Filed under Strategic Design

Anybody who has spent more than 15 minutes of research on the Drupal content management system (CMS), can see that the modules and the community developing them are incredibly valuable to the systems success.  Every week, new modules get pumped into drupal.org, constantly solving, improving and securing all the most common (e.g. Views Module) to the most specific (e.g Video Chat Module) web development challenges.

For designers and developers this sometimes poses a problem.  One who is classically trained in design, frontend development, or backend development has been conditioned to solve problems using the most intuitive and optimized work-flow with which they’ve had previous experience.  This results in conversations that start with statements like “LinkedIn uses this really cool UI pattern in their sign up process…”.  From there, they begin building from the ground up with subject to the constraints of time and budget.

With modular architecture, these proven rules don’t always apply because you’re not starting from scratch.  Your starting point is a series of cogs that, when combined right, create a desired outcome at a fraction of the cost.  Yet, when not combined properly, a Drupal site becomes “clunky”. The spirit of the functionality may be there, but its implementation is only as good as the architecture that the specific, individual module creator originally envisioned.

This poses a problem for Interaction designers because we are focused on what users remember from their experience with content, not necessarily the means to access it.  If that experience feels like a series of unrelated cogs instead of a unified vision, that negatively affects a user’s ability to both find information and the perceived value of the brand.

This can result in a very large ecosystem of developers that create well-constructed systems of cogs, instead of fully-realized content- and user-centric visions.  This is not unique to Drupal, as this problem is found in almost every CMS platform.  Developers and designers are empowering their clients to dream their wildest dreams, but in the process, brands and users are losing as the conversations about what role a website serves gets lost in a disconnected litany of functionality. Fully functional “templates,” available for free or purchase, offer one solution to overcoming this problem.

To use an analogy, it’s like restricting yourself to only using certain types of LEGO pieces.  When I play LEGOs with my nephews, they pick out all the coolest pieces they can find and slap them on the set they’re making. They’ll say, “Uncle John, check out this ship I just made!” followed by a systematic counting of laser guns they stuck all over it.

You can think about modules in the same way you think about these cool LEGO pieces.  On top of the Drupal core are certain pieces that have been designed to meet a lot of your building needs.  When one of our clients is looking for us to build a website, it’s easy to want to put together all the coolest pieces that we have found along the way.  It’s also easy to get wrapped up in the cool factor of each piece and market it that way.  Ultimately, we lose track and vision for what the website should communicate and how effectively it achieves it’s business goals.

Finesse of a Drupal website is tied directly to the steering wheel of the team producing it, and that often comes down to the modules they choose to utilize to achieve those results. Here at Duo, we stick to a core set of proven modules with the support of our friends over at Acquia.  It creates an environment where we can be more disciplined with our site architecture because we know what the final output and experience will be from each tool.

By limiting our core tool set, we allow ourselves to focus more on the quality of the implementation, keep a certain level of discipline, and most importantly from an Interaction Design perspective, focus on the content.  Instead of letting the conversation move to the means, let’s instead keep the conversation on the content and the types of users trying to access it.

Equal parts success story and cautionary tale, veterans of web-based content management Kelly Tetterton and Fred Salchli explain the process of building an online web-first platform for renowned newspaper Christian Science Monitor, and the issues it raised. Delving into the ideas and assumptions each team brought to the table, they show how the human, real-life factor involved in large-scale content migration and CMS implementation can influence as much, if not more than more technical considerations.

In the end, a widget can’t fix everything, but checking your assumptions, doing your research, and above all clear communication can not only launch your website, but help everyone walk away satisfied and happy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Often in the creation of websites there is a tension between the tasks visitors want to accomplish and the messages companies want to market or the information they want to gain. With the exception of some social networking or entertainment sites, people expect a certain level of anonymity, and want to remain in control of the interaction. If a customer comes to your site to perform a particular task, either in a browsing or goal-directed manner, yet is greeted with a sales pitch, fluffy marketing language, cryptic or misleading labeled links (or worse, pop-up ads and interstitials) they are presented with barriers to task completion, which leads ultimately to anxiety and frustration.

The problem however, is not the marketing. People want to be engaged with the products they use, feel satisfied that they are accomplishing what they set out to do, and get the most out of the time spent. Reminding customers of your value proposition is an important job for marketing, and reinforces the visitor’s confidence in your brand’s ability to deliver on its promise. In the right context, people want to be exposed to related product suggestions, appealing photos, and rich interactions. It’s when designers and marketers become too clever, or emphasize the brand without regard for audience context, that usability is compromised. The result is long flash intros, splash pages, internally-focused marketing jargon, and mystery-meat navigation.

The opposite approach is not any better. Focusing solely on usability can result in sites that lack enticement and emotional appeal. The elimination of style and personality can be a detriment to your perceived value as much as having a site that is difficult to use. This is why beautiful things work better.

An optimal user experience exists at the intersection of three factors:

Listed in this diagram are the positive and negative aspects of each concept. Focusing solely on any one has the potential for confusion, apathy, or frustration among your visitors. The ideal experience is one that embodies a balance of all three factors.

After work yesterday, I went to work. I joined up with 90 other people to practice our marketing craft. Here was the set up. A nascent organization, Windy City Social, was sponsoring a Marketing Challenge. Three business cases were presented and the crowd dispersed into nine teams to tackle the marketing challenges of each case. Pizza, beer, competition and collaboration at the Cubby Bear in Chicago.

The self-acknowledged un-cool General Motor’s Buick division challenged the crowd to help build a marketing program to bring the average age of their buyers down by about 20 years. No longer selling Electras and LeSabres, Buick’s  newest models were arguably cool enough for their target 35 – 55 market and they were looking for new ways to get the word out. Southwest Airlines, already in possession of the cool factor, desired to share their “bags fly free” differentiation with less frequent travelers. And for truly “cool” in the literal sense, the Chicago Special Olympics sought to grow participation in its Lake Michigan Polar Plunge annual winter fund raiser, now celebrating its 10^th year and having grown to over 1200 chilly plungers.

Teams had 90 minutes to consider the objectives, develop a plan and assemble a presentation. I joined one of the three Polar Plunge teams. Ten of us, having never met and with no appreciation for each other’s skills or background sat in a circle and stared at each other, perfunctory name introductions already forgotten. Go.

Amidst the cacophony of nine teams hammering out their solutions, our group’s leader, Daniel Honigman, filtered the input. Simple, he dictated and we responded by eliminating multiple affinity groups and market segments and focused on one. With that focus, ideas flowed and Daniel contemporaneously captured, structured and edited our draft into a rough PowerPoint. Stop.

Nine 5-minute presentations later we’d heard songs, monologues, skits, taglines and positioning statements. The business case sponsors voted and winners were announced. But actually, we all won as each of us refined and sharpened the skills we need in our day jobs including working quickly, effectively prioritizing, collaborating synergistically and presenting convincingly. It was a hard day’s night, but I had a ball.

Site zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz loading

I have very little time to indulge website publishers with their theoretical coolness.  So when I visit your website do not ask me to wait while your site loads so you can show me how cool you think you are.  Because what I am thinking, as those seconds tick by and you keep me informed to the nearest one hundredth-of-something with a snazzy loading time line, is how much you are all about you. But wait, there’s more.

In return for my permission-not-given patience, you now reward me by loading a useless page that has no information.  And I know that you know it has no information because the one and only option you give me is to “skip intro” and leave the page. Are you listening?

Yes, I see that the page you've loaded for me is entirely vacuous. Thank you for the option to leave - your site.

So if you are a web developer that likes to build cool sites that insult the site visitor with pages that take so much time to load you have to provide a reassuring graphic, find another line of work because you’re giving the rest of us a bad name.  And if you are a website owner that requests these kinds of features, you are barred from using the words “client focused” Because you’re not.

Ummmmm

Is there ever such a thing as too much viral marketing?  Carl’s Jr. faced this unusual scenario recently when it gave away free Famous Star burgers.  According to wired.com the free burgers were only intended for a small group of contest winners attending a Los Angeles Lakers home game Jan. 6, who were texted a special Lakers site URL and a coupon code for a printable coupon.

In a matter of hours, the coupon code and links to the URL showed up on coupon sites across the internet.  Carl’s Jr wasn’t amused and refused to honor the coupons unless bearers could prove they were at the game.

“We’re wanting things to go viral, just not free offers,” said Beth Mansfield, a Carl’s Jr. spokeswoman. She said that was the first, and likely the last time the chain would give out free burgers that way.

Are you kidding?  No one gets to choose if they go viral–or what goes viral. That’s the point.  Didn’t someone at Carl’s Jr. or their ad agency know about coupon sites?  Carl’s is blaming a winner for “sharing” the code. The spokeswoman told wired:

“Obviously, somebody who was at the game shared it with a friend. Eventually, it was everywhere,” Mansfield said in a telephone interview.

Everybody what?

So they did what lot’s of people do–blamed the victims and discontinued the offer after 50 burgers were given away. I applaud Carl’s for trying to reach consumers where they are–in the stands at Staples Center–and using text messaging as an avenue to reach them, but I don’t understand their naivete about coupon sites.

It’s clear from Carl’s/Hardees advertising they are trying to reach a young, male demographic, but it just seems to me that someone–or maybe someone’s mom–would have known the coupon code would spread “faster than a Paris Hilton homemade porn” (sorry, no link to that).

A simple, pre-emptive move to require a ticket stub to redeem the coupon could have saved them from all the bad press. The coupon’s fine print mentions an expiration date, and few other limitations already.

Bring your ticket stub

Carl’s naivete aside, shouldn’t they have honored the coupon once it went viral? Dropping the promo is the kind of fearful move that gives companies a bad rep, especially with guys wanting the free hamburgers promised them. How much could a greasy burger really cost them to give away in exchange for gaining a few new customers–and selling some fries and soft drinks at the same time?

Maybe they ought to just put a “sorry for the inconvenience” message on their own web site, and give everyone their meat.  Carl’s web site is cool anyway with lots of interactive features that will appeal to the demographic target and get them to stay a while.

I dunno, maybe I’m wrong here. I think Carl’s learned something about viral coupon codes, but if this story spreads, they may have even more to learn about their customers.

I know what you’re thinking.  Another top whatever list.  But the Nielsen Norman Group released its list of Best Ten Intranets of 2009 last week and, as usual, they provide some interesting reading and great insight. I’ve written here before on what we can learn from others’ mistakes and successes, so why not take advantage of some more free advice from the Nielsen Norman Group. They have been evaluating intranets for nine years now, so they have some pretty good advice to give.

Because this list rates intranets, we can’t see what makes them award-winning without purchasing and downloading the full report. At 473 pages with 241 screen shots for just over 200 bucks you may want to do that. However, I think some of the trends the Nielsen Group notes in the study summary are as interesting as the details. Here they are in a nutshell.

Intranet teams are growing

Companies appear to be taking more ownership over their intranets and building them with users in mind. This takes (wo)manpower, so budgets and headcount for them are trending upward. If you don’t have those types of resources, no worries. Nielsen says most companies use a combination of in-house talent and outside consultants to build great intranets.

Today, the predominant approach to running intranet design projects is to engage one or more consultants and external agencies to contribute parts — and only parts — of the design, while keeping overall control inside the company itself.

Intranets are playing a strategic role in supporting work processes

According to the study, intranets are becoming “important, strategic tools for doing business more efficiently.” For the first time, a winning intranet team (ERM) reports directly to the company chair. While this isn’t a trend itself, (most still report to Corporate Communications or IT) this year does show more executive visibility.

This executive involvement typically results from companies viewing the intranet as a collaboration tool and appreciating the increased business efficiency that a good intranet brings.

Intranets are using social networking and collaboration tools

The classic view of intranets being the place for HR forms and departmental policies is on its way out. While those housekeeping-type features still exist, award-winning intranets host wikis, forums, sophisticated search tools, and CEO blogs.  One winner (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) has a YouTube-like space for workers to upload videos to an internal “TV” channel.

CEO blogs have become vastly popular on the best intranets, with one winner’s blog (HSBC Bank-Brazil) enjoying 2 million views since 2005 and 8,000 employee comments.

Clearly,  (CEO blogs are) a well-established feature. What’s new this year is the sheer prevalence of this communications tool; we now have enough good examples to specify 9 guidelines for an intranet CEO blog.

Intranet customization and personalization improves productivity

Personalizing intranet features such as news, favorites, and links so users have quicker access to only the information they need or want for their jobs eliminates hours of wasted time.

Simple customization can often generate sizable productivity wins. For example, at McKesson, sales people can create a My Product List and My Favorite Reports, freeing them from having to wade through the much longer lists of all available options. Much appreciated when you’re on the phone with a customer and would prefer to focus your mental resources on closing the sale, rather than navigating the intranet.

Many intranets are improving usability by including multilingual interface features as part of its personalization options. BASF, one of this year’s winners, has 13 language options for its main features.

Intranet platforms are becoming more uniform

The hippie-rebel in you might cringe at the sound of the word Sharepoint, but like it or not, half the winning intranets for 2009 used it. However, there were several other great software vendors that winners used.  But the move toward better, single platform solutions that support the features users demand is evident.

Among the winning intranets, many are built on a single intranet platform that integrates most of the supporting features they need — including a content management system (CMS) and search. Some winners supplement their main platform with a few selected tools for specialized purposes — mainly Web analytics.

Intranet design is increasingly user-centered

Top intranets are employing usability tests and usage metrics to determine ROI and seeing great results when sites are designed around users.

Across this year’s winners, the average increase in intranet use was 106%. This is about the same as we’ve seen in previous years: The average usage increase in the 2005–2008 winners was 110%. So, roughly speaking, improving an intranet’s usability will double its use.

LLBean’s award winning site increased its usage from 67% on its old site to 88% for this year’s. Redesigning the site with users in mind has helped them cut the time it takes to perform certain tasks by more than half.

It’s easy to understand why top management sees a well-developed intranet as a strategic way for organizations to improve productivity on day-to-day tasks. It’s also the best internal marketing tool an organization can have.  We spent a lot of time in the late 1990s creating vision and mission statements, but those ideals had a long way to travel to reach our workers.  In the intranet 2.0 age, we can hear and see those ideals in action using tools like internal webcasts and blogs. So not only do our customers get the right message, so do our best marketers–our workers.

If you’ve ever tuned into a show about a couple preparing for marriage, you’ve probably been watching a show about the wedding itself. These shows, which proliferate cable television, are inevitably build-ups to the wedding itself, with little or no discussion of what happens after The Big Day. There is generally tension over the venue, the budget, the food and the guest list, but it’s all resolved by the end of the show, with the bride a pretty picture walking down the aisle. Thinking about what happens afterwards, when the couple is in workaday mode, fighting over their finances, their responsibilities, and taking out the trash, is conveniently not covered, leaving a savvy viewer to wonder how bumpy the road will be, or how long the relationship will last, as the two parties get used to operating in their partnership.

This sounds a lot like content management projects. The focus of discussions on content management forums, listservs, and related communities tends to be on the implementation project, leading up to The Big Day. All the big preparations are leading up to the launch date, when everyone is supposed to breathe that sigh of relief and get used to being hitched to the new CMS.

But if that’s just the wedding, what about the actual marriage? Just as the reality shows conveniently ignore the post-wedding challenges of staying married, Web content management projects often ignore the post-implementation operations aspect. And, as a reality show viewer may wonder about the longevity of a wedding-show marriage, skeptics may wonder about the viability of a shotgun marriage between a CMS and its human partners. After all, when the celebratory hoopla is over, and the ongoing work of using the new relationship to do business becomes the main focus, the road to strife can be swift, and the threat of separation can loom large.

The best way to combat the post-implementation blues is to deal with the operational aspects before system implementation. In fact, Web Operations Management (WOM) should not be a reactive activity at all. Instead, WOM should be an integral part of the planning process that ultimately influences which system is chosen, the accompanying change management – not the simpler side of change scheduling, but the deeper aspects of behavioral change and resistance to it, process control, and system governance.

WOM, in its purest form, is the implementation of the strategic vision. A corporation’s vision generally focuses on, at a high level, enhancing brand experience, solving operational problems, or a combination of both. The web strategy is a component of the strategy, and its implementation is often entrusted to a team whose task is to turn the vision into reality. Unfortunately, too often this becomes slanted toward a technology tool – a CMS – as if this solution will be the entire fix. One US-based firm that specializes in WOM is Welchman Pierpoint, whose approach recognizes that, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. They’ve shown that, in the transitions between strategy to governance to execution to measurement, having a web operations management plan dramatically increases the likelihood of a web implementation’s long-term success. It’s expected that the plan with change; after all, as operations change, technologies change, business needs also change. However, creating a WOM framework lays some ground rules for how the changes will be made, and prevents the devolvement of common sense into chaos.

By transposing WOM into a personal social context, it makes complete sense to spend more of the allotted project engagement deciding on what life will look like on a day-to-day basis, instead of focusing on getting to the implementation date. It’s surprising how many organizations don’t have such a plan on their radar, or have allotted a disproportionately small amount of resources toward figuring out their WOM strategy, or decided to cut this aspect from their project when they decide to trim the budget. It would be an interesting study to compare the outcomes of organizations that have adopted sound WOM practices with those that haven’t, to get some metrics around successes, and to see what gets compromised by that lack of commitment to the long-term relationship.

Want an easy way to hear what all your competitors are talking about? Think of the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki as a dedicated channel for listening in on what they are saying and what customers are saying back. It’s also a good place to get free advice on what makes a good company blog and what doesn’t.

The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki started as an idea of Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson back in 2005. He wondered why some companies were blogging and some weren’t. One theory he and fellow tech expert Doc Searls were toying with was if companies started blogging as a last ditch effort to save a sinking ship. So they began compiling a list of Fortune 500 company blogs they defined as “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products” to compare against the companies’ previous 12-month share performance. They also wanted to see if blogging made a difference in performance moving forward. In October 2007 their wiki combined with the Fortune 500 Blog Project Wiki (“another wiki project that sought to review all the Fortune 500 companies that blog”) in an effort to expand both projects. You can read the whole story on Chris Anderson’s blog.

In the early days of the wiki a scant 4% of F500 companies were blogging. Though they still lag way behind the Inc. 500 (blogging at a rate of 39% according to a recent study), the Fortune 500 Business Blog wiki has tracked an increase to 12.8%  of F500 companies blogging by November15, 2008.

At Southwest Airlines interns are cool

So F500 companies are starting to catch up for all the obvious reasons, but their blogging approaches vary greatly. Some use lots of widgets and links to other cool tools (like twitter and flickr) and some don’t. Some get lots of comments and some get none. Some blogs even think interns are cool and let them blog right along with marketing managers and CEOs.

You might think nothing is more uncool than an F500 company. I have visions of guys in suits running around placating stock holders, too. But you might be surprised by what they are doing on their blogs and what types of communications they dispatch. It’s not all mea culpa posts about product recalls and poor customer service. Knowing what makes for good F500  blogging (if you don’t already) is a good way to know what’s good for our own blogs. After all, they remain on the F500 list for some reason.

There are lots of reasons to visit the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki that I will write about in a future post. But one of the biggest reasons is that visiting often can help you make your own blog better. It’s the only place (that I know of) where F500 blogs are viewable from one location, are always current, and are routinely reviewed by other bloggers. So you can easily pick from any of the more than 130 blogs listed (companies such as Microsoft and IBM have multiple blogs) and do some informal research.  See what pulls you in and makes you want to stay for a while. What are the posts talking about? Are they all about product-speak? Which blogs are actively engaging in conversation? What kind of feedback are they getting from your mutual (or potential) customers?

While you are on the wiki take some time to read the assembly of reviews by other bloggers. The ones I read were thoughtful, constructive, and use what reviewers call “businessandblogging.com’s methodology for reviewing companies.” Though I couldn’t find reference to the methodology on the businessandblogging.com web site, it apparently rates blogs according to ease of finding, frequency of posts, engaging and relevant writing, and perceived honesty, among other things.

A good example of one review discusses the Southwest Airlines blog, Nuts about Southwest. Not only is Southwest blogging, they are Twittering, Flickring, YouTubing, Linking In and Facebooking.

You might think that’s overkill for an airline blog. Like Tony Chung said in his article last week, “Nobody wants to read a stupid blog.” And who would read and airline blog? Apparently a lot of people. Southwest consistently has several comments on each post. So they must be doing something right. You can read a review by Mack Collier at The Viral Garden to see what else they (or you) might be doing right.

Uh, BTW, that's a dumb name

In some cases even if the company is talking, no one is talking back much. But at least they are trying to engage in the conversation. For example Johnson & Johnson’s blog, JNJ BTW (Am I the only own who thinks that’s a dumb name?) has some interesting posts, but they rarely get any comments. Is that because they rarely reply to them when they do come in? You can read a review by Richard Young on his Whole Nine Yards blog.

Fortune 500 companies couldn’t ask for better, free, feedback on their blogs than this. Really, they should have to pay for it, and maybe they will some day, but that’s not the intent of the wiki. In the meantime the rest of us can use it for our own amateur research. Being better able to see what is or isn’t working on other blogs gives us some precious insight into what may or may not work on our own.

Have you ever stopped to think about all the signs, infrastructure, access, and coordination it takes just to get people to work each day in a major city? World Usability Day gives us a chance to do just that. The day itself was Thursday November 13. I hadn’t stopped on that day to take notice of what the day is all about so I thought I’d take some time now to look into it.

The Usability Professionals Association (UPA) created the initiative of taking a day a year to increase awareness and support making transportation easier and safer to use while also supporting a more energy friendly approach for our environment.

I work in software, so most of my usability focus is on user interfaces on a computer including desktop applications, web applications, and website usability. I was fascinated to think instead about the usabilty of transportation this year. Being a mom of young children and driving a stroller all around town has opened my eyes many times to the difficulties of using wheels for your ambulation rather than your stair-climbing legs. Visiting the Texas state capital in Austin with my two kids involves some lifting and struggle with the stroller since I don’t want to use the retro-fitted wheelchair ramp for my 28-pound two year old. But it does give me some limited perspective so I immediately thought of accessibility for transportation usability.

Another area of making transportation friendly to both users and the environment is considering your carbon footprint while traveling. I use Dopplr to share my trips with others, and just this year they integrated a web application that calculates and displays your carbon footprint. Somehow my trip to Philadelphia in June outpaces my driving trip to Houston and flying trip to Columbus this month. One trip was for business and another for family, but it is helpful to compare the two months. With the information in front of me, I can choose to ride my bike to work to make up the difference.

Another aspect of World Usability Day and Transportation is signage. Let’s take for example the failure of the signage on this London Bus – Break Glass for Hammer next to Use Hammer to Break Glass. I guess the moral of the story is to always travel with a hammer.

It seems a little unfair to usability professionals to take a day that might points out the difficulties and foibles of travel and usability. But awareness is a good start, and I hope your holiday travel plans involve useful signs, accessible paths, and a low carbon footprint.