Boykin’s approach, in a YouTube video called Satisfy the Cat, works well to illustrate the relationship between web designer, client, developers, and end users, and why a user-centered design process, instead of a client-centered design process, is important to grease the wheels of business.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dln9xDsmCoY

Be sure that visitors subject your website to the same first-impression scrutiny that they exercise in real life, only faster. It takes 0.1 second to decide whether your site is attractive, 10 seconds to decide that your site is “taking too long” to respond, and 1 minute to be fed up with a task or a video.

Explaining the importance of getting this right is critical to a development team has its problems, as people “yes but” when it comes to their territory. The marketing department may “yes but” over the whiz-bang elements that slow down the site. Interaction designers may “yes but” when asked to redo problematic area. Developers may “yes but” when asked to do over some code. The writers may “yes but” when you insist that a content strategy must precede the content development stage.

Actually, it’s not even the “yes but” that is the problem; that may just development stakeholders working through how to fix the situation. The problem is when the “yes but” is accompanied by a workaround, a justification, or a reason that serves to solve an internal problem rather than a client-facing problem. It can throw the development timeline off, affect the quality of the final product, and compromise the maintainability of the site. Because all of these factors have an effect on the Total Cost of Ownership, sometimes in serious ways, the “yes but” can be the “gotcha” that takes a project down; definitely not something I’d want to underestimate.

If you’ve never been to CANUX, you’re missing out on a fabulous opportunity. Being up in a resort-like mountain setting at the Banff Centre imbues the workshop with some cosmic-force creative atmosphere. There are a few days left to sign up with the advance discount, so don’t delay if you’re sitting on the fence.

I’ve just moved into a new place, which comes complete with a gas fireplace. I was told by my landlords that using the gas fireplace to warm the lounge area would be cozy and economical, so I pushed the button on the remote control to start up the fireplace, which was set to 74F, took some painkillers, and promptly fell asleep on the sofa. When I awoke, the temperature hovered in the low 80s, and I couldn’t figure out the right button combination to turn the fireplace off, and within a half-hour, the temperature was climbing into the mid 80s. As I couldn’t get in touch with my landlords, the next best thing seemed to be to find the information on the manufacturer’s site.

The site was completely geared toward sales. There was no telephone number to contact anyone, and the customer support side was rather anorexic. I sent off an email using their contact form, with little expectation that anyone would get back to me, as the form was also geared to sales – or at least knowing details such as the model number (and I wasn’t about to start poking around a very hot hunk of cast iron). There were some downloadable manuals, that in my fevered state made little sense, and even in my current non-fevered state, I realize now, didn’t have the information I needed.

The poor user experience continued, even after some creative searching turned up company with a phone number in the same area code as me. So do I have incredibly bad luck, or is this problem more widespread than should be, considering that the Web has been around for more than a decade? Where is their knowledge base, their forum, or at least a FAQ page? I am, after all, used to using new Web services, where  self-serve is the norm. I had every incentive to look for the information, if it were there. And in this case, where I was literally dealing with fire, I expect some sort of emergency line to get a much-needed answer.

According to Jeffrey Tarter, Executive Director of the Association of Support Professionals, “Tech notes should be the heart and soul of a great Web support site.Yet painfully often, users encounter a tangle of hard-to-understand, poorly maintained knowledge base documents that fail to solve their problems–and may even discourage users from ever coming back to the site. In fact, many knowledgebases were originally written for internal use by support reps, not customers, and hardly anyone ever seems to ask: Is this approach really working for us?”

I can answer that. No, it’s not working. It’s not working for either party. As a customer, the experience left me cold. I certainly wouldn’t buy from them, and could never recommend them in good faith. As an industry professional, I can’t imagine it’s pleasant or productive to have irate customers calling for information that support staff are ill-equipped to answer.

The people who come to your site, who are generally called “users,” come there to consume content. It doesn’t matter whether the content is text, audio, graphics, or video, and it doesn’t matter whether the content is of the persuasive, instructional, or entertainment variety. The people who come to your site are content consumers, and they have searched out, or navigated to, your site to find some content to consume.

When a content consumer comes to your site and finds what they’re looking for, they consider the endeavour a success. In other words, they went on a treasure hunt found the content “treasure” they were looking for.  When the hunt leads to no treasure, the time and mental energy spent is considered a waste, no matter how good the rest of the user experience.

Here’s a real-life illustration. Last year, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. When my sister called me from the other side of the country to tell me the news, I had all sorts of questions. As the eldest child, I’m the “fixer” and went into high gear, doing research to find answers to the questions no one had thought to ask at the time. I chose to look through the Mayo Clinic site, as they are a reputable source of information. Thankfully, I found the answers, and could provide links to my sister so she could read up on the topic, as well.

What would have been my response had I not not found the content I needed? Would I have been impressed with the navigation, the colours, the affordance on the buttons? I think not. I would have uttered a frustrated “this is terrible,” or something more colourful, and left the site in frustration.

In my case, the process of the hunt became invisible. This is because of the care that the Mayo Clinic team put into creating usable navigation and wayfinding aids.  (Had the design been flawed, the hunt would have been impeded, and that would have warranted a frustrated outcry of a different tone.) More important to me, however, was that the content that I had set out to find was actually there. It would never occur to me to wander around the Mayo Clinic site to marvel over the user experience of their site – well, actually, I would, but only because I’m an industry geek with infinite curiosity – but it would occur to me to read everything I could get my hands on about the topic at the forefront of my mind.

I relied on the clues that got me to the treasure in the most efficient way. This form of wayfinding is a critical aspect of user experience, but it is not the entire user experience. It may be convenient to abdicate responsibility for wayfinding to the information architects, interaction designers, and other user experience professionals whose work scope includes these aspects of site design, but it is certainly not effective. In other words, the user experience is not complete without good content.

Dorian Taylor, who comes from the technical side, hit the nail on the head when he wrote: “Rather than designating content as something that is plugged into a decorated shell, why not endeavour to put it at the centre?” This fits nicely with a content strategy perspective, where we recognize that content is not a shell game.

But really, wouldn’t it be an eye-opener for companies and bureaucracies who don’t seem to get it, and don’t seem to have an impetus to get it? And the consumers who could finally realize that the problem doesn’t like with them, but with the services, products, websites, and agencies with which they they’re trying to interact.

The idea would be something like this: follow around a couple of average people, watch their interactions with the world around them, and show the interactions, both positive and negative. Here’s what a half-hour episode could look like:

Woman comes out of the shower, holding two bottles. She shows the camera that she can’t tell which one is shampoo and which one is conditioner because she’s at that age where everyone needs glasses – who wears glasses in the shower, though? – and the labels on the bottles have the brand name in large type and the product type in small type. She figures out the fix: change brands for one of the products so she’ll know that yellow is shampoo and green is conditioner. (Are you watching, marketing managers? Designers?)

Woman is shown up some transit information. Between the compact fly-out menus and double-tab navigation, it takes her several tries to click on the tab she wants. With each try, her language gets more colourful. Finally, she gets to the schedule and discovers that the route she needs to take doesn’t work for her, and she expresses her frustration articulately but firmly.

Man is shown driving in his neighbourhood. He points to a bicycle lane being used as a right-turn lane, another being used as a right-hand passing lane. The camera shows how close cars come to the bicycles as they whiz by. Camera shows him on his bicycle, and as he rides down the street, wobbling from time to time, he articulates his fear of being hit by a car that doesn’t allow enough clearance. He reminisces about the bicycle paths in Holland, a tiny country that found the room to create bicycle paths separates from the road by greenways.

Man is calling a telephone provider to ask about deleting a service he doesn’t use. He is put on hold while told that they are “experiencing a higher than usual call volume”. He snorts with derision and says that he’s never once called without getting that message. In an Emporer Has No Clothes move, he theorizes that this is simple understaffing in the hopes that, aside from saving money at their end, more people will be motivated to figure out their problems by themselves. The camera pans to his computer screen, where he shows how he’s sent around and around in circles when he tries to get to that service. When he finally reaches customer support, the comical discussion with the staffer at the other end reaches Kafkaesque proportions. (Are you watching, marketing managers? Loyalty advocates?)

Woman is trying to book a ticket online, and shows that despite clicking “Remember Me”, the site design doesn’t want to remember the first six numbers of her account. Somewhere along the line, she is asked to put the number in again, and ends up looking up the number and, out of frustration, writing it on her hand. She muses that it’s times like this she considers taking up smoking again. (Are you watching, interaction designers?)

I could go on, but you get the picture. This is the reality of daily life, where design sloppiness gets ugly as it frustrates us ten ways to Sunday and wastes our time, from the time we get up until the time we go to bed (oh, and don’t get me started about alarm clocks). Oh, and if you need a willing victim, er subject, for your show, call me.

There are two types of people, I’ve found: those who read the tags, and those who read between the tags. A couple who exemplify this are my accountant and his database administrator wife. When I turned up there wearing my content strategy t-shirt, they both studied it intently for a minute. Her reaction was: yep, you wrote valid code. His reaction was: can you tell me what a content strategy is? at which point we all realized that she’d read the tags but hadn’t absorbed what was inside the tags at all. 

Content Strategy t-shirt

This was consistent with the reaction I got at the IxDA conference, where the “blank canvas” t-shirts were handed out. The coders read the tags but had to be reminded to read inside the tags. So what do you do when you’re the one who cares about what’s between the tags more than the tags themselves? (Or you’re like me and think the tags are just as important as the content within, for various reasons I won’t go into in this post.) This is where you need to know the technology options that support your content strategy. This is what separates strategists from writers.  

At many of the conferences I attend, there’s a fellow there who promotes a product that analyzes all the content within [a site, repository, code, etc] and will tell you where certain terms are used, and when terms are used “almost but not quite” the same, and so on. I know about this tool because it’s used by organizations that have buckets and dump trucks full of technical content that needs tracking and translation, and this tool assists with productivity when you have, say, ten or 500 writers who need to write in the same style and use consistente language. (Example: One simple instructional sentence was written with over 300 variations – that alone represented thousands of dollars in translation costs by the time it went into multiple languages.)

So reading the “measuring content strategy” post made me think: wait a minute. If the organization in question has such a “sprawling” site, surely they have such a tool, to make it easy to find, analyze, track, control and otherwise manage the content at the word level (as opposed to the tag level). I’m not mentioning the tool – this isn’t about product placement – because of the importance of knowing about the resources out there that are available to us as content strategists, and knowing when they could be used and to what purpose.

The blog post states: “If a customer lands on a website and leaves because the content was irrelevant or unprofessional, we won’t have the chance to say, “Hey! Come back! That’s not really us. We just threw some stuff up there until we have money for good content.” That person is gone, baby. And we may never know it.” From all the studies done in the UX field, we know how fickle site visitors can be, and we’re right to be concerned about that content between the tags. Equally as important is to arm ourselves with the ammunition to justify how we can keep that content on track.

I just found out about a new podcast series that sounds interesting: the Userability Show. Jared claims they’re some of the most entertaining and educational podcasts available on UX. I’ve listened to a couple of them now, and while it doesn’t complete with The Comedy Network, it is a podcast I can learn from while driving, working out, etc.

Subscribe to their feed through iTunes, other podcast apps, or direct link:

http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/

]]> http://intentionaldesign.ca/2009/06/05/podcasts-on-usability/feed/ 0 http://intentionaldesign.ca/2009/04/07/content-strategy-includes-convergence-integration-and-syndication/ http://intentionaldesign.ca/2009/04/07/content-strategy-includes-convergence-integration-and-syndication/#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:05:07 +0000 rahelab http://intentionaldesign.ca/?p=844 If you think content production is complex now, wait until it starts converging with content from other departments or groups. Or when users, dissatisfied with the quality of the documentation provided, start their own DIY documentation project, and it ranks higher in the Google rankings than your own support site.

If you’re being asked to use your content in more than one way, you might be at the stage where the more part includes methods or technologies you’re not really familiar with. Maybe content re-use means syndication or collaborative creation with other departments or divisions, or incorporating content from other sites or user generated content. It could mean figuring how to build community or provide better support or get better feedback.

Maybe more means creating or incorporating help from the technical side, sharing the content in a knowledge base, putting it on the Web, maybe with automatic updates, and adopting XML, perhaps figuring out how the new DITA standard works for you in all of this.

No matter what your situation, you’re in the position where you’re supposed to figure out the XML stuff and the Web stuff and the quality stuff and the stuff around RSS feeds and copyright, how it all fits together, and why you need any of it, anyhow.

After all, if you’ve even tried to coordinate content creation between departments, or track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, or just share content between a CMS and LMS, you’ll recognize how hard it is to find two systems that play nice together, let alone get an entire corporate strategy in place. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. The promise of content management was to solve the silo problem, but in many cases has simply created larger silos.

I’ve posted slides from my workshop, where we look at:

• The concepts of content convergence and integration, the principles behind it, and the market forces that are driving the trend
• Opportunities created by content convergence in various contexts, from technical documentation converging to support documentation to marketing material to user-generated content
• The changing nature of content to allow for successful convergence, and the changes in processes to support it
• Ways to prepare your organization to adapt, and explore ways to allow content convergence to drive improvements in business efficiency and customer relationships

When the DUO Consulting newsletter hit my inbox today, and I read Sonny Cohen’s post entitled “Site Loading? Skip Intro? You’re Kidding? I’m Outta Here,” I found myself nodding my head in sad agreement. However, a couple of the comments on the blog got me riled up enough to elaborate on the topic here.

To Flash or not to Flash

I have seen Flash intros well executed, but in very rarely and in very specific contexts. Most of the time, it’s an annoyance or worse, a complete block.I used to be able to successfully aruge with developers by reminding them that Flash undoes their SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. Recently, a developer proudly countered that because Google can now index Flash files, he sees no reason not to revert to Flash. This raised the stakes for me, as the need to “prove” that Flash is counter-productive just became a more laborious task. Here are a couple of user experiences you can try for yourself:

To Flash or Not to Flash

Your task: Find the address of the Moxie’s in Vancouver’s West End.

The test: Does the Flash interfere with getting information?(For a uniquely frustrating experience, repeat the test on your mobile device.)

The site: Moxie’s Classic Grill

Results: I did this exactly once, and only under duress. Each page takes ages to load. The logical “Contact Us” and “About Us” don’t yield any useful information, and the restaurant locator is less than useless. With each page load, I became so resentful of wasting my time (and having my lunch date waiting on the other end of the phone while I went through this exercise), that I now have a slight hate-on for Moxie’s. In other words, the site damaged the brand. It’s not like their menu is so unique that I have to go there to experience a particular type of food.

Conclusion: Nobody likes a flasher, especially when they think that forcing their jiggly bits onto you is cool.

Sound Indulgence

Your task: Go through a testimonial, and find the corresponding site in their showcase.

The test: Can you turn off the sound of the “hostess” to listen to the testimonial? (For a uniquely frustrating experience, try this on a wide-screen laptop, where the lack of screen height  affects the ability to navigate.) How long does it take you to match up the testimonial to the showcase piece? Most importantly, was it worth the work?

The site: Darvak

Results: Observe user behaviour as they wildly start moving the mouse across the page, trying to find the “mute” button. To determine if anyone actually listened to the message, answer these questions:

• What does the organization believe is the key in [sic] graphic design, marketing, and advertising?
• What is the name of the hostess?
• Did they accidentally open the pool game in their desperation to turn off the sound?

Conclusion: Maybe it’s because I spend too much time on airplanes with crying babies that don’t come with mute buttons, but this brings to mind the phrase “Children should be seen and not heard.” Kewl, maybe. Useful? Not so much.

Who Gets It?

The site: Vision Critical

They have a Flash option, which allows users to engage or bypass this. On their products page, the embedded video has controls to allow users to pause and continue, mute, or end the video. Also, users can scan the page while the video loads. And finally, the content in the video is useful. It is an extension of the page content.

The site: Jaguar

The site has a Flash presentation which doesn’t interfere with getting to the information. When I bypass the Flash, I don’t feel like I’m actually bypassing it; I’m simply getting to the information I want. If I want their Flash experience, I can return to it at any time.

The video didn’t really do anything for me, but let’s assume that their market research has shown that the video creates emotional impact. They let you move anywhere in the Flash presentation by moving along the preview bar (Want to see that leather interior again? Click along the bar and return to it.) There is, again, control. I didn’t like the music, so I turned it off.

The site: Adobe AIR

The Flash on the Adobe AIR site is actually useful – it demonstrates what the product does. Their execution is such that I don’t need to take any steps to browse the content on the site or to go about whatever task I set out to do. The lack of interference with other navigation and content elements means that the first time I come to the site (when I’m more likely to view the Flash), I can investigate it when I’m ready to, and on subsequent visits, I can ignore it (because I don’t need to be educated in that way again).

These samples have been chosen at random, from the frustration and appreciation of my personal experience. I used to think I was less tolerant than many users because of my industry experience, but having spent time with some younger users lately, I realize that my tolerance level is quite high, compared to theirs. They expect sites to “just work” and there is about a 2-second window before they go elsewhere in search of content (note: in search of content, not more barriers).

The conclusion isn’t anything startling. It’s nothing that hasn’t been said over the past ten years. Let users stay in control of their experience. Let them complete their tasks without friction. Don’t assume what users want to do on your site; do your due diligence in user-centered design to be sure you’re getting it right. When in doubt, do some user testing. And as a content strategist, I’m obligated to add: start with a strategy, then build to fulfill that strategy.