UX and the missing piece?

There has been a great resurgence of interest in User Experience – UX or UXD, which cannot be a bad thing. I remember the first ripples when this discipline started to take its first faltering steps int the US a good few years ago. It slid off the radar for a while but is now back stronger than ever.

Reading some of the many articles in the media what I an struck by is the unspoken dimension that is so apparent in what people are trying to achieve – it is psychology. Back in the 1950’s when advertising in the US was searching for some underlying scientific principles, it was psychology that they turned to. Like the web today, they were dealing with human behaviour, trying to understand it, evaluate it … and ultimately, predict it.

Many of the techniques employed by UX practitioners will be familiar to any psychologist – what sometimes concerns me is that in general it lacks the theoretical foundations. This restricts the deeper understanding and insight of cognition and behaviour that could lead to the most effective outcomes.

 

Ad hoc, full service, boutique or à la carte?

I am old enough to remember when the advertising industry spawned first, creative hotshops (remember Cramer and Saatchi?), then media independents and it wasn’t long before the discussions began to rage between the comparative value of buying full-service vs ad hoc. Later, when digital media first reared its interactive head it was seen as a separate service. Now, digital has been embraced as part of the marketing and communications scene and the old argument (in a slightly different guise) appears again.

We could spend a lot of time discussing whether ad agencies have sufficient digital expertise or fully recognise the possibilities, or if specialist digital agencies have a sufficiently broad marketing base – but in what is still an immature sector the discussion is rather pointless as the offering is so varied and patchy as to provide no obvious answers.

To compound matters, specialisms within the digital arena are growing and replicating faster than a swine-flu virus. We now have SEO, PPC, mobile, content, ecommerce, content production, international, email, research specialists and many, many more.

Nobody but the biggest digital agencies (big bucks) can keep the depth of expertise on their books to bring together the right mix of specialisms required for even moderately complex solutions. But few clients, particularly SMEs, have either the physical resource or the knowledge to assemble the right team of suppliers for an à la carte solution. The instinct of a big agency is do as much internally as they can; it maintains control and maximises revenue. But to provide a client with the most effective, and cost-effective programme, they need to take a more project management role.

The alternative is for clients to employ a digital project manager to manage the best possible team of disciplines to achieve their strategy.

 

Some cookies are best left to crumble.

I’m quite concerned about the stir cause by the knowledge that some etailers are delivering higher prices to returning ‘loyal’ customers than to new customers. What does this say to me as a loyal customer? It says; “We are complacent; we take your custom for granted so we will treat you like a mug!”

Of course we expect introductory bonuses and such for new customers, but loyalty is hard-earned and loyal customers should be nurtured.

It is often said that high street retailers can learn a lot from their electronic counterparts, but this is a case where etailers should take a leaf from the book of bricks and mortar retailers – why do you think they have loyalty schemes, give points and exclusive gifts etc? Because it costs a lot to secure one new customer, and far less to hang on to, and make money from those you have got.  Get greedy and those repeat customers will soon tell you where to stuff your cookies.

 

On the move

It seems like a long time since we first started hearing about the wonders or threats of convergence, but there is a strong indication that mobile in its various manifestations may be taking over the driving seat.

I’ve always been a bit of a purist so far as my mobile phone was concerned: it was just for making phone calls. Then I subscribed to mobile broadband, mainly to use a dongle on my laptop as I travel a lot (don’t get me started on the price hotels charge for broadband). Anyway, that permitted me broadband on my phone. My first use was Google maps when I was was lost. There followed a number of distress driven uses and soon I was hooked. My phone upgrade then led me to a bigger colour screen (my eyesight is no longer what it was… if it ever was).

So, where I always made sure I carried my laptop everywhere in its rucksack, I scaled down to a netbook for foreign trips. At one time I felt naked without some form of computer… now I am relaxed with just my phone, comfortably using it for most of my quick applications.

My tasks for the coming weeks?  Adapt and make sure my websites work well on mobiles.

 

Is CMS changing the face of digital project management?

Content management systems have been around a long time. Once they were custom-built and strictly for big organisations with the money to pay for them. Today they are commonplace for even the smallest enterprise. Building on frameworks such as Joomla they have shifted the project emphasis away from the management of development to the management of content.

This has some interesting consequences: the development of structure is far more in the hands of the managers. Does this make ’strategy creep’ more or less likely? In the previous model, if clients did not get their strategy exactly right, they would change or modify the brief, making amendments throughout the development stage. However, there was usually a substantial cost to these changes, perhaps mitigating against too many changes and (theoretically) an onus on the client to get the strategy right at the start. With a CMS, the client can more easily make changes… even serious structural changes, without such penalties.

So, what is more important, getting the project exactly right… even if you got your initial strategy wrong, or accepting something being 95% right but allowing the other 5% to go through to save costs?

With my project manager’s hat on I hate sloppy planning and I applaud anything that encourages people to get the strategy right at the outset. But in the real world I must accept that clients often DO get the brief wrong or unclear, or situations simply change and it is our job to help them get back on course as painlessly as possible.

The other aspect of the increasing use of the CMS is that it puts the emphasis firmly back on content. That means that it engages the client far more than the developer. There was a time when the the client passed a job over to the developer, with content as an afterthought, expecting the finished project to spring fully formed onto their server. Now the steps are far more synergic: get the design and structure approved, then develop the content… which after all is what the project is all about.

 

Will it be a square world for Google?

Google’s new ‘Google Squared’ has been launched, but just in its test phase at the moment (www.google.com/squared). Basically it seems to deliver search results in a matrix with rows and columns… so what? Well I was sceptical – is this just another jolly wheeze from Google or will it have any practical use?

In terms of searching that we are all familiar with, the tried and trusted layout is probably ideal, and a casual searcher might find ’squared’ confusing. I certainly did when I first looked at it.  But when I started using it as a research tool for one of my other blogs, it all started to fall into place… I could put topics down the vertical axis and categories allong the horizontal axis. Once I ditched Google’s suggested categories (Star sign?) and put in my own… things started to fall into place.

It does get addictive as you can be interactive in a way that traditional search does not allow. I think I will be getting square eyes soon.

 

Don’t forget to write.

Despite the growth of rich media and the phenomena of such channels as You-Tube, digital media is still predominantly text based. Writing sound content has never been more important.  I watch the twists and turns of the search marketing fraternity with interest, but of great fascination is the importance and integration with good, engaging and informative content.  PR skills are now becoming deeply integrated into search and social media strategies. Electronic PR (EPR) and the production and submission of articles is now more than a promotional, awareness-building tool but becomes an integral part of a web marketing strategy.  Wordsmiths are back in fashion.

Content production for SEO now moves beyond the mathematics of keyword density etc. For articles to be accepted the must be interesting, informative, engaging and entertaining…  Hmmm, isn’t that what good advertising and PR copy should have always been? Perhaps when much trailed semantic search really arrives we will be seeing websites as well written as the best ads and press stories.

 

Reverting to type

At the risk of having a rant, I despair of the quality of typography in much of the digital media I have to deal with.  Now, I trained as a designer when typographical design was a distinct and highly prized discipline.  Print material - ads, literature, stationary etc. was created by a designer, then passed to a typographer or typographical designer to specify the type.  When DTP arrived, the designer’s concepts could go straight to print – so the output was purely dependent upon the quality of the designer’s typographical skills and understanding, which in many cases was sadly lacking.

So, why does this matter in today’s digital world? Because, despite rich media advances, the web is still largely a text based medium and an understanding of the principles of typography is vital if copy is to be easily read and understood.  Let’s look at just a few fundamentals:

Line length – the landscape format of a web page is not ideal (why do you think newspaper pages are vertical?). The ideal number of words to a line is about 10-12 max. Why? Because that is the ideal number for the eye to scan and move to the next line with ease – without struggling to find the beginning of the line again.

Text layout – ranged left text reads better than justified or ranged right text. Why? As above, it makes it easier for your eye to return to begin the next line as the lines ‘look’ different.

Upper and lowercase text reads better than all caps – Why? Because once we learn to read we then begin to recognise words by their shape, not by reading them character for character, and the ascender and descenders (the bits that stick above and below the line) in lowercase text help us see the shape more quickly and easily(that’s why motorway signs are in upper and lower).

Sadly, part of the reason for the demise of good typography is that text or content in digital media is often left to the final moment. Pages are filled with ‘greek’ text to view the designs, and nobody (certainly not the designers) ever has to consider how well the content is read.

I could go on… but I hope these few, simple examples make the point. There is an old truism… the best typography is never noticed – you are too busy reading the content.

 

Ask for advice!

It is a simple truth, but if you ask people something, they just might tell you.  Market research built a whole industry on this simple principle. Today, smart marketers embrace social media. One major mobile ‘phone manufacturer used social media to ask its users what they wanted from a mobile phone… the users virtually designed the new range of phones.

Starbucks mounted their successful ‘My Starbucks Idea’, campaign where visitors to a microsite put up ideas and some were then put into action and their progress could be followed.

This is a great way of finding out what customers think and want without going to the vast expense of formal research and focus groups.  For small businesses this is invaluable, giving them access to research and R&D approaches once the preserve of only the big boys.

Amazingly, I still meet organisations who are afraid of letting their customers have their say… because they may say something bad! Surely, if there is something bad you would rather know so you can address it?  That sort of answer is also gold dust for any company.

 

Welcome to 2009

Well, the long Christmas break is over… time to get back into harness.  What will 2009 bring to the digital world?  With the general economic woes, one might expect a good time for digital business as organisations seek to cut costs by employing resources that run on electricity rather than monthly salaries. But making predictions seems to be a hazardous business right now.  I was feeling quite encouraged by the opportunities that could be presented for our sector, until I saw an article on the financial pages suggesting that technology was the place to look for growth and investment… and considering the economists’ track records on making predictions recently, I think I will stick to chicken’s entrails, and keep my clairvoyance to myself.