Irreverent Thinking

As organisations become ever more fleet of foot it becomes clear that the “old world” approach of making huge, long range policy decisions is no longer appropriate. For some time now I have been advocating a “test, test and test again” approach mixed in with a quasi-Kaizen methodology when it comes to improving the performance of websites. This is borne out of being able to have a complete view of what happens when we make changes to a site (thanks to our VITES™ platform); when combined with statistically correct sample sizes and A/B testing, this gives you the clearest (probable) indicator of how successful a change is.

I note that a search on Google turns up some interesting results, with some companies, such as Nike, embracing the idea, and no less than Forbes Magazine citing it as the reason for the wealth of creativity that comes out of our US cousins across the pond. Thomas Edison was once quoted as saying “I HAVE not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” This approach has its problems which need to be addressed, but the greatest problem is with its name- Trial and ***ERROR*** - which states clearly that mistakes will be made. Sadly most of today’s inwardly-focussed corporates seem to lack the courage to take this step. Even worse are the companies that make sweeping changes without trialling them first; in the case of AOL a $75m loss in revenue.

The companies that do test fly; the ones that don’t end up stagnating and die.

The moral?

To succeed you have to fail occasionally

I’m really very fortunate to work with some of the most forward-thinking companies in the UK, but sometimes they just plain don’t understand this Net thing.

This week I had a meeting with a large client who has spent over £10m on his web strategy since 2005. Big money, big ideas and huge amounts of success. Ace.

As part of the (large) strategy is a very successful forum, it’s the only one in their space and it stands large and dominating. They rarely have to moderate it and have a great community of about 6,000 registered users and around 50,000 lurkers every year reading 20,000 posts. It cost less than £5,000 to setup in 2003 - what a bargain!

It’s a great opportunity to communicate to their ‘family’, their customers, their messengers. It could be the most influential element of their brand. In the world of semantic trust, social networking, link-sharing and search engines it offers a unique (in their marketplace) opportunity.

Last year they spent less than £500 and 1hr a week looking after it. Not surprisingly it’s dying. That is dysfunctional marketing.

Put simply, they just don’t get it. What a waste.

I recently published a post on how you could start to use trusted third-party organisations such as the BBC to help your natural search results. There is another step forwards you can take to help this process. If you recall from my post the most important thing about your network of feeds is the quality of them as measured by Google, Yahoo etc.

You need to look at creating independent bodies of information that are uniquely and directly accessible on the net. A good example of this would be the creation of a forum for your customers to talk about your products and services - this independent source would start to build a quality rating on the internet and the fact that it (frequently) links back to your site means that this quality is bestowed upon your site.

Add a blog from an industry leader who works for your organisation, add several (or hundreds) of blogs by customers, suppliers and partners and you are starting to build you own network. The great thing about this is that any of the sites within your network can now attract feeds from other sites so the affect of this is to greatly widen your net (no pun intended) and generate a snowball effect.

It doesn’t need to stop here, Wikipedia is another example of a high rank site and the great thing about Wiki is that you can add, edit and change the entries in there yourself. So, do you have a page on Wiki? Try searching yourself. Is there any pages on Wiki that you or one of your staff could contribute to?

And what about Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Myspace, Bebo, Piczo? The list keeps growing …

It that so unusual? It’s probably rather dependent on whether I go in there a lot, which I don’t. He does, however, know quite a lot about me and stores it away in his memory. From what he said to me he knows:-

1. My favourite drink is Guinness and that’s pretty much all I drink

2. He knows I go on the train to London a lot as I will pop in for a pint on my walk back from the train station

3. He knows I smoke as I have to go outside and will leave my money on the bar whilst he’s pouring my Guinness

4. He knows I am male

Ok, so why the irreverent twitter about my local pub? Well, I was thinking that my company builds websites that learn about its visitors by their behaviour and was this a violation of privacy? The answer is “no”. The local barman sees me coming though the door and sometimes has a pint on the go, he says “hello” and if I’m in a suit and it’s around the time that the London train gets in he will ask if I had a good day in London. What he is doing is improving my experience, he’s treating me personally even though he doesn’t know my name - in fact sharing my name would seem wrong and too personal.

So why aren’t more websites like that? They should learn what I like and slant the content towards my interests. YouTube doesn’t do it; it only shows the most popular and latest videos of the day, which I hardly ever watch, so why waste my time downloading the content on that page - take a leaf out of Google’s book and just show the search bar.

More sites will certainly start to work this way and our new VITES platform certainly lets companies do that - it’s just a matter of time before it becomes the standard way to operate.

Our CEO, Martin Dower, recently posted a story describing how our philosophy came into being.

We decided to publish this as a page because is it so intrinsic to our beliefs as a company. As a post it would have fallen off the radar after a while and it is too important to allow this to happen.

Enjoy!

People hunt for information, quite often in the long grass and can become disillusioned if they see no progress, this reminds me of using AltaVista as a search engine in 1995!

I posted an interesting question on LinkedIn last week about the role that psychology plays in designing sites and have a got a fair set of useful answers. The most interesting talked about Jakob Nielsen’s theory of information scent. The basic idea is that human forage for information in a fairly lazy manner and as they hunt down the piece of information they require there is a balance between finding and reading. If the balance is too skewed towards work (finding) then they lose interest. Jakob goes on to list a few very good tips but it got me thinking.

If this is a forage then the stronger the scent, the greater the will to continue foraging and as many companies now integrate on and off-line information a great way to improve interaction would be to give tasters of off-line activity. E.g. “…request our brochure that gives far more information than you can find here”. Not, maybe, a very good example but you can see the point - it heats up the scent and therefore increases the drive to complete the call to action. Another example could be “register to our forum and read 20,000 comments about xyz product/service”.

This is fairly simple and we do this in many case now but we are not visualising it as a forage/hunt, we are trying to balance action with benefit when in many cases it is a far simpler case of balancing action with (foraging) progress. “This way to food” would be a great example of clarity but that assumes we know what the visitor wants and that, quite often, is an unknown so we have to either understand exactly what the visitor wants (and then post 10ft high signs) or try to understand what he or she wants and spoon feed them.

Alternatively we give the visitor a better view of the prey (information) so they can stalk (find) it with greater ease.

Oh yes, that’s usability, isn’t it?

Here we go again, bloody marketers spouting on about users and now we have to have a seamless experience. I know what they mean but they’re sort of missing the point, we need to remove all pointless and useless seams - these are a right royal PITA and need to go. Clothing manufacturers worked that out a long, long, long time ago - putting extra seams into clothes was expensive, made them uncomfortable and more to the point who would do it on purpose?

Brought in a new media translation what these “bravehearts” are suggesting is the bloody obvious - of course we need to remove tedious stages in e-commerce and of course we need to have systems that remember you and your details to save you time but come on. Can they really hang their hat on something they should be doing anyway? Not likely, in my book.

Seams are good, attractive and can flatter
Well, that’s a thought - that’s how they are used in the clothing world so is there a way to make seams in the e-world behave similarly? Well, a little creative thinking and you’re away - maybe when you are halfway through the checkout process (where many people still leave the process) a nice bright, intrusive element appears thanking them for valued time and custom and promises a little surprise at the end of the process. Seamless might work to avoid decreases buying momentum but there are lots of things we can do to increase the momentum - why do we assume that our checkout process is so bad that it will put people off?

So, don’t take the new credos at face value - the real sentiment behind the idea is about the reduction of friction in the buying process but if you can make the checkout process part of the value then you will have to have seams.

Me? I like the seam on the front of my jeans-fly - without It would look very strange with the zip showing although it would be seamless.

I’m just starting a project with a well known UK medical company around the popular topic of “user generated content”. Aside from intensively disliking the word “user”, I wonder sometimes how big corporate Britain is going to survive the next stage of e-growth.

We have have blog, forums, social networking and now so much activity that exists outside of the sphere of corporate influence. Old marketing is dead - we all pretty know that by now - and is being replaced with what customers think they want. They cannot have been made clearer when a post on said company’s forum from a new visitor asks an opinion on a particular surgeon. Great, an opportunity for the board admin to help out and she does this by posting a link to the main web-site showing what the marketers had written about this surgeon. The original poster summarily dismissed the comment, really quite off-hand actually and asks for REAL opinions from real people. Wow.

If this person, who subsequently got great comments about their surgeon and went ahead with the procedure, didn’t believe the corporate bull-shit but would listen to the idle ramblings of Joe Average then that says a great deal about the role of the corporate site.

This episode has somewhat accelerated my drive in this project. Which, ironically, is struggling to get proper funding as we are unable to illustrate a measurable RoI for it!

I mean, come on - who can take that phrase serious. Lets read it again “A User Experience Lens“. Pah. Why all this bluster and ranting? Well, for the last couple of weeks I have been tasked with bringing together the copy for our new website and whilst that has mean’t writing some 80 pages of copy I must admit in my dark hours I have sneaked off to the Internet to get some inspiration and re-start the creative juices.

Most of the browsing reveals the same-old-samey stuff that has been around since 1998 and some efforts at trawling turn up gems such as Tom Peter’s Blog which do make me smile, distract me for 30 mins and usually end up inspiring me. For every good however…..there is a bad and in most cases (such as the User Experience Lens above) the bad is so bad it makes me laugh and therefore ends up doing good - I wonder if that is what they intended to achieve?