152. War?

Posted in Classic shows on February 11, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Daniel Burka and Joe Stump from Digg discuss the supposed war between designers and developers. Paul talks about using twitter effectively and we ask ‘are you placing too much emphasis on your homepage?’

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News and events

How to film video case studies

Increasingly your web strategy is about more than a website full of pretty pictures and well written copy. Video in particular is playing an increasing role, whether it is embedded in your website or shared via YouTube.

Video can be used in all kinds of ways from product demonstrations to viral marketing. However, a growing use for video is customer case studies.

This week 37 Signals have published a fascinating insight into how they created their customer case studies for Highrise. The article covers everything from…

How they chose who to interview
The way they shot the videos
What questions they asked
How they conducted the interviews
How they edited the videos
The time they spent preparing the whole thing

There is little written about producing quality videos and even less about customer case studies. Without a doubt these kinds of videos are extremely powerful and so it is great to read quality advice about their production.

Effective communication in web design

Smashing Magazine has posted an excellent article that I would highly recommend to all website owners. No, it is not my excellent Twitter article that I will cover later. It is actually an article entitled – Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design.

In essence it talks about how to communicate on the web through both copy and visuals. It is a comprehensive overview (if somewhat superficial) of all the key considerations of communicating effectively through your website.

The article focuses primarily on your website, largely ignoring broader communication issues. However it does tackle…

The different methods of communication – Images, text, titles, icons, design styling, colour, audio and visuals.
The challenges of clearly communicating – This includes the curse of too much copy, the need for personality and much more.
What you should be communicating – Your company vision, the websites offerings, the benefits to your users and calls to action.

It also nicely demonstrates how the design and copy work together to communicate your message. This is something I will be discussing with Jeffrey Zeldman in an upcoming show.

Do we place too much emphasis on the homepage?

Following on nicely from my recent post about where we invest our money, Christian Watson recently wrote about one of his clients who requested a homepage redesign.

In the article he writes…

Sure, I could refresh the colors and move some content around. But is this a good use of my time and her money when the home page represents 20-25% of page views?

It is a good question. Christian goes on to argue that we often place far too much emphasis on the homepage and that in fact it is little more than a gateway page to direct users to more important content.

He uses a nice analogy borrowed from Jared Spool. He compares the homepage with a hotel lobby…

When visitors arrive at your hotel, certainly they should find that the lobby represents the hotel favorably. It should be attractive, spacious, with elegant lighting, welcoming colors, and the odd feature here and there.

The lobby should make it easy for the visitor to orient themselves â€” to see where the front desk is and where the lifts are. It should make it easy for the guest to find out any important information at a glance â€” upcoming events or where the conference is being held.

However, hotels are ultimately judged by the quality of their rooms.

It is an excellent post that provides real food for thought.

Interview: Joe Stump & Daniel Burka on War Between Designers & Developers?

Paul: So I am really excited to have joining me today Daniel Burka and Joe Stump from Digg. Hello Guys

Daniel: Hello

Joe: Hey hey

Paul: I have had both of you on the show individually and Joe you were on not long ago were you really…

Joe: ermhh yes a couple of months ago maybe

Paul: What can I say, we cannot survive without you. So erm but I though lets bring the two of these wonderful people together and talk about designer,developer relationships and how the two of them get on together working at Digg. I mean I have to say this is just a rip off really isn’t it, it’s a rip of a panel you did. Was that Future of Web Design (FOWD) you did that panel?.

Daniel: Yes it was Future of Web Design in New York. I think we are rehashing the panel at South By South West (SXSW) this year so if anyone is there it would be awesome if you dropped by.

Paul: Excellent, I need to persuade you two to come along to the SXSW live Boagworld as well, but I will hassle of of air so that you can back out if you want to without committing yourself live in a interview.(Paul laughs). OK so lets kick off by talking about the designer and developer relationship and really I think that it strikes me there is a lot of mythology around this that you know designers and developers hate one another and I am not convinced it actually works like that in practice. When you guys did your panel at FOWD you actually were agreeing on a lot of points so I though we would start of by maybe highlighting some of the differences and then look at ways of working together er mm further down the line so lets talk about to begin with what you guys see as the main differences in outlook I guess between designers and developers. How do you look at the world in different ways, do you think? Maybe Joe do you want to kick us off. How do you think developers see the world differently to designers?.

Joe: Sure I think erh developers are definitely, their default kind of response erm is that they would rather, I always make the joke that coders by default are lazy, good coders are extremely lazy people that’s why they’re good coders because they want to automate as much of their lives as possible. Ermm so I think that erm developers tend to get a little complacent when it comes to the actual erm product sometimes because they are so busy and so interested in and so worried about the actual code or the more nerdy side of things you know like are we running the latest greatest versions of different softwares. Developers also tend to be a lot more interested in what the new hip nerdness is as opposed to what’s actually going to make the product better for users, you know so like I have been in product review meetings where people are like “well Why isn’t this new version of some strange bizarre open web specification that nobody has ever heard of ahead of some major forward user feature” . (laughs)

Paul: (laughs)

Joe: So ermm I think that that tends to be like a big difference. The designers you know it is their job to be curators of the website in my opinion and kind of move the user experience forward and often times developers don’t have a whole lot of interest in that. (laughs)

Daniel: On the flip side of that if we are both going to slag our own professions ermm I think designers are often you know pushing unrealistic goals. They are interested in building you know the perfect product and you know aiming straight for that instead of looking pragmatically at doing things in steps and figuring out what is technically possible and I think there is also a gap where designers can only see sometimes what features that they can view and don’t understand, don’t see the vision, of where developers can see you know amazing things they can you know do pro grammatically that designers just aren’t envisioning.

Paul: Yeah

Joe: I think that’s er is another key difference that I know that there is a lot of, there have been struggles and tensions between Daniel and I in the past over this idea of a holistic approach to design where where Daniel designs his vision and his vision is normally version 10.0 and I am looking at you know the technical roadmap and things that I need to do and like I am OK well lets talk about version 1.0 and then we can start talking about 2.0 like, developers are much more focused on an iterative process as far as releasing, you know like small chunks, reducing risk etc. etc. and designers tend to kind of like go well erm you know it is like I wanna build a pyramid it’s like great well how about first we start out by finding some limestone and then we work our way up to building a pyramid.

Daniel: So what you are saying is we have got a fantastic optimism. (laughing)

Joe: Yes

Daniel: But I think that’s partly it. Developers are very interested, as Joe was saying,in mitigating risk and in a lot of ways designers are very adverse to even thinking about risk and want to think about opportunity. So I think this is kind of the crux of the whole thing and what we are trying to talk about on that panel is that both of those views are super valuable and if you manage to find the right mix of those two things then you can develop a fantastic product that is both concerned about risk and pushes the boundaries of what is possible.

Paul: Mmmm I remember one point that came out from the presentation which is one that you made erm Joe which is about the dangers of if that mix is not right. It is always the designer that’s in front of the client or the boss or whatever ermm the kind of realism of the developer is kind of left out of the process and ideally the developer either needs to be involved in those kind of meetings or there needs to be a conversation that happens between the designer and the developer before anything is ever presented. Is that kind of, do you still feel like that is that still a valid point?.

Joe: Yeah, I feel that is a extremely valid point for two reasons erm and this is a discussion that Daniel and I just had yesterday in fact. The thing is as a developer the reason I want to be involved early on in the development or in the design and like development of the product phase you know when requirements are coming together and when you know the first kind of formations come out of the clays so to speak is because two reasons. One ermm and they all kind of come back to this same kind of problem, is that the designers and the product people don’t know the system, the actual bits and bytes that like you know go into making the product, as well as the developer like the data and the code and the actual systems and stuff like that and how they are put together. So Often times two things happen Daniel comes up with a design and there is like one small minute detail on the page that would require you know one of the largest computer farms in the world to calculate in real time. Whereas in lots and just as often as you know that happens where it is like Daniel I can’t calculate that number in any meaningful way on a regular basis so you gotta remove that. But just as often as that happens because of you know as a developer I have such like intrinsic knowledge of the relationships in the data and what data we are storing and stuff like that just as often I am like well why don’t we expose this data or do this and Daniel is like I did not know we could do that actually I totally would have done that if I had known that that was possible or feasible.

Daniel: Yeah and that’s, especially that side of things designers often hear the first part Joe is talking about, the you know well that is just not possible or more difficult than you think. Any designer that has worked with a developer has heard that aspect of it you know and that is of course very valuable but it is the other side of things that I think people fail to leverage most frequently is the ability of developers to see different patterns than you in the data and come up with those suggestions, you know it might still be your call whether or not that is a valuable thing for the user but just hearing these ideas coming out is is amazingly valuable. That has shaped a lot of Digg.

Paul: So would you say that is a kind of you know a common mistake that maybe designers make with developers that they don’t communicate enough with them ermm

Daniel: Absolutely

Paul: yeah

Daniel: Designers often see developers as mules its like I made this thing go build it and that is a bullshit attitude, its terrible.

Paul: mmmm what …

Daniel: Its not just designers either all product people have a tendency to do that. In some ways, as Joe was talking about developers being involved in the process, at Digg we’ve got a pretty good structure where design actually falls under the marketing team and in some ways I see design as a bridge between marketing and business development you know product interests and the development team. Because I am often sitting over here and I hear you know someone from business development or marketing throwing around an idea and I am like “I’m no developer but I have a good sense of what the developer sees as important and you’re talking crazy talk like that is going to be nuts” and they are about to go and pitch that to a potential partner and you know like every week I put the brakes on from that kind of thing I am like listen you need to talk to Joe you need to talk to a developer because that what you are talking about is going to be months of development and you are promising it to a partner in two weeks that’s nuts and so I like that in you in some ways the design team can often be a bridge between product marketing people and the technical teams.

Paul: Joe from your perspective what kind of, you know as your communicating with Daniel and other designers within digg looking back where do you think you’ve made mistakes in your relationship with designers?.

Joe: Ermm I mean the mistakes that I often make ,its a not even a mistake are I don’t wanna say are what we do are like flat out mistakes it’s just more ermm you know being a bit more reserved and not necessarily defaulting your answer to no. Err You know I think that Daniel often talks about how a natural tension between design and product and development is actually good for the product because you have eventually, as long as you can keep that at a good tension and not you know bad or where things are breaking but ermm I think often times developers are quick to say no. You know they will be sitting in a meeting and it is just immediately no I am not going to discuss that when in reality if they sat back and let the idea germinate you know they would, Its kinda weird because I have in a lot of meetings where things were, where the developers were like be oh my god that is an amazing product but we will never be able to build it and so it is like they want to build it but their default is to avoid risk so they say no. So a lot of the times when I talk with Daniel now and this is something I like quit doing I try not to say no unless it is just like blatantly in black and white no way that is possible kind of thing. I might let the idea germinate more I might no say no immediately I might want to go back and spend a couple of hours thinking about it if it is actually feasible because maybe you know. That’s what engineers love doing they love solving difficult problems and if you are saying no to difficult problems then you are failing at what your passion and hobby is. Ermm so I think that ..

Paul: There is also an aspect is there not of not just saying no but explaining why you are saying no so that the other party is kind of educated into the kind of problems you face so as Daniel said earlier that they can be the bridge to you know business development or whoever else.

Joe: Yeah absolutely, I am the king of analogies at this point ermm but the other thing that developers erhh, this is extremely common that they utterly fail at is that they think for some reason that they are like the target demographic of the product so they will come into a meeting and say this product will absolutely fail because it doesn’t have key binding so I can keyboard shortcuts it’s like nobody uses keyboard shortcuts like in the real world, they are all mice people like you know. It is stuff like that that a lot of the time developers are like “this will never work unless you have least 14 completely nerdy niche features in it” you know and I think developers too often you know they do that and that is just silly.

Daniel: Hey guys that’s been a special problem at digg,since we started of as the pure technology side so it was seen as by developers for developers and you know we have obviously branched out from there and now we have got other interests I want to make sure peoples mums can use the website and that’s you know certainly a , you make different choices based on that.

Paul: I mean it is very timely from my point of view to have this interview with you because on Friday we had a internal meeting in Headscape where we talked about all kinds of production things and one of the things that came out of the development team was this desire to be involved in the process more and err to have their say more and just to be included earlier. So I am quite interested in you know because obviously you guys have been working together for a long time what kind of practical advise would you give to a , maybe this is just a question for me and not for anyone else, but what kind of practical advise would you give for designers and developers working together within the organisation. How can that relationship work better?

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely involving your development team earlier in the process but that doesn’t necessarily mean sitting around brainstorming right at the beginning of a feature with them. I mean I try to sit down work out an idea get it 20% of the way there, you know work out some of the basic issues figure out what this thing really means what’s at the core of it you know it might be ten different features together but what are we actually trying to achieve with it right so at least get that far even throw down so basic wire frames or some really basic comps and then present it to the developers its like listen this isn’t just an idea I came up with you know last night I just want to spill my entire brain out in front of you it is something at least I have thought through you know I have put a few things through my brain and now here is this totally unformed, not totally unformed, slightly formed idea but it is not baked you know don’t wait until you have got it baked and then you are so disappointed when the development team says well that’s not possible or have you really though about this and you have got this complete package already made up in your mind but come to them with a least you know the kernel of the thought out idea and get them to poke holes in it. Get them to push it in other directions and show you what else you could be doing and then go back to the drawing board again.

Paul: What about from your point of view Joe?

Joe: Well yeah, So ermm I agree with Daniel in some sense on that I think it is crucial to before you take it to developers to formulate a cohesive problem or hypotheses. Like if you come to the developers with a half baked problem that you are trying to solve you are going to get like, they are just going to run wild with it and it is like you know difficult sometimes to keep developers focused when they get excited about a problem. So have a formulated problem that you know you have a small idea of how you are going to fix but not fully baked. The other thing too and this goes on both sides of the aisle it shouldn’t be get developers plural involved and it shouldn’t be get. like a lot when you are first germinating that idea and you haven’t really moved it forward start small and then continuously expose it to more and more people errmh because I find if you involve too many people early on in a the process whether it is designers, developers, product people things tend to , you tend to loose focus quickly and everyone wants you know it’s kind of like port barrel spending and major bills its like everyone wants to piggy back extra features and stuff and pet projects that they have wanted for so long into like some major new feature.

Daniel: It is just simple death by committee

Joe: Right

Paul: Yeah Yeah OK That’s interesting a little random question I remember going to a talk once where, and I can’t remember who it was who was giving it, where they suggested that errmh designers and developers swapped roles for a while. Where you try and sit in the other persons shoes and I was just interested whether you two had tried anything like that?

Joe: That would be disastrous for me. (laughs)

Daniel: I I mean I appreciate development roles and I am you know somewhat technical for a designer but yeah I know I have never done that but I have always worked so closely with the development team like at silverorange where I worked previously to digg there was only ten of us and I sat in a room with developers all the time. I worked in their code with them and worked on problems as a group so I think I, you know I have never worked in a place like say you worked in a big enterprise and your in this classic where designers are in one office and developers are in the other office and you toss stuff over the wall yes then I think that would hold value at least go and sit in the other office, go work in the other office for a few months just hear the other discussions that are going on because there are a totally different set of concerns a totally different set of values than what you are doing and if you don’t at least appreciate and understand that, and not just understand it so you know what you are fighting against but understand it to know what is important and how you can work with it then you know you would be really missing out.

Joe: I think I am ermhh I think I am kind of spoiled at Digg because you know I work with two of the webs brightest, you know Daniel and Mark Trammell as well so I actually push back on my developers pretty frequently where they you know we will leave a meeting and they are like I really really completely disagree with what Daniel or Mark are doing with the design and you know I tell them all the time like look you are not a designer and you definitely not at the level that those two are at and you sometimes have to defer to them and trust that they are doing their job and they are doing it well you know and ermhh I think developers don’t do that often enough they make these assumptions that you know the arty-farty designers are doing stupid shit again and that’s not the case. I mean they would not be especially where we are at at Digg and what not I mean Digg is able to be very picky with who they bring on and the people Daniel has brought in to design are extremely competent at what they do err so I am probably not qualified to answer that question because I am so spoiled at Digg but that is a common problem I see from developers where ermhh they don’t let the designers do their job and they try and be designers when in reality you know they do not have the experience or the expertise so.

Paul: Lets talk about conflict resolutions, sounds very grandiose but basically you know how do you go around resolving a situation where you know OK you kind of respect each others skills and you respect each others competencies but you know where some feature is suggested by Daniel and you know and you Daniel from your point of view it is absolutely core to what you are trying to achieve you know it is extremely important and then from a technical angle Joe it just seems incredibly complex and very very difficult. How is the eventual decision made as to whether that feature should be implemented and in what way it is implemented? How do you go about resolving that difference?.

Joe: Ermhh Well I mean I think as far as making the decision whether or not the feature makes it in, because there is actually two possibilities when it comes to the conflict resolution. Whether or not a feature actually makes it into the product and in what capacity does that feature make it into the product and I think in the former whether or not the feature actually makes into the product if Daniel comes to me and he’s resolute like this feature has to be in the product the feature is going to be in product. I am always going to defer to Daniel on on, if he feels that strongly and is that passionate about it you know and it is not something completely hare-brained like I want magic ponies to come flying out of the screen I am going to defer to his expertise on the fact that feature needs to be in the product. Where the conflict resolution comes into it is what capacity is that feature going to come into the product like a perfect example of I think of something where there has been we have had a recent discussion at Digg and where this has happened we have, and I talked about this probably in our last talk but, there are these little green badges on the digg buttons and they indicate one of your friends has dugg that story and when you hover over the digg button it shows like a little sample of the people that have dugg it. Ermhh So those were causing significant strain and problems with our systems and our code and on our databases so I came to Daniel and of course again as my risk aversion developer brain was coming to Daniel I was like Can we axe this feature until we can figure out how to like fix it. He was like “No” that feature cannot absolutely be axed and then we came to a resolution which was a short term solution until we can get a better solution in place where operations now have knobs they can dial down so the green badges don’t show up on stories older than 48hrs, they don’t show up on stories that have more than say 5 or 600 diggs and stuff like that. So the conflict resolution came in basically making trade-offs in how that feature is surfaced in works ermhh at our scale more often than not what that means is that Daniel has to give up the notion that everything is in real time. The feature will work it is just that it may take you know thirty seconds to a minute for an action to be distributed across the entire system, that is probably more how things are now at Digg so.

Paul: What about from your point Daniel, when do you back down over something and when do you keep pushing on it? How do you decide you know how serious Joe is about something and whether you should keep pushing or not?

Daniel: Right I mean it kind of comes down to you know when I am looking at the product I am not thinking of any one feature, I am thinking about the whole set and I want it all to work together and so you know I know I want to push out six different features this month and if I push and push Joe to do the one really hard one well that is going to affect the other five I wanted to get done. So any feature is tied to other features and it is also based on a time line if I want something done in a certain time line and that’s just not possible well then I have to start making compromises so you know you have to be realistic and then at the same time you have to realise developers work well with shame and so if you tell a developer well I bet a good developer could do that (All laugh) they will go back to their cube grumbling at you and figure out a more efficient way to do it.

Paul: OK. So now we are getting into the realms of how to manipulate each other.

Daniel: Absolutely.

Joe: That’s definitely err one that I agree does work but is not a trick you want to pull out of your bag too often.

Daniel: No it is the same with designers too, it is like I want to do this really complex thing, no way I can explain that to users in a way they will understand. “I thought you were good” arhh shit I will go back and try that again.

Paul: That is quite interesting what you just said there because so far we have talked very much about you know designers initiating features and that kind of stuff I mean are there situations where the developer is the one initiating features you know just said there a developer wanted to do something really cool and you said you couldn’t explain it. Does it run that way as well? or is it always the designer who drives first?.

Daniel: No Absolutely that happens at Digg, it happens sometimes at Digg so Joe yesterday sent me an email that had two big feature ideas in it. They may not be things we implement this month but maybe later on this year. I was looking at them and you know it is easy to disregard well he is a developer he does not understand what’s going on with the product but you look at the ideas and they are strong and they fit in with what we are doing and now I am trying to figure out you know how they make sense in the big picture I guess. So we have got a brilliant development team a lot of people over there with great ideas and we try to sit down, you know I guess Kevin has been doing those where we do meetings once a month I guess where developers if they have been working on a side project you know something they have always wanted to build into Digg they can present this at the Digg ideas meeting.

Paul: Ah OK

Daniel: A bunch of those products will make it into the full Digg I mean its awesome these brilliant people go and throw around crazy ideas and show you what is possible.

Joe: I think err yeah I mean I agree with that you definitely have, it is a two way street erm largely stuff comes from product at this point the Digg ideas meetings is definitely helping that you know open that up and kind of what I would call level that playing field a bit. But one of the things I think developers are in a in a unique position just like Daniel I work with people across the entire companies so I know initiatives that are going on in marketing I know initiatives that are going on in PR and biz dev etc. and you know if nothing else developers are very good about noticing and pointing out and discovering patterns and err a recent product that made it out that err was a developer initiated product was Digg dialogue because basically I noticed this common pattern where business development and Marketing and PR were setting up interviews and then like reaching out to people to like conduct interviews using the Digg engine kind of thing and I was why don’t we bake this into like a cohesive feature that’s turnkey because you know business development like Daniel was saying earlier lots of times they are just making these one off deals you know and they don’t really recognise when there is a product to be had there erm so that is another one that recently went out. It was like I recognised a pattern and baked this into something cohesive and move it forward.

Daniel: That is a good example of where we are being lazy some people want to do this one off thing over and over again and it is a bunch of work to don it each time well like we will just build a system to do it and we won’t have to do all the work every time. It was great.

Paul: OK that is really good lets leave then with one final question or one thing from each of you. Which is if you could give you know one piece of advice to either designers or developers on how to kind of interact with their counterpart what would that one piece of advice be?. Lets kick of with you Daniel what would be your one piece of advice to designers about dealing with developers?.

Daniel: My one piece of advice would be to see the big picture, you know aim for version 10 like we were talking about earlier and know what you want to build in the future but be realistic enough to back it up and build it in stages. You know waiting and building a feature over six months and eventually launching it is a terrible way to develop and it’s a terrible way to design having an idea of where you want to be in six months but realising in one month increments is so much better you’ll end up in a different place but at least you know where you are heading and you can adjust that goal as you go forward

Paul: Yeah. Brilliant. Joe what about you?

Joe: Ermhh I would say to the developers out there that there is different shades of no ermhh that you know there is the, the default should not always be no and remember what I said about the conflict resolution you should be deferring to the people that are experts in their field by default for the most part and to work on compromise in how the feature operates and make your concessions and have them make their concessions rather than just defaulting to saying no to the entire feature.

Daniel: And as a developer push to be involved early in the process, even at Digg we struggle with that a lot and as a designer I appreciate when developers want to be involved I want to hear their opinions you know it is fun to have them involved I hear all kinds of crazy stuff I never even considered that’s awesome.

Paul: Excellent. Thank you so much guys that was really good I appreciate you coming back on the show yet again. It was really good to get your perspectives together on that relationship because it is one a lot of people struggle with. So it is good to hear that it can work most of the time. Thanks for your time

Daniel: Thanks for having us on Paul

Joe: Bye

Thanks goes to Shaun Hare for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

With everybody from Britney to Obama now on Twitter it is safe to say the social networking platform has gone mainstream. But what does this mean for the service and how can we as website owners use it? Read More

Tips for a transformed twitter

Posted in Marketing on February 3, 2009 by Paul Boag

Paul Carter from New York writes:

Paul, I notice that you have been lamenting a lot on twitter about it becoming a marketing tool. Is that really wrong? Shouldn’t we be embracing and using it?

I sent my first twitter in November of 2006, only 7 months after the services launch. For me it was a way to keep in touch with new friends I had made at the Refresh 06 conference. It was less intrusive than instant messaging and less formal than email. I quickly became hooked.

For the longest time it was the tool of geeks. My friends laughed at me as I sent tweets from the pub, my family stared blankly as I explained the service. However, that has all changed now.

Like Facebook before it Twitter is everywhere at the moment. It was even recently discussed by Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross on the BBC in front of 4 million viewers. It has become mainstream and increasingly it is being used as a marketing tool. There is no going back.

However, Paul is right. I am wrong to lament what Twitter once was and should embrace it as a tool I can use. Nevertheless like everybody, I need to be careful how I use it. I do not believe Twitter users will allow the tool to be reduced to a broadcast mechanism for pimping the latest blog post or special offer.

So how am I choosing to use Twitter?

I guess the first thing to say is that I am not a Twitter success story. Sure I have nearly 4000 people following me but that pale into insignificance when compared to others. That said, Twitter is turning into a third string of my online presence, alongside this blog and podcast.

With that in mind let me share with you a few tips that have helped me better utilise this interesting new tool.

1. Above all, keep it personal

Although twitterers like CNN breaking news have been very successful, generally I feel corporate twitter accounts are a mistake.

In my opinion twitter is about person to person communication and not a broadcast tool for faceless corporations. To use it in that way is to miss the potential of twitter.

Does that mean you cannot have a twitter account for your organisation? Not at all. For example if Vitaly Friedman created a twitter account you might not recognise the name. However, if he used the name SmashingMag you are more likely to follow because you know the Smashing Magazine website.

It is not the name that matters so much as the tone of posts. In my opinion your tweets should be more than an endless string of press releases and links. It should include personal content and a dialogue with followers.

This is important because it enables you to make a connection with your users. An open and honest relationship with users is very powerful. It builds trust, loyalty and engagement. It encourages repeat traffic and word of mouth recommendation.

2. Learn from others

I have learnt a lot about Twittering just by reading the tweets of those I admire. Merlin Mann for example injects a lot of humour into his posts and his followers really respond to that. Darren Rowse on the other hand strikes a good place between recommending content others have written with promoting his own posts.

As well as examining the style of others you can also examine statistics. Use a tool like TweetStats.com to examine how often others tweet and how often they reply to their followers. All of this helps to build up a picture of what makes a successful twitterer.

There are also a growing number of great sites which give advice on how to get the most out of twitter. One of my personal favourites is TwiTip that covers subjects such as “The Merit of Twitter Competitions” and “How To Get Unfollowed On Twitter“.

3. Get a good desktop client

Without a shadow of doubt the most powerful twitter client currently available is TweetDeck. This air application not only runs on Windows, Mac and Lynx but also provides a range of superb tools for managing your life on Twitter.

With TweetDeck you can create groups, filter tweets, monitor certain subjects as well as tweet, reply and retweet posts.

In fact it is so powerful that it can be somewhat intimidating at first. Don’t let that put you off. Check out this short tutorial into TweetDeck’s core features and you will be up and running in no time.

4. Use twitter on the road

If your twitter account is going to be personal as well as professional then you will almost certainly want to use it on the road. One option is to simply use Twitters mobile website. However if you are fortunate enough to have an iPhone then there is a wealth of Twitter clients available to you.

I think I have paid for and tried almost every twitter client on the Iphone, but the winner hands down is Tweetie.

I love Tweetie. It has a clean, easy to use interface, and yet is packed with powerful features including the ability to:

Handle multiple twitter accounts.
Navigate reply chains.
View twitter trends and perform custom searches.
Access complete user profiles.

In many ways it is even better than TweetDeck because it has much of TweetDeck’s power, but in a much cleaner interface. If only they did a desktop application!

5. Tracking the results

Although I have already mentioned TweetStats, that is just the tip of the statistical iceberg.

There are an ever growing number of tools you can use to track your activity on twitter. However, the ones that really interest me are those that track click throughs. What I really want to know is if I mention a link in twitter, how many people click through.

If the link is one on my own sites I could use Google Analytics using their URL tagging tool. However, this is somewhat fiddly and only applies if I am linking to my own site. What is more these URLs can get long, which is a problem when limited to 140 characters.

Fortunately there is a tool called TwitterBurner which solves these problems. It shortens the URL and tracks all click throughs even to sites you do not run yourself. Best of all it is now supported from directly within TweetDeck (although not Tweetie unfortunately).

6. Follow as well as be followed

Always remember that Twitter is a two way conversation. A big part of successful twittering is about replying to those who tweet you.

Twitter is also not just about who follows you. It is also about who you follow. One service that I find particularly useful is Mr Tweet.

Mr Tweet will provides two type of information.

First it suggests people you might want to consider following because they fall within your broad network (people who are followed by your friends).
Second it suggests those from your list of followers who you should follow back.

For each of these people it provides various stats including:

The number of followers they have
The chance of them replying to you
How often they update

This is a great way of extending your network of contacts and potentially increasing the chance of your tweets being retweeted. Its also a great way of meeting new people!

7. Integrate whenever possible

If you are intending to use Twitter for anything other than personal use it needs to be incorporated into the rest of your web strategy. That means it needs to linkup with your other online activity including your website and other social networks.

There are no shortage of tools that help you do this from the basic twitter widget to a tool for sending your tweets to facebook.

One tool that particularly caught my attention is called TwitterFeed. It posts content from an RSS feed to Twitter which is a useful way of updating your followers about new posts.

However, use any tool that automatically posts to Twitter with caution. It can easily become annoying if used too much. Also it lacks the friendliness of a personal post.

8. Don’t over think it

Of course the problem with all these tools, statistics and analysis is that it can suck the spontaneity and personality from your tweets.

Although some of those late night drunken tweets are best gone, you want to avoid your tweets becoming too sterile.

Let me explain what I mean. I am naturally a fairly good public speaker. However, once I was sent to a public speaking workshop. They taught me all the techniques you should use to be exceptional. However, instead of it improving my skills it made me so amazingly self conscious that I was paralysed. I was over analysing what I was doing.

The danger is we do the same with Twitter. Sure, Twitter can be used as a marketing tool but that doesn’t mean it cannot be fun too. Don’t let articles like this suck the joy out of twittering!

150. User Manipulation

Posted in Classic shows on January 28, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Liz Danzico talks about user research. Paul explains how to create an effective call to action and we discover how one button cost $300 million in sales

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News and events

The $300 Million Button

Our first news story is an incredibly tale from usability expert Jared Spool, which really shows the power of usability testing.

In the post he writes about a client who had a fairly standard checkout process on his website. The process began with a login form:

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password.

It is the kind of form I have seen on many ecommerce websites. This feature, which had been designed to help repeat customers, created two distinct problems:

New users resented the idea of having to register. One user said: "I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something."
Repeat users rarely remembered their username or password. They wasted substantial time guessing, before eventually resorted to creating a new account. In fact after examining the database Jared discovered that 45% of all customers had multiple registrations. Some did go as far as clicking on the forgotten password link but of those only 25% went on to place an order.

In the end the site was redesigned, allowing the user to continue without registering. Within a year this created a $300 million increase in sales.

Of course $300 million is a meaningless figure in itself. It is the percentage increase that matters. In this case is was a 45% increase. That is a staggering number and one that really drives home the importance of testing with real users.

Read the ‘$300 million button’

The UK government and graded browser support

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the importance of graded browser support. In my post I explained how we should not limit our support to the browsers we test and how it is unrealistic to push for identical support across all browsers.

This is an approach which has been adopted by the likes of Yahoo! and the BBC for some time, but which now also extends to public sector website in the UK.

According to The Web Standards Project the rules surrounding browser testing on public sector websites have been changed to better reflect best practice in graded browser support.

Changes include an emphasise on functionality over identical layout across browsers (paragraph 39):

You should check that the content, functionality and display all work as intended. There may be minor differences in the way that the website is displayed. The intent is not that it should be pixel perfect across browsers, but that a user of a particular browser does not notice anything appears wrong.

As well as support for progressive enhancement (paragraphs 17-18):

You should follow a progressive enhancement approach to developing websites to ensure that content is accessible to the widest possible number of browsers.

This is excellent news and certainly provides a great reference for UK designers and website owners looking to convince others of the importance of graded browser support.

Read the UK government guidance on browser testing

50 Illustrator tutorials

From development to design now, and a list of 50 tutorials that help you get your head around Adobe Illustrator.

The list is compiled by UK web designer Chris Spooner. He echoes my own experiences when he writes:

Adobe Illustrator can be a little tricky to get your head around, particularly after getting used to the workflow as applications such as Photoshop. The difference between layer use and creating and editing shapes can be especially strange at first hand.

I am a Photoshop man and I have found it very difficult to make the transition to a vector based world, so this list was particularly appealing to me.

Its a great list that you will definitely want to check out, if like me you have never got to grips with Illustrator before.

Read 50 illustrator tutorials every designer should see

A new approach to PNG Support

Finally today I would like to draw your attention to a new technique that has been developed by Drew Diller for using PNG transparency in IE6.

Unlike previous techniques this one allows you to use PNGs as background images instead of just as IMG tags. This opens up a world of possibilities and overcomes one of the most annoying limitations of IE6.

This minor miracle is achieved not by using AlphaImageLoader as has been done in the past, but with VML.

Implementation seems fairly straightforward and involves adding a Javascript library to your page. Because this is for IE6 only you can embed the code within a conditional comment. This means other browsers will not even download it.

Although I have yet to use this approach myself, I have high hopes that this will finally solve the IE6/PNG barrier.

Download DD_belatedPNG now.

Interview: Liz Danzico on User Research

Paul: So joining me today for our little interview is Liz Danzico. Liz, why don’t you start off by introducing yourself a little bit. Telling us a bit about yourself and your background.

Liz: Sure. Um, I am a user experience consultant, I am here in New York City, I have been developing web sites and user experiences online for about 12 years now. Um, I do a lot of work with Happy Cog Studios here in New York, with Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santa Maria. Um, I’m also chair of the new MFA interactions design program.

Paul: Okay.

Liz: At the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Paul: Excellent. I mean, so, to say that you’re an expert in user experience would be a slight understatement then, Liz.

Liz: Well I wouldn’t go that far.

Paul: You’d be too modest, obviously, to say that. Okay, so we got Liz on the show, I met Liz when I went to Future of Web Design and we got talking. Um, she’s got some fascinating insights into the whole area of user research, and usability generally, so I thought let’s get her on the show and let’s maybe, you know, try and cover things from, from the very basic level, a kind of introduction to this concept of user research. Um, so, perhaps a good place to start, if you’re okay Liz, um, would be, how would you go about defining the area of user research? What would you include, what would you exclude from that?

Liz: Right. So … user research, even today, we’ve been doing user research on the web since, uh, the very beginning, so it’s a very old concept but it’s still fairly controversial. So the basic concept is it tells you what really happens when real people interact with your product or service. So, there are no real rules about what it includes and what it doesn’t [inaudible]. You can basically speculate about what your users want, or you can find that out, um, you know? And uh, and the, uh, the latter is probably a more useful approach for you to take than speculation. But with either one, thinking about your audience is useful no matter what. And so, so there are no real rules, now um, when you disconnect thinking about your audience from your business objectives, and you start getting, you know, very excited about behaviors that they’re doing that are sort of disconnected from the real mission that you’re trying to sort of accomplish, then it becomes, um, a bit murky, and confusing. But thinking about your audience is, just in general, is an extremely useful approach.

Paul: Okay. I mean one of the things that, that, um, I’ve heard said before by, particularly cynical clients I have to say, but I’ve heard it said before, you know, ultimately user research, and all of this kind of stuff feels in some ways like, um, just another way for web designers to suck a bit of extra money out of us, you know that fundamentally how, I know my audience already, is the kind of attitude that many web site owners have, so why do you see it as an important part of the process?

Liz: Well uh, you know, as we’ve been seeing design flaws often translate to lost business opportunities, you know, usability is becoming more important than ever as the number of web sites and products is, you know, increasing more and more every day. So, we design these products and services, and we are at the same time users of them, but there’s no way that we can really tell what are users, um, might want. And the best way to, you know, usability research doesn’t cost a lot of money, so, the best way that you can help your clients kind of understand that you need to do usability research in some way is to let them know that usability research is important and it doesn’t need to, um, suck up a lot of time or money in the, in the process. So there’s a great fantastic book by Steve Krug, called Don’t Make Me Think, which I’m sure you’re probably well aware of.

Paul: Uh huh.

Liz: And in one of the chapters towards the end, he has a chapter called "Usability Research on a Shoestring", or it’s probably better titled, which talks of this approach of going out into the hallway and kind of grabbing people, and just sitting them down, and putting them in front of your product or service, and getting some feedback. So getting some feedback from people, no matter who they are, is better than getting none at all. And so, I think starting there with clients, instead of the, you know, $100,000 user research project that’s going to take you across 8 markets, you know, in the United States, the UK, and Asia, then, is going to be a much better approach than kind of intimidating them with the very extensive projects.

Paul: Mmm, I mean, when it, the kind of one scenario that I’ve come across before, um, is where we’ve come across with clients that say "Well we’ve already done user research, we already know our audience ’cause we’ve got somebody in to do this or that." Is there a difference between user research that’s been done primarily with an offline audience, and those with, you know, when you’re interacting with people online? Is there a difference in the kind of results and information that you’re after, and even the techniques, maybe, that you use?

Liz: So, they are probably, when they say that they’ve done user research, they’re probably talking about focus groups. I would venture to guess that when they talk about that they’re probably talking about either focus groups or surveys of some kind and those are not, well, I wouldn’t say that they are, those are bad things to do, but those are not the kinds of user research techniques that are going to give them feedback about their product’s usability. Those kinds of techniques are going to give them good information about, um, certain kinds of things but they are not going to give them information about whether or not people can use the product or service that they’re looking at. So, you want to find out exactly what kinds of user research they’ve conducted. If they say the words "focus group" then you know you want to move them towards something that is a one on one kind of interview. Focus groups tend to be conducted with groups of people, as the name might suggest, um, and when groups of people get together to talk about, you know, they put forth a question for these people, and when they, you know, groups of people get together to talk about the question they might influence one another in their answers, they’re typically aren’t talking about an interface, they’re typically talking about ideas, so you’re not getting good feedback, like in a one on one kind of scenario. So you want to sort of guide them to a more individual, one on one kind of experience. Surveys, on the other hand, are good, but they don’t get that kind of personal experience with a moderator, sitting with an individual, kind of looking at an interface in a kind of task-based scenario.

Paul: Okay, yeah that makes a lot of sense. I mean, let’s then talk about some of the techniques that can be used to better understand individuals, or how those individuals will interact with your product. What different kind of techniques do you use? I mean, there’s the kind of very basic usability session, but do you do, or are there other things above and beyond that, that you do?

Liz: Right. Well, the sort of big secret is that, there are names and there are certainly techniques, but the big secret is there are really no sort of techniques beyond knowing who your users are, kind of documenting what you’re seeing, and then kind of analyzing/prioritizing the results of what you see. So, you can, I’m gonna tell you a number of techniques that we can go through, but if those basic sort of constructs are there, then you’ve done sort of good user research. Now, that being said, the techniques that you can do are usability testing, usability testing traditionally has taken place in a user lab where a moderator is sitting with an individual looking at a screen, or a product, or a sketch of an interface and going through questions in sort of a task-based way, asking people "Show me how you would search for x" or "Show me how you would check out," or, you know, and seeing, measuring the success or failure of that kind of task. The clients are typically sitting behind a one-way, a one-way glass, or mirror, and observing these kinds of things. People have been not so thrilled about this technique recently, saying that it kind of, um, is not, it doesn’t produce natural reactions from users, but that is one kind of technique. There is, uh, kind of creating personas, and using personas, user personas which are an archetype of your site or product’s users, and getting everyone involved in activities around those personas, whether that be using those personas as your talking through features around, you know, a brainstorming session, and getting people to sort of role-play those personas. That’s another user research method. There are, there’s sort of the ethnography kind of take, where a lot of people have been doing kind of in-home interviews and observations recently. Ethnography, cultural anthropologists and people who have been doing traditional ethnography have been watching closely the design research that we’ve been doing recently, and wondering if we’ve been doing it right and so on, but ethnography, in that sort of observing users in their "natural environment", has been I would say a more successful way recently of watching people use products and services, um, so I would say that those three things, usability testing in a lab, sort of using personas and scenarios, and ethnography or kind of going out into the field and watching users, whether they’re in their homes or their offices, are the three kind of key ways to gather user research with users. The fourth way that I’ll mention, and we can talk about this in a little bit, is not with users directly, but it is certainly user research that’s available more and more now, and that is data on sort of analytics, which you can gather from Google Analytics, Shaun Inman’s Mint, these kinds of things. Watching site data and user behavior through site analytics is another form of user research that gives you, you know, some information, and you can watch these traffic patterns on your site. It doesn’t answer the question "Why?" but it does show you some evidence as to how users are behaving on your site.

Paul: It’s quite interesting that you bring up eth, ethnography, whoa I can’t even speak today, because, that’s of interest to me, because that’s an area that we’re beginning to explore a little bit more, and have kind of discovered the same thing, that there’s a real value of going into you know, somebody’s home, seeing the environment that they access the internet on, you know, do they have kids under their feet? You know, where they access their PC, can they sit comfortably at it? All those kinds of things. Um, I guess it’s also an advantage you don’t have to hire an expensive usability lab and all of the rest of it. But I have to confess, I’m a little bit new at it, so talk me through maybe some of the things, you know, how does it differ from a usability test that you would do in a usability lab, other than that you’re in a different environment?

Liz: Well, uh, it depends. It doesn’t have to differ at all — it depends on the goals of the test. I would say that you could construct a test that’s exactly like one that you’d conduct in a lab, it just happens in someone’s home or office, or in a different environment. But as you said, you get the more realistic interruptions, and that kind of thing, and are they going to be able to complete this task given the natural kind of occurrences of their day. And that, depending on what kind of test you are constructing, that’s either going to inform your results or not. If you are doing task-based testing, so I could maybe talk about the different kind of usability testing that you could do.

Paul: Yeah, that’s good.

Liz: Yeah so there are different ways that you could conduct a usability test. Um, traditionally there is task-based testing, where you set up pre-written questions, before you get to the test, that are based on the goals of the testing. So, if we were testing a photo site, we would test whether or not users could upload photos, could they task photos, you know, those kinds of things. So we would write those kinds of questions up beforehand, and then ask those questions during the test. Um, that’s one kind of test. You could do that in a lab, and you can do that same test in someone’s home. In a lab there would not be the children screaming, and the phone ringing, and that kind of thing, or, if someone say were uploading a photo, you would never be able to tell if sort of, timing out, would be an issue, or if anything with time or space or motion would be an issue. If those kinds of things are a goal of your test, then you might want to think about doing it in real time, in someone’s home environment. Another type of testing is something that, I’ll say it was first coined by Mark Hurst, who is a user experience consultant at Good Experience, I think he coined it, it’s called "Listening Labs". Listening labs are, I’ll call them experimental, but they’ve probably been going on long before I was aware of them, where people are designing usability tests in real time. So in other words, you go into the test with absolutely nothing written down, and you sit down with users, and based on your initial interview with them, you hear who they are, and after understanding a little bit about how they use photos in general, say, then you kind of write the questions on the fly, and then sort of develop a test around who that person is and their behavior, with your product, or product type.

Paul: Which I guess, makes people more engaged with the test, because it’s about what they specifically interested in. Is that the idea?

Liz: Exactly. So it’s a more natural way of doing the test. That’s the idea. That kind of thing you could do either way, and probably is even more rewarding if you’re doing it in someone’s natural environment. And then the third type of test is sort of a web, a web wide kind of test, where you have people just surf the internet, as it were, and uh, and just have them think out loud, and that kind of thing is also, I’ve found, more rewarding and fruitful in someone’s home environment, because they have their bookmarks there, and they have their post-it notes. Whereas you put them in a sort of artificial setting and they don’t have those things around them. So, if you, it kind of just depends on the type of testing that you’re doing. If you’re doing just the first kind I talked about, just task analysis and having people go through that kind of task-based testing, doing it in a traditional usability lab is great, you know, I mean you really do get the answers that you’re looking for, and it just depends on your goals.

Paul: I mean, it’s interesting, going back to Steve Krug’s book that you mentioned, I mean he talks about, I guess his agenda in that book is to get people to do testing who perhaps aren’t previously, and so, you know, he really downplays the demographic of who it is that you test, and that it’s more important that you test than that you get the right people, you know and all of that kind of thing. Um, but when you’re going into somebody’s home, and interacting with them, I’m guessing it’s more important to get the right demographic? Is that right?

Liz: Yeah, I mean one of the, um, I think it’s always important to, it’s always important to get the right demographic. Um, but, well I would say that there is a hierarchy of common mistakes around usability testing that kind of has a trickle down effect. You know, the number one mistake is not conducting any research at all, um, and conducting research on the wrong audience is kind of further down the list. So, you know, yeah if you’re doing research on the wrong audience, it’s not going to affect, whether you do it in a lab or you’re doing it at your desk, or at the water cooler, or at home, it’s going to affect your results and your analysis, you know, no matter where it takes place. So, you know, I think that the drawback is you are going to waste more time going out to that person’s time going out to that person’s time, so it’s going to be a drawback for you, but I don’t think that, it doesn’t matter really where it happens, because if you’re testing on the wrong audience, you’re testing on the wrong audience. Um, you’re probably going to get more information out of that experience if you’re in someone’s home, than if you’re not, so if you’re going to test on the wrong audience, do it in someone’s home, because you’re going to, it’s a richer experience, you’re going to get more information out of it than if you’re just testing in a lab.

Paul: No that makes perfect sense, I kind of see that. No, it’s difficult, isn’t it? Because, uh, obviously finding the right demographic of people, and picking the right people to test on is tricky, you know, it’s a more difficult thing and it can be time consuming. So have you got any advice about that? What really matters here? You know, for example, if you’re designing a web site for an over-60s audience, you know, are you, do you want to concentrate on the age aspect of that? Or the technical literacy aspect of that? You know, is it okay to have somebody younger if they’re not as good with the internet, if your audience is, do you, I’m kind of not wording this very well, but you get the idea — what’s important when you’re trying to match demographics?

Liz: Um, well, it’s very specific to your clients. Developing a, so, whenever you are trying to match demographics, you want to work with your clients to develop what’s called a screener, and a screener is a, I would say, whether you’re trying to develop a pretty rigorous recruiting demographic with a professional recruiter, to say, recruit 300 people for an extensive study, or whether you’re going to go out into the hallway and grab some people, or whether you’re going to recruit from something called Craigslist, which a lot of people are familiar with, um, which a lot of people do, I would say developing a screener which kind of outlines your demographic is a really good idea.

Paul: And what kind of things would that include? Sorry I interrupted you.

Liz: Yeah, what a screener is, it kind of goes through, it’s a questionnaire that outlines a number of questions that you would ask a potential recruit, that says, if this person can answer a particular question we should keep them in or out, so it’s actually a really good exercise to go through that allows you to kind of think through the type of demographic that you would have. So that doesn’t answer your question in any way.

Paul: It’s very interesting, though. Can you give me an example? Sorry, I’m interested in this screener thing, cause I haven’t come across it before. Can you give me an example of the type of questions? I mean obviously they’re going to be specific to the individual client, all the rest of it, but what kind of questions?

Liz: Um, what kind of questions? So, let’s see, would this person, so, let’s see, has this person, I mean typical questions could be around financial demographics, age demographics, you know the sort of typical things. But let me think of some more interesting things. So, is this person a full-time student? Has this person been fired from a job in the last 6 months? Has this person participated in usability research in the last 6 months? Those types of things, so if the person answers yes or no, then they’re not a good candidate. But there are other kinds of things you could put into that screener that would be more specific to the project.

Paul: So could it include something like is this person aware of a certain brand, because you want to associate with that brand?

Liz: Absolutely, so does this person drink Coca-Cola on a regular basis, yes or no? That kind of thing. But I’ve found that the screener, because the clients that you work with are often kind of speaking in those terms about their audience, the screener is a really good way to kind of help them understand how you’re recruiting audiences, and a good tool to kind of work together with them to narrow down who you want to be in the target audience for your testing, or your research in general. So, that said, how do you develop a good kind of set of participants for a research study for, say, a product for people over 60? Um, what’s most important, you know it depends on, and I know I hate to say that it depends, but you’re going to develop a goal for the testing, right? And the goal might be about usability, the goal might be about navigation, it might be about design, it might be about, it’s going to have, you have to first identify the goal, and depending on what that goal is, then you can identify the audience. So, the audience, you know the goal might have nothing to do with age, although the product has to do with age. So you can kind of strip away, you can pull apart the product from the goal of the testing a bit, and sort of just focus on the goal of the test. That’s why developing goals for user research is so critical, um, because often times you can separate those and therefore develop a better set of participants for that user research.

Paul: Mmm, that’s really good. I think what we’ve done here, is, a lot of people that listen to this show probably have a basic understanding of user testing. Maybe they’ve done some basic user testing before, or maybe they’ve even written a persona before, but I think what we’ve done, or what you’ve done, is push people a little bit further to kind of consider it in a little bit more detail what they’re doing in order to kind of refine the results that they’re getting back, and that’s really, really great. I mean, if somebody has just kind of done the very basics, you know, they’ve grabbed some people, they’ve done some user testing, maybe in their own office in front of their own PC, and they’ve got a few people in, um maybe they’ve created a couple of personas, what’s the next step for them? What should they be pushing? Is it through this screener? Is that the number one thing they should be doing? Is the goals more important? Is getting a better demographic more important? What’s the kind of next step for them?

Liz: Mmm, that’s a good question. I think that one of the most, well, doing the research is really key. Analyzing the research and connecting the research to the next iteration of a design is also key. We haven’t talked about that at all.

Paul: No, we haven’t, we ought to.

Liz: It’s often a grey area, um, you know there are lots of reports that are produced, you know, diagrams and things, but there’s a lot of kind of intuition that happens between sort of translating the research and putting that research, feeding that research back into the design. There are hunches, leaps of faith, um, you know kind of between that analysis and design. I mean there are clear cut recommendations that one can make, but then there are a lot of more grey areas. So I would say that, I still think, even though I mentioned we’ve been doing this kind of research for at least, you know, more than a decade online, and you know quite a long time offline, I think we still need to get better at the rigor at which we translate those recommendations and findings. So that’s one place I think we need to focus. Um, in terms of the actual research itself, uh, you know, there’s something, I think there are other sorts of techniques. I’m interested in these kinds of emergent, I would say emergent techniques like the listening labs, um, you know where the kinds of things that we’re looking at today with kind of mobile research, where people are, we need to be looking at how people are using our sites not just in the browser on their desktop but, you know, in the browser on their phone, and how their context is changing constantly and how we need to sort of look at that adaptation. So how do we develop tests that are more emergent and can be a bit more flexible, rIght? So I think there’s something interesting about that listening lab, where we kind of understand the person, and then develop the questions around a person and how they use a product, rather than having a pre-written set of questions. So, something that’s more emergent, I think that’s an area that’s interesting to kind of look at. Then, uh, ethnography, really understanding, goes right along with this sort of, emergent, as you said you’ve been getting more excited about ethnography as well, so, thinking more about kind of fine-tuning our approach to people’s own context, whether that be ethnography, going into their homes, their offices, you know, where people are using our products, whether that be on the street, in the hallway, wherever it is, but really understanding how to find people where they’re using our products and test them or do some research around that, I think that’s really exciting and a really interesting opportunity. Um so that, that’s the next step for us, uh, and I think that the way that people are designing tests and doing some usability testing now, is, you know, is good, I don’t think that there’s a big next step that we can all take together, but I think these are three areas that I think as a discipline that we’re going to see people moving forward together in.

Paul: Excellent. Let’s finish off, then, with a kind of where people should go if, you know, they’ve been excited by this interview, they want to learn a little bit more, um, about user research and user testing. You’ve mentioned Steve Krug’s book. What other resources are out there that people should be looking towards?

Liz: Well, let’s see. You know, I was thinking about, I was thinking about that and there are physical places that people can go, but they’re all in San Francisco in the United States, so that’s not going to help anyone. There is, you know, A List Apart has a User Science topic that often publishes user research related methods-like articles, there’s always BoxesandArrows.com which publishes user research related topics, um, Adaptive Path, which is a user research consultancy, or at least one aspect of what they do, they have published a number of articles but they also do events. A lot of events are in the United States right now, but they may have international events as well. But they do kind of give away a lot of their content. Um, and then last but not least, there’s a new-ish publisher called Rosenfeld Media, and the books that Rosenfeld Media publishes are about methods in user experience and, one recently in web form design, was about the usability of web form design by Luke Wroblewski (called Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks).

Paul: Yeah, I saw that. That looked very good, I have to say.

Liz: Yeah, so that’s something to keep an eye on as well.

Paul: Excellent. Thank you so much, Liz, that was absolutely superb. And I will be fascinated to get you back on the show in the future to talk more depth about some of these issues. Thank you very much for your time, Liz.

Liz: My pleasure.

Thanks goes to Jason Rhodes for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Every website should have a call to action, a response you want users to complete. But how do you encourage users to act? How do you create an effective call to action. Read More

Snape and Keith, separated at birth?

146. Obsessive

Posted in Classic shows on December 3, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show, Paul interviews Nicholas Felton about designing with data, we celebrate the return of 24Ways, and explain how community can keep users coming back for more.

Podcast: Download (24.0MB)

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Housekeeping

Two pieces of housekeeping before we begin:

First, Jaysone wrote in asking about the chat room we mention on the show. He wanted to know what it was and whether anybody could join. The chat room is associated with the shows we occasionally stream live. You can watch these shows at http://boagworld.com/live and interact with us as we record via the chat room. Anyone is welcome although you will probably need to follow me on Twitter to see when the shows are being recorded.
Talking of streaming shows, the next live show will be our Christmas special on the 8th December at 2.30PM UK time. The show will be an open question and answer time so either send in your questions in advance or come along and join us in the chatroom. We will also be doing a feature on this years top Christmas gifts for geeks. You can vote for your suggestions over at UserVoice.

News and events

24 Ways is back

This week sees the return of 24 Ways. 24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December they publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring a little Christmas cheer.

I am not sure whether it is the quality of the posts or that 24 Ways appears just before Christmas, but I always get excited when they return.

This year it returns with a somewhat controversial new look (personally I think it is great they are experimenting) and a whole new set of posts. They still offer a complete archive of previous posts so be sure to look through that, as well as subscribe to their RSS feed.

There is something very special about 24 Ways. I think part of the reason I like it so much is because the writers are given a free hand. They can write on whatever they want and so inevitably write about their passions. This leads to a better quality of post.

As if that glowing recommendation is not enough, I should also point out that our very own Marcus Lillington has a post coming soon. Surely that will be enough to encourage you to subscribe!

iPhone designers kit

In the past I have been slightly rude to the guys over at Smashing Magazine about their endless lists of other people’s creativity (we love them really). However, this week they have released something that is genuinely useful.

The iPhone Starter Kit, is a set of button elements and various iPhone interface options, bundled in a Photoshop PSD. The pack is ideal for mobile developers and front-end designers who need a professional way to show mock-ups or try out ideas.

You can use the set for free and without restriction. This includes both private and commercial projects. The only thing they ask is that you do not resell it.

Admittedly you may not be doing work on the iPhone right now. However, I suspect it will only be a matter of time before we will all be working on a mobile application of some description.

The mobile sector is incredibly exciting at the moment and this is another useful little weapon in our arsenal.

5 Ways to Get Usability Testing on the Cheap

Our next post is from the sitepoint blog and is entitled ‘5 Ways to Get Usability Testing on the Cheap‘.

Usability testing is a good idea for any new web site. Increasing the usability of your web site is good because it will increase visitor satisfaction, which in turn increases sales and user loyalty. On the business savings side, usability testing can also save you money in development, maintenance, and support costs.

The problem is website owners often perceive it as expensive, failing to grasp the high return on investment. However, it doesn’t need to be and any project can incorporate some user testing, no matter what the budget.

The sitepoint post makes 5 suggestions of how you can keep the cost down…

Use a service like usertesting.com, which provides a video of users interacting with your site.
Get a written user response to your site from Feedback Army for as little as $7.
Use a DIY user testing tool like Silverback for the mac or Morae for Windows.
Ask friends and family to take a look at the site. Alternatively ask for some feedback on the boagworld forum.
Use services like Crazy Egg or Click Density to get heatmaps showing how users interact with your site.

Whatever approach you choose, always make sure you have at least some user testing in every project.

Site search options

One of the things I hate most about the Boagworld website is its search facility. The built in search mechanism that comes with my blogging software sucks! This is particularly embarrassing as I am always banging on to clients about how important search is. After all half your users will turn to the search box before even considering browsing the site. Search has to be right.

I have half heartedly looked around for something that would do the job. I remember looking at Atomz a while back and also there is the obvious Google integration route, but nothing inspired me.

This week however another post from Sitepoint caught my eye. It was talking about the new site search from Yahoo! Recently adopted by Techcrunch it has some fairly impressive features…

Real-time indexing of content – When new blog posts or comments are added to the site, the search index updates almost immediately.
Customised ranking – You can fine tune the algorithm to fit your audience and user experience.
Structured search – You can build your own refinement mechanisms. For example I could allow users to filter posts by category, number of comments, tag or any other criteria I set.
Blending Web with site results – Users can search both site and web content and see the results blended together in a single display.

If your site search sucks as much as mine, you might want to check this out.

Interview: Nicholas Felton on ‘Designing Data’

Paul: So joining me to day is Nicholas Felton. Good to have you on the show Nicholas!

Nicholas: Thanks so much Paul, it’s a pleasure being here.

Paul: It’s the first time that I’ve really spoken to you. I only first saw you or heard about your work at Future of Web Design and I have to say you completely blew me away with a presentation that was very different from the majority of stuff that was being talked about because it wasn’t really fundamentally about Web design, I guess in a way.

Nicholas: No, I think in a way it’s about a weird hobby that’s kind of developed into a tiny Web phenomenon.

Paul: Well, from what I can gather it’s a fairly big Web phenomenon according to Keir from Carsonified who was raving about you afterwards. For those people that haven’t come across you before, tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you? What is it that you do? Where is it you work? A bit of background basically.

Nicholas: Sure, sure. Well again, my name is Nicholas Felton. I’m a graphic designer, predominantly print but I definitely dabble in the web and am there more and more frequently. I went to art school, I studied graphic design about ten years ago here in America at the Rhode Island School of Design and I’ve worked in graphic design firms and advertising doing identity and on the side I’ve started my personal website called Feltron where I’ve grown these annual reports that have become something that I’m sort of getting well known for.

Paul: So let’s talk about these annual reports, because this is what you were talking about at Future of Web Design. There’s a lot of people that might be listening to this thinking “Well, hang on a minute he’s just said that he’s primarily a print designer, this is a web design podcast. Why have we got him on the show?” Well just to kind of deal with that to start with, I mean obviously web design should be a lot broader, we should be looking outside of the web for inspiration and I’ve found these Felton Annual Reports incredibly inspiring. For those that don’t know, tell us a little bit about what they are.

Nicholas: Alright. Well, I really latched onto this name for them because I think it communicates pretty quickly what it’s about. Everyone understands what an annual report is. It’s the summation of a year. I’ve just attached my name, more precisely my sort of Web name, which is Feltron. My last name is Felton. But these started in 2004. I was just trying to get a grip on the year and wrap it up and I looked around at the websites I was looking at and the books I enjoyed and I put that all on my site but I snuck in a couple of little details, like the number of postcards that I sent and worked out the number of air miles that I traveled and those sort of, they hooked me. And so the next year I went back through my records and I put together a multi-page feature for my website where I looked at my travel in more detail, making pie charts of the countries that I went to. I split up my photography into all these different metrics that I could examine and between that I came up with about six pages I think of exploration of my eating and drinking habits and the culture that I enjoyed for the year and this is something I thought would only be appealing to people who knew me well, it would be a little bonus for them at the end of the year and it turned out to be a little viral and people started sending it to their friends and I started hearing from strangers that they thought it was fantastic and people saying, “I want to do this,” so I’ve tried to spend more and more time on it each year to stay in the forefront of this desire that I see building for people to encapsulate their year in this kind of report.

Paul: For me personally, when I heard you speak I immediately came away with a desire to do the same thing, just as you described.

Nicholas: That’s fantastic.

Paul: But the question that’s burning in me is, “Why?” Why do I feel the desire to do that? Why did you do it? Where did the idea come from? How did this all start?

Nicholas: I think it wasn’t that hard for me to do. The first one that I described, which was a multi-page document I actually didn’t do anything different than I’d been doing for previous years. I just had this natural habit that in my calendar I would write down where I went socially as well as what I did for work and I was able to look at that and between the names of the restaurants I knew this was a Thai restaurant so I could sort of make pie charts of what types of meals I was eating and I knew how many bars I had been to and I guess after that year I decided I was really going to formally examine this and decided to strictly track more things over the course of the year. I guess for me it’s driven by curiosity, I think I’m a pretty naturally curious person, maybe you are as well and it’s not about changing my behavior. I really don’t want the reports or this recording of my year to affect what I do over the year. I think I find a lot of solace in the numbers that come out of it. Just knowing how many beers I had or how many coffees I had or how many air miles I traveled is really comforting to me. It’s a way of tackling some of the unknown in our life.

Paul: It’s interesting because when you describe it, if someone hasn’t seen these reports you kind of think of an annual general report that’s published by a company, which are tediously dull documents but the things that you produce are graphically stunning as well. So I’m interested, is it primarily a kind of data collection exercise for you, or is it more a graphic design exercise? Is it about, I mean you kind of indicated that it’s about the data that you’re gathering rather than maybe the graphics, but the graphics are obviously what sells it to other people I guess. I don’t know.

Nicholas: Yeah, it’s hard for me to split it, but I have to say it’s absolutely about the finished product which is a piece of graphic design and the better the data is the better the story I have to tell so it’s a narrative of my year. It’s all encapsulated. It’s primarily a visual piece and I do put a lot of time and effort into making sure that it’s very visual and very easy to read quickly but that there are little details in it you can pull out if you want to spend more time with it.

Paul: Yeah. I mean that’s the immediate thing that you said there, it’s very time consuming.

Nicholas: Yes.

Paul: Not only from a design point of view, and I’m sure it must take you just an unbelievable number of hours to produce something that is so exquisitely designed but I mean tracking all this stuff, you must spend, I mean I’m surprised there isn’t a big part of one of your pie charts that’s just entitled “Tracking” you know where you spend hours just tracking all this information. What keeps you going? Why do you continue to do this?

Nicholas: Well first of all, it just doesn’t take that much time actually. I tend to sit down in the morning in front of my calendar and write down the meaningful things from the previous day but at most five to ten minutes a day. It’s definitely a background process that’s running in me all the time as, “Do I need to take note of this for my reporting?” And when I do leave my routine, when I travel, it’s a bit more complicated because then I’m doing new things and I want to make sure I get them right but it’s something I think you get into the habit of doing. For anyone who writes a diary or does these sort of recordings of the day I think after a while it’s not a burden at all. Last year I did find out, I decided out of this curiosity that I wanted to record every street that I’d walked down in New York City and that did become a little burdensome, but it was well worth it.

Paul: It’s interesting that you picked that one out because that was the one that I really looked at and went “Wow, that must have taken a long time.”

Nicholas: Yes. But it was well worth it. A year is a long time but it’s actually not that long of a time and I had a lot of hunches going into it about where I would go and where I didn’t go and it’s phenomenal to see how little of the city my routine is actually settled into.

Paul: Yeah, it’s a fascinating exercise. Just kind of give us a little bit of an idea, you know tell us you just mentioned walking down certain streets. Tell the listeners some of the other things that you collect, the other bits of information.

Nicholas: Well last year I was keeping track of every single alcoholic beverage that I had. For some reason I think drinking is really easy to keep track of because it is sort of a binary act, it’s like “one drink” versus a meal which can be more complicated but so alcoholic beverages I had 968 in 2007. I had 83,565 milligrams of caffeine through all my coffee beverages which by examining my weight and the caffeine content of each type I was able to deduce was approximately 6.8 lethal doses. I knew there’d be a couple lethal doses in there I just wasn’t sure how many and I worked it out.

Paul: That’s just horrifying. How do you decide what it is you’re going to track?

Nicholas: It usually just leads naturally out of the previous year. So like in June I will decide, “I wish I’d been tracking that this year,” and so next year I’ll make a point of doing that. So last year I started delving into the distances I’ve traveled, I worked out that I traveled about 1075 miles on the New York City subways. So this year I’ve taken a much closer look at the distances I’ve traveled. I’ve worn a pedometer all year so I could figure out how far I’ve walked and yeah.

Paul: What kind of other stuff are you tracking at the moment? You’re tracking how far you’ve walked, what other things?

Nicholas: Mostly the same things from previous years, but I’d like to look at it all through the lens of distance so it’ll be a different measure of the year rather than relating things to days or hours how does that relate to how far in terms of length I was through the year.

Paul: I mean you mentioned a pedometer there. What other kind of tools do you use for collecting data when you’re out there? When you’re out and about I feel like you need a really handy little iPhone app or something here that kind of records all this stuff for you but what tools are you using?

Nicholas: Well yes the iPhone is great I’ve tried to have some sort of smart phone where I can take notes at all times through this project but often times it’s just as simple as sending an email to myself so I have this little note that gets collected and goes into a folder and I make sure that I enter that into my calendar. It mostly all goes into iCal. I also use Backpack by the 37signals guys to keep running lists of the clothes that I purchase through the year or the movies that I saw and then when it all comes together it’s Excel. Everything needs to get into a spreadsheet so that all the math can get done and that’s probably half of the time it takes to design is just collating all the numbers.

Paul: Yeah, I’ll bet. Wow. This is absolutely fascinating. It’s something very addictive about the whole idea. I mean OK, for somebody like me, let’s say I wanted to go for this and I wanted to try it. What kind of advice would you give me starting out?

Nicholas: Well probably the best advice is to pick something that you’re going to be able to track, that you’re not just picking “What websites do I visit?” because it’s going to be overwhelming and you’re just going to pass on it after a week or two so pick something that’s easy that you do, not too infrequently that it’s not interesting but frequently enough that you’re going to get a good data set out of it. And so like if you see a lot of concerts I think concerts attended is great and then what aspects of that that are interesting? Who did you see and where was it or how long was it? So I think definitely in this website I’ve been developing to help other people create their own annual reports or just personal reporting in a way you can just have one really rich data set and by slicing it in different ways I think you can get a lot of interesting presentations out of it.

Paul: You mentioned a site there that you’re developing. Tell us a bit about that.

Nicholas: OK, it’s called daytum.com. It’s D-A-Y-T-U-M and it’s just a place where I’ve tried to remove a lot of the boundaries for creating a document like this. So there are two parts of it, there’s the recording element that can get complicated so we want to make a way that’s really easy for you to count things and then the display part of it which is practically inaccessible to a lot of people so there are a lot of built-in pie charts and stack line graphs and counting methods that are all built in, in a sort of clean design and you can just make this page that fills up with graphs and numeric intricacies of your life.

Paul: I must admit I’ve had a quick look at it and I haven’t signed up for it yet and you know it has that same clean look that your reports have and you know it’s obviously beautifully designed as well I mean we’ve spent a long time haven’t we talking about the collecting of the data I think that’s probably the most fascinating bit but as this is a web design podcast I feel like we should be talking about the design a little bit as well.

Nicholas: Absolutely.

Paul: You know I think the kind of key thing that really struck me is that you’re presenting, you know, fairly dry data and don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that your life is boring but at the end of the day it’s data that you’re presenting and you’re doing that in a kind of visually stunning way. Tell us a bit about how the design comes together, you know. What’s your design process?

Nicholas: Well I have the benefit of being in control of all the data so if something isn’t looking right one way I can explore it a different way or I can rewrite a headline which is one of the greatest advantages that any designer can have rather than working for someone else. And then I sort of have an infographics approach where I really eschew using keys or trying to make your eye go in too many places to understand something so whenever possible I try and keep everything really focused so you can look in one spot and hopefully understand what’s going on there immediately rather than having to look at color codes or translate symbols unnaturally.

Paul: I mean is it, a lot of graphic designers out there that kind of find working with data and, you know, things like that incredibly dull. How do you keep inspired? How do you get something out of it? Because you’re not working with gorgeous imagery or anything like that, you know it’s quite dry, what inspires you about doing this kind of stuff?

Nicholas: Well I guess they’re kind of like puzzles for me. Um, I will see the establishing of infographics sort of like the data’s there and it wants to look interesting so how can I make a system that’s going to present it in the most instructional way? So I’ll play with that system so that it will line up in a dramatic way rather than just sitting in a static predictable line graph or bar chart or something like that.

Paul: I mean also you seem to use typography very heavily so I’m guessing that’s something you’re particularly passionate about.

Nicholas: Yeah I guess it’s my two natural loves in one place: the numbers and type.

Paul: Oh dear. So what advice would you give for us Web designers that are kind of, you know we do work with data a fair amount, you know from surveys through to content management systems that provide reporting and things like that. What do you think the key is to presenting data in an understandable and approachable format?

Nicholas: I think that one of the key things is just getting away from the default options that you’re given like I’ve found it’s really impossible to get a nice looking graph out of Excel or out of Apple’s Numbers and the same is kind of true for the Google Chart API which is what we use for daytum.com which is basically a way to send a URL to Google and they return a pie chart or a line graph but they can get really overly complicated and ugly very quickly so it’s a matter of stripping it down and making sure that this is something that’s going to be dramatic and simple to understand.

Paul: It’s that simplicity thing again that, you know, have taken something complex and as you say stripping it down and keeping it simple.

Nicholas: Absolutely, and even if you have the benefit being able to edit your material so that I’m looking at a pie chart that has four or five slices rather than seventeen I think it’s going to benefit your readers enormously.

Paul: So Daytum, that you are in the process, is that actually live now or is that still in the process of being developed? I can’t remember whether it was generally accessible or whether it was in a closed beta.

Nicholas: It’s in a beta but the wait list is down to less than a week now so it’s just a queue basically to protect out severs. But yeah, we’re adding new features all the time. We’re about to add averages there so you can examine your average cup of coffee or your average commute time and we just plan on trying to preserve the user experience by making sure we don’t get too swamped and growing it over time.

Paul: So how did this come about? You keep saying “we” so who’s the team that’s behind that?

Nicholas: Yes it’s my partner Ryan Case who is more on the development side but is also a fantastic user interface designer and he came to me in January or February of this year and like many people had said we should figure out a way to do this year reports on the web so that other people can do it but he had the technical chops and motivation to really get the ball rolling and he’s become actually a great data tracker himself and has been keeping track of all his beers religiously and all the trains he’s been taking, which I didn’t know he had in him. So I think it goes to show anybody with the proper motivation could get started.

Paul: So is this your full-time job now or is it a part-time project?

Nicholas: It’s about half-time at this point. I still have my editorial clients and web clients and identity clients that I work for but this definitely occupies as much free time as I can give to it.

Paul: Well I found the whole thing incredibly inspiring.

Nicholas: Thank you so much.

Paul: It made me look from a completely different perspective at graphic design and also at life in general I guess and we have so many people who come on the show that are talking about the stock and trade of web design and thought it’d be really good to get you on just to give a different perspective and make us look outside of our little boxes. Thank you so much for coming on and I wish you all the best in your various projects.

Nicholas: Thank you Paul. Thank you.

Paul: Good to talk to you.

Nicholas: OK, take care. Bye bye.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

This week’s listener contribution is a question from Dave. He writes:

I am having real problem maintaining users. They visit the site once and then I never seen them again. I have good content, the site is usable and so I am at a loss as to what I should do.

Should I be worried? Are repeat users really important? What can I do to keep them coming back which doesn’t cost a fortunate?

It is such a good question that it spawned an entire post on using community as a retention tool.

143. Partnership

Posted in Classic shows on November 12, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show Paul and Marcus discuss how to promote your web application, ways to improve the client/designer relationship and tools for managing your font library.

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News and events

Obama top technology promises

One of the most exciting things about being at this years FoWD conference in New York was that I got to witness the election of the next U.S. president.

Whatever your political persuasions it was a landmark election. Not only will Obama be the first African American president he is also probably the most technically aware.

Obama campaigned aggressively online, from a dedicated YouTube channel to Obama pages on Facebook and MySpace as well as Twitter feeds. He even had his own iPhone application.

So what can we expect from this tech-savvy President? How will he shape the future of U.S. online presence and possibly that of the entire web? An article on tgdaily entitled ‘Barack Obama’s Top technology promises‘ gives us a roundup of various technological promises from Obama’s speeches. These include:

A commitment to Net Neutrality
A desire to expand broadband penetration in the U.S.
A review of the current wireless spectrum usage
Tougher legislation around online security.

Of course, promises made on the campaign trail are one thing. We shall see what the reality turns out to be.

Could Microsoft consider adopting Webkit?

Talking of things that may never be, a young (and very brave) developer at Microsoft recently asked Steve Ballmer:

Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?

Ballmer’s response was surprising to say the least:

There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service. Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.

Although some have seen this as a sign that Microsoft may adopt Webkit, personally I am sceptical. Were Microsoft to completely change its rendering engine it would inevitably break large numbers of sites and cause outrage among many of their large corporate clients.

The backlash when moving from IE6 to IE7 was massive. Moving to Webkit would conflict with Microsoft’s mantra of ‘not breaking the web’.

That said, we can dream. Without a doubt the real innovation and competitive advantage among browsers is in features, not rendering engines. This would in many ways be a smart move allowing Microsoft to concentrate on differentiation through ‘extensions’ and functionality, rather than wasting time on getting pages to display correctly.

WCAG 2.0 resources

Something that is definitely going to happen very soon is the release of WCAG 2.0.

WCAG 2.0. has now become a proposed recommendation. This means it is not only technically complete but has been successfully implemented on a large variety of sites. In short, it has been proved to work.

According to the Web Standards group this means it could therefore be released before Christmas.

This is hugely significant and very exciting from an accessibility point of view. WCAG 2.0. has come a long way from its controversial beginnings and is now a very good set of guidelines.

Now is the time to start building compliant sites and the Web Standards Group has provided some useful resources for implementing WCAG 2.0.

Prototyping with XHTML

Our final story is a post on the Boxes and Arrows website encouraging us to ‘Prototyping with XHTML‘.

The article lays out an approach to wireframing and prototyping, which is based entirely around the use of XHTML. Starting with the XHTML itself, you build up the structure and elements within your site. You then add CSS and Javascript to further refine the concept.

It is an approach with a lot of merit. Unlike other methods, the prototype is not thrown away but becomes apart of the final deliverable. It is also an approach particularly suited to multiple iterations, allowing you to refine the design over time.

In a world of web applications it is becoming increasingly important to demonstrate user interactions in a way static comps cannot. However, although this approach is appealing I do not believe it replaces the Photoshop mockup. Client’s like to see ‘finished’ looking designs. That said, it is another useful tool in your arsenal and you should be sure to read this post.

Feature: A Partnership of Cooperation

At this years FoWD I shared how the relationship between web design agency and client is fundamentally broken. Where there should be mutual respect and cooperation, there is negativity and mistrust. Read More.

Listeners feedback:

Marketing a web application

Nick Charlton writes: Long time listener, havenâ€™t asked a question before though..

Apart from your blog, the podcast and twitter, how else have you marketed GetSignOff?

To be honest, I have done very little marketing yet. However, I know that has got to change. The problem is that I am not a trained marketeer and so don’t really know what I am doing. That said I do have a rough plan:

Free pro accounts – While in beta we gave away numerous pro accounts to ‘web celebs’. However, to be honest it was a waste of time. These guys were either too busy to review it or just didn’t feel it was worth writing about. This time I intend to give free accounts to those who blog about the application. Not entirely sure how I am going to do this yet but I think it might generate some buzz.
Offering discounts – Discounts are an effective way of spreading word of mouth. Again I am not entirely sure if or when we will do this, but offering the occasional discount should encourage people to tell their friends.
Targeting appropriate publications – I am in the process of writing a number of articles either directly or indirectly related to GetSignOff. I have also asked some sites to review the application. I have approached sites like Digital Web, Think Vitamin and printed publications such as .net. Having a product aimed at people like myself makes identifying appropriate publications easy.
Producing supporting video content – I have already produced the ‘Getting design sign off‘ presentation but also intend to make some shorter tutorials for YouTube. These will contain valuable content in their own right, but will also promote GSO.
Utilising CSS galleries – Because my audience are web designers we have submitted GSO to several CSS galleries. We know that many web designers use these sites and so this gives our application a lot of exposure.
Use speaking opportunities – Speaking opportunities have been a great opportunity for promoting GSO and I have started tailoring my speaking slots around the subject of sign off.

In time we may consider advertising through things like Google Adwords or the Deck. However, until we are confident in the return on investment we are not willing to invest more money in anything other than development.

Font management

Aurel writes: I would realy like to know how designers deal with fonts? From personal experience, I have alot of fonts and it takes me time to find or manage them. So I was wondering if you know of any way to group the fonts, e.g. when you go through the drop menu of fonts in photoshop, they apear in groups (or something along those lines).

The solution I use was recommended on the Rissington Podcast (oh the shame of admitting that.)

It is a piece of software called FontExplorer X which is available for both the mac and PC. It has some superb features if you are serious about fonts. These include:

Organising your fonts – Organise using a library, folders, tags and even smart sets. You can directly access all typefaces from a certain foundry or all fonts tagged with a certain keyword? You can even view all italic fonts.
Auto activation – FontExplorer allows you to decide which fonts are available in which applications. This is ideal if you want to avoid scrolling through large numbers of fonts in applications like Photoshop.
Font information – FontExplorer gives you a clear customisable preview of your fonts as well as detailed information on the character set and usage restrictions.

The application also has an in built store that allows you to buy additional fonts within the same intuitive interface. I am guessing this is how they manage to offer the whole application absolutely free.

139. Brand

Posted in Classic shows on October 15, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show we’re joined by Ryan Carson to discuss building an online brand. We look at promoting your site with minimal budget and Marcus shares his views on working in an office.

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News and events

Understanding progressive enhancement

Its funny how we spend our whole lives telling clients to avoid jargon and yet web design has more jargon than most. Every few months we seem to make up some new term that is thrown around like everybody knows it.

In reality some we have never heard certain terms, while others seems so similar to one another that the difference escapes us. Take for example ‘graceful degradation’ and ‘progressive enhancement’. Have you heard of them? Could you tell me the difference?

I have to be honest, I couldn’t. In fact in a few weeks you will hear an interview I recorded with Paul Annett from clear:left where I make a comment about graceful degradation and he said ‘no its more like progressive enhancement’. I had no clue why one was right and the other was wrong and I am supposedly a web design expert. Does that make me thick? Possibly. However, more likely I just missed the memo on that one.

The trouble is we are all too busy looking intelligent to clearly communicate with one another.

I have to some extent criticised A List Apart (among others) in the past for perpetuating this kind of ‘in the know mentality’. However, I am now being forced to eat my words (gratefully so) as they published an excellent article on Progressive Enhancement and why you should care about it.

Now if only somebody could explain what Web 2.0. really is.

A free conference (kind of)

I realise that some of the advice I give on this show is unrealistic for some. For example, I talk about the importance of attending conferences. However, when a conference can cost hundreds of pounds it is not always possible.

One alternative is to listen to the podcasts that most conferences published. Unfortunately, they are slow to appear and are hard to follow without being able to see the slides.

Fortunately, the FOWA in London has significantly raised the bar and other conferences will be forced to follow suit.

FOWA has released video of most talks. These appeared within hours of the speaker taking the stage, and are beautifully done including both speaker and screen.

There are also ‘highlights reels’ for most talks. These are a cut down version of the presentation, ideal if you are too busy to watch the whole thing.

With some of the most influential people in web design taking the stage, this is an invaluable resource and Carsonified should be congratulated for making it freely available.

Design Float

Talking of useful resources check out Design Float. Design Float is basically a Digg clone. However it is a clone aimed at designers.

I have to say I don’t like sites that rip off Digg. I have huge respect for what people like Daniel Burka and Joe Stump are doing at Digg. I hate to see people directly ripping off their work (normally badly).

However, Digg does have one flaw. It doesn’t serve the niche very well. Even Kevin Rose recently said: "We don’t really do a good job of servicing the long tail of content." And he is right.

As a web designer, categories such as technology or design are just too broad for me to bother following Digg regularly. Until this problem is resolved, Design Float is an alternative.

Design Float allows me to only see stories relating to web design and although the smaller community means that stories are posted less regularly, what is posted is pretty good.

I recommend checking it out. However, if you are a designer don’t just limit yourself to web design posts. Also look at the other design posts. There is some pretty inspiring stuff there.

Can we stop supporting text scaling?

Finally today, a post by Dave Shea in which he discusses page zooming.

Most modern browsers now support page zooming. The only exception is Safari and that will soon change. This allows users to zoom an entire page, not just the text. Obviously this is beneficial to those with visual impairments. However, is also exciting for web site owners and designers.

Traditionally websites have been forced to support text resizing. This significantly increased development time as well as making design integrity challenging. As text scales, designs often breakdown especially when fixed sized images are involved.

With page zooming these problems go away. It provides the designer with more control and reduces the costs of development. A cost normally passed on to the website owner.

Dave asks whether it is time to support page zoom rather than text resizing. As can be seem from the comments, there is no wrong or right answer. Nevertheless it is an interesting question and one you might want to start considering for your own site.

Interview: Ryan Carson on Building an Online Brand

Paul: So I’m really excited to have joining me today Ryan Carson from Carsonified. Good to speak to you Ryan.

Ryan: Thanks for having me Paul. Good to be here.

Paul: It seems that we are crossing paths more and more often with me doing various things with Future Of conferences and you guys kindly giving discounts to my listeners, so it’s good to finally actually have you on the show.

Ryan: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Paul: So the reason I have asked Ryan on to the show today is to talk a little bit about building an online brand. Carsonified have got lots of different brand identities going on with obviously Carsonified itself and then Future Of and ThinkVitamin and various other things. Ryan’s a bit of an expert really, or he comes across like that anyway, at building an online brand and I wanted to talk to him about how he’s gone about doing that. But before we get into that, Ryan, tell us a little bit about the background of Carsonified. How did it come into being, so to speak? How did it end up being what it is today?

Ryan: Well, it was kind of born four years ago. It started off basically as just me in our top bedroom. I used to be a developer in a web design studio and when Jill and I, my wife and I, got married four years ago we just decided to start our own company. At that point it was just me and I was trying to build web apps and attempting to make money and didn’t really do a great job of it. Then I kind of slowly moved into doing sort of more workshops and things and then we built our first proper web app, which was DropSend, and then we just kept growing and growing and doing more web apps and more websites, for ourself not for clients, and then we launched a couple big conferences, Future Of Web Apps and Future Of Web Design, and all of a sudden now we’re about eleven people. Located in Bath and just love what we do and are really excited to be part of the web industry. So that’s us kind of in a nutshell.

Paul: It’s quite interesting, the approach that you’ve taken. You’ve come from the same background as the vast majority of us yet your business has gone in a completely different direction. You haven’t gone down the road of delivering solutions to clients but you’ve done this quite eclectic thing of a bit of web apps here, conferences here. Was that an intentional thing or has it just kind of naturally evolved that way?

Ryan: It kind of naturally evolved but my mother, and your mom always knows you best, she always said there’s a vein that’s been running through my life for a long time, which is just connecting people. I don’t know, for whatever reason I just get a lot of joy out of connecting people and physical events are just a great way to do that. I’m passionate about the web and therefore it’s kind of like, well, connecting people in the web industry, in the technology sector is just kind of made sense. It did start off with this thing called BD4D which you probably don’t remember, By Designers For Designers. A friend and I did that and it was bd4d.com which is now gone but the idea was we got together designers for free just at a bar and people showed their work. It was in London originally and it kind of took off and I think then it was always just a for fun thing. We called it the Creative Fight Club. I think that was kind of the genesis of our events career. We don’t really see ourself as an events company we see ourselves very much as lovers of the web and technology and we just kind of happen to connect people at events so, it just kind of worked that way. I’m also not a big fan of working for clients because it’s just so hard. I really respect what you guys at Headscape and any web designer web developer because constantly doing work for clients is really hard work and it’s fun but it’s hard and because we run our own conferences and build our own web apps thankfully we’re our own client which gives us a bit more freedom. So that’s kind of how we ended up there.

Paul: It depends on how you look at it Ryan because from my point of view you’ve got thousands of clients while I only have one at a time because you have all those users of your apps and the people who come to your conferences. You’ve got far more trouble in my opinion.

Ryan: I guess you could look at it like that but they tend to be less demanding. They’re not paying us thousands of pounds each so it kind of. But you could look at it like that. We try to treat all of you who come to our show with the same respect as clients, it’s just a shorter term, lower economic value relationship.

Paul: OK, so let’s talk about brand a little bit and profile and stuff like that. Carsonified has kind of built quite a significant online profile and I’m just quite interested in some of the techniques that you’ve used to achieve that. You know, how have you made that happen?

Ryan: OK, well I think underlying everything we do is genuineness. I think that we care very much about honesty and being genuine and being kind and friendly and that sounds a bit fuzzy and happy but that’s just kind of, I don’t know, the way we are. And I think that’s been the key to our success, that when we do things people know that we’re not trying to pull the wool over their eyes or secretly sell them something. We have a genuine interest in the web and the tech industry and so when we do things people kind of know there’s real people that are behind this, we’re not some company. And I think we’ve always been very personal and very human and very transparent and I think that at least set the stage for being successful, but obviously we just follow through with pumping out tons of hopefully valuable content. We see building a brand as basically building friends and I think that on our blogs and through our tweets and at our events and through our communications we try to treat everybody as friends and that’s kind of, I think, a little bit of the key to our success.

Paul: I like that idea of talking about treating people as friends. I think that’s a good way. Too many people treat people as potential customers in preference to actually having any real interest in them as human beings I guess. So it’s good.

Ryan: Well yeah. I just kind of think about who do you like being around? I mean, It’s your friends and there’s a reason for that. I think why does business have to be different? Of course there’s an element of professionality but when you go to the pub and you relax it’s because you feel comfortable with people and I think that whole idea should permeate business. You know with your friends you just buy them a beer, but with your customers there’s significant money being exchanged I think that should involve even more trust than friendship. Hopefully our customers, our attendees and our sponsors really believe that we’re doing the right thing for them. You guys probably do something very similar when you work with your clients. You want them to know that you care about them. That this isn’t just about money that you actually are trying to build something beautiful and worthwhile for them.

Paul: Yeah. I mean it’s interesting. You talking about friends reminds me a little bit of the Innocent smoothie guys that I heard talking at Fuel, which is obviously one of your conferences, where they were talking about how they refer to their customers as family, don’t they? And I always thought was quite a. It sounds naff when you say out loud, referring to your customers as family but if you kind of treat them with that kind of respect, I don’t know, it’s good but it depends on how you get on with your family I guess.

Ryan: Yeah. It could be good or bad but the problem is that would never work if you didn’t actually think Innocent cared about you. If you looked on their bottle and there was E numbers and preservatives and stuff you’d think, “Well, they talk this stuff, but they don’t really seem that committed to doing this.” So I think it really needs to be backed up with a sincere and real effort to support. I mean, we’ve been talking about accessibility, this is a good example, at Carsonified for years. You know, “Yeah we care about accessibility and it’s a great thing,” but we don’t actually know what we’re doing and so we just met with AbilityNet yesterday with Robin and we said we want to get serious about this. I know that you guys are really good at accessibility and sort of putting our money where our mouth is. We want people with disabilities to be able to attend our shows and to use our websites. Let’s actually spend some money on that and get serious about it so at the bottom of each page we’re going to put a little thumbs up symbol that will go to a site that explains why accessibility is important to us and what we’ve done to move towards that with also sort of some tips and hints for people who are disabled like how can you use this site better and get more out of it so trying to put our money where our mouth is really.

Paul: Yeah. I tell you one of my favorite moments I ever had at one of your conferences was, I can’t even remember who the speaker was but the question that came out for the panel was about promoting your business and can you do that outside of San Francisco and California and this guy said you had to be in California you had to be at San Francisco if you wanted to launch a web app and you stood up afterwards and you completely laid into this guy and you said, “No no no, that’s not the case, blah blah blah.” But it does strike me, you know, you’re a Bath-based company and Bath isn’t exactly the beating heart of the web design world and I’m quite interested as to whether you feel that that’s been a barrier to you in any way, being based where you are.

Ryan: That’s a great question. It makes it harder, for sure. You know, we have to go to London to have meetings to go to drink, parties, to network, blah blah blah, but the way we make up for that, and I think a lot of your listeners won’t be in London necessarily or New York or Silicon Valley so this is applicable to all of you out there. It’s all about being visible on the web. And you guys do a good job of this as well. You just have to get yourself out there. So we blog as much as we can, we tweet as much as we can. We try to gather a community around us and that’s the way we make up for the fact that we’re not in London or Silicon Valley. I was going to say another important thing about building a brand, and this fits into that, you need to have an opinion in order to be heard, and that means that you have to be comfortable with the fact that people will completely disagree with you sometimes. You know I think in a way I’ve been successful at building a brand because I’m willing to say something that pisses people off really. You know and I think it’s only interesting to hear from someone who has an opinion. When Paul Graham said that “You know you need to be in the startup hub,” it just really made me angry, because he was basically saying to every one of us, well, you know you’re just kind of screwed, and I just thought, “You know what? That’s just not true, and it makes mad and I’m gonna sort of put my reputation on the line by going on stage and disagreeing with you, a well known entrepreneur.” And if I kind of was afraid to do that you know, not so many people know about et cetera. So yeah, get out there, blog, be as controversial as you can, you know as long as you’re being genuine and be ready for people to say mean things about you really.

Paul: Talking about mean things and people say mean things about you. You’ve come under some criticism for being somewhat pushy in your self-promotion. Do you think that’s kind of justified in any way? Do you think maybe there’s a cultural difference there, the fact that you’re American and are us English more uncomfortable with marketing and promoting ourselves?

Ryan: Yes, I think there is a cultural difference. But I’m also kind of, I like to think I’m friendly but I am sort of a brash person. I’m not afraid to tell you my opinion and do what I think I need to do. While being kind, I don’t want to sort of hurt anybody, but I think there is a cultural difference and I do think that, I mean my wife is English so I’m obviously very familiar with English culture now and British culture and I think there is kind of a slight uncomfortableness with getting on stage and blowing your own horn. I think that in the UK we need to get over that. Not change our culture here but be willing to admit that in the UK if we don’t start to step up to the plate and start talking about ourselves, the rest of the world’s just gonna carry on in the tech space. Mike Harrington, he’s not going to shut up. You know and unless we really start to kind of compete with that and start talk about all of the great things that are going on in the UK and really kind of get out there I think unfortunately it means that the startups and the web designers and web developers that are British are going to start to fall behind in the world stage. For instance, I was trying to think, who are the rock star developers in the UK? Who can you name? I mean I can name a couple but who do you think?

Paul: It’s hard. It’s hard to say. I think there are more rock star designers than there are developers. You know you can think of people like Rachel Andrew, and Drew. Two that spring to mind. Jeremy Keith is kind of a developer but maybe not really.

Ryan: Matt Biddle. You know, there’s a few but it’s just. It’s not the plethora that are sort of being spoken about, in the US particularly, but I have no doubt there’s just as many talented people here. It’s just that, that hesitancy to say, “I’m going to do my own startup. I’ve got a good idea. I’ve got what it takes. I’m gonna start talking about it.” It’s just less common over here. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing and that everyone here should change but I think if you want to build a brand in the web space you just need to admit that I’ve got to get out there. You know I had an interesting conversation with Alex Hunter who is sort of really big in Virgin, The Virgin Group, he’s high up and he’s met Richard Branson a bunch of times. And you know what was crazy? He said that Richard was really shy. And I was like, “Really?” That’s a great example I think of a guy, he’s obviously driven and I don’t think everyone should be like Richard Branson but he’s obviously driven and he understands that in order to get Virgin talked about, to build a brand he’s got to be kind of crazy and get out there. He’s always hanging from helicopters or you know flying spaceships and you know, that’s why people talk about him.

Paul: I think there’s also a little bit within the web design community here in the UK of kind of almost false modesty and a little bit of trying to persuade the world that we’re being very altruistic in what we’re doing and not being up front. I receive criticism for the fact that I’m very open about the fact that Boagworld is a marketing tool and that we make money out of it.

Ryan: But it’s the truth.

Paul: Yeah, exactly. So I think I prefer to be up front about those things, than kind of hide them behind a faÃ§ade of false modesty to be honest.

Ryan: Well yeah and that kind of goes back to my thing I said earlier about being genuine. I think you’ll always be better off if you’re genuine. And of course we’re sort of painting with broad brushstrokes here, but there’s some very talented people here and I just think, let’s get on our soap boxes and sort of shouting back at the Americans really. And people are doing it, I just think there should be more of it.

Paul: Talking about effective marketing tools, ThinkVitamin, let’s talk about that for a little bit. ThinkVitamin is a website that you run which is basically web design related and web app related kind of articles and stuff like that. I’m guessing that was set up as a marketing tool. Tell me a little bit about why it exists and how you came about setting it up and what its aim is for you.

Ryan: Yes. So thinkvitamin.com has two purposes. It’s to build good will and to give back to the community but it’s also a marketing tool and those things are actually very related. If we pump out great content we give away for free it will be valuable, but those of you who read thinkvitamin.com will also probably come to our shows. It’s a symbiotic relationship. We’re very happy to do that. There is a little bit of altruism there, we do actually want to provide good content and give it away for free but we also realize we needed a platform to talk about our shows. We kind of kept calling in favors like, “Do you mind blogging about Future Of Web Apps?” and “Can you mention it?” We just thought we need to build a big site that people go to so we can tell them about that and we’re fortunate to have great connections. We know people like you and Molly Holzschlag and Kevin Rose and just big Internet people and they all agreed to be on the advisory board and really that’s just a group of people that we trust that occasionally write for us but we’re actually taking ThinkVitamin in a new direction where we want it to pretty much become it’s own little business. So we’ve hired a full time Editor named Simon Mackie and he was really high up at SitePoint actually. And he’s come over and he’s taken the reigns and we’re gonna, yeah we’re gonna basically grow that team and expand that out into its own little business.

Paul: That’s interesting.

Ryan: It’ll be better for the readers. It kind of was dying. The publishing schedule was going down and I think we realized, “Man this is so valuable we have over 50,000 RSS subscribers, closer to 70 if you count the news feed,” and we thought, “This is great, we should grow it.”

Paul: Yeah. I mean it’s interesting in some ways you’ve kind of taken the same approach that we have at Headscape using ThinkVitamin that you could have created a blog on the Futures Of website and you could have put this content there. There’s actually a value in separating it out and making it a standalone thing. It feels less salesy I guess. The same way as I could have posted my Boagworld stuff on the Headscape site. You know it could be the Headscape podcast instead of the Boagworld one. All the rest of it. It just comes on a bit too strong if you do that I guess.

Ryan: I totally agree. And it’s interesting because I had a good conversation with Mike at FreshBooks, and freshbooks.com for those of you who don’t know is an app that helps you send out invoices. He had this blog and he was really slogging his guts out on it and at freshbooks.com/blog or something and he said, “I don’t get it. No one’s really reading it,” and to me it was obvious for that reason you just said. Well it’s clear that this is just a marketing tool. Why would you put a blog on your company’s site, on your product’s site? It’s just kind of obvious and that’s exactly why we haven’t done it for our events, you know we put occasional updates there but it’s hard. As much as I like Web 2.0 Expo or something I would never read a blog from Web 2.0 Expo. It’s just too blech, you know what I mean?

Paul: Yeah totally. It’s interesting that the other thing that you’ve done, which again is something that I do, which is that you haven’t just relied on people coming into your sites, whether it be ThinkVitamin or the Futures Of sites or even the Carsonified site. You’ve made a big deal of kind of going out there and using tools like Twitter and Qik and YouTube. I’m just interested as how effective you’ve found those things.

Ryan: I find Qik to be really effective, or Qik, however the heck you say it qik.com and I was really shocked as soon as I started broadcasting was that just tons of people were interacting and I almost couldn’t wait to do the next one. Annoyingly 3G is kind of spotty in Bath so it makes the quality a little bit bad but I’d highly recommend Qik or any other comparable service. It’s so fun you just take your phone with you, I had to get a kind of crappy Nokia phone or something, because I use my iPhone for normal business but just grabbed it from the 3 store, got a plan I think it’s 20 pounds a month that gives you unlimited data which you’ll need if you’re streaming live video from a phone, and whenever I’d walk to Starbucks or something I’d just turn it on and start talking and people would show up because the way Qik works for people who don’t know is you actually see comments live on the phone screen.

Paul: That’s very cool.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s great for interaction and any tool you can use to interact with your fans will increase your connection and that friendship. It will show you want to be real and you want to connect with people and I think hopefully we’ve achieved that where people think, “Gosh you know Carsonified we know who’s there we know it’s not a company it’s really these people that are there and they’re interested in hearing from me and talking to me,” so that’s been good. YouTube has been amazing, I mean I hate YouTube, it’s ugly, it’s a bit crude you know but man there’s just a lot of people on it. I used this cruddy little video camera, filmed myself giving some tips about business, threw it in iMovie, put some music to it and popped it on YouTube and I think I can’t remember the figures it’s up to, it’s up to like 10 or 15,000 views in literally like two hours work.

Paul: Yeah, I keep meaning to get around to that myself and I’ve never quite managed it.

Ryan: Now you can use a Flip camera. Flip is just a type of camera, you just record and then it’s got a USB dongle built right into it. You pop it in and it actually automatically uploads it to YouTube.

Paul: That’s nice.

Ryan: There’s a couple tools you can use to make it easier. And then Facebook, I’ve been using Facebook a lot just to connect with people and remember people’s birthdays and say hello and just be a friend to them. The more connections you can have to people the better, which builds your brand and I feel that, like a mercenary when I say that, and I don’t like it, like I do believe it’s just a better way to live to connect with people and it happens to build your brand which is great and I like that as well, but I think it’s important that you need to be genuine and actually care about people for this to connect.

Paul: What about Twitter? How have you got on with that? Have you found that a useful tool?

Ryan: I love Twitter. And it’s been probably the best way I think for me to communicate I’ve got I think around 4,200 followers now and I don’t know why people follow me. I don’t think I’m particularly interesting but I do whenever I tweet I try to imagine if I was somebody else and I was reading it if I would find it interesting. I think with Twitter don’t tweet too much, maybe a couple times a day max. If you tweet too much people unsubscribe.

Paul: That will explain my problem then, I tweet too much.

Ryan: I still follow you so it’s not too bad. But you know Evan Williams had a good tip he said you should tweet things every so often that you’re not quite sure if you should tweet because they’re a bit too personal or a bit too blech, because that’s the type of stuff that’s actually fun and interesting to read. Initially we had a twitter account for Carsonified and we deleted it. I think we decided that that was kind of exactly what not to do. People don’t really want to hear from a company, they want to hear from you.

Paul: That’s almost the same as having a blog on your own corporate website isn’t it? Having a kind of corporate Twitter account. After saying that we have set one up for GetSignoff but more as a for announcements. If something goes down with the service or if we’ve done some bug fixes or stuff like that. By far the majority I do via the Boagworld Twitter account which is just me talking about my life. I agree with what you’re saying about putting personal stuff there as well that people seem to like to know what’s going on with each other’s lives. I like to know how Jackson’s doing. People like to know, I don’t know. Making it personal, it’s about that personal connection again isn’t it really?

Ryan: Definitely. And I think that that’s the future, you know just in general. Humankind you know it’s just kind of being personal and not hiding anymore behind companies or brands or policies or terms and conditions. It’s about, “Hey, how can I help you and how can I take care of you?” and that’s just a better way to live and it will massively benefit your company which is great. What’s interesting though is that everybody, including us, continues to look at the Signal vs. Noise blog from 37signals and kind of scratch our heads it’s like, it’s the one blog where it is a company blog, I mean yes it’s called Signal vs. Noise, but it’s on their domain, and yet they have over 90,000 subscribers. It’s funny because I think everyone is kind of, “How do you do that? I want to replicate that.” In the end I think you know, they were kind of first. You can’t have that many of those type of blogs and I think most of us are gonna have to be happy with just doing a good blog that is real and personal whether, and I mean ours is carsonified.com and it seems to work and we have about 4,000 subscribers and for us that’s a pretty good number. We should post more but that’s something I haven’t quite figured out yet and I’d be interested to hear from your listeners what they think about that. Is it possible to have a company blog that people care about or is it just not possible? I don’t know.

Paul: I think what you said there about being first is quite significant. I think originality goes a long way. I mean even with the Boagworld podcast. Simply the fact that I was the first web design podcast it seems to give it a momentum that keeps things going, you know because you keep delivering the goods so to speak which obviously the guys at 37signals really have done. I think there is a momentum in being first in something.

Ryan: Yes and that’s probably the secret sauce.

Paul: OK, So let’s wrap this up with kind of a last question which is: What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs seeking to increase their profile? Let’s have some kind of top tips if you’ve got some.

Ryan: OK. The first tip I give is to start connecting with people that you feel are influential. You know, spend some time and try to get out and physically meet these people, get to know them and to not be creepy about it, but to get out there, to get in front of them and to get to know them. See if you can do something to help them out, to get on their radar, and I think building sort of a group of friends that trusts you but is also influential is just instantly valuable. So I’d do that and you can use all the tools we talked about for that: Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. but physical meeting is always the best. I mean you want to have a beer with people.

Paul: And you say you do that by trying to help them out in some way? Because that’s always the difficult thing. It’s all well and good to say, “Get to know influential people,” but how you do that’s the tricky part isn’t it?

Ryan: Well my dad always did something that worked. If it was someone he really respected or cared about and wanted to get on their radar he would find an article about them in a magazine and he’d actually go to a framer and have it framed and then write them a personal note and just kind of say and send it to them and say, “You know, I bet you haven’t had time to actually frame a picture of your article so I thought you might want this for your wall.”

Paul: What a genius idea. I love it.

Ryan: And it’s genuine. I’m not trying to get anything out of you but I respect you and here you go. It’s very subtle. You have to be very careful to not try to sort of bribe people. If you come across that way it’s exactly what you don’t want to do. If you feel, and kind of think deep down, “Do I actually want to be friends with this person or am I trying to use them?” I think you should steer very clear of a person if you just think actually I don’t really like this person I’m just trying to get something out of them. But if you think there’s some synergy there, that’s a great way to do it. Remember people’s birthdays, it’s just a nice thing to do. Stuff like that is a great way. Most people’s friends don’t even do that for them. I’ve had people send me stuff and you know it just makes me smile and I’ll always take their call or answer their email now. So I think that’s a good idea.

Paul: Any others?

Ryan: Um, other tips. Um, probably put a real emphasis on customer service and build a real base of caring in your company. Not just for your customers but for your own team. I think that your team will never be able to treat your customers well if they don’t think that they’re treated well. So I think as entrepreneurs grow and they start to hire people I think it’s important to remember to take care of your staff first and then your customers second. And a really great resource for that is what zappos.com does. Zappos.com has an amazing company culture. They have this book called the Culture Book and every year it comes out and you can buy it and it’s basically a bunch of testimonials, thousands of them from the Zappos employees about why they love their job. And it’s just packed full of ideas of how to take care of your team and it’s a great inspirational resource. I think you can either get it on eBay or Amazon or you can buy it straight from Zappos. A couple hopefully useful tips?

Paul: Yeah that’s excellent. Ryan thank you so much for coming on the show, it’s been really good to get you on and I think there’s some really good useful advice there for anybody looking to kind of build an online brand so thank you very much and no doubt we will have you back again soon.

Ryan: Thank you, it’s an honor.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Site promotion with minimal budget

Our first question is from Adam in the boagworld forum:

I have got a site that needs an awful lot of promotion to work, and have got very little budget to do it with. I could probably spend a little bit on Google AdWords but on nothing else. So, how can I promote my site for little money?

Adam went on to tell me it was a charity website. This makes it challenging. As Adam said…

There are thousands of Charity sites, and many better funded, and just altogether bigger.

In this situation search engine optimisation or Adwords is going to be tough. The competition is fierce and so it will be expensive to be highly ranked.

The other problem with a charity site is that unless it is niche (e.g. bird protection) the potential audience is open ended. However, with limited resources there is little point in targeting ‘the general public’. You will have no impact on such a broad audience.

Target a specific group as it will be easier to gain momentum within a smaller audience. For example, there are Christian charities who do general humanitarian aid. Even though anybody could be a potential supporter, they instead target other christians. Therefore they are well known in that circle. Better to have a lot of support from a niche audience than a small amount of support across the general populous.

Once you have picked the audience use three techniques to reach them:

Offline promotion – Engage with your audience offline as well as on. Attend conferences, produce offline promotional material and target magazines your audience reads. As web designers we often forget to power of offline marketing.
Social marketing – Identify the social sites your audience You should be wherever your audience is interacting. Finally, seek out key figures who your audience admire and respect. See if you can get them on board and encourage them to promote your site.
Editorial promotion - Find out if your audience reads online blogs or magazines. Offer to write articles for these sites. Do not overtly promote your charity but instead write content which will be of interest to the audience. Failing that make use of comments to join in the discussions and increase your sites profile among that audience.

However, be careful. In your haste to promote your site do not spam. The key is to offer something of value. You must earn the right to promote your site.

Sitepoint has an excellent article entitled ‘10 rules for driving traffic using forums‘. Although it is focused on forums, its advice is applicable to most forms of online promotion.

Office Or Not

This from Brad:

A question from Canada! I’m a long-time listener of the show, and I thank you both for your entertainment and inspiration.

A little bit of background first… Two years ago I co-founded a small web development company, and to date we have not yet invested in office space. As we slowly move on to ‘higher profile’ clients, we find it increasingly important to have someone in-house, to answered the phones, do the books, etc, etc, so we can focus on growing the business.

That said, I’m obviously touching on a huge spectrum of possible questions, so I’ll try to narrow it down. I don’t think this is something you have covered specifically on the show before…

Is office space really important for a creative business? If so, what steps would you recommend. And if not, are there better areas to spend $2000 / month?

If I had been asked this question only two years or so ago I would have said that office working for a web team is not important at all. If anything, I would have said that home working was better. The following extract from Paul’s blog, written in 2005, underlines this:

The benefits of a virtual company

By virtual company, I mean we do not have a central office. Each member of staff works from home and we communicate and file share with tools such as Skype, CVS and Groove.

People are often curious about an entire company home working and ask how well it works in reality. My answer is usually that it is brilliant. From the employee perspective, you do not have to commute and you can see a lot more of your family. For example, if I were still working for IBM when I used to commute an hour and a half everyday, I would only see my 2-year-old son at weekends. As an employer, I love it because my staff tend to work the hours they would commute and generally home working is seen as a big bonus that keeps people at the company longer. Not to mention the savings made on premises.

Communication really is not a big problem. There are so many tools out there these days that help, and broadband means that even telephone conversations are now free.

Paul goes on to say that the only drawback of home working is that it lacks the social aspects of working in an office.

Not true I’m afraid. Though of course home working does give you an environment to ‘get your head down’ without interruption, what it really lacks, that phone/email/IM cannot replace, is creative collaboration. People simply do not bounce ideas around like they do if they work together.

Our current office is open plan and there’s nowhere to hide yourself away. This has meant that I haven’t really frequented it that often – I need ‘calm’ to write. However, watching particularly our development team grow and work really effectively together underlined to all of us the value of working together.

So much so that we are about to move into our ‘dream’ offices where there will be a mixture of open plan spaces and areas where we can work quietly.

So (finally!), in answer to Brad’s question, I think that office working is better for the business in the long run and I would say warrants the additional associated cost (though beware the costs, they can mount up – another podcast topic I think). That said, we have managed for nearly seven years before doing it properly (i.e. pretty much all of us will be in together most of the time) so it won’t necessarily damage you if you leave it awhile.

113. Hiring

Posted in Classic shows on February 27, 2008 by Paul Boag

On show 113: Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes. Marcus talks about hiring new staff and Paul shares his journey into screencasting.

Podcast: Download (29.9MB)

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News and events | Hiring new staff | Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes | Listener emails

A quick request. We are really in need of some more transcribers to help with the interviews we do every week. The team we have are doing an amazing job but it would be great to spread the load.

If you feel you could help once in a while please drop me an email and I will add you to the list.

News and events

Highly extensible CSS

A while back Cameron Moll released a tantalising screencast of a seminar he was running on Highly extensible CSS. Website today need to be ultra-flexible, dealing with changing content, multiple devices, and user customisation. Cameron’s presentation aimed to teach designers and developers how to build interfaces capable of adapting to the unforeseen.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the opportunity to attend. I was therefore excited to discover that Cameron is about to cover the same subject in a series of four posts on his website, all for free!

So far he has only posted the introduction. However I am really looking forward to the whole series. For now just check out the screencast and see if it excites you as much as it did me…

Video tools

Talking of screen casts I have actually been working on several myself at the moment. We are in the process of redeveloping the Headscape website and have decided to include a couple of demonstrations and presentations.

This means I have been in research mode and I thought I would share what I have found. Firstly, I have discovered a great screencasting tool called Screen Flow. This Leopard only software stands head and shoulders above anything else I have tried on either Windows or the Mac. It is amazingly easy to record and edit your screencast and has some great built in effects. My favourite feature is that it will capture from both a web cam and the screen at the same time. This allows you to cut between video and the screen or even overlay a video feed on top of the cast.

Once I had recorded my video I started to look for somewhere to host it. Although I would be foolish not to put it on Youtube where it will get the most exposure, I didn’t want to use Youtube when embedding on my site. The quality on YouTube is poor and you are limited over length and size. With this in mind I looked at a number of competitors. The winner for me turned out to be Vimeo. The quality is superb, they are much more flexible over length and time, but most of all they provide links to the original file and allow you to customise the interface.

So, if you are looking to create a screencast I highly recommend Screen Flow and Vimeo. Also, if you are looking for tips on how to make an engaging video then check out Ryan Caron’s tips over at Carsonified.

Microformat boost

The last thing I want to mention in this week’s news segment is the growing interest we are seeing in Microformats recently.

For a start Firefox 3 is going to have built in support for Microformats, which will be hugely significant in itself. However the guys over at Yahoo! are doing some interesting stuff in the area too. Yahoo! Micro Search is a new way of viewing search results that include all kinds of metadata including microformats. According to David Peterson at Sitepoint this could allow Yahoo to really challenge Google.

I am not sure whether that is true or not, but I do know it is a great time to start using Microformats. If you want to get started then check out Microformats.org or for you more advanced users have a look at this interesting demo of compound Microformats.

Feature: Hiring new staff

Marcus shares his thoughts about taking on web design staff for the first time.

Expert interview: Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes

Paul: As I said at the beginning of the show, joining me today is Christian Heilmann. Hello Christian, how are you?

Christian: Hello Paul. Why it’s quite fun cause it’s Valentines day & I’m stuck with you as a date.

Paul: Well I’m sorry that you had to ah to endure me on Valentines Day but I’m sure you’ll survive. And um yeah… so basically, the reason that we’ve got you on the show today is we want to talk a little bit, a little bit about javascript. Now we’ve talked a lot of times about javascript before and it’s not a new subject, but I kind-of um… felt it would be worth touching on the kind-of common mistakes that we’re seeing a lot in the world of javascript at the moment. I think um… you know obviously javascript is very in and there’s load of cool stuff being done with it but not always in the wisest ways. Um… and then on top of that, so there’s this kind-of group of people that are doing quite advanced stuff with javascript with maybe not considering all the ramifications of what they’re doing. And there’s another kind-of group of people which are people like myself that go ‘Ewww… look at that, that’s cool I want to start doing things like that.’ And so you know a little, a little knowledge is dangerous as they say, and you know we’ve picked up books like Jeremy Keith’s scripting book and read that and now we think that we can, we can build javascript applications and are kind-of hacking things together. So I thought lets spend a few minutes looking at those, those kinds of issues. So um um… maybe probably a good place to start off if you don’t mind Christian is what advice you’d give to somebody starting to learn javascript so that, so that they kind of avoid some of these mistakes you know from the get go. What good principals, good foundations should they be working on?

Christian: Um… the main foundation is that javascript is a language in its own rights. It’s uh uh… you can not take any other knowledge and try to apply it on to javascript and this is where the two angles actually come where people that come from a higher programming language background trying to find the same principals that apply there inside javascript

Paul: Um hum…

Christian: Or people that come from CSS design background, basically think that it’s as easy as applying a CSS selector to an element that everything will be matched magically…

Paul: Yeah…

Christian: … and not realizing that there is an impact on speed and an impact on how the browser actually finds these things and what kind of mistakes the browser does. The main thing to remember about javascript is ah… there are many different ways of javascript, there are many different environments where it’s applied. So there is lots of really clever things being done right now with javascript, even on the service side and inside frameworks and inside API’s. But there’s also, in the end you would run it in a browser sooner or later. And if that’s where you are going to work the best advice is actually to not trust javascript ever and to actually um… enhance with it but not really rely on it.

Paul: Um hum…

Christian: So if there is a window print link, then this link should be generated with javascript and not just be an ‘href’ javascript window print because if somebody doesn’t have javascript or for some reason javascript’s broke, or the engine doesn’t work in your environment then you click the button and nothing happens. And there’s nothing worse than uh promising an end user something that you don’t deliver in the end.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: The other thing is that uh… when you start from javascript, one of the first things to remember is that you should always learn the if statements and learn that they’re your best friend. Like never do: ‘apply something’ BUT IF ‘something’ THEN ‘apply something’. So if you…

Paul: Umm…

Christian: Try to access a heading with an ID for example, and then you don’t just do: HEADING ID ‘something’ = ‘something’… cause it might not be there.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So basically test for it, before you apply it. When you follow this principle through with all of your programming, this kind of defensive programming, then you will (we will) definitely write good javascript in any programming language really. Over the years when you get more and more experience you just learn more and more ways how the technology that you use fails…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: …rather than actually succeeds. So you learn how to avoid the biggest pitfalls.

Paul: I mean, you always hear this thing don’t you about um… that not all browsers support javascript or that not all users have javascript turned on. I mean how real a problem is that? Is that being overly cautious to worry too much about that kind of thing or is it a real problem? Are there actually a lot of users out there that… that don’t have javascript for one reason or another?

Christian: It’s impossible to say. Its statistics and it’s a bit like flash. When you when you look at flash statistics and you hear like a 99% have it enabled on the Adobe side, then you’re like ‘Oh yeah really.’ because these are the only stats that you find…

Paul: Um hum…

Christian: …the company that delivers that is a bit like… yeah, I think that the Microsoft help pages with have a lot of hits from people with Windows.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So um… it’s not really a problem I don’t see the problem at all. I see the problem of people… uh, architecting and designing applications around the premise that javascript will be there, and everything will be happy and work.

Paul: Mmm hmm…

Christian: If you write your applications like javascript does not need to be there, but is nice when it’s there and actually makes it a lot smoother, then you don’t have a problem…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: I don’t buy this whole argument of like… oh AJAX is so cool because we don’t’ have much traffic on our servers any longer. It’s like yeah, but you never know the environment that javascript is run in. It could…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: …my mobile phone, it could be it could be an iPhone, it could be it could be an old browser. I just bought myself this eeePC that doesn’t have much memory. It’s uh… you can never expect the end user to actually cater their hardware to your needs…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: So it’s pretty… it’s pretty unsafe to actually rely on it. So even if the statistics are ridiculously low, it doesn’t really matter because you don’t want to deliver a bad practice and deliver a bad experience to users.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: And then there’s, of course, the SEO problems as well. If you have a navigation that’s dependent on javascript and doesn’t show anything – or you make elements clickable that shouldn’t be clickable, then you won’t have search engine spiders following these links and your sites won’t be indexed.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: Same with accessibility. When you make something clickable that is not clickable by default, like a ‘span’ or a ‘div’ or whatever, then you can not expect a user agent actually to allow people with assistive technology or people that use a keyboard to use the same application because browsers are just not clever enough for that.

Paul: Mmm. So what about people, um… starting out as absolute beginners – what are the most common mistakes you’re seeing them make when they start out doing javascript?

Christian: A lot is copy and pasting and hoping that nothing breaks…

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …and ah… also um… a lot of it is skimming tutorials. A good tutorial writer will tell you a lot in the paragraphs between the code examples.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And um… just going through the code examples and trying to figure out what’s going there yourself and copy and pasting it does not really make you a good developer. This information was put there for a reason and actually explains you the smaller bits that you need to know about the language. ‘Cause most of the javascript errors that actually happen in the real world is not because you did a coding mistake, but because you made an application mistake that you expected a browser to do something. Or you expected an application to give you the right information back, where as you didn’t test for it. So um… I think trusting tutorials and uh… just copy and pasting code without actually knowing what it does is a very dangerous thing.

Paul: Mmm… Would you apply that same principal to frameworks? You know and not under… if you don’t understand what a framework is doing then it is probably best to avoid it.

Christian: Well it’s a matter of what it does. I mean uh… the last few years in web development have become a lot more transparent than before and that’s… Firebug is actually to blame for that.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: It’s great because you can look at code that is generated by javascript or a backend application and you always know, you can always analyze the whole document ñ what’s doing on there if you know your Firebug. That’s another thing that I would actually tell any developer that would start with javascript to get his head around it’s like java… uh… Firebug is a great great way to learn from other people’s mistakes and also to monitor what’s going on in your scripts all the time. When it comes to library’s, that’s a bit of a different story because um… I had a bit of foot in mouth moment there when I proclaimed in the past that most library’s are bloated and unnecessary and um… now I am part of a library…

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …and uh I’m also I also talked to media AJAX to a lot of library developers and I realized that all the libraries do the same thing. All of them actually make the pain and the uncertainty that is browsers out there bearable for you.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: So um… if you don’t understand what the source code of jQuery is, or the source code of the YUI is that does not mean that you shouldn’t use it.

Paul: Okay.

Christian: Other people have had that problem before you and loads and loads of people find bugs and submit bugs and help these libraries get better. So now a days if you are a new javascript developer I would basically say that you have learn the syntax, you have to learn the standards like what does DOM scripting mean, how does event handling work – but by all means if you go into a production please please use a library.

Paul: Oh okay.

Christian: Because that one take the cruft of all the fixing and uh… hacking that you have to do to make something work away from you.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: It’s a matter of what you do. I mean if you’re doing a high traffic Twitter clone, or whatever, that runs an error application then you might have to these fixes – but you’re not necessarily going to do that as a new beginner.

Paul: Okay yeah… that that’s a very different opinion than I’ve heard in the past and it’s quite interesting to hear the other side of the argument. It’s good. So what about… what about dangerous people like me? So you know… where I knew nothing about javascript but I decided: ‘Yeah, I really need to learn this’. So I got a couple of books, I’ve read a couple of books and I’m kind of up and running but I’m not… you know I’m not a developer. I’m not somebody that’s an expert. You know… what other kind of common screwups you’ve seen people like me make?

Christian: Um… It’s tricky to say. It’s like most of the time, what these kind of people do is also try to solve problems that other technologies have with javascript.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: Which is sometimes cool, but sometimes it’s also thinking about there’s a reason why that doesn’t work. So um… I mean the classic is… the classic is like rounded corners and things like that. There are loads of javascript rounded corner solutions which on the outskirt look like they are really clean solutions. This is also might be to put a class on a ‘div’ and to put a bit of javascript in and then everything has rounded corners and there’s no harm done.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: That the javascript needs to inject a lot of HTML and probably is slow doing so. It’s the other side of the story it’s uh… I think people like you, that are just enthusiastic about it and basically want do it are not necessarily savvy of the implications that it has.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So the uh… the information that we need there is that we need a lot more tutorials on um… how javascript impacts performance. And we are starting with that already in the development network and other people are doing that as well, but there are lots of mistakes being done as well there. The other problem that I see with people that have just started with javascript, is they apply… they find one solution, they find one library then they become the biggest fan of that library then everything else is rubbish.

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: And uh… that is a very dangerous attitude as well because you will not be, you will in your career work for different clients that will use different libraries as well. So you shouldn’t make yourself dependent on only one but understand what the benefits of each of them are and where you should apply them.

Paul: Um huh.

Christian: And how they actually make your life easier, or how they make your life less easy, than another competing product. So the implications there is that a lot of people use these newer libraries, or newer ways of using javascript, to actually make javascript behave like their favorite language or their favorite technology. That’s why people went nuts with every javascript library came up with the CSS selectors.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And that’s great because now I can go fifty levels deep in my CSS selector and the javascript finds what’s in there. While this is already an indicator that your HTML is not necessarily good structure

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …and it also means that if you change your HTML in the future you also have to change that path, or if you don’t change that path then your javascript will break.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And a lot of libraries break silently as well. So instead of just getting the error in your face that you’ve basically screwed up, you will not know what’s going on and will wonder what’s going on.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And when that happens that’s normally when people, like you, fire up emails to the library developers and tell them that their product is rubbish.

Paul: (Laughs) Yeah… I can’t disagree with that. That’s the kind of thing that I’d do probably. Um… what about, I’ll tell you the one thing that I’ve come across is that… I’m kind of competent enough to write functions to do a lot of the things that I need to do. Nothing really complicated, I couldn’t build anything too sophisticated, but you know enough to get me by. But then as I’m kind of looking at other people and what they’re doing um… a lot of them are using object orientated type techniques in the code that they are writing. There’s me hacking away with little functions and there seems to be some transition across object orientated approach when you kinda hit a certain level… you know why, what’s the benefits of that? Why do people take that kind of approach?

Christian: (Laughs) Um… It’s been very beneficial in other languages, and other environments, especially when the environment is rather sophisticated.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Then ah… you seen for example action script. Action script has been as much as a hacky javascript. Yeah, look what I can do if I do it this way language and now with the Flex frameworks, and Adobe opening up more and more to the java world, um… it’s getting more and more into structured ways. And the structured ways are hard to understand for somebody who is not from that background.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And I can safely say that, I’m not myself. So I um… I have a lot of problems with like properly, or massive structures, and frameworks. But when you see people do proper action script, for example, or do Rhino applications for the server in javascript, or some of the things that are happening with javascript 2… that there is a reason for that and the reason for that is the scalability is just so much bigger.

Paul: Right.

Christian: It’s uh… basically you can extend an object and I can reuse a class and I don’t have to worry about that. It’s like I start building these little small components, all of them in themselves tested and unit tested, and I know they work. And then I can build a bigger application from them.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Basically without really needing to know to test these things ever again.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: That’s how things like PEAR and PHP and Perl libraries work as well. It’s people extending these kind of already existing bits, and bobs, rather than starting from scratch every time.

Paul: Mmm hum.

Christian: Most of the time for the little web development things that we do like the AJAX form or the Constentina navigation that’s not necessarily needed, but when you write a library for example, and it grows, like YUI is growing or like jQuery is growing as well… then you need to adhere to these standards ’cause otherwise everyone will just submit their own code in forms that are just terrible.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And there’s not much magic to it. I mean I get annoyed when I see javascript guys going on stage and saying like: ‘Well guys, this is a function and when it’s an object it’s a method and…’ and why should I know this? Well you should know this because you need to communicate with other developers as well sooner or later.

Paul: Umm hmm.

Christian: And these people speak that lingo and rather than you having to explain yourself for 15 minutes you could communicate in 3 minutes.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And that gives you more time for lunch break.

Paul: (Laughs) …or drinking…

Christian: So the worlds of hard core programming and javascript are actually getting closer and closer and seeing some of the things that browser vendors come out with and some of the other software that builds on web technologies that is being built at the moment, I don’t think that we can actually rely on our being the cool cookie web developer anymore.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: It’s a bit like we have to have broaden our horizons the same way that backend people have to broaden their horizons when it comes to using javascript, but you can only make someone understand your problems when you understand how they tick.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Otherwise you start preaching to the choir.

Paul: Yeah. Okay here’s the last question to wrap up with. I’m going to open it up and let you rant uncontrollably. What are the worst mistakes that you’re seeing at the moment made with javascript, just generally.

Christian: Uh. The worst mistakes that I see are that people write little scripts for tasks over and over again.

Paul: Okay.

Christian: The same task and I see them actually tying the interface a lot to the javascript. So…

Paul: What do you mean by that?

Christian: Instead of making a javascript that actually creates the things it needs, there will be HTML that is just not necessary where the is not javascript available.

Paul: Okay yeah.

Christian: So instead of starting with the proper HTML and CSS structure, you basically have this whole gumph of HTML because there’s the javascript to clean it up anyways.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So um… basically the main tip is you will never ever be able to replace a proper HTML structure. It doesn’t matter where technology is going because technology will go away from that sooner or later, but at least a human could actually go there and see that there is a structure.

Paul: Mmm hum.

Christian: And that there’s a way to convert this to something better in a second step. If you’ve created a lot of spaghetti code with like HTML and javascript mixed in and lots of little scripts in there, then you will never be able to convert that to something better in the future and this is what we’ve been running in circles for years and years. We’ve never been improving things, we’ve just been fixing things and adding little bits, and bobs, to it.

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: The other thing that I keeps seeing is well the fan boy thing, about javascript libraries and of the academic way of some people measuring javascript. You have all these like, I mean there’s people that spend like weeks finding different javascript includes and script libraries and measuring how fast they are on their computer…

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …generating twelve thousand objects and trying to put them on dominoes. Show me the application that needs that done, then your comparison actually makes sense.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: It’s the same as CSS. You have like ’10 Most CSS Tricks That You Never Knew’ or ’10 Most Beautiful Naviagations’. It’s like list blog posts digging their way through the internet.

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: And it’s the same way there right now, like I can appear immensely cleaver if I just put loads and loads of effort comparing things to each other. Instead of saying ‘this’ means use ‘that one for this one’ and ‘use that one for this one’ cause the benefits of that one library is ‘this’ and the benefits of the other library are ‘that’.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: It normally is like, ‘Oh yeah… that library won.’ or ‘All of the others are bad’.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And that’s never the case.

Paul: Hmmm.

Christian: We have to get away from this putting things together randomly and making up an application, to a proper web application design and I’m going to be in New York at the end of the month, no actually beginning of next month at AJAX Worlds and my talk there will be about how to do javascript design and javascript architecture of big applications.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Christian: That’s going to be quite interesting feedback from the audience I’m quite sure about this, but it’s a matter that we grow up, we actually have to grow up as web developers and take our stuff serious and actually make sure that we don’t build for ourselves – but we build for the guy that comes after us cause that will always happen as well.

Paul: Yeah… and that’s really good advice.

Christian: If you think like that, then you will never write bad code and sometimes people just have to suffer that themselves before they start doing it.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: It’s always clever to think of yourself as the javascript god that can do things better anyways, but some times it’s good to leave your superhero skills in the corner and just do something that works and that’s understandable and spend some time documenting for the next guy that has to take it over from you.

Paul: And I think that applies to everybody you know people, even people doing HTML or CSS or server side stuff thinking about the next person is, yeah, hugely important.

Christian: Yeah.

Paul: Thank you so much Christian. That was very useful and I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show on Valentine’s of all days. Good to talk to you Christian and we’ll speak soon.

Christian: See you soon. Bye.

Listeners email:

Rolling out new features

Our first listener comment is from Alex who has come up with a clever little approach for educating existing users about new features…

I just listened to show 112, where you mentioned Christian Heilmann’s javascript walkthroughs. These walkthroughs reminded me that I wanted to do something similar for our website, except I wasn’t able to squeeze it in before the deadline.

My workplace decided on a total revamp of their website, and the final design had some substantial visual and navigational changes. Among other changes, disparate logins had been consolidated into one login button. Of course, now we had the problem of habitual users; because the website hadn’t changed for several years, how do we now try to avoid several hundred support calls asking where the logins have gone?

Well, the obvious solution is to not make such drastic changes. Going for evolution, not revolution and whatnot. Failing that, is something like Christian’s walkthrough popups. However, these would still show up for new users, for whom this information would prove totally useless.

Here’s the solution I had planned:

A couple weeks before the new site or feature launch, we use javascript to set a cookie. This accomplishes two things: 1) we target people who have javascript, so we know the popups will work for them, and 2) we’ll know they were at this page *before* we changed the design or added a feature. Now, once we launch, we check for that cookie using PHP (or other server-side scripting). Why do this on the server side? Well, it lets us avoid even inserting the popup code for people who don’t have the cookie. If the cookie exists, we can then delete the cookie (so they don’t see the walkthrough again), and then insert the walkthrough divs and javascript.

Even though I didn’t get a chance to implement it, maybe this will help other people prepare for site overhauls.

What a great idea Alex. Existing users rarely like sudden changes to the sites they use regularly and often need a lot of help making the transition. This is an excellent way of doing that without confusing new users with unnecessary information.

Content management and CSS

Our second listener contribution is a question from Adrian…

Thank you very much for the show – it has been so helpful!

I have been given the job of creating an Intranet site for a small business. After listening to your shows I would love to create this website using webstandards and have been learning CSS. As well as this it is important that the users of the site can modify the content via a CMS.

So my questions are; can both of these things be satisfied? Also is it possible to design the website using webstandards and then “plug” a CMS into the already created website?

It is definitely possible for content providers to update content built using CSS. In fact it is easier, and allows the designer to maintain more control over the design. Traditionally content providers had to make all kinds of design decisions when adding content. If they needed to add a heading they had to decide what that heading looked like. If they wanted to make a piece of content stand out, they would pick a colour and font size to make that happen.

However, when a site has been built with standards the content provider doesn’t need to worry about what content will look like. They simply say this is a heading by defining it as an H1 and the CSS will decide how to style this. Equally to make something stand out they mark it as strong and the style sheet does the rest. Simple.

The only problem is that some content management systems do not have WYSIWYG editors capable of supporting this approach. They are still focused on giving the content provider design control. Fortunately there are editors out there that do think in this way. A good example is xstandard although there are others. These can just be dropped into your CMS.

Finally, it is certainly possible to plug standards based code into a CMS. Infact, it is actually easier because the style and content have been separated. A content management system is (as it name suggests) primarily concerned with content. It doesn’t care about how that content is styled. Nothing makes integration easier than nice clean meaningful markup, unencumbered by formatting.

Show 98: Flybe Farce

Posted in Classic shows on October 16, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul looks at the ongoing role of the website manager. Marcus looks at when to allow a loss leading project and instead of an expert section we are looking at the ultimate web design reading list.

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News and events | Loss leading projects | Ongoing role of the web designer | Web designers reading list | Question of the week

Housekeeping: Prizes and problems

A free ticket for FOWD (New York)

With the 100th boagworld show coming up on the 20th October I am beginning to feel guilty. After all its going to be such a great time and all you poor Americans are going to miss out. I know how hard done by you all are and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t offer something as compensation.

Fortunately the guys at Carsonified are insuring that at least one of you poor hard done by Americans have something to cheer you up! They are offering you the chance to win a free ticket to the Future of Web Design conference in New York City between the 6-8 November. The ticket normally cost $195 and you get to see great speakers such as Jeffrey Zeldman, Andy Clarke, and Ryan Singer.

Now obviously this is not as good as going to the recording of the 100th boagworld but you will have to just struggle through. For your chance to win a ticket simply email me your name by the 22nd October and we will pick a random winner. For more information on the conference itself visit futureofwebdesign.com.

Download problems

From time to time I get emails from you complaining that episodes of Boagworld are getting cut short in itunes. Its rare but does happen. Unfortunately this is one of itunes less publicized ‘features’. I just wanted to say that the files are complete, the problem is that the connection gets dropped part way through and itunes thinks it has finished. If this happens to you simply delete the file and re-download it from scratch. It almost always comes down fine second time.

News and events

Em Calculator

Personally, I love using ems. Although I don’t use them extensively on every site I build but I do use them a lot. They strike me as the perfect compromise between the pixel perfect control of fixed design and the accessibility and flexibility of fluid. Ems based sites scale as the user increases text size providing a rudimentary zoom functionality.

However I am not claiming that ems are perfect. They are not always the most appropriate solution and have their own technical difficulties. One personal problem I always had with ems was working out the sizing. The problem is that ems inherit from one another. 1 em may equal 10 pixels in one part of the HTML but equal something entirely different deeper down because of inheritance.

I always hated maths and so it is unsurprising that this inheritance issue made my brain want to dribble out of my ears. You can therefore imagine my relief to discover this week that somebody has built a great little em calculator that works out this nesting for you. Simply set the base size and then add the nested tags and em setting for each. The calculator does the rest.

Check it out. I guarantee if you work with ems regularly you will think it is a real time saver.

How to disarm 10 difficult client observations/requests

Next up, a great article about dealing with clients. We all know what it feels like, client after client churn out the same old comments…

I’ll know what I like when I see it.

or…

I love beige; can we get more beige in this?

… the list goes on. These kinds of questions are horribly frustrating and despite the fact that we hear them time and again we are often left floundering as to how to respond. This article lists 10 such comments from clients and proposes some ways to respond to them.

Obviously everybody has to respond to these questions in a way that suits them. However, it is still interesting to see how others suggest you answer these questions. Check it out and then post how you would respond to those questions in our comments.

The resurrection of downloadable fonts

Next up, the return of the downloadable font. Some call it the Holy Grail of web typography. Others just believe it would be used and abused. However, whatever you think you cannot deny that being able to define whatever font you like on a website is something that there is demand for.

The idea has been around since 1998 but different implementations of it by browser manufacturers meant it never gained traction. However according to a number of courses including Robert Nyman it looks like it is back on the cards again.

Both Safari and Opera have now implemented a standards based solution to the problem called @font-face, which is certainly good news. However, until IE and Firefox follow suit this is still not going to get a lot of traction. We will have to wait and see.

Creating better user personas

I feel like I have been talking about user personas a lot recently. They are certainly a tool I have been using for a long time and with good reason. I find them incredibly useful in focusing the designer and client on who they are developing for. They help to define functionality, content, tone and design.

However although I have done an introduction to personas on the show I have avoided going into too much depth. Developing a really good persona is a skill and I am far from an expert. However, if you do want to learn more about personas then you should consider reading Ten Steps to Personas a relatively short article outlining some more advanced techniques.

Now I should warn you up front this is not the easiest of reads. It is certainly more heavy duty than most of the things we cover here. However, I wanted to mention it because I know many of you are already using personas and this will take you to the next level. Also if all else fails it has a very useful chart outlining the steps accompanied by lots of pretty pictures ;)

Marcus’ bit: When to allow a loss leading project

Even after going on at length in this podcast about making sure that contracts are in place, tasks are recorded in detail, requirements consultations are paid for and project management effort is not underestimated – all to avoid under-charging – sometimes there are occasions when you should take a hit and do a project as a loss leader. In this week’s show Marcus explains why loss leaders are sometimes a good idea.

Paul’s corner: Ongoing role of the website manager

While writing my book I have been thinking a lot about the role of the website manager. In particular it has struck me how underestimated the role is. One aspect of the job that is particularly overlooked is the long term commitment involved. In the book I talk about what that ongoing role is and what companies need to consider if they are going to properly support a website over it life. Fortunately my publisher is keen for me to share my thoughts on various aspects of the book so I have put together a blog on the ongoing role of the website manager.

Web Designers reading list

Instead of doing an ask the expert section this week I thought I would answer the single most common question I get from people who listen to this show…

What books would you recommend.

This is something I have blogged and spoken on before but I am going to give you my latest list of top picks based on my ever growing reading list.

Question of the week

What books would you recommend about web design? Answer in the comments.

Lost: Top 5 moments

Posted in Working in web design on June 1, 2007 by Paul Boag

I have just completed a Lost marathon in order to finish season 3. One part I found particularly powerful was Charlie writing his list of top moments in his life. He inspired me to do the same.

Establishing an ordered list of the top moments in your life is surprisingly hard to do. I have been fortunate enough to have some wonderful times and as result there are all kinds of different highlights fighting for a position. However, this is what I came up with…

#5: Being a dot com billionaire for 3 days

Sneaking in at number five is the few days I got to feel like a dot com billionaire. Back at the height of the dot com boom I was working for a web company that was in the process of being floated on the NASDAQ. The managing director of the company was flying backwards and forwards to the states preparing for the IPO and presenting to potential investors. On one of these trips he decided to take me. It was a 3 day trip covering Miami, New York and Atlanta, so it was a fairly grueling schedule. However it was my first trip to the states and so all very exciting to me.

Those 3 days were like stepping into a different world. We flew first class and were treated like royalty by the “business guys” handling the floatation. We rode in stretched limos, stayed in five star hotels and ate in restaurants where other people queued around the block to get in.

However, the most memorable moment of all was sitting in a restaurant with an investor and his girlfriend (who happened to be the body double for Cameron Diaz – the real one not the fake). The investor turns to me and states very matter of factly that I would be a millionaire by the end of the year.

Although, I knew better than to believe the hype it was still nice to spend those 3 days in a fantasy world.

#4: Winning the first job at Headscape

As anybody who has done it will know, setting up your own business is a strange experience. It is both exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. I am a cautious person and so the risks involved in setting up my own business seemed overwhelming at times. However, in the middle of all that fear and trepidation came a moment of pure joy, the moment I saw our first contract.

It sounds like a funny thing to have in my top 5 list but it represented so much to me. I hated my previous job which had somehow descended into me being a hatchet man who did nothing but fire people. To get that first contract meant the beginning of something new, it felt as if I was being set free.

To this day I have that contract pinned to my wall.

#3: Seeing the grand canyon

Having a child is a tough time and we found the year following James birth particularly difficult. We longed for something exciting to look forward to and so we planned our dream holiday. 2 weeks in Florida relaxing and another 2 weeks road trip through California, Las Vegas and finally the Grand Canyon.

Unfortunately our trip started off as more of a nightmare than a dream. While in Florida James became very sick and ended up being submitted to hospital. It was a horrendous experience that still haunts me to this day. We felt trapped in a foreign country and even though we shared a language the cultural differences seemed huge.

Fortunately, James did get better and we continued with the rest of the holiday. However, by that stage we were tired and our expectations were low. We just wanted to get the holiday over with and go home.

We also had no expectations whatsoever of the Grand Canyon. I kept joking that it would just be a “hole in the ground” and that Americans always claim to be bigger and better.

We arrived at sunset and were walking through a tree line until suddenly we found ourselves at the edge. No warning, no preparation, just suddenly there it was.

In that moment all of the hardship of the trip had been worth it. I was in awe of what I was seeing. As I have said before I am a Christian and the beauty of Gods creation was a spiritual moment for me. I cannot express how overwhelming it was.

I will truly never forget that sight.

#2: Making eye contact with my son for the first time

I have already said that the first year of James life was very difficult for us. I think partly this was due to the very difficult circumstances of his birth. The labour was very traumatic and there were times that it was a close run thing.

I don’t know what my expectations were of the moment of his birth but the reality was a complete surprise to me. By the end of the labour I had very little sympathy left for my son and felt almost angry and resentful. However, what really surprised me was the moment James was handed to Cath. I expected a wrinkled, screaming thing, but what I got was a tiny human being. What shocked me even more is that I swear he looked up at Cath and then fixed his eyes on me. We looked at each other for a moment and I knew that both him and Cath were now all that mattered in my life. I know babies are not supposed to see much when they are first born but I choose to believe that myself and my son made a connection in that moment that will never be broken.

#1: My wife walking down the aisle

There are some amazing moments in this list. Life changing moments, moments that have defined who I am and how I see the world, but nothing will ever compare to that moment when my wife walked down the aisle and agreed to marry me.

I don’t want to labour the point about my faith but I cannot talk about that moment without saying what a spiritual experience it was. It felt like the whole of heaven was watching that service. I take marriage very seriously and it was a huge step for me and yet on that day I realized the love inside my heart for Cath was more than mine alone. I knew it would never change and never fail. I knew that God and all of Heaven would help me to love this woman for the rest of my life, no matter how she changed or I changed.

She was glorious that day, filled with such joy and child like excitement. Although we have both changed over the years, not once has my love for her been any different from what it was on that day and I am sure it never will be.

She filled my vision as I saw her walk down the aisle and she fills my vision still.

No apologizes

I make no apologizes for the sappiness of this post. I think it is important to remember the significant moments in life. By remembering what brought you joy also enables you to focus on what is important. I guess this is another thing I have learnt from “Getting Things Done.

But what about you? What are your top 5 moments?