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.

 

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.

 

Can you see the wood for the numbers?

Search marketing is a wonderful tool, and any marketer worth his or her salt loves the data and evaluative tools it delivers. The old adage, ‘If you can’t measure it you can’t use it,’ comes to mind.  But I’m getting increasingly uneasy about the the amount of weight given to this one dimension. Client review meetings devote an inordinate amount of time to going over the stats, slicing and dicing the data. Nothing wrong with that, but I would like to start re-dressing the balance a little. Putting the user more centre stage rather than the numbers.

It’s easy to count the user sessions, track the visitors and measure the conversions, but often, when we look to improve the performance, the focus is upon the numbers, the keywords, the content and the clicks. Performance may be greatly enhanced by going back to the user and the user’s experience.

It’s easy to see why the focus tends to be upon the numbers – quantitative data is easier to collect and easier to analyse. Qualitative data is harder to amass and analysis takes more skill and experience than just wielding a calculator. Social psychologists use a number of approaches to qualitative data including ethnographic studies. One of the most interesting is perhaps grounded theory which, simply put,  means approaching the data with a completely open mind and no preconceived questions to ask – the theory being emergent from the data itself.

Unfortunately, when all the quantitative analysis of web stats has been done, qualitative decisions are often made on the basis of hunches and anecdotal evidence, with no real input from the user.

Perhaps getting back to the user and spending more time on the experience might deliver even better results that can then be evidenced by the stats. I feel sure that some of the predictable and unimaginative sites we see today are the product of too much data focus. They look as though they were built by statisticians – not humans.

 

Content – the starting point, not an afterthought

Ask any web developer and probably the biggest issues he or she has to deal with is content. All the planning stages are carried out with only broad notions of content. There is a view that it can be simply added at some point down the line. This means approaches may be developed with predictable structures and unimaginative navigation.

Structure and navigation should be emergent from the content. Try taking the content as a starting point, with no preconceptions and building the sitemaps and wireframes out of the content – rather than the other way around.

 

Creativity for all – the ever changing face of digital.

Digtal media is a slippery, slidey thing morphing faster than a Terminator CGI. Just when you think you have a handle on it it changes before your eyes. When I first got involved back in the dark ages of new media (1990’s) it was a dark art, the preserve of strange hybrid creative geeks and bored (or visionary) graphic designers. When I tried to sell it commercially, the most common rejection I received was, ‘We don’t know who is looking at it: probably some 13 year old kid in Uzbekistan’.

Then a tsunami of metrics hit us, and digital became the most measurable medium available to marketers and communicators. Classically trained marketers loved it… and stats ruled over creativity for a while.

Then creativity returned with a vengeance riding on the back of rich media. When I started as a young creative in a Manchester ad agency the chance of working on a TV commercial was a remote day dream. Rich media attracted passionate creatives who were already cutting their teeth on social internet. On-line became the most exciting area for creatives to work.

Today we are seeing a convergence of measurability and creativity. Marketers, particularly those involved with brand issues are seeking qualitative as well as quantitative measures. Click through rates are no longer the end of the story… or even the beginning. I’m not suggesting the on-line arena has matured and the factions are now living in happy harmony: as I said at he outset… it is a formless, changing beast.  What I do applaud is a return to creativity and a chance for every aspiring creatives to produce stunning, provocative solutions and snap at the heels of those with multi million pound budgets. And, an opportunity to use the stats to demonstrate that brave ideas actually do deliver in a crowded, media-rich community.

 

Digital project management – where did it come from?

Although, as I have discussed before, digital project management is a valuable discipline, I mused for a while on where it came from.  Many digital organisations came from the design and advertising industries, where, although significant project management skills are practised, it is not recognised as a discipline. Having worked in those areas myself for a number of years, I understand that the concept of a project has negative connotations. Project based work means that the company has to constantly be chasing new work – the holy grail is to turn those projects into clients requiring on-going service. The management philosophy is usually built around account handling and account management, rather than project management.

When digital media arrived, the type of work originally undertaken was the building of websites. These were usually individual turnkey projects, and as such were amenable to project management methods and approaches. But what of the other services now offered by companies operating in the digital arena? Web marketing, on-line promotion, and digital communications all can be looked at as on-going processes, rather than finite projects with a beginning and end point. However it could be argued that if a strategy is in place with defined objectives, project management is the route to go.

Okay, I admit a lot of this is semantics and depends upon the taxonomy of roles within an industry sector, and most operations will embody both account and project management disciplines, but I think it is also a reflection of the culture and business philosophies to observe which is dominant within the sector.

 

Beauty is more than skin deep

I’ve already spoken of the problems of evaluating website proposals and so often I have been called in by clients whose lovely websites are just not delivering business results. Often the problem lies in the lack of identifying clear objectives in briefing, or the web developers being unclear of how the site will deliver.  It is the underlying structure and architecture of the site that is of critical importance.

What many clients fail to understand is that with modern web standards based sites changing the visual look should generally be very simple. So, your prime criteria in selecting a site should be the structure and whether it delivers technically. If you can get a site that really works for you you can change the visual look easily. Too often the client forgets the business objectives of a site and is seduced by the visual look of it.  It’s like going out to buy an economical three door car and buying a gas-guzzling 4×4… because you like the colour. Follow these simple rules:

• Give a clear brief on what you want the site to do from a business point of view (for example, is it to generate responses, build brands, provide technical data, drive customers to outlets?). Build this into your brief and make it the prime criteria for selection.
• Consider how the site will be maintained and updated, in view of you internal resource – put this in your brief.
• Look at other websites that deliver what you want yours to deliver – forget the looks and concentrate on technical delivery and usability – reference these in your brief and compare your developers’ solutions to these best practices.
• When you get a proposed solution that delivers, then look at the visual design. If you don’t like it as the developers to work on it until you are happy. Remember it is far easier to change the visual look than change the underlying coding and structure at some point in the future.