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.

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

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

“From chaos comes order” – Friedrich Nietzsche

An old friend and (now) colleague were discussing card sorting exercises and asked if I’d ever write something on the subject. Well, @harry_harrold (and other lovely readers) the DJ is indeed playing requests, so here you go…

For those unfamiliar, it’s a research technique similar to reorganising your music collection instead of doing your school revision. You might not know what you’re going to end up with but if you did you probably don’t need to run this sort of exercise. It’s easy, fun and great for engagement, collaboration and stimulating structured debate. They’re also stock in trade for user-centred design (UCD).

I use card sorts in situations where I’ve got a mess of as yet unrelated information that’s difficult to organise or identify relationships – organisation structures, website information architecture, prioritising and assigning work tasks. As always, this warrants greater description, but I’ll try a brief outline of the technique…

Equipment:
- ‘A mess of as yet unrelated information’ (pieces of web content, tasks, members of the animal kingdom etc)
- Cards. These can be A6 speaker’s prompt cards, Post-Its or anything else that’s small, numerous, inexpensive and easy to write on

That’s it. Maybe a pen to write on said cards, but that’s really all you need.

I’m going to deal with the solitary and group activities separately, but there’s one BIG rule for both approaches: Don’t try and make things fit an idea you’ve got in your head. This is what this exercise is about: discovering new and sensible ways of organising information.

Dancing on your own
Use a different card for each piece of information and don’t be shy about using a LOT of cards. Better to capture everything separately and get it right, than save a few coins on stationery. Scatter the cards onto a big table, put sticky notes on a wall or window, stand back and take a long look.

Where items seem to be related, start to put them into groups apart from the mass, but feel free to change mind and reorganise at any time. Using the idea classifying the animal kingdom, you might group dogs, cats and cows together as they all have four legs and fur/hair, but keep sharks separate even if they all have a head and tail at opposite ends.

Once you’ve enough items in a group, think of the common element that describes this group (e.g. mammals) and create a heading or “label” for that group. Ok – repeat until everything is either in a group or unquestionably on its own.

If groups get big or disproportionately bigger than other groups, you’ve probably lumped too much together and need get more granular with subgroups. You could create a new group for cows, lamas and antelopes (ungulates) and another for the dogs, cats and rabbits (pets).

Don’t expect to get it right on the first attempt. Go back and check. If it seems right, duplicate cards to fit in multiple areas, change labels to give the most understandable description, check for spurious or over sized groupings and check how the groupings relate to each other. You might want to rethink lumping dogs, cats and rabbits together as ‘pets’ and maybe split them into canidae, felidae and lagomorpha (betcha thought they were rodents, dintcha?). These subgroups fit neatly into the main group ‘mammals’.

Outputs
This way you end up with either distinctly separate groups, or a granular hierarchy of groups and subgroups (check out the graphic). The latter is often used for creating hierarchical nepohedral taxonomies for websites, better known as “sitemaps”.

Group therapy
Group card sorts are great for getting some real user-centred design going and on-the-job buy in from stakeholders as they see patterns and structures emerge and have an input in the process.

For some of the intranets I’ve designed I’ve started the research process by getting a dozen or so people from around the business, and at different levels, then given them five minutes to write down things they currently use the intranet for, their day-to-day daily work tasks (on or off the intranet) and what they’d like to see on a new intranet. This gives plenty to start off with and things written down by more than one person also begin to give significance to weighting the perceived importance of information.

The key thing is that you can then get the participants to make their own groupings. Make sure you watch and facilitate what’s going on and clarify any ambiguous cards so that the entire group is clear about what’s meant by everything. Provoke debate and conversation – “Can you tell us why you think it’s best this way?” and get them – the real live punters – to come up with subgroups and labelling for the groups, under your watchful eye of sensibleness.

Lastly, remember to capture things they way they happened: Photograph the output, copy the results into an electronic version (Visio, Excel etc) or if it’s small enough, physically pick it all up and heave it back to your desk.

There … order from chaos. Just don’t try and make things fit, instead discover relationships and new ways of organising.

Questions?

Oh … and I *might* have made up the term “hierarchical nepohedral taxonomies”.

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

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum: “but it isn’t so nohow.”
‘Through the Looking Glass’,
Lewis Carroll

One of the problems of communicating with or making services available to large bodies of people is that everyone is different.

I was recently told off, on a well known communication organisation’s forum, by a ‘colleague’ for the apparently anachronistic use of the term “audiences” (your thoughts please?). Anyhoo – be it audiences, stake holders, participants … woddevah! … you need to understand who it is your engaging with (that better?) to craft your work to meet not only your needs but the needs of those you’re engaging with. If you don’t, you have to make ill-informed assumptions, so at best you’re fighting blind, at worst it’s vanity publishing, a waste of money and in some cases potentially litigious – a classic example of this is web sites intended to be used by disabled people, that aren’t accessible.

- Web Accessibility Guidelines (dry, dull and impenetrable, but ‘official’ guidelines from the W3C – the international standards organization for the World Wide Web)

In the miasma of “We are all individuals” (sorry Python) how does one tease out the relevant information about your intended (dare I say it) audience? The answer to this is manifold, but here are some quickies off the top of my very own head.

Personas
Originally a marketing technique, these are great fun to create and give you archetypes, illustrating broad demographic characteristics. The personas are intended to be characters that are believably real, so that those working on the same project can relate to them on an empathic level to encourage a focus on the intended audience as real people.

Typical characteristics include age, gender, educational level, financial position, motivation and goals for using your material, your response to their motivation and goals and often include a scenario concerning the persona needing to interact with your material.

I recently made a bunch of personas for a public sector organisation and even before the end of the presentation my stake holders were already taking about their proposed web content in ways like “Well, is this going to easy enough for Dean to understand?” and “We’re going to have to find a way to make sure Chrissie follows the process the way she needs to, not the way she wants to”.

I’m happy to write a whole post on personas if people are interested, but as a starter, I’d say have a look at things like:

- “The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web”. Good but unless you’re a stats geek, skip quite a few chunks about audience segmentation with pivot tables *snore*
- “Personas” – Wiki

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
MBTI uses a psychometric questionnaire to identify certain characteristics that show how individuals interact with people, situations and information. There are four pairs of polar characteristics (e.g. extrovert vs. introvert) and the questionnaire determines where we are on each scale to give a four letter ‘personality type’, which in turn carries a broad description of our behaviours. Case in point – I come out as an ‘extrovert, intuitive, feeling, judge’. You can read what the MB Foundation say they think I’m like under their entry for an ENFJ and feel free to disagree with only the bad bits.

How does it work in practice? I was talking to a senior project manager recently who told me a story about meetings he used to chair where no decisions were made, interminable debates always dragged the meeting over time and general dissatisfaction was felt by all. He then ran some Myers-Briggs tests on this group and realised that he was running his meeting all wrong for these people – they needed structure, not creative freedom. At the next meeting, he simply limited discussions to five minutes per topic with a decision to be taken at the end and ruthlessly enforced this. The result? Discussions were focussed, decisions were made and the attendees declared the meeting the most productive they’d ever had.

My first encounter with MBTI was in a workshop, run by Uma Palaniappan, an Ergonomist and Human Factors specialist at Rolls-Royce (the engines business, not the cars – Rolls-Royce sold the car business over 30 years ago, bet ya didn’t know that!). She split the attendees into four broad groups based on the MBTI results from the tests we’d done prior, and at the end of the workshop we presented our work to the group.

I presented my ‘extrovert intuitives’ group’s scruffy flip chart page, covered in shapes, squiggles and annotations, with my other ‘EN’s chipping in, while at the other end of the spectrum, the two quietly spoken ‘introvert sensors’ held up their A4 sheet with two or three lines written in small, red biro lettering and apologised as they’d not finished discussing what the question was really getting at. It was a fantastic example of how it IS possisble to pigeon hole people into identifiable groups – Moomins and Hemulins (for those that know).

- MBTI Wiki definition (sorry – lazy, I know)
- The Myers & Briggs Foundation (nastily ‘smiley’ site and with no definition of MBTI – aren’t they missing a trick? – but they appear to be specialists, so hey)

Now, I also wanted to talk about UCD (User-Centred Design), NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) and something from the Dalai Lama, but as I’m approaching 1000 words and have already streaked past the boredom threshold of a number of you … they’ll have to save for their own special days.

But before I finish, I do need to mention that it’s not just about individuals. Another fascinating (read ‘geeky’) example of getting your ‘people things’ wrong is what happens when we get the wrong NUMBER of people in on something and why no government in the world has ever held a cabinet of more than 20 people for any length of time. Just read it – it’s a good story: “Explaining the curse of work”, New Scientist, 14 Jan 2009

Right. Done. Now, just remember: To paraphrase Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’: “We are all individuals … I’m not!”

The Long Dog

- “We are all individuals!!!“ Youtube ‘Life of Brian’ clip by Monty Python, for those of you living in a cave for the last 30 years (contains adult humour and religious irreverence)

“Mr Chatterbox was one of those people who simply couldn’t stop talking.

“He used to talk to anybody and everybody about anything and everything, going on and on and on.

“And on and on and on!”

For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘The Little Miss’ and ‘Mr Men’ series of children’s books it may please you to know that Mr Chatterbox (right) is a loveable but garrulous little character whose unbungable flow of waffle is eventually stopped with a magic hat that steadily grows to cover him when he doesn’t stop talking.

There are far too many websites and intranets that need their own magic hats, but it’s often difficult to explain to your CEO / subject matter expert / Marketing Director / Training Manager (delete as appropriate) that making content too wordy, confusing to follow or simply boring your site’s audience into submission has one of two effects:

1. If your site makes money, your competition is only a back button away: Your revenue drops – simple as that.
2. If your site is an information site or an intranet, people don’t find answers and your avoidable cost increases (calls to helpdesks, lower efficiency, wrong answers, referrals to other colleagues to find answers etc).

Oh, and don’t forget the damage it does to your brand. Business objectives mean nothing if your customers aren’t engaged with what you’ve got to offer. Don’t be showy, be smart about what and how you write your content.

Ok … so where’s some science to back this up?

In 1997 (yes – TWELVE years ago, so why is so much dross still being commissioned) Jakob Nielsen wrote an article outlining research on how people read web pages. While he talks about all the things we should already know about, like page scanning instead of reading, a particularly good demonstration shows how to edit eight lines of dull prose into just over one line and six clear bullets.

While some of the article is now outdated, humans haven’t evolved noticeably in the last decade so it’s worth a punt: “How Users Read on the Web”. A strong caveat I’d add to this concerns the logic of emboldening keywords (one of the aforementioned outdated thingies): Gerry McGovern, self styled content guru and repackager of information architecture as ‘Carewords’, sensibly pointed out that if you only want your readers to read the bold words, why bother with the rest of the text? Of course he’s right – just create focussed content and cut the waffle.

Last year I designed a tool for a UK bank – one of those things where you put in the details of all your various outstanding debts and they tell you just how much you can save every month if you consolidate your loans with them. One of the features that I killed off was the need for the customer to specify what interest rate they wanted to pay. Given the choice I’d have said 0% or at least something like 0.0000000000001% every time. What they really needed to say was how much they wanted to pay every month and then the bank can tell them what the interest rate is, if they’re … wait for it … ‘interested’ (ba-boom-tish!). My point here is this: don’t put obstacles in people’s paths to answers – or your product, for that matter.

Recent usability testing has shown that it’s not unusual for people to open several browser windows at once and compare services from different sites as they go along. As services don’t make the grade (difficult to understand, higher price, slower response time etc) they close those windows down until only one remains: the probable winner. Darwinian ecommerce? If your site’s still chattering about irrelevant or extraneous info while another’s taken your audience straight to the point then you lose, they win, and likely as not, your competitor will be the place that they return to next time.

So …

• Cut out all … that’s ALL … extraneous waffle
• Avoid sesquipedalian maledictions (cursed use of overly long words)
• No vanity publishing (the text equivalent to loving the sound of your own voice – that includes valueless pictures of grinning execs and their “welcome – this is site is full of useful information…” blarney)
• Pitch your language to the level of your audience
• Write a draft, chop the word count in half then chop it in half again
• Remove all speeling eroorrs and grammatical errors (unless the style says it ain’t so)
• Learn when to stop

And on that note … I’m going to shut up.

The Long Dog