Life used to be simpler, didn’t it? We could fix our own cars and milkshakes really had milk in them and content providers could generate revenues from content that people were interested in.
A good writer could publish a book that people would pay for. A band could write a hit song and make money without going on tour. Newspapers could break news (even if it was a day or a week or a month later than the event) and the public would snap it up on a daily basis to remain informed about their community, country and world.
Yes, there were issues of content control and distribution and there was a lack of choice for consumers… but good content seemed to “work” because people paid for information and services and entertainment, and that helped ensure that the pipeline for those things would remain full.
The Internet has brought many changes in our lives and how things work, and it has, essentially, broken this “pay for value” system. Users now log onto the Web with their computer and their browser and they expect to get everything. For free. Google can find it, right? And if it’s behind one of the few bastions of “premium content” (think: ESPN Insider or the Wall Street Journal Professional Edition) a user only needs to know where to look to find the content she wants copied-and-pasted into a free form.
Content providers—from newspapers to music studios to television networks—know that once something is online, it’s everywhere. If Google doesn’t distribute it, something (or someone) else will. Rupert Murdoch has said, “free is too expensive” and reportedly plans to bring News Corporation content behind paywalls, and although I enjoy free stuff as much as the next guy, I can’t say I blame him. Banner ads don’t generate enough revenue to support the infrastructure of major organizations, and without that infrastructure, News Corp can’t make content.
A paywall won’t fix everything, even if it does cut Google off at the knees in terms of piggybacking on the content others provide. The content will still be out there, and content providers will be in a running battle with aggregators to capture the eyes (and wallets) of users. Users who expect to get on their browser and get stuff for free.
News Corp and other content providers technically have another option: create applications that act like browsers but are more locked-down. Take the Wall Street Journal off of the “Web” and only stream information to those who subscribe to it using a special News Corp app. I say it’s “technically” possible because it is unlikely to work since goes against the grain of current personal computer use and trends.
The whole personal computer has gravitated towards browsers as the hub. The traditional World Wide Web is the clearest example, but Microsoft and Google and Facebook and a host of other companies are all about creating applications that supplant conventional desktop applications.
So… are content providers toast? Are users doomed to a universe of state-subsidized and/or user generate content?
Not necessarily.
Look at the iPhone and other app-based smartphones. Users’ expectations there are markedly different than on laptops or desktop computers. Sure, they want to be able to hit up the Web, but they also are willing to purchase and use applications that are alternate data clients… ways to get content outside of a conventional browser.
The iPhone is limited, of course. Not many people are going to want to read the Wall Street Journal from front to back on a 3.5 inch screen.
But what about an Apple Tablet? Or Microsoft Courier? More pixels. Easier for those of us with fat fingers or particularly bad manual dexterity.
It also, even if it has a browser, will not have the “baggage” (from the perspective of content providers) associated with personal computers: that everything is free in a browser if you look hard enough.
Imagine Time, Inc. making a Sports Illustrated app, where a user pays for a year’s worth of content up front, or authorizes a weekly or monthly payment. Without knowing its exact strategy, it seems clear based on this demo that SI is already thinking this way.
For users it might seem a step back. It might seem like the Web except not for free (like the bad ol’ days of AOL). But it might turn out to be a great thing. Content providers that can provide content in a more controlled environment should be more willing to generate and distribute superior content because they will generate revenue from its consumption.
Yes, it might be a great thing. It might be the salvation of media as we know it without disrupting the social media/conversational Web that we have come to know and expect.
It is more and more obvious to businesses and individuals that technology allows for opinions to travel more quickly than ever. Every blog is a potential blessing or curse for a business, and any tweet may take the place of old school Consumer Reports magazine. We all know we can save money and improve our chances of getting a good value by looking to online sources that we trust.
In addition to the widespread and speedy dissemination of information, though, a recent survey points out another factor at work: cyberdisinhibition.
What is “cyberdisinhibition”? It is the reduction of the “public face” that each of us wears in real life. It is the willingness of people to be more extreme—in their opinions, in their (lack of) manners, in their abrasiveness—online. Anonymity and the low barriers to entry to contributing online logically make being especially loud and grouchy more likely; the consequences are fewer and the costs lower to complain (even in an over-the-top fashion) over a digital medium than in person.
What does cyberdisinhibition mean to businesses? It reinforces the need to be aware of how their brand and image is being communicated online. The days of controlling the message entirely are long gone, but an untended complaint (whether thanks to cyberdisinhibitionist forces or not) can snowball out of control quickly. Businesses should be aware of communities (blogs, forums, Twitter users) that use and discuss their products and be willing to communicate about issues.
Nip the problem in the bud before the Customer with the Keyboard starts typing in all caps.
Everyone likes their privacy, right? None of us want people peeking in our windows at home, watching us. Orwell gave us nightmares of the government watching us through our televisions.
As technology has advanced and so many of us have given more and more information (from names and addresses to credit card information), technology has also started to gather information about us that we don’t explicitly offer. Safeway knows when I buy bread but not milk, and they know how much more likely I am to purchase milk when they put bread on sale. Amazon knows enough about my preferences to make recommendations in music and books based on purchases and what I’ve viewed. Google knows what I search for and where I’ve been online.
Of course, I know they know. But do I know how much they know? And does it matter to me if I do?
Google has become not just dominant (in that it’s the search engine used almost 70% of the time) but pervasive. Google ads, powered by Google AdWords, are on seemingly every site. Google Analytics ties into Google AdSense, letting Web sites optimize and monetize. And the visitor sees ads that she actually is interested in, ideally, because of the use of data collected by Google about the user.
If we ignore privacy as a concern, it’s a pretty good deal. A win-win-win for users, content providers and advertisers.
But we like our privacy, right? Are we afraid of what they know, or afraid of not knowing what they know?
Google has to make sure that there’s no huge backlash against its market share, and it has come out with the Google Dashboard, which allows users to monitor settings and see what Google knows about them across its myriad of services (including YouTube, Google Docs, and others).
Is it enough? Is it too much? Will we even care enough to use Google Dashboard?
Two services that I use on a regular basis have been hit with service interruptions this week. T-Mobile has had ongoing problems with Sidekick services, and I’ve been personally affected/afflicted with an inability to use my phone’s browser. I called customer service about 24 hours after it started happening and was greeted with a pre-recorded general “We know it’s happening” message. Fortunately for me, I sit in front of a PC for most of my waking hours, so I can put up with the lack of service, especially since the company is going to be providing me a credit for an entire month’s worth of service.
Facebook, too, has had its problems this week. An unknown number of users have been unable to access their accounts and they’re not pleased by it. Facebook has some 300 million users, and if even one percent of users are locked out, that’s a lot of potential anger.
People put so much of their lives—their contact information, their primary communication mechanism—into Facebook that when it’s suddenly unavailable for an indefinite amount of time for an unknown (or at least uncommunicated-to-users) reason, frustration is natural. And, unlike T-Mobile, Facebook cannot simply refund user fees because (obviously) it’s already free.
Facebook is, at some level, a victim of its own success and its users’ high expectations. If it hopes to maintain its dominant position in the social networking universe, it needs to have plans in place to avoid emotionally isolating its users when technical snags arise.
Imagine a hypothetical Web site that is ready to launch. It looks great, test users love it, the client loves it, and everyone is happy. Everyone, that is, except the SEO expert.
The SEO expert is, after all, responsible for guiding and delivering search engine optimization (SEO). SEO experts provide methods to drive a site up the Google results page, and because what they do often can be quantified quite easily as success or failure, SEO experts can be very specific about what changes are necessary to ensure that the site shows up when people want to find it.
Or, rather, they help ensure that the site shows up when people search for certain things. We’ll get to that why that difference matters in a moment.
An SEO expert might want the page titles changed. No biggie, right? They might want keywords integrated into site copy and image alt tags. Again: that’s cool. So far the great-looking, user-approved, client-adored site is intact, and the “under the hood” SEO adjustments don’t mean any concessions.
But what if the results aren’t good enough? What is the SEO expert to do?
Answer: they want more keywords. They want more and more keywords. They want links and other adjustments to the site that often not only spoil the aesthetic nor the way the client views the site, but the way that users experience it.
The stage has been set, then, for the classic SEO v. UX battle.
User experience (UX) encompasses how the users navigate a site, how they feel about a site, and how key features and messages are delivered. Good UX adds value and, when coupled with content users want, helps define the value of a site.
An argument for compromising UX in the name of SEO is relatively easy to make: if users cannot find the site, they cannot enjoy the experience. By giving a little on the experience front, the thinking goes, traffic will be generated and the site will be better off for being … worse.
In order to challenge this position, I think it’s necessary, first and foremost, to examine what SEO is at its most basic level. It is the manipulation of the difference between the value of a site and what search engines perceive to be the value.
Let’s deconstruct that quickly before we move on. A perfect search engine would know what the user wanted to find and give them the best possible value given that request. It would not be fooled by fake Web sites and it would be able to account for minor user error to point them in the right direction. No search engine is perfect, though, and because of the algorithms and logic used by the software of Google and Microsoft and others, inefficiencies exist: gaps between what the user wants and what the search site delivers. SEO manipulates that inefficiency by knowing (or guessing) at what search sites look for and “gaming the system” for positive results. If that perspective is too cynical for you, gentle reader/conscientious SEO expert, another way of looking at it might be that SEO strives to accurately convey the true value of a site given the search engine’s inability to correctly judge what the user wants when she searches.
SEO, then, is a cosmetic cover-up for the acne-riddled face of search sites.
The early days of search sites saw directories dominate. Microsoft and Yahoo employed teams of worker bees to review sites and classify and rate them, allowing users to have a virtual yellow pages. This didn’t scale, of course, as the number of Web pages exploded. Early attempt at user-updated directories were prone to severe levels of cheating and it was nearly impossible to trust ratings and/or believe that the directory was anything near complete.
The next step was the use of software to supplant directories with search engines. Bots would read pages and see what terms showed up and then spit out results for users on the search pages. Proto-SEO actors would game the system, search sites would adjust, and search engines evolved into what we have today: a reasonably fleshed-out coverage of many parts of the World Wide Web.
The good news is that as technology has improved the gap between search site perception of value and actual value has decreased. The bad news is that the gap is still relatively wide in many cases.
It is in this environment that the hypothetical Web site we’ve created finds itself. Search site placement can be very important, but sacrificing value to users in order to gather users can result in an inferior Web site.
Fortunately, the future might allow the best possible sites to exist with the most possible users. The future might have a superior search approach: one that combines technology with communal eyeballs and collective-approved expert opinion.
Earlier efforts at this sort of thing (by sites like Wikia) have fallen short, but hope is not lost. Zakta seeks to augment its search results by letting users edit, save and share the results for their search terms. A standard Google search for “best HDTVs” might have two pages of questionable or even unusable results—either because of SEO or because of the passage of time and weakness of the search algorithm. On Zakta, the same search may point to a user who has taken the time to build a top 10 list of HDTV review sites and five of his favorite online retailers. Eventually, the same search might result in a half-dozen similar lists, with the searcher able to differentiate between the quality of the lists and/or quality of the list-maker as rated by other users of the search site.
Zakta might not be the next step, but the next step is coming. It’s Wikipedia meets Digg meets Google. It encourages value over gaming and substance over style. And it might signal the end of SEO as we know it.
We’ve been working on the web redesign of a local community college for the past several months and as with any large, complex organization, the information architecture has been a bit more challenging than your average display site. Any time you try to formulate a simple, useable navigation schema while respecting the hierarchical structure of an academic organization and the sundry needs of students and faculty alike, you’re going to end up with a very deep site. Deep sites are problematic for various reasons: important pages can get lost in the bowels of the structure, navigation elements can become unwieldy as we try to design for six or seven levels of hierarchy, and the overall usability suffers and people get frustrated.
There are solutions to the deep site problem. A couple we’ve tried in the past include highlighting popular or important links in special “Quick Link” areas. Another was to create special persona-based “portals” that work alongside the deep hierarchy to promote important links to the top based on user profiles. The one solution we have always tried to avoid is the dreaded drop-down menu. In the 6 years I’ve worked here at PBDH I can’t remember a single project where we have recommended using drop-down menus. There’s been a couple projects where we were coerced into using them, but never without a good deal of “informed pushback” from us. Drop-down menus present all sorts of problems, from allowing users to skip over important pages, to removing any frame of reference, and mostly frustration at having to keep your mouse in the elusive “sweet spot” as you scan the link offering quickly before the menu disappears again.
So a few weeks ago our community college client came by the office with the results of a pretty extensive card-sorting exercise. We all headed down to the ideation lab and began pouring over the data. As expected, we were faced with the potential for more than 6 or 7 levels of hierarchy and all sorts of varied user needs. Eventually, as we sat there pondering the white board scribbles, the D-word came up. What about drop-downs? Could they actually work here? This time around they didn’t seem all that bad. Especially when we started calling them “flyouts”. Flyout menus sound sleek and purposeful. And there is a real-world distinction: we were envisioning large, multi-column menus that required little in the way of mouse dexterity to operate.
Flyouts make sense in this situation, especially since all of our top-level section index pages were essentially devoid of any real content—they would be reduced to, well, indexes. But, if we could create a section flyout for the first 3 levels and skip the index, we could save the user a lot of time clicking through to the meaty links and offer a nice section overview at a glance. (This is not a site concerned with a sequential narrative, so “stepping” the user through the content is not a requirement.) The file structure would remain hierarchical, with a browse-based interface built on top if it, and anything beyond the third level would become side navigation.
This sounded good. But what about all the anti-drop down usability studies out there? Usability experts are always coming out against the use of drop-down menus—and heck, we were too. Was this really a good idea? So we did some research and it turns out the king of all usability gurus, Jakob Nielsen, has recently published a pretty extensive study called Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well. (This is sort of like the Pope recommending that married couples start “seeing other people” to spice things up.) It’s a great read and there’s some good information on what to avoid when traveling down the path of the now renamed: Mega Drop-Down Menu.
From the article:
Given that regular drop-down menus are rife with usability problems, it takes a lot for me to recommend a new form of drop-down. But, as our testing videos show, mega drop-downs overcome the downsides of regular drop-downs. Thus, I can recommend one while warning against the other.
I’ll keep everyone posted on the progress and we’ll see if our assumptions about Mega Drop-Down Menus are correct.
One of the great things about working on interactive development at a brand design firm like PBDH is the variety of projects and clients we get to work with.
It’s not uncommon for us to help one company collaborate with a business audience one day and then help another connect with a retail audience the next.
One interesting retail project we are diving deep into at the moment is the retail web site for The Shops at the Bravern, a European-inspired shopping and dining experience that’s set to open in downtown Bellevue later this year.
The Shops at The Bravern will feature outdoor plazas, great stores like Neiman Marcus, fine dining like New York-based Artisanal, as well as urban residential towers.
We are heavy into the design and strategy phase of the project and it is exciting to work with folks from Schnitzer West to as we consider all of the things that today’s web makes possible.
Scoble had a great article on Saturday describing how Facebook is positioned to serve higher quality information to people and, in doing so, why it will continue to grow into the center of attention for the majority of web users (and a target for effective marketing).
He offers this foodie example—
You pull out your iPhone or Palm Pre or Android or Blackberry or Windows Mobile doohickey and click open the Facebook application. Then you type “sushi near me.”
It answers back “within walking distance are two sushi restaurants that more than 20 of your friends have liked.”
Wait a second. “Friends have liked?”
And that is a great summary of the emerging power of Facebook in an easy to understand story.
A friend’s recommendation (when it’s easy to find and is contextually relevant) will always trump other forms of marketing / advertising—it’s the easiest way to find a good restaurant, the hot spot of the hour, or that “today only” deal we’ve all been on the lookout for.
Because Facebook is built around these relationships from the ground up, it will continue to trump Twitter (and may even best Google eventually) as the most effective place to focus many marketing efforts.
I am somewhat of a magazine hound and I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting publications. A recent find is Monocle from Tyler Brûlé, the man behind Wallpaper* back in the nineties. Monocle has a lot in common with its predecessor and the attention to detail is what you would expect: great typography, tight layouts, stunning photography—even the various paper stocks are worth noting. What makes it better than Wallpaper* is that the articles themselves feel a bit more substantive. In a recent review of the magazine Business Week asks: Can rarefied information be sold like a luxury product? That appears to be exactly what Monocle is trying to do.
But I think what most attracts me to Monocle is a seamless (and beautiful) transition from print to Web. So few magazine Web sites live up to their print counterparts and magazine brands are quite often diluted and dumbed-down online. Not so with Monocle. That same attention to detail found inside the pages of the magazine are right there on the pages of the Web site. And it’s not just a copy and paste effort. Stories are extended with broadcast-quality video, slideshows offer rich, high resolution photography, and there’s even a companion podcast available. It’s obvious that the whole effort was intended to be multi-platform from the beginning.
For an excellent in-depth look a the entire process of designing and developing Monocle’s Web site check out the designer Dan Hill’s blog post. He covers it all in great detail. One of my favorite quotes form the article:
“We wanted to really give a sense that the website would have the same quality threshold as the print magazine in terms of production. Building a 2.0-style service, or a ‘platform for journalism’, was not at all relevant at this point.”
That’s a refreshing approach. www.monocle.com
About two years ago we decided we were long overdue for a new Web site. The old pbdh.com site, while still mostly functional, wasn’t quite the spring chicken it was when we launched it back in 2003. So we got together and started to figure out how we could improve the site as a whole. The look, the functionality, the usability and even the overall purpose of our site were considered. When all was said and done we came up with one major goal: simplify. In the words of Albert Einstein we decided that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
We started by looking at the many different sections and pages we had produced over the years. Some of them were from the original site-map, others were add-ons cobbled together over various marketing initiatives, and one or two pages just showed up one day out of the blue. As is the case with most aging Web sites it was becoming cluttered and difficult to navigate. It needed a major overhaul.
News
We started with our news content. We had eight different pages devoted to news-worthy information: News, Events, In The News, Newsletter, News Archives, Press Releases, and a blog called Open House. There were just too many places to start. So we simplified. Instead of eight different pages devoted to eight different types of news we decided to route all the news content through our blog. After all a (good) blog is, by definition, a reverse chronology of written information that can be timely, interesting, though-provoking, insightful, and informative. We decided that if our news isn’t any of those things it doesn’t need to be on our Web site in the first place. So now Open House is one page of news instead of eight pages of news. It’s simpler. It’s better.
Portfolio
Early portfolio information architecture sketch.
Next, we tackled our portfolio. As much as we design firms like to champion our processes, a portfolio is still probably the most important part of a Web site. We had a very comprehensive portfolio with plenty of examples of our work and it told a good story of what we were capable of as a firm. But, it had one major flaw: it was designed for us, not our users. The portfolio was was organized by our clients’ names, and as long as people wanted to simply browse the portfolio and see the work we had done for each client they were in good shape. This organization worked great for us too because we know our clients intimately and we could easily navigate to any one portfolio example without much trouble. But then we put ourselves in the shoes of a first-time visitor and started to imagine how they would want to navigate our work.
Let’s say there’s a guy named John Doe and he’s looking for a design firm that does fantastic annual reports. His boss wants him to round up some samples of annual report work from Seattle design firms by noon so he can start putting together a short list of people to call. With the old portfolio structure John would have to click through each client individually to see whether or not any annual reports had even been produced before he could start selecting the ones he liked. We figured John probably wouldn’t take the time do this extra work in the end. So we began architecting our portfolio around John’s goals and the goals of people like John. This was easy to do because the development of personas have long been a key step in our own experience design process—we just never had a chance to try personas out on ourselves! (And like we’ve been telling our clients all along: personas work.) In the end we came up with a portfolio that assembles itself on the fly depending on what the user is interested in. User interest can be as broad as work for print or as granular as annual reports and the portfolio will accommodate. And for those want to see it all at once there’s still a comprehensive client list option.
Change of Plans
Things were moving along nicely at this point. We came up with a pretty fun concept for our always popular people page and after a final tally of 3778 photographs, staff camera-shyness was at an all-time low. We were a week or so away from going live when the conversation turned to rebranding the entire firm. (I won’t go into the rebrand process as Devin did a good job explaining it in the previous post.) Since we built the entire site with extensibility in mind from the beginning, it was a fairly painless process to scrap the entire look and feel and redesign the site form the ground up in under three weeks. (When used properly CSS is a wonderful thing—more on that in a future post.)
Transparency
The final touch was to introduce our focus on transparency into the site visually, and the final solution might be my favorite part of the site. We are using photography, illustration and even strategy diagrams somewhat abstractly throughout the site. While each image is visually interesting as presented, it can also be extended to reveal a bit more information or even link to a relevant project. Moving forward we want to introduce a lot more of this “behind the scenes” imagery. We are also having some fun with it on the Open House page by giving visitors a peek into our work areas. Ultimately it’s a pretty subtle feature, but it offers a little something extra for people who are curious.
Both the rebrand of PBDH and the redesign of pbdh.com were very successful endeavors and we’re all pretty proud of the results. Next week in Part 2: How It All Works I’ll give you some insight into how the site works and how we manage content. And feel free to leave any comments or suggestions as we’d love to hear your feedback.
