Mind on Marketing

Like most Americans, I’m horrified and sickened by the disaster in the Gulf (which is not, as some seem to think, a “natural” disaster). And I’m enraged by BP’s response.

BP CEO Tony Hayward’s performance this week in front of Congress provided further proof of BP’s sociopathic inability to empathize with the incalculable destruction the company has wrought–the deaths of 11 people and injuries of 17, the destruction of livelihoods, and the massive killing of wildlife and fouling of the ocean and wetlands. My heart aches as I write these words and consider what is continuing to happen.

In the June 9-22 edition of Knowledge@Wharton, two management professors — Hamid Bouchikhi of the ESSEC Business School in France and John R. Kimberly of the Wharton School — share their recommendations for what BP should have done. And they know what they’re talking about. They wrote a book on how BP handled the 2005 oil spill at the Texas City refinery. The company apparently learned nothing from the 2005 experience, nor from the actions of other companies when faced with crises of their own making.

One of the most interesting recommendations they make is that BP should have acknowledged its moral responsibility first, before dealing with legal liabilities. Taking moral responsibility for one’s actions–what a novel idea!

They also point out how Perrier took responsibility and showed they cared about their customers when they recalled all product in 1990 when traces of benzene were found. “While the recall hurt the company’s sales and market share badly, its broad and dramatic action showed that it cared more about its customers’ health and its reputation with them than about immediate sales and profits.” And they ask the question that we have all been asking:

“When are BP managers going to show that they too care as much about the environment and the communities as they do about profitability? “

It’s a question that all businesses, and we who are shareholders, need to be asking.

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For this post, I’m drawing on my training and certification as a personal life coach, although I don’t coach for a living any more. I’m a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC), credentialled by the Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and completed about 300 hours of training and supervision. One of the core concepts in my training was to help clients find the “compelling way” in the process of clarifying their values. Living your values is the foundation of having a fulfilling life. Fulfillment is not something that you have to wait for, something that has to be delayed until you reach a goal. Instead, you can make the path towards the goal fulfilling in itself, because you know you’re moving closer to what you ultimately want.

Writing Your Blog: Do It or Lose It

For example, I have a goal of building my consulting practice. Blogging is one of a variety of ways to share things I’ve learned as I’ve worked on projects for clients. But for the past several months, I’ve let my blog languish. I told myself it didn’t really matter that much, and that I was too busy with client work to take the time to write blog entries faithfully. The downside of my neglect is that there’s now a gap and that I’ve  lost continuity and connection with regular readers. In addition, I lost the rhythm of writing regularly.

The thing is, I love to write. But that requires goals,  ideas, and a sense of direction. And every time I’ve sat down to write a blog entry, I’ve simply lost steam. Pfffffft.  In client work, writer’s block has never been an issue. If I’m stuck it’s almost always because I don’t have enough information on the topic, the goal or some other aspect of the project. For this blog, I wrote an entry a few weeks ago, and came up short on ideas and energy after that. Until today.

Finding the Compelling Way to Keep on Writing

Today didn’t just spring up out of the blue, though. Instead, I’m finding a Compelling Way for myself. The values that I’m focused on are learning, communicating, and connecting with people. Business is a wonderful way to do that, as well as to express my talents and generate money to fund other things I value and enjoy.

 As I see these words on the screen, they look so simple-minded. But sometimes simplicity is the key.

So I returned to my learning process, and was browsing Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability this morning. I was reading the Top 10 Information Architecture Mistakes, where Nielson mentions the need for consistent global (sitewide) navigation on every page (it’s usually the links you see in the bar at the very top of a page). It was then that I realized that although the site I was putting the finishing touches on meets that requirement, it needed local navigation on every page–a way for visitors who arrived directly at a lowerl-level page from Google to know where that page fits in the overall structure of the site. So I went through the site and added breadcrumb navigation to every page.

A Passion for Learning, Teaching and Communicating

And I think my inner logjam is clearing out. Because I’m excited about how much such a simple thing has improved the site, in the absence of side-rail links. And as I sat down to blog about the usefulness of breadcrumb navigation, my enthusiasm for this blog has returned. For me, the compelling way is to learn and share, using my ability to write.  

What’s Your Compelling Way?

When you’re feeling stuck and your energy for something is at a low point, consider what might be a compelling way for you. What is fulfilling for you? What could draw you to the path that will take you to your goal?

(FYI–here’s the breadcrumb nav before and after)

Without breadcrumb navigation, you don't know where you are

Breadcrumb navigation (enlarged) shows you where page is in relation to whole site

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Last month I received an email from someone pointing out many mistakes on my own web site. A couple of these were really bad mistakes. I have a section describing classes I’m offering at PVCC, our community college. I gave the same description for two entirely different classes, and got the date wrong on one of them.

It brought home the importance of having somebody else look at your site, or any new content that you’re publishing. It seems like such a no-brainer, but in the jet-stream of business, which moves so fast, it’s tempting to just get it done and publish it. That’s something I never do when the project is being printed, where mistakes are permanent. For print, at the very least I ask someone to proofread. It’s vital to do the same thing for electronic.

That’s because credibility is at stake. Studies done at Stanford showed that typographical errors erode the credibility of a site. Typos raise questions–”If this business can’t be bothered to proofread, what else are they sloppy about?” I covered this study at greater length in an earlier blog post.

In the class I recently taught on web site best practices, students, all of whom were owners or stakeholders of business sites,  reviewed one another’s sites. Having a fresh pair of eyes looking at their sites revealed things they’d completely missed. They found the experience highly valuable and identified changes that needed to be made.

So, if you’re not ready to do user testing on your web site, ask a friend or colleague to take a look and tell you what they see.

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I’ve just finished teaching a class at  Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC), co-sponsored by the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, on Best Practices for Your Web Site. In the process of teaching, this recommendation became part of the list: use Google Analytics or any full-featured site traffic log tool to track what goes on at your web site.  It’s critical to know how your site is being used, so you can make changes to reflect what you learn.

Web site analytics provide data that tells you

• What keywords people have typed into Google that brought them to your site.
• What pages on your site they have visited.
• How long they spent on those pages.
• Whether your site is doing a good job in carrying out your business and marketing strategy.

Why does it matter, and how can you use analytics information? Here’s an example. Yesterday I was making a few changes to a client’s web site, innerconfidencecoaching.com.(Normally this would be confidential information, but site owner Jeannie Campanelli is very generous in sharing knowledge and I know she won’t mind.)

I looked at the Google Analytics data for the site, and noticed that the keyword “blue heron” had brought a lot of traffic. There’s a page on the site devoted to the blue heron as a totem animal. I was a bit surprised to see what is going on. Jeannie is a life coach whose specialty is in working with women who are ready to strengthen their inner confidence and create more fulfillment in their lives.

Of the many keywords that bring people to her site, “blue heron symbolism” is not one I would have thought of. But there is a possibility that the people who are interested in the symbolic and spiritual dimensions of animal totems may be good candidates for the kind of coaching Jeannie does.

However, the “bounce rate,” the percentage of visitors who come to that page and leave from that page without visiting the rest of the site, is high (x% of visitors bounce in and out of  the site on that page). That suggests that we need to make changes on the page to create more engagement for these visitors, enticing them to check out  worthwhile content elsewhere on the site.

As a start, I added a link to allow them to sign up for a newsletter. We will develop a strategy for that page designed to create an ongoing  relationship with visitors through subscriptions to Jeannie’s newsletter, and other free content that can pave the way for a coaching engagement.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, and it’s free. You sign up for an account and Google provides a snippet of tracking code that you paste into every page that you want to track. You’ll begin to see data within 24 hours of placing the code on your site. You should also submit a site map to Google, following the instructions provided on their web site

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In her all-day day session at EDUI2009, “Usability Testing Without the Scary,” Dana Chisnell laid out the entire process for usability testing. Breaking the process down into small parts that are easy to understand, Dana showed us how to be comfortable with the process, rather than intimidated. Here’s what she shared about creation of the plan for usability testing.

Someone who will try the design, somewhere to test and something to study.

As Dana puts it, the essence of testing is “sit next to someone and watch them do stuff.” Pretty straightforward. You just have to know what you want them to try out, and how to watch and ask questions so you can learn what they are thinking as they work with your design and functionality.

To support great site design, each phase of the development process should be supported by input from users. It’s also essential to have multidisciplinary teams working on development (ie. marketing, IT, management, etc.).

Although it’s highly useful to look at best practices, guidelines and conventions for usability, they aren’t enough to guarantee usability and accessibility.The nuances of implementation can conflict with best practices, and best practices can even conflict, cancel each other out, or magnify certain issues.  “Informed designs come from data,” says Dana.

The goals of usability testing should be to identify problems in design that lead to

• misinformation
• incomplete transactions
• need for support from administration, management or staff

What tests and measurements to do when

–When you want to map out what the design should do, you observe and listen to users through user testing, focus groups, participatory design, surveys, heuristic evaluations and setting benchmarks.

–To figure out how the design should work, use participatory design, paper prototyping, walk-throughs, usability testing and heuristic evaluation

–To determine whether the design actually does what you want it to do, conduct usability tests, do heuristic evaluation, follow-up studies and comparison of benchmarks.

In the early part of the process, do things that help you learn, that are exploratory and formative. In the middle, do things that help you assess and summarize. And at the end, validate and verify when you’re close to launch but have enough time to incorporate changes.

The User Testing Plan

It’s important to create a test plan. It serves as your blueprint for testing, is a communication vehicle, clarifies needed resources, is a focal point for each test, and lays out milestones. It should include:

• Goals and objectives**
• Research questions**
• Participant characteristics**
• Description of method**
• List of tasks**
• Description of test environment
• Say what the moderator will do
• List of the data you’ll collect
• Description of how the results will be reported

**If your time is limited, focus on the starred tasks.

Next: Selecting participants

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In her EDUI 2009 Workshop, Usability Testing Without the Scary, Dana Chisnell discussed how to best support great site design. User testing is essential, even if you only have time to spend one hour with one person. If one person has a problem, it’s legitimate to assume that others do too, and to make design changes based on that data. It’s also important to have management buy-in to doing testing–they must be able to see the benefits of doing the research and implementing what is learned from the tests. Multi-disciplinary teams also support implementation of great design, provided they speak one anothers’ languages and understand one anothers’ skills. Finally, it’s essential to be willing to learn as you go and make changes accordingly. (Note that these criteria are completely in alignment with Jared Spool’s research showing that vision, feedback and culture are the most important elements of developing great design.)

Great designs are :

• Useful–What’s valuable to your user about having this information or this tool.
• Efficient–Users can accomplish their goal quickly (that means you have to know what your users’ goals are).
• Learnable–It should be easy for users to apply what they’ve learned about how to use other sites to using your site (your site should conform to usabilities conventions as much as possible).
• Satisfying–Your site should be one that people are happy to use, one that seems to be easy and doesn’t take too much time.
• Accessible–Implementing accessibility guidelines actually makes your site easier for everyone to use.

You should identify design problems that lead to misinformation, incomplete transactions, and/or necessitate support from administrators or staff.

What kind of assessment to use to answer fundamental site design questions

Dana segments analysis into three areas and defines certain types of assessments to use for each area.

What should the site design do? When you want to answer this question, do usability testing, conduct focus groups, have users participate in the design process, do surveys, conduct heuristic evaluations and set benchmarks.

How should the site design work? To answer this question, use participatory design, paper prototyping, walk-throughs, usability testing and heuristic evaluation.

Does the site design do what we want it to do? Answer this via usability testing, heuristic evaluation, follow-up studies and comparison to benchmarks.

Next: Dana’s pointers on putting together a test plan

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Dana Chisnell presented an all-day session at the EDUI Conference held in Charlottesville  September 21 & 22, 2009. She founded Usability Works and does usability research, user interface design, and technical communication consulting and development. She is co-author of the Handbook of Usability Testing.  The focus of the workshop was to show how eminently doable user testing can be, if you let go of the idea that you have to do it “by the book.”  Classic, by-the-book user testing can seem intimidating and scary. Instead, Dana spent the day showing how to identify and do the essentials and make it easier to test, and to do it  on an on-going basis. Her approach takes into account that there usually isn’t a lot of time to test. The following is a list of all elements “by the book,” and I’ve noted which ones Dana says are essential:

• Develop a test plan ESSENTIAL
• Choose a testing environment–Don’t test in the lab—go to where the users are
• Find and select participants–ESSENTIAL
• Prepare test materials
• Conduct the sessions–ESSENTIAL
• Debrief with participants and observers–ESSENTIAL–Debrief only with observers
• Analyze data and observations
• Create findings and recommendations

User testing works best when you’re early in the design process (that’s where testing using paper prototypes comes in very handy). What you need is someone who will try the design; somewhere to test (preferably where the user typically would use your site, such as at home, the office, or in a dorm room); something to study. Neat and simple. And you’ll learn things about your website interface that you would never have seen on your own.

For example, in conducting user tests of the University of Pennsylvania website,  Dana learned that users were looking for admissions “dates.” But they couldn’t find the information because the University used a different term: “timetable.” User testing provided the context in which they learned about this very simple labelling problem. Your site has to accommodate the way your users think and work, and you can’t be certain about that unless you actually watch them use your site. You must learn whether the user grasps the conceptual design of your site and if not, what the user’s concept is.

 Pointers for moderating user tests

There’s tremendous value in sitting next to someone and watching them do something. Dana recommends saying to the tester things like “tell me what you’re doing–think aloud… tell me what you’re thinking…” When the tester is quiet, be careful about when you ask a question–sometimes they’re quiet because they’re working on a problem, and you may not want to interrupt that process. At the end of the test, review the experience with the tester. Walk through what happened, what happened next. Ask “how did that go? What was confusing or frustrating.” Dana conducted a demonstration, working with an attendee. I found the moderator questions she asked to be very helpful:

• How would you describe the information you’re looking for?
• How far do you think you are from getting it?
• Are you warm or cool?
• You were hovering there–tell me what you were thinking.
• What question do you have about the site right now?
• What do you think the site is about?
• What one main thing should be improved?

It’s essential for the moderator to talk with the tester and create a situation that feels natural to him or her. As moderator, you should be neutral and objective, but also friendly. Remember that this is not a psychology experiment, it’s a test of user-centered design.

NEXT: What Dana says about design.

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Tricks and techniques work better for improving website usability than do structured methodologies, Jared Spool (CEO, User Interface Engineering) said at the EDUI conference last week. Spool says that there is no evidence that methodologies result in quality designs, and that design can’t be institutionalized to conform to usability templates. He equates methodology with dogma, defined as “an unquestioned faith independent of any supporting evidence, using the TSA’s airport screening procedures as a prime example of methodology’s lack of value. His research found that:

• The best teams didn’t have a methodology or dogma they followed
• The struggling teams often tried following a methodology, withou success
• The best teams all focused on increasing the techniques and tricks for each team member
• They were constantly exploring new tricks and techniques for their toolbox
• Struggling teams had limited tricks and techniques

He recommends that usability development teams focus on developing great techniques and tricks and avoid get dragged down by methodologies. Techniques, he says, are things that you can master through practice, building blocks that can be applied to any methodology.

How the best teams develop great design

Vision, feedback and culture are the most important variables in the way the best teams develop great design:

• Vision: Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design five years from now? Spool says that five years is an optimal time period becaue the team’s thinking is not constrained by current legacy ( ie.technology limitiations), freeing them to focus on the aspiration of the design. Everyone on the team should have the exact same vision. Focusing the vision gives the team the chance to know where they’re going. They can deal with how to get there later on in the process.
• Feedback: In the last six weeks, have you spent more than two hours watching someone use either your design or a competitor’s?Everyone should answer “yes” to this question. You don’t know what’s happening with your design until you watch people use it. Spool points out that great chefs go out into the dining room and ask people about the food.
• Culture: In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure? Spool says that we only learn by making mistakes. He advocates making a huge investment in order to a failure, mentioning that Scott Cook, founder of Intuit (Quicken and Quickbooks), gives a big party for someone who has “screwed up big,” that celebrates all the things they learned. Spool asserts that organizations that are risk averse “produce crap.”

Spool says that user testing can be as speedy as the “Five-Second Page Test” that he uses. Have the test participant look at a page for five seconds (not the home page, but one with a specific purpose, such as providing customer support information or making a donation). Then ask the participant to write down what they remember aboutthe page and whether they would do business with the organization. The test is particularly useful when a page is too cluttered or confusing, and identifies whether pages quickly communicate their purpose.

On the other hand, Spool says that paper prototype testing is especially useful when the design is in flux. The team can participate in the sudy at a point where they can make changes before going into technical implementation. Paper Prototyping, by Carolyn Snyder, is a recommended resource.

What a couple of Jared Spool's paper prototypes look like

Virtual seminars and many other free resources are available on Spool’s company website and on his blog, Brainsparks.

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 Twitter’s limit of 140 characters is one way that the medium shapes the message and the conversation. Wesch talked about the ways that digital media affect self-awareness and the construction of identity. Twitter’s “What are you doing?” contributes to “lifecasting” or “mindcasting.” In creating YouTube videos, we have no idea who, exactly, will be watching. We talk to the webcam. And when we look at YouTube videos, we are watching others without staring at them. Context collapses, as we saw in the “Bomb Iran” performance of John McCain, who thought his behavior was perfectly acceptable to the audience he was addressing in person, military veterans. But when the performance, captured digitally, appeared on YouTube, the context changed completely, as did the reception of his act.

I was particularly struck by Wesch’s comment that the anonymity and physical distance inherent in both traditional and digital media have enabled what he calls “hatred as public performance.” We see this on reality TV, in flame wars and vicious comments posted on YouTube, blogs and other places. It’s one outcome of the tide of narcissism that afflicts our culture, combined with a sense of hopelessness and impotence, the behavioral amplification of “whatever.” At the same time, he says that it’s important to have sites where comments can be posted anonymously, as a mechanism for great creativity and as a safeguard for free speech.

In spite of what seems to be a bleak analysis, Wesch is moved by what he sees as real and caring community on YouTube, and the emergence of more civil discourse through crowd ratings of the content of posts on Reddit (Wikipedia notes that “When there are enough votes against a given comment, it will not be displayed by default… Users who submit articles which other users like and subsequently “vote up” receive “karma” points as a reward…”). He’s amused and encouraged by the Free Hugs video that went viral on YouTube (as of this writing, the video has been viewed 50,748,157 times), and the kindness off the responses to a YouTube creator who spoke about her hopelessness.

There’s opportunity and danger in digital media, Wesch says, and we need to see and seize the opportunity or we’ll be washed up thanks to mainstream media. We need to be aware how the machine is using us, so we can guide the future.

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Professor Michael Wesch’s talk at EDUI 2009, “Mediated Culture,”  may well have been attendees’ favorite session. Looking at relationships between individuals, communities, traditional mass media and the state, Wesch showed how blogging, YouTube, Twitter and other social media provide us with a new way of relating to one another, a way that has not been available in television and print.

Wesch builds on his own anthropological research in New Guinea, explaining that the creation of a state book of law changed the way individuals related to one another. When the law book was published, communities began to gather to measure up individuals against the rules and apply punishment accordingly. The book shifted focus from individuals’ relationships to one another to individuals’ relationship to the state. He says that the media are not just tools or means of communications but that they mediate our relationships. When media change, our relationships change.

Drawing on Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Wesch says that our culture is far more the way Aldous Huxley envisioned it, rather than George Orwell. Huxley commented that it wouldn’t be necessary to ban books, because no one would want to read them.

Television became the primary medium for  the conversations of our culture, controlled by a few people and designed for “the masses.”  The conversations are always entertaining, even the serious ones. They’re punctuated by commercials and they create a culture of irrelevance, incoherence and impotence. As Huxley said, we are amusing ourselved to death. At the same time, because so much of the media is aimed at entertaining us, we feel special, flattered, as if shows have been created just for us.

 Wesch shows a funny picture of school children demonstrating various states of boredom in the classroom and explores the origins and meanings of the word, “whatever.” He explains that reality TV has shaped the meaning of the word as, “who cares about you–I’ll do whatever I want.” In addition, kids have been told by their parents the world is their oyster. Becoming a contestant on reality TV has become the way to prove that it’s true. And, as all but the shows’ winners discover (and as they head into the world in their twenties), they see that it isn’t true. We see that discovery happening on every episode of American Idol and the other reality shows.

Moving to a discussion of digital media, Wesch comments that it is fundamentally different from anything we’ve seen before. We still use concepts from the past, such as referring to web “pages.” But Tim Berners-Lee said, long ago, that the Web is not supposed to be a glorified television channel.” And thanks to blogging, YouTube and other social media, anybody can create and publish anything for “the masses.” Evolving Web standards for web browsers have helped make that possible. It’s no longer necessary to know HTML and other aspects of digital technology to have visibility online.

(To be continued…)

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