed, the soldiers did exactly what they were trained to do and destroyed helicopters that looked like the ones they recognised as enemy craft.

Usability is concerned with understanding human behaviour and psychology and ensuring that websites, processes, products – whatever a human has to interact with – is usable to its highest degree. We can tweak websites and improve on them as we go, but when someone’s life depends on usability, some serious research needs to be done.

If you can understand the how people work, fit what you’re creating to how people can best use it. Bodge it and there will always be mistakes – thankfully for most of us, these mistakes are usually only minor irritations.

Recently I went to Tankfest 2009 at the UK’s Tank Museum, next to Bovingdon Camp, where British soldiers are taught how to drive tracked vehicles. Apart from the sheer boyish enjoyment of seeing massive rumbly trundly things and indulge my four year old son in the pleasure sitting in the tank driver’s seat, there was one tiny almost overlooked feature that caught my professional eye.

In old style tanks, the Commander would kick the driver in the back of his chair in different positions depending on whether he wanted him to start, stop, turn left or right. A nice little bit of non-verbal communication, but hardly what you’d expect from Her Majesty’s Finest in the 21st century. 

These days the Commander of a Challenger 2 tank now communicates with his crew (driver, gunner and loader) by computer. Instead of a clunky keyboard and mouse combo, the Commander instead uses a handset almost identical to the Xbox 360 game console handset. Why? Games companies have spent a lot of time and money finding the most ergonomically designed controllers and the military have borrowed this learning to make their systems as usable as possible. As ‘the Nintendo generation goes to war’ (thanks @Haydens30), these interfaces are also familiar to the incoming recruits, so why make them learn something new and less usable?

@fulnic also tells me that this handset interface is also being use in unmanned spy planes.

Anyone remember the Robin Williams film ‘Toys’?

If this looks like playing to a degenerated generation, I disagree. It’s about understanding human strengths and weaknesses and working with and around them. The US Air Force found that under combat stress, fighter pilots ignored alarms alerting them to an incoming missile. They tried sounds and flashing lights, but again the pilots learned to ignore these in the same was we ignore gaudy advertising banners on webpages (banner blindness). The only thing that got the pilots attention every single time was a child’s voice in their earphones saying “Help me Daddy! Help me Daddy!” – a story that still gives me goose bumps.

Understand the machine, play to its strengths and not to its weaknesses.

The Long Dog

Experience is an illusion and personal opinion is vanity – only through investigation and measurement can we understand the truth.

Ok … it might sound like an atheist manifesto but I wanted a punchy opening.

To wind the melodrama down to a more acceptable volume, my point here is that when you’re dealing with producing material for anyone who isn’t “you”, without research or investigation you’re operating on guesses and blind faith – and if faith defies proof, then I really hope you don’t have any KPIs for your work.

In 2007 I redesigned the intranet for a global publication. On the limping violet wilderness that was their current offering, a sizable chunk of homepage real-estate was taken up by three clocks showing hours, minutes and even the seconds, for times in London, New York and Hong Kong – the three main offices. My dismissive and smug assertion “Well THOSE will go for a start - people should use the clock on their task bar and save space. Pah!” was buried under drifts of praise for their usefulness, in the ensuing employee interviews.

It turned out that the international offices needed to communicate so often that a quick check on the intranet’s home page showed who in the world was or wasn’t awake and who had already left for the pub. My mistake – but one corrected by investigation, backed up later by user testing. Needless to say I came up with an elegant solution that saved space and also removed the disenfranchisement of those in other offices like Frankfurt, Moscow and Honolulu.

Experience goes a long way in making educated guesses, but it’s unlikely that we can ever be sure our suspicions are absolutely right without something robust to back them up. We risk what Jay Ball, Creative and Planning Director at Banner advertising agency calls “the focus group of one”.

Don’t be afraid to not know the answer – just make sure you know how to find out.

An Information Architect I spoke to recently was challenged at an interview, by an executive of the company whose website he was going to redesign. “Why don’t you know? We’d be employing you to have all the answers”. His correct and brave response was to say that he didn’t have the answers – he wasn’t this guy’s target audience – but what he did have was the skills to defensibly find out what the answer was.

Ok – you want practical advice?

Well … like the profusion of management gurus and the myriad of conflicting religious and new age answers to ‘Life, the universe and everything’ (that’ll have Douglas Adams spinning in his grave), you can take your pick from any number of experts, gurus, consultants and self-help books. But, for anyone who’s got enough brain to read this far, just make sure you do your research about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and who you’re doing it for. Some ideas on how …

- Clearly understand the requirements or brief
- Define who your audiences are. See my “We are all individuals … I’m not!” post on defining audiences and individual behaviours for some tips
- Speak with stakeholders and the people with the big salaries, permashine Mercedes and not really enough time for ‘someone like you’, but more important are those who are actually going receive or use what you’re going to produce, through interviews, questionnaires, workshops and repeated testing, started early on in the process
- If there’s conflict between the audience’s and the organisation’s needs, find out why and go back to whoever commissioned the work. If you can suggest a solution – gold star and take the rest of the day off
- Mock it up and try it out before you put all the hard work in and have to change it. Frequent tweaking (Matron!) is better than launching a poor product and having to redo it. To paraphrase, “It’s better to fail in testing than in the market place”
- Don’t be afraid to *not* know the answer, just make sure you know the best way to find out what it is

In summary: apply imagination to your thinking, but make sure your thinking is grounded in reality and just because I espouse research over assumption doesn’t mean I don’t like pretty things and chocolate.

The Long Dog

In a previous post I referred to being told off by a colleague for my defence of the use of the term ‘audience’ on a communications company’s forum. Even before I’d had a chance to read that post, I received phone calls and emails from other subscribers, shocked by his behaviour so I contacted the moderator, only to be even more surprised by their response.

For those of you who don’t know what a listserv is, it’s an email distribution list, restricted to a group of subscribers who can read and reply to posts which are then visible to all the subscribers. The listserv in question is hosted and moderated by a respected, global communications organisation (not the IABC in case you’re wondering). A question posted about measuring the value of organisations’ internal news was met with a quick and florid rebuttal concerning the terms the person had used.

My reply that I thought ‘audience’ was still a valid term found the same, rebutting, non-UK subscriber (non-UK is important, you’ll see) replying with a self-righteous 600 word diatribe referring me, with interminable quotes, to “the world’s leading PR/ Communication scholar”. This stultifyingly self-important follow-up to his original flounce was finished with this flourish…

“Allow me to put my tongue firmly in my cheek, but after more than 10 years following [the comms company’s] publications, conferences and chatter, it seems to me that the only ones who would defend the terms “audience” and “communicator” today in 2009 would be those employed in communication who live in the British Isles. Certainly, my sense is that Europe, NA, Australia see a larger role for communication professionals. Is it something to do with the old class system?”

Now, isn’t “tongue firmly in my cheek” a similar platitude to “I’m not racist, but …”? It appears that’s what this listserv’s (dare I say it) audience thought. I felt I couldn’t reply to the post without either trading insults, or needing to defend myself – neither of which would have been appropriate or productive. Here are some of the remarks I received from people, both known and unknown to me:

- “Those guys were just patronising”
- “Offensive and basically racist”
- “One if his recent posts was also a bit close to the bone”
- “What’s [he] trying to do, start a US-UK communicators’ war?!”
   (NB: [He] isn’t from the US)
- “He actually had the nerve to email me directly and – at length – patronise the socks off me! Who does this bloke think he is?”
   (after replying to the original question, but unfortunately also after
   [his] post)
- “I had to sit on my hands and see if you were going to reply, because if you didn’t, I was going to”
- “I’m still with you on this one”
   (interesting why they felt they couldn’t add their voice publicly
- “Sounded like he was just trying to sound intelligent when actually he sounded just, well testiculatory!”
   (probably best she didn’t post this one publicly)

So there you have it – the voice of the people. So what do you do when someone bullies you? You go tell the teacher – or the moderator in this case. But this is what I got…

“Thank you for your comments. We know [him] quite well (he’s been a very long-term contributor) so read this in the way it was hopefully intended, namely, playful and provocative rather than insulting and offensive. I would suspect he’d be mortified to think that he’d caused any offence to you and other network users.”

Doesn’t this boil down to “Sorry – he’s already in our gang. Anyway can’t you take a joke”?

Apparently not. Nor could all the customers (yes, that’s right … the comms company’s ‘customers’) who contacted me, or who were silent either by choice or because they DIDN’T know [him] so didn’t feel comfortable taking him on.

Oddly enough, I found this reply more aggravating than the original post, coming from ‘the powers that be’ and all. So, not worried about mortifying [him], I replied, asking whether this post should have slipped past the moderators, only to find my complaint escalated because the moderator was “a little concerned that her moderating duties may have fallen into question”. Hang on … why am I the one fielding complaints and comments of support from the public, while the company in question is defending its sleeping gate keepers, its friends who profess professionalism while practising vainglorious condescension, and kindly telling me to get a life?

One articulate reply to the offending post summed up well…

“There is a danger that the person who is heard the most is the one who shouts the loudest. Is perhaps one of our roles to moderate/mediate messages with honest appraisals [and] with an eye on those who do not join in for whatever reason?”

There is a part of me, however, that hopes that if [he] reads this, he isn’t “mortified” because the comms company never contacted him. Still – I hope they all take this post in the spirit of ‘playful’ and ‘provocative’ healthy debate and discovery with which it is meant. So there.

Ok … normally I’d end a post with practical ideas on the topic I’ve just been ranting about, but this time I want to ask questions instead:

- On what basis should moderators screen, reject or at least ask for modification of subscribers’ posts?
- How should moderators of a social network reply to individuals who feel they have a genuine grievance?
- Can you gauge the full impact of an issue by only seeing the tip of the iceberg?
- Are there or should there be ASBOs for repeat or particularly objectionable offenders in social networks?
- In an incident like this how do you share responsibility and accountability between host and post?

Grrrrrrrr!

The Long Dog