Get the full story on How to Develop a Great FAQ Page for an Online Course in eLearn Magazine, an ACM publication.

All kidding aside, for a number of years, there has been talk of moving away from the term “user” to describe the non-development (and in there, I include all corporate staff, not just software developers) persons who buy, sign up for, interact with, or otherwise interact with a product. Keeping in mind that entire professions have been based on the term – user experience, usability, user testing – this is not a decision to be taken lightly. A mostly thoughtful discussion , started by Josh Bernoff, can be found on the Forrester site blog.

I’m staying out of the fray, but will weigh in briefly here. My personal feeling is that as times change, words become bogged down with meaning, and so new labels get attached in an attempt to change the semantics. I saw this in the periodic re-labeling of some visible minorities and sexual orientations over the last several decades – the intent was to break the negative connotations associated with the original term. In this case, I’m not certain that the semantics they’re trying to shift actually need to be shifted. People who use technology to achieve various goals (find information, complete a transaction, etc.) may change technologies and may change goals, but they will continue to interact (that is, use) whatever technology is provided by the organization mandated to provide it to them. If I were to change the semantics, I’d start at the other end, and relabel the jobs of the people who create the technologies. Developers, schmevelopers – model it after the public service sector. User servant novice class, user servant intermediate class, user servant master class. It will never happen, of course, but now that would be a major mind shift in the industry.

The example I’ve been using is of going to a rental car office and being able to take the keys from the desk, get into the car, and drive away. You’re not asked to first take a tutorial or read a manual because the pattern, the schema, the mental model is well established. You know where the steering wheel, gas pedal, brakes, clutch, etc. are all going to be. (Even when going to a country where they drive on “the other side of the road,” you know where everything is, just in mirror image.) The only variables might be the windshield washers and cruise control, which you check before you drive off. But you know they’re there, and approximately where they wil be. And when we’re driving, because the pattern of driving is so familiar, we go through the rote tasks of changing gears, tapping the brake or accelerating, etc. in background processing mode while our primary processing mode is on wayfinding through an unfamiliar neighbourhood and/or avoiding the bad driver next to us and/or talking to whoever is in the passenger seat.

So when we use software, we have a similar experience. Right now, if you think about the feedback Microsoft is getting from Vista and Office 2007 users, you hear that new users love it, while experienced users are frustrated. When you think about patterning, and primary and secondary cognitive levels, it makes sense. New users have no existing patterns to break; they simply adopt a pattern and their feedback is “great stuff!” Transfer users have a very different experience. They have to break deeply ingrained patterns, and during the transition process, their frustration levels mount because what are usually background processes – pressing key combinations and clicking and right-clicking are now taking over. Instead of concentrating on what would normally be primary processes – wordsmithing or image cropping or political diplomacy in the workplace – the users are now painfully conscious of not speeding through their patterned responses. They have to slow down, feel clumsy and stupid all over again. One very smart fellow confessed to me that he went home and left a number of documents open in the new version of Word because he couldn’t figure out how to save them, only to come in the next morning more determined to figure the darned thing out. So the first item on his agenda was to “get rid of some annoying flashing thing in the corner” (that experienced users have trained themselves to ignore), only to discover that, you guessed it, it was the Save mechanism that he couldn’t find the day before.

The adoption of a CMS makes users feel similarly out of sorts, particularly when the patterning of the software is unreliable. People don’t process information, they process patterns, and when looking for patterns to follow, they look down their “frequently followed favourites” for the first pattern that fits. So they’ll have certain expectations of what they should be able to do from a toolbar, by right-clicking, by dragging and dropping, and so on, based on patterns that they may not even realize they’re tapping into. The responses may come from an intuitive, muscular level that they can’t articulate but, sitting at a keyboard, just intuitively expect to happen, based on collective past experiences. Knowing this, and understand these user expectations, is the first step toward product usability, and user acceptance of the product. (Because you just know that if it’s not usable, staff will go to great, great lengths not to have to use it.)

The software development teams that don’t understand this dynamic, that insist of doing something different and compensating with more explanation and documentation, will eventually lose the race, but the sad part is that they’ll take out a lot of innocent bystanders along the route. For too long, CMS vendors haven’t had their feet held to the fire when it came to usability. As long as the output was to standard, the usability for internal users could be compromised to get the build out the door. But younger users “get” usability, and demanding more. And newer, more agile vendors “get” usability, and have changed the game. If they were to stand in front of this new breed of customer and explain away the reasons why their interface worked thus and so, their users would come back at them with, “Those aren’t reasons; those are excuses!” The gauntlet has been thrown down, and now it’s up to the industry players, one and all, to get their game faces on. As James Robertson points out, “broader discussions are needed within the industry to better define ‘best practice’ design for content management systems and to help improve the usability of all products.” It was gratifying to see, at the last CM Professionals‘ Summit in San Francisco, a vendor discuss the practices in their office, the metrics that they track, and what measures they take to keep customer satisfaction high. It was equally gratifying to notice the other vendors in the audience listening intently, making notes, and chatting with the presenter afterwards. There is a time and place to compete, and a time and place to collaborate. Perhaps this is the first step in the right direction: toward a better user experience.

This echoes my sentiments all along – so why don’t we see more of this in the technical communication world? Are tech writers so lacking in imagination that we can’t think these things up? Possibly, but I suspect that’s a minority of writers. Are tech writers so used to being shouted down by the budget-holders who don’t see the value in engaging documentation that they’ve given up? I think we’re getting closer. Is the company culture one that leaves tech writing right till the end, when the writers barely have time to throw together some form of document just-short-of-fiction to include with the product so that it gets out the door at the same time as the product? I suspect we’re getting closer to the reality of many writers’ lives. (For those writers’ tsk-tsking the notion, you don’t know how lucky you are!)

Hoorah for Kathy Sierra (“chief poohbah” of Head First books) for spelling this out in such a clear way.

Before the site redesign, the site was usable, more or less. With a little hunt and peck, you could find what most of what you wanted. It was a little boring, but, well, it’s Canadian, and one step away from bureaucratic. It’s supposed to be on the staid side. The new site, on the other hand, is Vegas. It’s a marquee of gratuitously disappearing (and re-appearing) rows of seats, flashing words – I almost expect “Eat at Joe’s” to flash at any moment. Yes, some 18-year-old in a garage had a good time.

But wait, there are other “improvements”! Checking the “remember number” box under your Aeroplan number doesn’t work any more. Well, to be accurate, it only remembers the last bank of numbers of the trio of boxes. But seeing as you are supposed to have your Aeroplan card in your hand at all times, that shouldn’t be a problem, heh?

Another improvement is that, even when you have your password and click LOG IN, nothing happens. Well, I shouldn’t say that nothing happens. The “waiting for http://www.aeroplan.com” in the bottom corner happens for a very, very, very long time. And then you get the error message, the one that says to try logging in on the left (which you just did when you got the error message), or go to the homepage (?&!!! – I’m not sure what that is supposed to accomplish but I tried it and just went in a loop), or to call them. Now that, my friend, is a trick question. Or a trick answer. Or maybe it belongs in the trick suggestion category. Because when I phoned, I got an outdated message telling me all the dates that they would have less phone service (despite the fact that all those dates had passed), and then gave me five options, none of which answered my question, and then said that all operators were busy, and then told me to go to the website at, guess where …. wait for it … http://www.aeroplan.com, the very home page that doesn’t like my password. Hmmmm.

So what is one to do? Last resort, let me try the Password Help link. After”Loading …. Loading … Loading … for a minute or two, well maybe three, it can’t seem to find the link destination which seems to be “http://www.aeroplan.com/home.do” (but wait, that’s the home page!) and then it tells me “We’re not able to identify you online. So give us a call and we’ll make sure you get a password as soon as possible.” Where have I heard this before? Perhaps the same place I heard the next message, which expressed how they are experiencing high call volumes (do these places ever not have high call volumes?) followed by a suggestion that I phone back or hold the equivalent of forever.

I thought I’d try waiting for a while, at least the time it takes to blog this less than illustrious user experience. The experience only got worse, as I realized whatever content management system they use does not support basic topic expiry.
Oh, look, it’s January 2nd, and I can find out about “Reduced operating hours at the Aeroplan Contact Centre: During the holiday period, the Aeroplan Contact Centre will be open from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. EST on December 24, 25, 26 and 31, 2006 and January 1, 2007.”
And “Rewards you want and a chance to win miles–in our new catalogue. “ Oh, but “This promotion expired on December 31, 2006 00:00 at 00:00 and it’s no longer available.” But my favourite was “Shop Smart–earn miles upon miles at our new retail store partners.” Click here returned the message: “This promotion expired on November 12, 2006 00:00 at 00:00 and it’s no longer available.”

I will give credit to their phone staff, though. They must be very familiar with the failed password routine. The obviously practiced gentleman rattled off the directions at breakneck speed about how I should click the first link in the email that I would get, and with minimums of 6 characters and 20 characters and … well, I didn’t catch the whole thing, but the short answer is that if the first link doesn’t work, use the second link within 6 hours and I’ll be up and running again.

Aeroplan, you’ve outdone yourself. I’m sure there’s an award out there somewhere for you.

There’s still a lot of ego-driven web design out there – and when I talk about design, I include the information architecture of the site, the content architecture, the graphic design, and the copywriting – that speaks more to “look what cool stuff we can do” or rather than “how do I better serve my customer?” This spawned such phenomena as the “skip intro” movement, where web designers insisted on creating Flash introduction pages that irritated consumers so much that the designers were asked to do something to solve the problem, and rather than simply remove the offending page, they kept it, but added a subtle link called “skip intro.” We’re seeing less of this as the industry matures, but there are still plenty of sites around that try to control the size of the type so that readers can’t resize it. It’s one of those “good in theory, bad results” ideas. The theory is that the graphic designer keeps “the look” they want, but the result is simply that the target market can’t resize the text to read it. On a properly formatted site, readers should be able to hold down the control key and use the scroll wheel on their mouse to make the text larger or smaller. Try that today (November 20, 2006 – as sites change every day, I can only speak to the validity today) on the Holt Renfrew home page or Target or Macy’s home pages, where a few of the text items gets bigger but most stay frozen at the size the designer decided on. As customers report that they make less distinction between a company’s web presence and their storefront presence, the company ergonomist may want to take a look at the huge stumbling block being put up just in front of the doorway. You might be surprised who might come in once you take it away.

When the proposal to go forward with the preparation and implementation of a content management project is put to the executive team, and the business imperative is clear, executive endorsement of the project is required for the project to move to active status.

This article is not about getting executive sponsorship, or buy-in; we assume you already have moved past that particular hurdle. Rather, it is about the need to explain in some detail what exactly executive endorsement means. Why is this important? Because unlike many other corporate initiatives or software investments, the implications of a migration to a content management system stretch far beyond the initial investment.

In general, executive teams are focused on the higher-level aspects of a proposal. Their role is to evaluate why a content management system makes sense for the organization. They will, of course, weigh costs and anticipated benefits, and are able to do so without needing to know exactly how this new system works. After all, that is why they have line managers, to do the research and prepare the proposal for a decision. The decision to endorse a CM project is generally, from the executive point of view, financial.

Consider the tension between three sides of a triangle – one side is People & Performance, a second side is New Technology, and the third side is New Procedures. The interplay between new technology (the CM system), new procedures (protocols to create and manage content), and people must be balanced, or there is no triangle. The aspect that often, unfortunately, gets little or no consideration, is that of adoption/acceptance by the people who work with, or whose work is impacted by, the new system. And those people are scattered throughout the organization.

In order to prevent disappointment further down the road, or to be held accountable for events over which you have no control, you need to explain and clarify what may not be so obvious to your executive team. Besides releasing the funds to purchase, configure and implement the CM system, here are the non-financial consequences of “executive endorsement”:

1. Championing change management throughout the organization.
2. Enforcing compliance with new business processes from adjunct departments
3. Helping transition lost employees

To elaborate on each of these points:

1. Championing change management often literally means leading by example – communicating very clearly and unambiguously to the entire organization that change is happening, why it is happening, and how it will benefit the company and the individual employees. Combine this with visible displays of conforming to the new rules, and it will be perceived as genuine enthusiasm for the new system.
2. Enforcing compliance with new procedures means cracking down on the departments that circumvent new procedures, or find work-arounds. Again, communicating very clearly and unambiguously that non-compliance with procedures will be viewed as an individual performance issue, and will not be tolerated. If it is a matter of training, then training will be provided, but if it is simply stubborn clinging to the old way of doing things, then it must stop. Here too, the executives must understand that they should put their money where their mouths are; they must be seen complying with new procedures.
3. Finally, helping transition “lost” employees. As with any project that significantly impacts the organization, cutting across departmental boundaries and upsetting the established order of things, some will not be able to make the necessary skills adjustments and/or behavioural changes, no matter how much training they receive. Finding ways to deploy these people in other areas of the company, or helping them transition to another job or workplace, is not only the kind thing to do, it is the only responsible thing to do.

If there is insufficient appreciation of the need for executive involvement in these three areas, the CMS project already has an albatross hanging around its neck before it has formally started. It makes so much more sense to prepare the executive for their involvement, than to bear the brunt of their displeasure when things go wrong. Call it Murphy’s Law, because without executive involvement with and support of the change process, things will go wrong. The implications, and the related financial consequences, of not securing executive support for managing the real changes may become so overwhelming that the executive decides to cut their losses, and the project is shut down before completion. What a waste that would be.

From problems with the business premise to change management, from lack of conformance to open standards to lack of up-front planning, Erik has seen it all. Learn the most common pitfalls in content management implementation from Erik Hartman. – 6.53 MB