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.

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

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

Social media frontierswoman, PR pro and MD of PR agency thebluedoor, Abigail Harrison gives us some solid practical advice from the pointy end of using social media in a business context. Just don’t call her Bernard.

LD: Abi? Abigail? What should I call you?
AH: Abigail or @AbigailH would be just fine
LD: You just can’t help yourself, can you.

LD: You work in PR – what are the top 3 three things individuals can get from using social media?
AH: (1) It facilitates conversations with ‘influencer’ audiences about things they care about, (2) Ensures individuals stay ahead of the curve as digital tools evolve and networks develop, (3) Helps test ideas and develop thinking – people sometimes forget social media is great at delivering excellent results, it’s a brilliant research tool.

LD: Tell us about your organisation and what you do – yup, this is the chance to plug your biz
AH: Ahh music to my ears! thebluedoor is a PR agency. Our ’sweet spot’ is understanding the relevant digital tools – what they do or don’t do, and how they can work for different companies, brands and campaigns. Digital hasn’t changed the nuts and bolts of what PR is.

LD: Continental or ‘Full English’?
AH: Neither really – I love a pink grapefruit or a bowl of porridge.

LD: What got you interested in online social networking?
AH: I’ve been involved in online for a while, and worked on the PR for one of the largest dotcom IPOs in 2000 – StepStone, the online recruitment site. It’s a fascinating world which allows us all to work creatively with some brilliant practitioners.

LD: Isn’t this all a bit … well … geeky?
AH: Well, yes and no. Part of the problem is language. We do ourselves no favours hiding behind walls of geek-speak. It’s vital we make digital approachable and normalised. That said, it is crucial we understand the geekiness behind it all – and once you start to understand it, there’s a beautiful, measurable logic about the digital world.

LD: What are your top social sites for work?
AH: It has to be Twitter – the digital rock-star of the PR and online world. I have a separate screen on my desk with TweetDeck running – through this Twitter application we discover breaking news, respond to requests for help and interact with the multiple social communities using it. [LD: That is sooo 'geek chic']

LD: And top sites for play?
AH: It isn’t strictly a social site, but I couldn’t live without BBC iPlayer. It’s wonderful – great for catching up on the world and business.

LD: Pint of beer or glass or wine?
AH: Glass of wine – it’s been a long time since I had a pint!

LD: Favourite online social success story?
AH: The work that we have recently done for SocialSafe has been a real high point for me. Key to cracking online is to identify the ‘influencer’ blogs and sites. We successfully pitched a story to Mashable, and the ensuing traffic (meaningful rather than drive-by) and knock-on pick-up was phenomenal!

LD: Favourite online social disaster story?
AH: Thankfully I don’t have one. But I did send a new business pitch, addressed to ‘Mike’ but was actually ‘Mark’. Naturally he was upset – but we agreed as penance I’d be ‘Bernard’ for time-immemorial.

LD: So … Bernard … advice for someone starting out with social networking?
AH: Get your hands dirty and jump in.  It’s the only way to learn. Follow people on Twitter who use practice – it’s a great way to understand what and how people are using the tools. A key challenges is staying on top of developments, so keep reading. And of course don’t lose sight of the world outside the digital bubble.  

LD: Let’s say I’m a business who’s ’social curious’ – what are the top benefits and risks?
AH: Benefits:

• just taking a step towards understanding the digital world opens up a world of opportunity and possibility
• digital is a real-time barometer about how your audience, customers, stakeholders feel about you – not knowing is a bit like sticking your fingers in your ears and not looking, because it is happening anyway and isn’t going away anytime soon
• engaging online is a great way of qualifying leads and researching potential customers

Risks:

•  the major risk is letting the excitement of online get in the way of rational objective consideration – just because it’s shiny and powerful, it’s vital to understand the medium to ensure it fits in your overall business strategy
• also if you haven’t conducted the due diligence of understanding your current online footprint before you start experimenting you risk tripping over quite quickly and publically

LD: Thanks, Abigail. Want to come to my free social media event in London? Go on – it’s going to combine theatre, art and business skills and there’s a glass of wine in it for you?
AH: Go on then.

• More on Abigail / @AbigailH / Bernard (so many profiles, so little time) on thebluedoor website.

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

“A picture is worth a thousand words – and thousands in avoided costs for messy rebuilds” – the Long Dog

Getting safely from concept to the design of your web site or intranet is as easy as scribbling on bits of paper. No, really … it is. This is meant as a beginner’s guide, so old pros, look away now – newbies … come on in, the water’s lovely…

What is a wireframe?
It’s an illustrative plan of a web page, showing elements such as placing for text, images, search boxes and is often annotated to give an understanding of functionality. E.g. What happens when a button is clicked. In the initial stages, they don’ have any design elements, colours and are filled with dummy content. Sound complicated? It’s not – check out the  wireframe image.

What are they used for:

- Testing: Before you waste time and money have confusing conversation between design and technical teams, or just with your own stakeholders you can use simple print offs for sense checking before creating more elaborate wireframes. In the biz we give this fancy terms like ‘paper prototyping’ or ‘low fidelity testing’.

When the wireframe becomes more developed, you can add functionality so that things do stuff when you click on them. Again, this helps in user testing, before committing to, or being distracted by colours and design elements. Again, while from different clients, the wireframe image shows the how a wireframe starts simply and becomes more complex.

- Design plans: Once you’ve tested and you’re sure what you’re doing is right, you’re left with fine architectural plans that show creative designers or development teams exactly what you expect to be built. Save them time, you money and you’ve both got something to work from.

When should use them:

AFTER your preliminary work is done:

- Understand your brief and do your research
- Define your audience
- Work out what you’re going to have on your site and how it’s arranged
- Build your sitemap

Oh … and as a freelancer you might be employed just to produce wireframes for agencies: potentially interesting, but can eat away at your sanity after a while, unless you see something actually launch.

I always start by drawing them on big bits of paper, whiteboards (or my windows) and only later use somethig like MS Visio, but you can use whatever floats your boat, inncluding PowerPoint, so long as you can do boxes and arrows and turn concepts and requirements intoa clear illustration.

Go on then … what’s stopping you?

The Long Dog.

“Since the start of Facebook real conversations are down 10% and real poking is down 40%” Mark Watson, comedian

Comedy aside, it’s understandable to think that expertise is enough to get and hold onto a job or contract, but sadly it ain’t necessarily so.

Someone recently said to my friend “You’re just as good at your job as [your colleague], the difference is no one knows who you are”. And while the buzz words du jour are social media, making sure you don’t underestimate your online social capital is only half the story. Employers and clients are looking for individuals who can communicate their expertise and change hearts and minds in organisations, using their inherent real-life social skills.

Trouble with being a professional specialist is you’re often far down the food chain or at least brought in late in decision processes, to ‘make it happen’. I often find myself in positions where clients ask me for something I know is fundamentally wrong. I either have to grin and produce unworkable rubbish, wasting their money and tarnishing my reputation, or find ways to politely tell them they’ve got it wrong while not embarrassing them and giving compelling arguments for why my way is better and reassurances it’ll all be alright in the end.

Nick Cochrane is MD of digital recruitment agency Zebra People , has found that as well as professional knowledge, his clients are increasingly demanding candidates with ‘influencing’ abilities, following this very real trend for real-space social skills. To be able to show our professional peacock feathers or communicate our potentially controversial opinions, we have to consistently communicate and engage a variety of audiences.

“When you present, you’ll be trying to persuade someone to alter their behaviour, or attitude. ‘Influence’ is a pretty constant feature of everyday life and work. We’re more emotionally aware than we used to be, and as people become more aware, the dark arts of persuasion need to keep up, like an arms race.” Rob Archer, Bloom Psychology.

The moral of the story is, keep Tweeting, blogging and interacting online for a wide reach, maintain distant connections and build personal brand, but also do the other social things we hairless monkeys are so good at …

 

- Make sure your interpersonal skills are up to scratch (remember, “Presentation is a skill not a human right”)
-  Capitalise on your strong points and improve your weak points in social interaction – you might want to do one of the many personality profiling tests to help you identify these
- Remember that everyone you deal with is firstly human, then many things after: parent / sibling / carer / manager / director / customer
- Collaborate and share to engender good will, showcase your knowledge and create new relationships
- Stand up and be counted, or the blabber mouthed numpties will climb over you and stupidity will prevail
- Be natural and treat everyone with the same level of respect from the CEO to the cleaner

Be Human.

Er … The Long Dog