How to improve your site using stakeholder interviews

Posted in Web strategy on November 7, 2011 by Paul Boag

Most websites are more than a marketing tool. It is therefore important that other stakeholders outside of marketing get a say about the future of your site.

I recently wrote a post talking about the importance of thoroughly researching business objectives before starting your next web project. Although the post focused on expert reviews, heuristic evaluation, stats and competitive analysis, it did make passing reference to stakeholder interviews.

For Headscape, stakeholder interviews are a crucial tool in our web design arsenal. But what exactly is a stakeholder interview, why should you bother with them and how do you run one anyway? These are the questions I wish to address here starting with what a stakeholder interview is.

What is a stakeholder interview?

A stakeholder interview is a semistructured discussion held with any individual with a vested interest in the success of the web project you are undertaking. That may be somebody who works directly on the website (such as a content editor) or other individuals within the organisation who rely on the website to achieve their business objectives (such as departmental heads).

Stakeholder interviews do not need to be limited to people within the organisation. Stakeholders can also include prominent customers or suppliers who rely on the website to do business with your company.

Typically these interviews last for approximately one hour and are held on a one-to-one basis.

Although they have a simple format, they can prove an invaluable tool for setting the scope of the future web project.

Why stakeholder interviews are so valuable.

You would be forgiven for mistaking stakeholder interviews as an unnecessary step that delays a web project from beginning in earnest.

Although it is fair to say that not every project requires stakeholder interviews, we found that in large organisations with complex projects, they are invaluable.

In this type of situation they provide 3 benefits.

They bring us (the web design agency) up to speed with organisational requirements. When faced with a complex business model in a new sector, stakeholder interviews are an invaluable way of understanding the unique requirements of a client. Through speaking to stakeholders we learn about the sector and organisation, while also identifying how the website can help meet business needs.
They provide a more complete perspective on the role of a web project. Most web projects within large organisations will impact on work being done by numerous parts of the business. To fully understand the role of any new web project it is important to discuss it with all parties. Often these projects are commissioned by a single department such as marketing who have a particular perspective on the projects objectives. By talking to all the stakeholders you ensure that the web project helps rather than hinders others within the organisation.
They are politically advantageous. Unfortunately internal politics is a reality of most large organisations. This means when it comes to most web projects there are no shortage of people who want their voice to be heard. Stakeholder interviews provide them with an environment where they can express their opinions and feel they have been listened to. We have found this goes a long way to diffusing potential conflicts further down the line.

In short, well run stakeholder interviews ensure your web project has clearly defined goals which will benefit everybody in the organisation, while at the same time achieving buy-in from all parties.

With the potential benefits so obvious, the next question then becomes; how do you run a successful stakeholder interview?

How to run a successful stakeholder interview.

At first glance running a stakeholder interview is simple. It is just a matter of sitting down with the stakeholder and running through a series of questions in an informal discussion. Of course as we all know things are never as easy as they first appear.

Getting the most out of a stakeholder interview takes a degree of practice. Nevertheless there are some things you can do to improve the chances of success. The most important of these is to ensure you have a damn good set of questions.

The importance of your questions.

In my experience your questions need to fall into 3 categories.

Questions about the person. These should focus on the person’s role, responsibilities and objectives. This will help you identify ways that the current web project could help them.
Questions about the organisation. The focus here should be on companywide business objectives and the character of the organisation. Knowing the organisation’s business objectives will help inform the focus of your web application. Understanding the organisation’s character will influence the branding and aesthetics of the website.
Questions about the website. This is the opportunity for participants to express their feelings and frustrations about the website. This normally consists of things that they do not like, and elements they would like to see on any future site.

Having a good set of questions helps a huge amount. That said, it is important not to be constrained by your pre-prepared questions.

Allow tangents.

The best way to look at your questions is as a starting point for discussion. A stakeholder interview is not a survey but rather a discussion between 2 individuals.

It is important that the conversation is allowed to evolve naturally, which may mean setting aside the questions and following a particular train of thought.

This is important for 2 reasons. First, these tangents often lead to interesting insights that would otherwise be overlooked. Second, it is important that the stakeholder has the opportunity to express whatever he or she wants. These “pain points” often deserve particular attention and even when they do not it is important that the stakeholder feels you have listened to their concerns.

The need to let everybody express all they wish to is one of the reasons that stakeholder interview should always be one-on-one.

Ensure they are one-to-one meetings.

Stakeholder interviews do not work well if treated like a committee or focus group. The problem is that group meetings radically shift the dynamic as one or 2 dominant individuals monopolise the conversation. This has 2 consequences.

First, the dominant individuals tend to be fairly senior and so people do not wish to disagree with them. This means that they tend to get agreement from the rest of the group and use that consensus to amplify their own opinions.

Second, quieter participants don’t have the opportunity to express their opinions. This means that not only do you miss out on their contribution, but they also feel resentful that nobody listened to them.

There is a hidden benefit to these one-on-one meetings. By meeting with people individually you are the only person that has the entire picture. This makes it much easier for you to propose a way forward without it turning into design by committee.

Finally, it is also worth noting that one-to-one meetings offer an opportunity for anonymity.

Keep things anonymous.

The turning point in many stakeholder interviews is when the interviewee gets up and closes the office door and lowers their voice.

When the stakeholder feels that they can share information in confidence, it often leads to revealing insights. These can dramatically change your perspective on the web application you are building.

It is important to ensure the anonymity of those sharing. This means when reporting back, names should not be mentioned even if you shared some of the comments they confided.

For somebody to feel confident enough to share this kind of sensitive information, they need to know you are truly listening to what they are saying.

Balancing listening and speaking.

The primary objective of any stakeholder interview is to get the interviewee talking. It is therefore important not to do too much of the talking yourself.

That said there is a balance to be found here. Without a doubt, good listening skills are vital. Nevertheless, engaging discussions encourage more creative thinking and great ideas.

The interviewer should act as a sounding board for the stakeholder. The stakeholder should do most of the talking, but the interviewer should not be afraid to express opinions or suggest ideas.

A powerful tool

Hopefully this post has demonstrated that done correctly stakeholder interviews can be a powerful tool in defining the shape of a web project.

I believe that they are particularly beneficial when considering broader web strategy that will have an impact across the entire business.

Where once a website was just a marketing tool, now it is a crucial component in everything from recruitment to delivering products and services. As a result it is important that all stakeholders are adequately consulted.

The best way to research your next web project

Posted in Web strategy on November 3, 2011 by Paul Boag

Before starting your next project take a step back and do the groundwork. In this post we look at how to research your objectives and why its so important.

In my experience many organisations rush into major redesign projects without having a clear idea of where they are going or even what is wrong with their current site. At Headscape we have found that this inevitably leads to scope creep, internal politics and finger-pointing further down the line. That is why we favour a requirements gathering phase at the beginning of projects.

Broadly speaking this falls into 2 phases: a review of the organisation’s current online presence and a discussion with internal stakeholders to establish aims and objectives.

In this post I would like to focus on the first part: the review of the current online presence.

A typical review falls into 4 stages. These are:

An expert review .
A heuristic review.
Competitor analysis.
An analytics review.

Although we often carry out all four stages, not all are necessary for every project. For example, it is not possible to do a competitor review when working on an intranet.

That said, let’s look at each of these stages in more detail, starting with the expert review.

An expert review

Typically it falls to me and my 16 years of experience working with the web to write expert reviews. They normally consist of spending a couple of days trawling the website until I know it back to front. As I work through the site I identify various issues. Many are obvious such as poor navigation or overly verbose copy. However, others can be much more subtle such as no clear calls to action or inconsistent labelling.

Once I have reviewed the site in detail I translate my findings into a report. This document does not just identify flaws it also suggests possible solutions. The document is designed to be circulated to internal stakeholders and so contains a large degree of education about web design best practice.

An example of an expert review

The exact content of the expert review will vary. However, typically it include sections on accessibility, usability, design, content, social media etc. It also tends to focus heavily on business objectives, calls for action and how return on investment is going to be measured.

In many ways the expert review is similar to a heuristic review with the exception that it doesn’t just observe, it also makes recommendations.

A heuristic review

A heuristic review uses a standard set of criteria to measure the success or otherwise of a website. As with the expert review these cover areas such as usability, accessibility, design, content and more.

The website is measured against the criteria on a 1 to 3 rating with 1 being poor and 3 being high.

This review provides a more objective analysis of the website than an expert review because the reviewer is using a consistent set of criteria and rating to measure the effectiveness or otherwise of the website. These numerical results also enable us to provide clear visual representations of the strengths and weaknesses of the site. This enables you to see at a glance which areas require additional work.

An example of the visualisation provided in a heuristic review

Another advantage of heuristic reviews is that because they use a consistent set of criteria it is easy to compare one website with another. This can be useful when comparing your site to the competition. However heuristic reviews are time-consuming and so a competitor analysis may often be more appropriate.

A competitor analysis

Depending on the number of competitors an organisation has, a competitive analysis can manifest itself in a number of ways. When there is only one or 2 major competitors in may be appropriate to do a heuristic style review. However, if there are numerous competitors a stripped down version of an expert review is probably more useful.

In this scenario a web design consultant spends a few days looking at the competitors’ websites and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Where the competitors do something well we learn and improve upon it. Where mistakes have been made, these can be avoided in our own development project.

In certain situations it can also be beneficial to carry out usability testing on the competitors websites. These sites act as a prototype for your own development project and help identify usability issues that can be avoided on your own website.

It is important to stress however that looking solely to the competition for inspiration is a mistake. If you do not look outside of your sector for examples of best practice you are at best going to be following the competition. To truly innovate you need to look further afield for inspiration.

Examples of Higher Education websites all looking the same

An analytics review

The final part of the review process is an analytics review. This requires website analytics (such as Google analytics) to be installed on the existing site. In most cases organisations already have analytics installed, although they are notoriously bad at monitoring them.

An example of the Analytics review

Analytics are incredibly important in any web project. Without them it is impossible to judge whether the web project generates a return on investment. Existing analytics are necessary to provide a baseline against which the redesigned site can be compared. However an analysis of the existing analytics can act as more than a baseline, it also provides a real insight into the behaviour of users.

The exact details of the information available will vary depending on how the analytics are set up. However, using techniques such as advanced segmentation it is possible to tell how various users behave. For example on a law firm website you could ascertain whether users who have viewed attorney biographies were more likely to contact the organisation than a user who only looked at information about the services they offered.

This type of information is obviously invaluable in designing any future website. For example, if you know users are more likely to contact you if they have read an attorney’s bio then the website can be designed to funnel users to these pages.

Is it worth it?

You may be wondering whether all of this research is entirely necessary before beginning to even discuss business objectives, let alone build the website. This is a fair question and the honest answer is that it is not always necessary to complete all of these steps. However, at the least this kind of research will inform a major redesign project. It also has the potential to save a project hundreds of thousands of dollars by revealing that what was originally envisaged is not actually required. Nothing is more dangerous than going down the line of thought which results in a website which does not meet users needs or fulfil the organisation’s objectives.

181. Interview or death

Posted in Classic shows on September 2, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: how to avoid design by committee, why you shouldn’t bother submitting to Digg and how to specialise in being a generalist.

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Housekeeping: .net awards

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The winner of the .net awards is chosen by a panel of judges and a public vote. I would therefore very much appreciate it if you would take the time for vote for our podcast.

News

The 7 deadly sins of blogging

I few weeks back I wrote a post entitled “10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging“. The idea was to highlight bad practice in the way many organisations approach blogging. This week sees the release of a similar article entitled “The 7 Deadly Sins of Blogging“. Interestingly even though both articles tackle very similar subjects in a similar way, both of posts raise very different issues.

According to the article on Copy Blogger the 7 deadly sins of blogging are:

Selfishness – Focusing on what you want from your readers rather than what you can give them.
Sloth – Not being willing to put in the work that is required to run a successful blog.
Impatience – Expecting to see instant returns on the time invested in blogging.
Lameness – Producing poor quality uninteresting content.
Identicality – Copying the blogging styles of others rather than finding your own voice.
Irrelevance – Writing about something nobody is interested in.
Boorishness – Being that guy who just won’t shut up about his pet subject.

Its a good list and one that really makes you think about the way you approach blogging. However, ultimately I think it all comes down to the authors first point, selfishness. As she puts it – if you want to run a successful blog you need to:

Give. And then tomorrow, you give some more. And the next day, you give more.

UX Design – Myths and consistency

There are two user experience posts that I particularly want to mention this week.

The first deals with the lack of consistency users experience online. The post asks “Should There Be a United Set of Styles For Web Interfaces?” The author argues that operating systems encourage a degree of consistency by providing standard interface elements that can be easily utilised by third party developers. Generally speaking most mac apps use the OS interface elements and the same is true for windows.

The author goes on to propose that CSS 3 provides an opportunity to standardise the rendering of form elements across browsers so that whether you are viewing that element in Firefox or Safari it will look the same.

Although I like the concept it falls down on a number of levels…

CSS3 is not supported by IE6 at all.
Even in other browsers CSS3 support varies, meaning that the elements wouldn’t be consistent anyway.
In my mind using different browsers is like using different operating systems. You tend to only use one at a time and so consistency is not a high priority.

That said consistency is important. However, I think getting consistency across a single site is a more pressing aim, and one that many website fail miserably at.

The second post on user experience is far more practical and frankly useful. Entitled “Top 10 UX Myths” it blasts apart many of the common misconceptions about UX design. My personal favourites are:

People don’t change – Just because users didn’t scroll in 1994 doesn’t mean they don’t now!
Design to avoid clicks – Sometimes it is better to ask a user to click more than overwhelm them with too many options.
People know what they like - You cannot blindly give people what they ask for. Often there is a difference between what they think they want and what they actually like.

If you are a website owner I highly recommend you read this. If you are a UX designer than check it out. It will make you smile!

Typography – Stats, facts and sizing

There continues to be a lot of buzz around web typography this week with 3 posts/sites I would like to quickly mention.

Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices

This is a Smashing Magazine post that researches 13 web typography questions. It addresses issues such as most frequently used fonts, the average size of body copy and how often links are underlined.

Although it is always interesting to see what others are doing, it is important to remember that just because a lot of people are doing something that doesn’t necessarily mean it is a good idea.

CSS Font-Sizing: a Definitive Guide

This Sitepoint post tries to bring clarity to the confusing world of CSS font sizing. As anybody who has worked with CSS knows, setting font sizes is not as straightforward as it should be. This post lays out the various options and then recommends an approach.

Obviously there are no absolute answer when it comes to this subject. However, this post does recommend some good practice and helps you understand the problems surrounding font sizing.

Typedia

This newly launched site is essentially Wikipedia for type. This shared encyclopedia for type attempts to classify, categorise and connect fonts.

The site has a powerful search facility that allows you to search for fonts by foundry, typeface, designer and more. It also helps you better understand typography and has growing little community where you can discuss type (among other things).

If you are a typography geek, this is definitely worth checking out.

Volume does not equal success

Are you desperate to get on the homepage of Digg? Do you crave to be number one on Google? Do you monitor your visitor stats and page views continuously? If so, then I recommend you read Gerry McGovern’s latest post “Volume is the wrong way to measure web success .”

Gerry says you are looking in the wrong place if you want to measure the success of your website. He argues that it is not the number of visitors that matter, but whether you are providing users with what they need. In fact he even argues that an obsession with volume can be damaging to a site:

Measuring success based on volume encourages bad practice. The search engine optimization industry is often a prime culprit of such bad practice. A search expert I met once refused to remove out of date and clearly wrong and misleading pages from the site he was involved with because it would reduce search traffic volume.

For too long we have belonged to the Cult of Volume when it comes to measuring whether a website is successful or not. For an increasing number of websites, high volume traffic reflects the website’s failure to help customers quickly complete the tasks they came to complete.

Perhaps it is time to stop looking at volume as a measure of success and look instead to the completion of calls to action. Did users complete your contact form, signup for your newsletter or buy your product. In other words, did your website meet your business objectives and the needs of your users?

Feature: Hold stakeholder interviews now or pay later

Committees are the kiss of death to any web project. Give the kiss of life to your dying project with some one-to-one interviews.

Read ‘Hold stakeholder interviews now or pay later’

Listeners feedback:

Specialise in being a generalist

Colin writes: I’m a former web design company owner – I worked initially as a freelancer, the business grew quite quickly, I took on staff, and then gave it all up. The reason was because I couldn’t decide what role to focus on and ended up doing the vast majority of the work.

Web design and development seems to be a seemingly endless list of skills – but how do you decide which direction to go down, and how do you stay up on technology?

What if like me, i’m a jack of all trades, but master of none? What can I do to help me decide where to focus my efforts?

There is certainly a big push towards specialising. This is especially true if you are a freelancer looking to stand out from the crowd. However, I do not agree it is always true. It certainly hasn’t been for me.

I was once in a very similar position to Colin. When we started Headscape I was responsible for all the design and development we did. We began to grow by simply taking on more generalists like myself. However, the point came when we started to employ specialists. As the roles started to fragment I felt the need to make a decision. Just like Colin I asked what role I should adopt.

In the end I made the decision to specialise in being a generalist. With so many of the top level designers and developers specialising I saw an opportunity to maintain a broad overview. We had specialists within the company and so there was little need for me to personally specialise. By remaining a generalist I had the opportunity to improve internal communication, identify new areas worth exploring and have enough knowledge to speak intelligently to our clients on most issues.

My level of knowledge in any particular area varies depending on my personal interest. For example, I know only a little about flash development or server side coding. However, I know enough to get by and identify any potential problems.

I understand the need to specialise if you are a freelancer. However, if you are running a small agency who are employed to provide the complete solution to clients, then I think there is a need for you to be a generalist.

Sites like Digg are not worth your time

Mike asks: Should blogmasters submit their posts to digg and stumbleupon, or should we let our users submit them for us?

I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer to this question. However, personally I leave it to users to submit for me. The reason why? – I don’t think social sites like digg or stumbleupon provide much in the way of valuable traffic to my blog. They are simply not worth my time and attention.

It is actually not that easy to drive a lot of traffic to your blog through these sites. Sure, we have all heard about the Digg effect. However, getting highly ranked is hard. It is the submissions of a few prominent Diggers that dominate the homepage. The chances of your post getting picked up are relatively slim unless you happen to post silly videos or breaking news.

Even if your post is fortunate enough to gain a high profile on these site, the quality of traffic is low. The users visiting your site are interested in only one thing – the particular post. They are not interested in who posted it or the site it is hosted on. The chances of them turning into regular readers is almost zero. The chances of them completing a call to action even lower.

In my opinion it is better to take the time you would have spent submitting your post and invest it in making that post really stand out from the crowd. If your content is outstanding it will naturally attract an audience.

Hold stakeholder interviews now or pay later

Posted in Web strategy on August 25, 2009 by Paul Boag

Commitees are the kiss of death to any web project. Give the kiss of life to your dying project with some one-to-one interviews.

There are two ways to kill a web project – form a web steering committee or push the project through without consultation. We all know the dangers of former, but there seems to be an increasing movement to embrace the latter.

Failing to consult is dangerous

“Just do it” has become the mantra of many web designers and website owners. They believe they know what needs to be done and should just push on regardless, refusing to get bogged down in organisational politics. However although I applaud the sentiment, choosing to ignore the opinions of colleagues and other stakeholders has serious consequences:

You can create resentment among influential individuals within your organisation who maybe tempted to derail the project.
You may fail to accommodate key business objectives.
You could miss opportunities to further benefit the business through the use of web technology.

So if forming a committee or ignoring stakeholders entirely is not the answer, how should you consult with stakeholders?

One-to-one interviews put you in control

At Headscape the majority of our clients are large institutional organisations such as central government, large charities and universities. As a result we have faced our share of committees and extensive consultation phases.

The problem with consultation by committee is that you are not getting feedback from all of the individuals in the group. Instead you are at best getting the feedback of the consensus, and at worst that of one or two dominant individuals.

A better way is to meet people individually. Not only does this allow you to focus on their specific requirements and concerns, it also allows them to be more honest than when they are with their colleagues. Some of the best feedback from an interview comes when they close the door and tell you stuff in confidence.

One-to-one interviews also put you in a powerful position. In committees everybody hears all the opinions shared. This quickly leads to discussion and compromise. Before long you have lost control of the project and the committee is designing the site on the fly.

One-to-one interviews removes this problem in two ways. First, only you are aware of what has been said in all the interviews. Second, you have time to consider your responses rather than decisions being made on the spot.

Interview a wide cross section of people

So who exactly should you be interviewing? The answer is as many people as possible from a wide range of positions. The tendency is to interview the most influential individuals such as senior marketing executives or the MD. However, although you do want their strategic overview, you also want to solve grass root problems experienced by sales staff, customer support or business partners.

Obviously the exact nature of the people you speak to will be determined by the organisation and nature of the project. However, you should consider including:

Senior management – who provide a strategic overview of the company and the position of the web within that strategy.
Marketing – who can provide a perspective on how the website integrates into the marketing strategy.
Sales – who can help you understand the sales process and identify ways that the website can move a user through that process.
Business partners and suppliers – who are able to give you an outside perspective and an indication of where the web might be able to support the relationship between an organisation and its partners.
Customer support – who will have stories of real customers concerns and frustrations. These are areas the website might be able to alleviate.
Customers – who can share their expectations of the website and the organisation as a whole.

Of course, in smaller organisations some of these roles maybe combined and managed by a handful of people or even a single individual. However, no matter how small the organisation it is still worth holding stakeholder interviews.

Once you have your set of interviewees lined up the next question is what should you ask them?

Allow your interviewee to shape the interview

Although it is good to have some questions preprepared it is not wise to be too restrictive. Generally speaking you should allow the interviewee to drive the direction of the discussion. That way you ensure the website addresses their needs and interviewees get a chance to “have their say”. This means they are more likely to go away satisfied and are less likely to object later.

That said, some structure is necessary. In most stakeholder interviews we cover the following areas:

The interviewee’s job – Understanding somebodies job helps you identify ways that the web maybe able to help.
The interviewee’s challenges – Everybody faces challenges in their jobs and the web maybe able to help.
The interviewee’s opinion of the current website – This provides an opportunity for the interviewee to express any frustrations and make their voice heard.
The interviewee’s expectations of the new website – This is the interviewees chance to outline anything they would like to see on the website.

Just these four areas are normally enough to encourage a valuable conversation of about 40 minutes. However, allow at least an hour between sessions because you do not want interviewees to feel rushed. A major part of the exercise is to ensure they feel consulted and that their opinion has been fully heard.

Spend time now, or spend it later

Stakeholder interviews are time consuming. To interview a reasonable number of people in a large organisation you need to set aside at least two days. That might seem like a lot. However, the alternative is misinterpretation of requirements and stakeholders objecting to the direction of a project because they were not consulted. It is possible to schedule and budget two days of meetings. It is not possible to predict and schedule for the problems you will encounter if you do not consult properly.

10 ways to Battle Site Bureaucracy

Posted in Web strategy on February 17, 2009 by Paul Boag

Running a large institutional website is frustrating. Your site is often held back by internal politics and bureaucracy. Let me show you 10 ways to cut through the crap and get results.

My recent post ‘10 harsh truths about corporate websites‘ generated a huge number of comments both on my own blog and on Smashing Magazine. I seemed to tap into an undercurrent of frustration that exists within the industry.

However, although there was a lot of agreement about the points I raised, there was also resignation. There was a feeling that little could be done to overcome these problems because institutional websites are too entrenched in bureaucracy and politics.

Although I can sympathise with this position and have myself suffered from the problem, I am not one to give up! Over the last decade of working on these sites, I have developed a number of techniques which (sometimes) help to smooth their evolution. Hopefully they will help you too.

1. Educate and inform

At the heart of any technique for dealing with politics and bureaucracy has to be education.

Although there are occasions when people are just ‘trying to be difficult’, in most cases their objections are based on ignorance.

You cannot expect people to be as knowledgeable as you about the web. If you want people to make informed, sensible decisions you must educate them.

Education is also not just about giving them the background to a specific decision so they understand ‘why you are right’. It is about increasing your organisations general understanding of the web.

Run workshops, publish email newsletters, do anything that informs people about the latest web innovations. Increasingly I am invited into organisations to run short seminars on everything from accessibility to facebook! This kind of ongoing education means people are better informed when tough decisions need to be made.

2. Hold stakeholder interviews

One technique that we find very effective at Headscape are stakeholder interviews.

Stakeholder interviews involves meeting individually with anybody who has a ‘stake’ (interest) in the website. This is typically members of the marketing and IT teams, as well as departmental heads and senior management. However it should also include suppliers, customers and users of your website.

These one-to-one meetings provide two opportunities…

Requirements gathering – It is easy for website owners to live in isolated bubbles, separate from the rest of the organisation. These meetings provide an opportunity to understand the real needs and objectives of others within the business. It will highlight ways that your website can help, which you might not have previously considered.
To be inclusive – Stakeholder interviews offer a ‘political benefit’ as well. By meeting with people individually they feel included in the process. They feel their opinions are valued and listened to (which they should be!). People are much less likely to object if they have been consulted before a decision is reached.

People often complain about the website in stakeholder interviews. Allow them to do this and avoid becoming defensive. They will feel more favourably towards you and your website, if you listen to their concerns. We all like to be heard.

3. Avoid group committee meetings

The key to stakeholder interviews is their one-to-one nature. Group meetings can be very destructive. This is for a number of reasons…

The need to defend – In large organisations that have internal politics, everybody feels the need to defend their own ‘turf’. If somebody criticise the website, you are forced to defend it to ‘save face’ in front of others. Equally others feel the need to defend their own positions for the same reason.
A tendency to compromise - When two individuals in a group reach an impasse, the others try to find a compromise. This kind of ‘design on the fly’ inevitably leads to a bland solution. It will neither offend or inspire anybody. Unfortunately, to create a successful website you need to make tough choices that some will not like. A group approach does not lend itself to this.
A loss of control – It is easy for you to loss control in a group meeting. One-to-one meetings work better because you can divide and conquer. Only you know what the other stakeholders said. This puts you in charge and allows you to ‘cheery pick’ the feedback you receive. In a group meeting things can easily get out of hand and decisions are made without your buy-in.
The dominant individual - Every group has one or two dominant individuals. These are the people who bounce the rest of the group into agreeing with them, forcing their agenda through. A dominant individual drowns out quieter members, who become resentful later that nobody listened to them. Meeting with people individually prevents this because the dominant individuals cannot force their point of view on others or overwhelm quieter ones.

One cannot expect a larger organisation to run its website without some form of committee. However, there is no reason why that committee needs to meet as a group.

4. Target your influencers

Talking of dominant individuals, another successful tactic is to target influencers.

An influencer is somebody that others respect and follow. Their opinion is incredibly valuable and if you can sway them to your cause, others will fall into line. However, be careful not to confuse dominant people with influencers. A dominant person will ‘bully’ others into publicly agreeing with them. An influencer will fundamentally alter somebody’s attitude.

Identify who influences your decision makers and speak to them personally. This person might not even be a decision maker themselves, but they carry enough clout to make them worth your time.

When you meet with your influencers, really listen to what they have to say. They often have valuable insights which may change your strategy significantly. Do not go into a meeting with an influencer simply intent on pushing your own agenda. Instead try and shape your approach around their perspective.

If you get an influencer enthusiastic about your project it can make a huge difference.

5. Use third party experts

A variation on the influencers technique is to back up your ideas with third party expert opinion. This can be done in two ways…

Reference the work of a third party expert – For example, if you wish to discourage internal stakeholders from overwhelming users with options on the homepage, you might refer them to Steve Krug or Jakob Nielsen who have both written on the subject.
Hire a third party expert - I often find myself brought into companies simply to confirm what in-house staff have already been saying. Unfortunately, decision makers often doubt the opinion of their web team because they either undervalue them or feel they are pushing a hidden agenda. An independent expert can add creditability to your opinions.

Of course, for this approach to work the stakeholders need to respect the expert. There is no point referencing Steve Krug or hiring Jakob Nielsen, if the decision makers have never heard of them. It is often necessary to sell the credibility of your expert first.

6. Rely on evidence, not opinion

Sometimes it is better to avoid personal opinion entirely (even if that is the opinion of an expert). In such cases statistics can be your friend.

Nothing is more powerful for driving home a point than referring decision makers to Google Analytics. However web stats are not the only evidence you can draw upon. Others include…

Surveys and polls are an excellent way of getting feedback from your users that can then be presented to decision makers.
Twitter search and Google Alerts can be used to gauge how people view your site and brand. These can be powerful testimonials to present decision makers.
Heat maps can be used to take some of the subjectivity out of design.

Of course one of the most powerful evidence you can present is the results of usability testing.

7. Focus on the user

As website owners we know that a successful website is user focused. However, not all our decision makers will understand this and even those who do may get ‘distracted’ sometimes.

It is therefore important to constantly move our decision makers away from their own personal preferences and back on the needs of users.

User testing is one way of doing this. Being able to show decision makers how real users interact with your website is incredibly powerful. It helps them empathise with the needs of users rather than thinking only about their own agenda. Play them video clips of users interacting with your site or at the very least quote them the feedback of users.

However, even if you involve decision makers in user testing, they can still get caught up in their own agendas. One gentle way of preventing this is to word your questions carefully. When you need a decision makers response to something don’t ask…

What do you think?

Instead ask them…

How do you think users will respond to this?

This will keep them focused on the needs of users.

8. Control the feedback

As well as wording questions carefully there is also a need to control the feedback you receive. This is important if you want the decision makers to make considered decisions.

Take for example design sign off – never ask a decision marker if they like a design. It is too broad a question that will lead to a plethora of uninformed and ill considered responses. Instead ask them more specific questions such as…

Does the design conform to the brand guidelines?
Does the design meet the needs of our users?
Does the design emphasis the right content?
Does the design have a clear call to action?
Does the design fulfil our business objectives?

This prevents the decision maker from falling back on their gut reaction (i like it / I dislike it). It forces them to focus on the issues that define whether the design is successful or not and ignore personal preference for specific colours or layout.

Of course, sometimes you will not like the answer to these specific questions. When that happens you need to ask why.

9. Ask why

This is probably the most powerful of all the techniques I have listed here and yet by far the simplest.

When you face opposition to your plans, always ask why. Too often we switch to defensive mode and focus on better communicating our own position rather than understanding the opinion of the person opposing us. This is a mistake.

The question why is powerful for three reasons…

It informs – Often the objection raised initially is not the true underlying issue. By asking why you get to the root of the problem and that allows you to offer alternative solutions. Asking why ensures you have all the information required to deal with the issue.

It can confound – Most of us make decisions based on an intuitive leap. We do not always think through our decisions and so find it hard to articulate the underlying reason. By asking why you force people to stop and consider their logic. When they struggle to express the underlying reasons, they weaken their position.

It shows interest – By asking why you allow them to have their say. You demonstrate an interest in their opinion and establish empathy with their point of view.

Ultimately asking why avoids the disagreement from turning into an argument with entrenched position.

10. Avoid confrontation

I avoid confrontation at all costs. Going head-to-head with somebody especially in front of their colleagues achieves nothing. You can rarely get somebody to shift their position through confrontation.

Once a disagreement escalates into a confrontation, nobody can afford to ‘lose face’ by backing down. It becomes a matter of ego, where pride dictates the outcome. Your website will almost certainly be caught in the cross fire.

A better approach is to agree. The word yes can be immensely powerful. Whenever somebody suggests something to me, no matter how stupid, I will do the following…

Acknowledge and thank them for their input.
Say yes we could do that.
Go on to explain the consequences if we did.
Offer an alternative which could achieve the same aims.

In short I tend to go around problems rather than bashing my head against them. I always look to work with others rather than against them.

Conclusions

So there you go, 10 techniques for battling site bureaucracy. I do not claim these techniques are foolproof. Neither do I suggest they are always appropriate. However, they are useful techniques in your arsenal which you may want to call upon from time to time.

Finally, this is not a definitive list. I could have written more but then it wouldn’t have been a ‘top ten list!’ However, I would be interested to hear what works for you. Post your techniques in the comments.

10 things a web designer would never tell you

Posted in Design on February 5, 2009 by Paul Boag

These arty-farty web designers are always telling you how your site should look. Don’t listen to them! Don’t they know the customer is always right? Here are 10 things a ‘good web designer’ would never tell you about choosing the perfect design.

Working with web designers is a nightmare. You will never meet a more opinionated bunch of snobs. They are always going on about ‘white space’, ‘composition’ and how they went to art college (like that counts as a proper education!). When it comes to choosing the design of your site, they are the last people you should listen to.

What follows are 10 things you need to know about managing a web design project, that no web designer will ever tell you!

1. Always request speculative design up front

Before you pick which web designer to work with make sure they submit some designs for your site upfront. Whatever you do, don’t pay for this work. If they really want to work with you they will swallow the cost.

Some of them might start bleating about not doing ‘speculative design’ and that only designers desperate for work would do design for free. Personally I ignore this BS. If they are ‘so successful’ that they can’t spare the time to do unpaid work for me, then I don’t want to work with them.

What is great about speculative work is it is not constrained by ‘understanding the business’ or ‘user feedback’. Its all about creativity. Surely a good web designer can come up with great work out of thin air, even if they don’t know who the target audience is and have never spoken to the client. I want something that makes me go wow. Who cares if it ‘fulfils my business objectives.’ The more bells and whistles the better!

2. Don’t get hung up on end users

Web designers are always obsessing about the end users. They worry that users won’t like this or that they won’t understand that. Its pathetic.

People like to be told what to do and they will ultimately follow your lead. I once had a web designer complain because I wanted to collect users phone numbers on a sign up form for our newsletter. Apparently ‘users’ don’t like being asked for unnecessary personal information. Can you believe it! How the hell am I going to cold call these people if I don’t have their phone numbers. Sometimes you wonder how these idiots survive in business.

Instead of focus on user needs, focus on what you can squeeze out them. Times are tough these days and so you need to maximise your returns on every one of these sheep. You have to be tough in business.

3. Rely on your gut instinct, not testing

Talking of users – what is this obsession with user testing? Just sounds like a way for web designers to charge more money if you ask me.

After all you have probably been working in your job for years. You know all there is to know about your audience, right? Even if you did run user test sessions, stakeholder interviews or whatever other made up technique is the latest fashion, its not going to tell you stuff you do not already know.

Admittedly, these sessions occasionally turn up stuff you might not expect, but can you really trust the results? Surely your years of experience count for more than a few hours of testing.

Of course, the other problem is that user testing is massively expensive. I heard from a friend that it involves usability labs, videos, two way mirrors and ‘facilitators’ (whatever those are). That all sounds pricey to me!

Some web designers will tell you that they do it by going into user’s homes and talking with them in their own environment. They justify this by saying you learn more because the user is relaxed and you can see where they live. Personally, it doesn’t sound very professional and if it isn’t expensive, how could it possibly give good results?

4. Form a committee to provide feedback

Admittedly I maybe sounding a little arrogant, but I really am not. I think it is important to get the opinions of other people. I just think web designers are not the people you should be asking. They live in a techy bubble and do not understand what it is like to be an ordinary user like us.

I suggest forming a committee to approve any designs produced. After all web designers keep telling us that design is subjective. That means you shouldn’t rely on the opinion of just one person (especially if that person is a designer). What you need is a committee to thrash out what the site should look like.

Ideally you would call a meeting with the designer in the room and get them to produce something there and then under the direction of the committee. However, most designers tend to get ‘emotional’ when you suggest that. So instead I recommend giving them the freedom to produce something themselves and then discuss it as a group.

Now inevitably this will lead to disagreement. Some people will like the colour, others will hate it. This is natural. What you need to do is seek a compromise that will please everybody. If you can have the designer on hand to try out new ideas in the meeting this will really help. Before you know it you will have a design everybody can tolerate (although admittedly not everybody will like it).

5. Become obsessed with detail

“The devil is the detail they say. Nowhere is that more true than on a website. Unfortunately you cannot rely on a web designer to have that attention to detail. Its hardly their fault. They are ‘arty’ people after all and their brains just don’t work that way.

If you want your design to be ‘just so’ you will need to micro manage every aspect of the design process. Don’t be afraid to tell your designer exactly what you need them to do. Be as specific as possible. After all, they call themselves pixel pushers.

Also insist on consistency across all browsers. Web designers tend to be sloppy in this area. It might look great in Safari (apparently this is a browser – who knew!) but in Netscape 4 it looks awful. They will give you some rubbish about not all browsers being capable of rendering modern design. They will say that as long as it is usable on all browsers, that is what matters. The hell it is! You don’t put up with that kind of rubbish in print design, so why should you on the web?

6. Enforce corporate style guides to the letter

Your organisation has a corporate design guide for a reason and yet web designers think they can flaunt the rules. They will talk about the differences between print and the web. They will go on about colour on screen, web typography and dots per inch. However, the real reason they want to ignore your guidelines is because their egos will not allow them to work within limitations.

You must take a firm hand over this issue and stick to the letter of the law. Enforce pantone numbers and ensure they use corporate typefaces. They might mutter something about limited fonts on the web but this is just not true. I know for a fact that sites built in flash can use any font you want. With that in mind I always recommend that sites are built entirely with Adobe Flash.

Oh yes, and watch out for abuse of the logo. Most style guides say that the logo must have a certain number of millimetres around it to allow ample white space. I recommend taking a ruler and measuring the space around your monitor on screen. Better still, print out the design so you can be even more accurate.

7. Fit as much on the homepage as possible

Let’s take a moment to discuss the design of your homepage in particular.

Without a doubt the homepage is by far the most important page on your site. If I look at my own website statistics the majority of people who come to my site never get further than the homepage (I have no idea why this is the case!) This is a problem.

The solution is obvious when you also consider the importance of minimising the number of clicks a user has to make to reach content – Put as much content as possible on the homepage.

This also solves the problem of everybody within your organisation wanting homepage real estate. Instead of endlessly discussing whose content is most important, simply put it all on there.

Of course with so much content on the homepage people might complain their content is lost in the crowd. The best solution in such situations is to either make it bigger or animate it. I find flashing text particularly effective.

8. Ensure all content appears above the fold

Unfortunately you are limited in the amount of space available on the homepage. This is because all content has to sit above the fold.

The fold refers to the point where users have to start scrolling. As we know users do not scroll. In 1994 Jakob Nielsen found that only 10% of users would scroll when presented with a web page. 15 years on I see no reason why this would have changed.

Some designers will tell you that the fold is a myth. They will argue that it does not exist because different browsers, resolutions and toolbars all effect the vertical available space. All I know is that on my computer I have 470px of vertical space before I have to start scrolling. I am a fairly typical user and so you should ensure all content is within this area.

The only exception to this rule is if your boss has a different amount of vertical space. If he is going to be looking at the website I suggest designing for his browser. Alternatively simply print out the site for his approval.

9. You only need to test in Internet Explorer 6

Web designers like to claim they need to spend hours testing on every browser combination. However, in reality this is just another way to extract more money from you.

All you really need to do is build the site so it works on Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer is the most dominant browser having by far the largest market share. Although there are different versions of IE most companies run IE6. As corporate customers are the people with the real money you should concentrate your testing on their browser. Also surely if it works in IE6 it will work in IE7! You can trust Microsoft not to break the web.

If you want to be super cautious, add a message to your site telling users it is optimised for internet explorer. Users can then download that browser if they want to see your site.

10. SEO is more important than design

Getting the design of your website right is important. However it is no use if nobody sees it. Your number one priority has to be driving traffic to your site.

The best way to do this is through search engines. Fortunately there are a plethora of tricks and techniques to fool Google into ranking you highly. You can use hidden text, cloaking pages, redirects, doorway pages and keyword stuffing to force you up the ranking. Google kindly list these techniques in their Web Master Guidelines.

The problem with some of these techniques is that they undermine the design and content of your site. They can also affect the usability and accessibility. However, this is a sacrifice worth making in order to keep those new users rolling in.

Some web designers place a higher emphasis on repeat traffic. However, in my experience it is hard to get a user to return a second time. This is almost certainly because they have seen everything already. Why would they come back? Concentrate your efforts on creating a steady stream of new users.

Conclusions

If I could leave you with a single thought from this post it would be this – your web designer does not work with you, he works for you.

You need to take control of the design process. Its your site and you should get the design you want. The role of the designer is to implement your idea. Do not allow him to drag you down into endless discussions about ‘users needs’, ‘accessibility’ and ‘usability’. These are all distractions from the primary aim – to impress your boss and earn that next promotion.

This article was based on a presentation I gave at Bathcamp and is a sick twist version of content taken from my book ‘The Website Owners Manual‘

Headscape is recruiting (again!)

Posted in News on March 26, 2008 by Paul Boag

Headscape are currently after two new members of staff. If you are an experienced Information Architect or a newly qualified developer, we would love to speak to you.

Yes I know, I am not supposed to be blogging at the moment. However, the reason I am not blogging is because we are so insanely busy. In order to get around this problem we are recruiting (yet again!). If you fancy the idea of working with the gang at Headscape then drop me an email.

Here are the jobs…

Information Architect

We are currently looking for a smart, articulate Information
Architect to work with our clients on initial stakeholder interviews,
user testing and the production of wireframes.

We are looking for candidates with some or all of the following skills:

An ability to organize complex information into simple, easy to
understand structures.
Experience in running stakeholder interviews and other requirement
gathering exercises.
Outstanding organizational and communication skills.
Proven experience in preparing, running and reporting on usability
test sessions.
The ability to produce easy to digest documentation on IA and
usability issues.
Extensive experience creating sitemaps, wireframes, use-case
scenarios
and flow diagrams.
Experience of working with large, complex, information heavy
websites.
Ability to plan and execute competitive analysis.
Proven experience of working with and producing personas.
The ability to meet aggressive deadlines.
A good understanding of the design process.
A good understanding of technical constraints.
Experience of copyrighting.
Experience of working with B2C ecommerce sites.

The ideal candidate would be one who is able to work from our Southampton office for at least part of the week.

Experience:

Bachelors degree or the equivalent
3 years experience designing websites preferably within a web design
agency.

Graduate web developer

Starting salary: £22k+
Location: Southampton

Headscape is looking for a graduate web developer, with a 1st or 2:1 degree in a relevant discipline, who is passionate about their profession, keen to learn and can demonstrate good problem solving abilities.

Headscape’s core development technologies are ASP.NET v2.0, VB.NET, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and XML/XSLT. We have our own, highly flexible content management system software that is the basis for most of our website implementation projects for clients. We are also in the process of developing an online service aimed at web designers.

If you don’t have skills in our core development technologies, don’t worry. We can help you to acquire the skills you’ll need. What we need is demonstrable ability and enthusiasm.

You will need to be a fast learner. You need to be a confident, productive developer. You need to understand relational databases. You must be motivated by developing real-world, web-based applications that really matter to their users. You’ll want to grab with both hands this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a web agency with a national (becoming international) reputation.

If you have had some web development experience outside your degree course we’d love to hear about it too.

Your role will involve working in client project teams with project managers, designers, information architects and user interface developers to create superb bespoke web solutions on-time and within budget.

About Headscape

Headscape is an established web design agency based in the Southampton,
England. We produce top quality websites that are accessible to the
widest possible audience, easy to use and designed around our
clients business objectives. Clients include large government bodies,
educational institutions, charities and the commercial sector.

Lessons learnt at SXSW 08

Posted in News on March 17, 2008 by Paul Boag

Marcus shares his impressions of SXSW and the lessons we can all learn.

Looking back at my
notes, I didn’t realise how much I actually took! So, I have decided to focus
things a bit and look at talks given by people from three big interactive
agencies. These presentations were fascinating to me as they gave me an insight
into how these companies run their businesses, their projects and make
decisions about their futures.

Respect!

This was a great start
to the conference, really got me in the mood. What I expected was a Zeldman criticism of the corporate world’s misunderstanding /undervaluing/general
disdain of all things ‘web’. I think this was what he was trying to do but what
we got was a run down of how Happy Cog works or more particularly how it runs
it projects – great for me!

It was quite
reassuring in that they do pretty much exactly what Headscape does:

Stakeholder interviews – though there was
a wonderful description of when you really know that you’re about to get to the
bottom of an issue with a client – that ‘close the door’ moment
User testing/requirements
IA
Design – they still do multiple concepts (which
we very rarely do now) though try to avoid ‘Frankensteining’ the design
Build

The big thing, for
them, missing from this list is content and copywriting. They employ a
specialist copywriter who has a wide-ranging remit from kicking off the content
process to completely writing a site’s content. However, usually they
concentrate on editing ‘raw’ content into one styled voice.

Zeldman says that the
content is the most important aspect of any site. He has a point – we
don’t go to websites to enjoy the design or appreciate the usability of the
navigation.

This is, I expect, the
next big thing for Headscape.

Ten things we’ve learned at 37
Signals

Jason Fried telling
everyone 10 things they’ve learned at 37 Signals. I found his delivery a little
grating, which is why I probably don’t have too detailed notes on this talk.
But, again, this was interesting stuff from my point of view, learning about how
a small company operates particularly because we are about to go down the
product road.

The general theme of
his biggest messages were:

Keep it simple – otherwise you won’t ever
release your product.
Don’t plan – plans tend to have a habit
of becoming ‘sacred’. That is, people tend to stick to a particular goal
religiously, rather than adapting to what is the best way.
Don’t expect your next thing to be way better
than the last. If you’ve had a hit it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re next
offering is going to be as well.
Don’t talk to each other! I really wasn’t sure
about this, but JF basically felt interrupting people through talking was the
key productivity killer. Methods of communication that can be ignored -
IM, email, Basecamp etc – are fine.

10 Tips to Managing a Creative
Environment

This was the best talk
of the lot for me. With most of the ‘famous’ agencies, I feel that what we do
is not too far away from what they offer. However, these guys felt like they
were in a higher league.

The talk was given by
Bryan Mason (CEO) and Sarah B. Nelson (Design Strategist) of Adaptive Path.

They had looked at
(and interviewed) a number of other organisations that they felt there was some
similarity with a design agency. These included:

Theatres
Restaurants
Orchestras

They are all highly
creative places (probably more so than the design agency), they have absolute
deadlines (again, probably more so than the design agency) that mean highly
regimented processes are required while keeping creative staff focused.

These are the tips
that they have learned:

Cross-train the entire team – not easy, but it does build
understanding and therefore empathy towards other people’s jobs and the effort
required to deliver them.
Rotate creative leadership - makes people value others’ decisions
because they know that they will get their turn.
Actively turn the corner – meaning make a specific decision to go
from ‘thinking’ to ‘doing’ and make sure that everyone knows which phase
they’re in. The thinking phase being the point where there are no bad ideas or
questions with people moving into their specific roles (see point 4) for the
doing phase. They described this process as divergence to convergence.
Know your roles - once the corner is turned everyone
needs to know what is expected of them and when.
Practice, practice, practice - they mean ‘practice as a group’ i.e. keep
familiarising (and improving) processes. This ensures quality under pressure.
Look to bring new people in at quiet times or on internal work.
Make you mission explicit - to the entire team so everyone knows
where the team is supposed to be going and what they stand for (i.e. what it
means to be a ‘Headscaper’ instead of just a ‘designer’ or ‘developer’). Cut
out stuff that isn’t part of the mission – be ruthless.
Kill your darlings - but do it respectfully e.g. for the
young chef – "we won’t use that recipe, it’s not for us. You put it on
your menu when you get your first restaurant!" AP hiring decisions are made
without discussion – thumbs up, they’re in, thumbs down, they’re out.
They only discuss if it’s neither.
Leadership is a service - leaders should talk to everyone about
their involvement. For example, a creative director should provide space not
enforce their vision.
Generate projects around the groups’ interest - in other words, only take on work that
you want! Easy said. However, maybe a watered down version would be to dish
work out based on personal preferences rather than just who’s available. BM
said "any time that AP has taken on work for the money or the kudos of a
particular client, it has bombed. If there’s no interest internally in a pitch
- drop it".
Remember your audience - what you’re doing isn’t for you, don’t forget that and don’t
forget who your specific audience is. They used the kitchen analogy where the
restaurant manager’s audience is their existing customers. He needs to make
sure that the guy who loves liver and onions gets the same every time. The chef
doesn’t care about this. His audience is the new customer.
Celebrate failure – creativity
doesn’t always work. Carry out project post mortems but call them ‘after
parties’! Discuss what worked, what didn’t and what was learned. Don’t
apportion blame. You want your creative team to take risks and to feel that
they can take risks. If you have a blame culture then safe and boring (and
eventually stagnation) is where you’ll end up.

Show 102: Worktime blues

Posted in Classic shows on November 27, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul looks at why you should have a training budget and how to spend it. Marcus looks at capturing requirements and Roo Reynolds introduces us to the possibilities of virtual worlds and their impact on web design.

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Marcus Requirements capture | Paul: Spending the training budget | Roo Reynolds on virtual worlds | Question of the week

News and events

10 Absolute “Nos!” for Freelancers

I know that many of the people that listen to the boagworld podcast are freelancers so I keep an eye out for stories that appeal to this group. I was therefore drawn to an article in my news reader entitled 10 Absolute “Nos!” for freelancers. It’s a great article that lists 10 questions asked by clients to which the answer should always be no.

The questions include classics such as “Can you show me a mock-up to help us choose a designer/developer?”, “Can I pay for my e-commerce site from my website sales?” and “Can I just pay the whole amount when it’s done?”. Almost without exception I agreed with every item on this list. The only exception is “Will you register and host my site?” because I think a lot of clients expect this even if it is a pain in the arse. Of course, the fact that I work for an agency rather than as a freelancer could be colouring my view on this one. However, whether you are a freelancer, an agency employee or just an enthusiastic amateur this is all good advice.

Making the most of working with designers

Adaptive Path are an agency I really admire. Not only do they produce some cutting edge work they are also some of the foremost thinkers in the world of web design. I was therefore understandably interested when one of their clients recently asked them how to make the most of working with a design agency.

The resulting blog post called “Making the Most of a Design Engagement” is a fascinating collection of tips that is definitely worth a read.

The subject of how an agency and client engage is something that I have posted on a number of times [1], [2], [3]. However, reading the perspective of another agency (especially one so well respected) is very enlightening. What I found most encouraging of all is that they obviously struggle with the same kind of client issues we all do.

Whether you are somebody who commissions web designers or whether you are a designer yourself take the time to read this short post.

How Open ID will change your site

Just before I went away on holiday (did I mention I had been away?) there was a new post on the Think Vitamin website about OpenID. I am a big fan of OpenID and have spoken about it before on the show. However, its a tricky concept to explain. At its heart it allows you to login to all the many services you use on the web from one single site so having to deal with only a single username and password.

I sincerely believe that if you are building a new website that has any form of login then you should consider including an OpenID login. The problem at the moment is that you will have to do this in addition to the normal login process. You might wonder if it is worth the effort.

The article on the Think Vitamin site does an excellent job at explaining just how significant OpenID is going to be (even though it exaggerates it in places). It explains the background, the problem and the possibilities. If you haven’t looked at OpenID yet or are sceptical about its worth then the Think Vitamin is a great place to start.

Good practice when working with Tag Clouds

Tagging is everywhere these days. From Flickr to Delicious every site seems to have tags. Even blogs like this one has tags. Tags are a useful alternative form of navigation that allows users to quickly find related content no matter where it is in the sites hierarchy. There is no doubt they are powerful and incredibly useful especially on larger sites with a lot of content.

The problem is that they are relatively new. We are still working out how to successfully integrate them into our websites and what role they play. Fortunately a recent article entitled “Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples And Good Practices” attempts to establish some best practice for tagging and makes some suggestions about their design and integration.

If you are doing some design work with tags or if you are looking to add tags to your own site then you may want to take a look at this post. My only word of caution is that it only tells half the story. It addresses tag clouds but says little about how tags on individual pages should be displayed.

Marcus’ bit: Requirements capture

While Paul has been buddying up with Mickey, Donald and Pluto, I have been working with a UK higher education institution at the very early stages of their website redesign project.

One of the things that we have been discussing in detail is the process we will go through to capture requirements and set objectives for the site. I thought I should share them here.

Existing site review

I have looked in the past at carrying out an expert review relating solely on a site’s information architecture. A site review takes on board some aspects of the existing site’s IA but is more general than that.

I tend to look at the following site features very much from a usability point of view:

Navigability – can I find things?
Consistency of navigation
Visual hierarchy – consistency of the design
Writing style
Processes – search, making a comment, ordering etc
Terminology
Content – grouping, repetition, wide/narrow mix, internal/external mix etc

The main purposes of the review are:

To highlight to all stakeholders what the site issues are
To highlight to all stakeholders positive aspects of the existing site
To suggest possible solutions to issues
To explain the processes involved in achieving goals

Stakeholder interviews

We have found that interviewing key internal staff (i.e. content owners) and sometimes key users, is the most valuable exercise in creating a requirements and objectives document.

Each interview is done on a one-to-one basis to ensure that people say what they really mean! The interviews are semi-structured which means that we will create a script of questions but will happily allow people move off-track.

The interviews aim to gather opinion on the site’s user base, weighting of content, issues and opportunities.

Work together

Though we are usually brought in as experts to consult on this type of process it is imperative that the client is involved at every step of the way. This is because one of the purposes of the exercise is information gathering. For example, creating user personas based just on stakeholders interview input may miss something that discussing/reviewing with the web team would not.

Create the document

What we are trying to do is record all findings in a manner that can be used as a basis for all the work to follow – IA, design, copywriting, build etc. In other words – create a list of requirements for the new site and give them an order of priority.

It needs to get into detail to be useful. A recent review we carried out contained over twenty specific opportunities for the site, which target audience groups each issue related to and how the site could deliver each opportunity.

This was coupled with a detailed list of requirements per audience group – 25 audience groups with over a hundred requirements. The requirements we also graded for importance into ‘must haves’, ‘should haves’ and ‘nice to haves’.

Paul’s corner: Spending your training budget

I recently received a question from Harry asking “what approach do you take to training?”. He has some budget set aside and is wondering how he should spend it. As I am always keen to spend other people’s money this seemed the perfect subject for me to talk about… read keeping your skills sharp.

Training course give away

While I am on the subject of training, the guys over at Clearleft have two training courses coming up on January the 24th and 25th in Brighton. The first is CSS mastery by Andy Budd and the second is Bulletproof AJAX by Jeremy Keith. If you would like to attend but cannot get your company to produce the £345 + VAT for the early bird fee then I might be able to help. I have one free place to give away to either course (your choice) for a lucky random winner. We will announce the winner on our Christmas special so entries need to be in by Friday 14th of December. Just send me an email with your name and contact details with “clearleft competition” in the subject line.

Ask the expert: Roo Reynolds on virtual worlds

Paul: Okay, so joining me today is Roo Reynolds who is a meta verse evangelist for IBM, Its nice to have you on the show Roo

Roo: Hi Paul,

Paul: What on earth is a meta verse evangelist?

Roo: That’s a good question, I guess a meta verse evangelist is someone who helps people understand the very exciting and confusing area of virtual worlds.

Paul: Ah, virtual worlds. Now the people listening to this show might be thinking what has that got to do with web design, why have we got someone one on here talking about virtual worlds and I am quite happy to admit that that’s not our normal fair. Its not what we normally cover on the show but I wanted to get Roo on partly because um, well to be frank we grew up together didn’t we pretty much

Roo: we did we were family friends for many, many years

Paul: yeah, which was very bizarre to then discover the he is a kind of world authority on virtual worlds. so that sounds very dramatic doesn’t it

Roo: A thought leader?

Paul: A thought Leader

Roo: I remember inheriting your old star wars toys Paul

Paul: There we go, So I set you of on a good direction in your career by getting you into Sci-fi early. I am now taking all of the credit for all that you have achieved since then.

Roo: Its all thanks to you (giggle)

Paul: yeah (hahahaha) Well um, but I though it was quite interesting. I was doing a presentation where one of the things I wanted to talk about in this discussion was upcoming and emerging technologies and how they would affect things and I wanted to talk about virtual worlds and realised that I knew absolutely nothing about them so I gave Roo a call and we had a chat on the phone. Then I got educated so I figured I ought to pass on that education to everybody that listens to this show so that’s um, a bit of the background. So lets kick of the with the first questions. So what exactly are virtual worlds and why do you think there is so much hype surrounding them at the moment there has been lots of talk about, you know, things like second life and that kind of thing. Perhaps if you could explain them a bit, and explain why there is so much enthusiasm about it at the moment

Roo: yeah I can try. So I guess I can ask you to think about it. as it a good an example anyway, probably the most popular example of a virtual world. At the moment. So these are things which are kind of digital online environments or as some people would describe the as multi-user virtual environments its that kind of online social space. So to the untrained eye they might look a lot like game but there are no game elements inside virtual worlds or rather there are but they exist within the broader world. So something like second life doesn’t really have any point there is no final point no enemies to kill there is no “x” level to achieve its just a world and if you want to inhabit that world and build a shop or you want to habit that and be an explorer and wonder around finding interesting things and talking to people then that cool as well.

Paul: Hmm, I mean the immediate thing which comes out of that is well, you know, what is the point. Why do people take part in virtual worlds and what kind of ways are people using them

Roo: Yeah, there are a lot of different answers to that, almost as many answers as there are different people really so as in the real world there is not point. people make up their own point they decide that the are going to make a lot of money or they are going to be an artist and be well known or open a sex shop or whatever it might be and people will have different personal goals which they set themselves. So really any goal is a tangible thing that people will almost determine for themselves

Paul: So I guess in many ways its like the web itself it’s a tool and how chose to use that tool is largely up to you

Roo: Yeah exactly. And within that you will get lots of different things, I mentioned some, you will also get games within that so people play chess inside virtual worlds and people do all kinds of crazy things. Yeah I guess the answer to your question is really why is there so much hype about them, its because over the last 12 months or 16 months or so the press has been covering this is quite a bit way. That turned it into a kind of hype feeding frenzy. Garner had a very famous prediction about how 80% of active internet users by 2011 I think it was will be using virtual worlds and will have an avatar. Not necessarily in second life but in a virtual world. And all of this make people realise that this might just be the next “big thing” its gone from being the kind of space where people will, I don’t mean this in any derogatory way, everyday people will would hang out in to becoming a space that a lot of big companies and small companies and advertising and marketing firms are really getting interested in. You know we have all seen “the web” in that ,very early in my career, was the web being picked up by corporation and some people almost missed the boat and had to catch up later on

Paul: So Why do you think this is going to be the next big thing? Why do you think a virtual worlds are going to be you know, you talked about how some companies had to play catch up on the internet you almost imply that this I going to be as big as the internet is. Did I miss interpret that or do you really think its going to be incredibly significant and if so why?

Roo: Well, I think it is always going to be a subset of the internet, you know, this is just another communications media and its probably will remain a subset of the web. There will always be a place for flat 2D content, But once you start getting into 3D social stuff and giving people a real time opportunity to relate to each other and see each other and this sense of presence where you can see what the other is paying attention to. For me joining a circle for the first time, a circle of people talking and I walked up to it, and you know people took a step back to invite me into that circle. That was a really compelling moment to me. It was also a real eye opener that the “real world etiquette” that we see in society all the time actually was playing out for real in this virtual space as well. In terms of why it might be the next big thing a lot of different elements are coming together at the same time here, we finally have, almost complete availability of broadband, certainly in this country and in the west. We have got fairly powerful machines now that have 3D graphics accelerators and sound cards, this is something which is now also happening in corporate environments as well as at home. There is kind of a point in time where the… someone might describe it as a tipping point where there is this lot of interest and we have seen this massive press interest, but also big companies getting involved, you know when you see Sony with their playstation home project which is going to be like a lobbying environment for the playstation 3 its been delayed a little bit, but that is really the kind of mass Market application for virtual worlds and it is things like that which really opened my eyes to where this might take is. This is not going to be a niche thing with a few geeks hanging around and some would argue that it has never been that. Really virtual worlds have been attractive to creative people and to the people who feel like they want to kind of express themselves and share things, Its not full of 16 year old boy with glasses sitting in their bedrooms and really there is a difference between games, traditional online games and Massively multiplayer online role-playing games And a space like virtual worlds that allows them to be attractive to the mass market . So yeah I wouldn’t say it is going to replace the web or even be the largest portion of the internet. But there is certainly a growing space for these virtual worlds

Paul: so what, I mean, I can understand how some people are maybe making money out of being involved in virtual worlds where, I don’t know, where they are creating things which they are selling inside that virtual world, but what about other companies, how are larger organisations using it. For example, how do IBM use it?

Roo: well, we are maybe quite weird in because we do an awful lot in virtual worlds. We do everything from recruitment too employee discussions and meetings. although of course we cannot use a virtual world for confidential discussion, we certainly have the types of meetings we would have in public spaces, like conferences, we also have virtual facets to real world conferences like forties a really big conference we run, and we had that for the first time happening in second life running in parallel to the real world event so people who could not make it to the real world event could at least attend. They could see and hear some of the presentations and they could mingle and network. So like I said we are a bit weird in that in that we do so much, that’s partly because we are such a big company. Now a lot of other people would look at it and say they have a very particular need or desire, something they want to get out of it and for some people historically it has been marketing, or advertising, it has been to reach a wider audience or to reach them in a different way. Which is more playful and allows them to be really participants rather than just eye balls

Paul: yeah, I mean one thing you said was earlier was that you referred to virtual worlds as a subset of the internet and the web. Its another that that going on online. One of the things which strikes me is that if you do something, in something like second life, say if you run a conference that conference is kind of just fenced into the second life world so its not going to get picked up by search engines, its not going to be very accessible and things like that do you think that there are going to be changes in that, do you think there will be more crossover between virtual and maybe the more traditional web

Roo: yeah absolutely this is one of the areas that really excites me at the moment, this whole area of interoperability and that needs to be not just between different virtual worlds but also between the web and virtual worlds so this idea of the virtual universe sort of thing as a virtual world or virtual worlds is something that IBM even throws this term 3D internet around quite a lot. In a kind of evolutionary next step when you look at virtual worlds today they tend to be proprietary walled gardens and actually a lot of people would compare them to AOL in the mid nineties but actully when you start thinking about how they may interconnect, and that inset just moving your avatar from world of war craft to second or habbo or whatever its actually much more interesting than that. Its things like bringing you wallet with you your friends list with you being able to blur the lines between virtual worlds and bring content in from the web and share content back out to the web, these things are beginning to be possible and in some ways one of the reason I think second life is so successful because it does have the ability to make request to web content and bring that in so you have dynamic stuff going on. But that is still very early days and I think that we will probably see a massive focus and in fact the big conference in san hosa very recently where this came out in a very big way but a lot of companies will be wanting to get together and its very, you know the will is definitely there to have a real focus in the next few month on interactivity

Paul: I mean so, I am kind of very aware this for many of the people listening to this show that are kind of a mixture of designers, developers, you know, people that are running websites that a lot of this is very theoretical and it is not something they would be directly involved in at the moment. I mean do you think there is anything that they should be doing, that they should be aware of when it comes to virtual worlds. Is this an area you think they should be keeping an eye on or doing anything actively.

Roo: Yeah, I guess most people I talk to even if they are not going to rush out tomorrow and buy some space in some virtual world and um, you know its not for everyone. But most people who I talk to at least want to stay informed once they have got that hook in their head that this is, you know, I obviously find it very interesting but people tend to come away with the a sensation that this might go somewhere and there is enough evidence already today that its fairly compelling, if you look at it on the “garnet height curve” this idea that things go though a life cycle of interest it haven’t yet peaked the top of that and it is now falling back down into this trough of disillusionment in the long run what might happen it might reach the stable plateau where it will actually become a really useful space that interesting work will happen and kind of follow the same progression as so many technologies before it. Most people come away with the feeling that they want to keep an eye on it. Now I guess if I am going to step back a little bit and look more broadly at what is going on, on the web then for web designers and for almost all of them, this is very big on their radar the whole area of social online collaboration and this whole “web 2.0″ umbrella which you started talking about a year ago if not longer and has been you know really quite large for me, that fits very neatly into this same space. What you are talking about are people sharing content and whether that is a a chat or something they have built themselves you know, you look at a world like second life and most of it is not built but the company that runs it. As with youtube and del.icio.us and as with flickr and so many other popular services and site these days, it is built by its users. So maybe it is something people need to be aware of maybe its something which will gradually fit into a growing mentally of this is how the web works. Yes it happens to be 3D at the moment on the popular ones and yes they are not all currently delivered through websites, mind there are plenty that are, and there probably will be an increasing number that are delivered though the browser. So yeah, if people find this stuff interesting then they should keep an eye on it, maybe read a bit more about it.

Paul: Where is a good place for them to go then to wrap up, as far as if they want to find out more information or want to read up about the potential of it, where would you recommend they start by looking?

Roo: well there are a lot o very good blogs out there, if they have a very academic mind then they and want to read some really good writing on the subject then the best one I can think of is http://terranova.blogs.com/ , its one that I have guest authored for, but not the one I regularly write for, the one I regularly write for is http://eightbar.co.uk/about/roo, which has got a growing profile in the space of virtual worlds, That is written by a bunch of IBMers writing about what they find interesting. I have a personal blog a personal blog at http://rooreynolds.com if anyone wants to follow that although, please don’t all come at once

Paul: (Laughs) its really not that popular out podcast that it would…

Roo: no you are paul, you wouldn’t know how popular you are, but you are.

Paul: That’s okay, Thank you very much for you time , I think it is interesting we spend so much time on it with the immediate here and now problems, but every now and again it is nice to poke out heads above the parapet and see what is going on a bit further afield; so thank you very much for time coming and being on the show

Question of the week

Do you think virtual worlds are going to be a mainstream method of online communication or are they a novelty doomed to failure? Answers in the comments.

Combating design by committee

Posted in Design on October 4, 2007 by Paul Boag

Design by committee has been the nail in the coffin of many good design concepts. So how can you minimize the damage done when a client decides to approve a design through a committee structure?

The problem is that it involves compromise. Everybody has a slightly different opinion and so the design is tweaked and tweaked in order to ensure everybody’s concerns are addressed. The result is inevitably a design that offends nobody but also fails to excite anybody. In short it creates unobtrusive design.

Unobtrusive design does have its place. A mediocre design can still be very usable and can meet many of the needs of your target audience. However, it is never going to excite or inspire them. It will never create brand loyalty or generate a feeling of satisfaction with the site.

The best approach is to limit the number of people making design decisions. Ideally this should be just the designer and the website manager. However, realistically this cannot always be the case. In the real world of internal politics there is often a requirement to consult and let everybody have their say. There is however a difference between consultation and design by committee.

The key to successfully avoiding design by committee is getting all parties to agree to a process before design even begins. In my experience the following order of events works very successfully.

The designer produces initial design concepts
Working with personas and business objectives the designer and website manager refines these concepts
The website manager and if possible designer, meets with each stakeholder individually to talk through the designs.
The website manager and designer collate feedback and make any amendments they feel necessary
The design is presented to real users and feedback is taken
The design is revised into its final iteration
The final design is presented to all stakeholders supported by feedback from the user testing and stakeholder interviews
Design is signed off.

The crucial step is the individual meetings with stakeholders. By meeting with them individually you prevent “design on the fly”. This is when a group of people starts making changes to a design in an attempt to reach a consensus. Without a doubt this is design by committee at its worst. By meeting with people one on one you can simply listen to their opinion and then collate all the suggestions together later. No design decisions will be made in the room.

It is also important in these meetings not to simply show them the design and ask what they think. Provide them with the background information they require to give educated feedback. In particular talk them through the user personas and objectives for the project. When you do show them the designs, do not ask them their personal opinion but rather ask them how they believe the target audience would react to the design. The aim is to encourage them to think beyond their personal preferences and focus on business and user requirements.

By adopting this process by the time those involved in design sign off see the final version they are already on board. They have contributed to the process, been given all the background information, seen the design testing and been educated to think from the users perspective. You will have done everything possible to ensure that the design is not produced by committee.

Show 86: Boagworld Book

Posted in Classic shows on July 10, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul talks about taking a brand online, Marcus gives some advice about reviewing your information architecture and Ian Lloyd introduces us to the challenges of designing for screen readers.

Podcast: Download (44.6MB)

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Paul’s personal news

Just a bit of personal news before I get into the industry related stories. I want to let everybody know I have signed a contract to write a book. The book is going to be primarily for website owners rather than web designers, however to be honest I think it could appeal equally to both. I intend to look at what “client’s need to know about building and running a website” so hopefully it should show by example how best to communicate and work with clients.

The most exciting thing about this book from my point of view, is the fact that I want to write it as a collaborative process with you the boagworld community. I am going to release chapters for you to see in advance of publication and also blog on various aspects of what I am writing. I really want to encourage you to share your thoughts and make suggestions as we go along through comments and the forum. I have already set up a forum thread dedicated to book ideas as well as an initial blog post on the book.

Obviously writing a book is a really slow process, but hopefully it is something that we can all get excited about.

News and events

Building for the iphone

Unsurprisingly there is a lot of information appearing relating to building web applications for the iphone. There is an iphone gallery consisting of hundreds of screenshots of the iphone. This is great if you want to mirror the look and feel of the iphone as closely as possible. There is also the iphone developers guide from Apple which provides loads of great advice. Finally there is iphoney, a piece of software that replicates some of the iphone’s web browsing functionality and lets you see what your application will finally look like.

Of course whether it is worth developing for the iphone at this stage is another matter. I guess if you are trying to reach the tech-savy audience who are iphone owners then maybe. Otherwise it might be better to wait until the iphone becomes more mainstream or other phones start offering the same level of web experience.

@media podcast

I was gutted to miss @media this year. Well, I say gutted, I was actually on a really pleasant family holiday, so I cant complain. However, I did miss a great line up of speakers talking about some amazing subjects. I was particularly depressed to have missed Jesse James Garrett’s keynote on “Beyond AJAX” and “Diabolical Design: The Devil is in the Details” by Jason Santa Maria.

Fortunately the recordings of the @media sessions are beginning to filter out for me to download and listen to. However, note that I don’t call them a podcast. There is no feed that I can find which is extremely frustrating.

Setting that little moan aside, it is great to be able to listen to these speakers even though I did not attend the conference and I would strongly encourage you to download and listen to a few yourselves.

Common mistakes in web copy

Although we would prefer to avoid it, the reality is that as web designers we write far more copy than we would like to admit. As for those of us who are website owners, a substantial part of our responsibility is writing good web copy.

We have talked on the show before about writing good copy but our focus has mainly been on style rather than technical detail. This week, I came across a post about common grammatical mistakes. However what I liked about this post is that it wasn’t focusing on the silly details of grammar that don’t really apply particularly well to the conversational tone of the web. Instead it looked at errors such as when to use “me, myself or I” and the difference between “i.e. and e.g”.

If you ever have to write copy then spend a few minutes to check it out. It only covers the worse offenders so doesn’t take long to read.

A department dedicated to the web

Jeffrey Zeldman has written a post entitled “let there be web divisions“. If you are responsible for deciding who should manage your corporate website then you simply must read this. If you are a mere foot solider then it might not be as relevant but it is still a good read.

Basically Jeffrey proposes that a company website should not sit under IT or marketing (as is traditional) but should be a division in its own right. I am not going to repeat all of Zeldman’s logic, but I have to say I wholeheartedly agree with it.

Websites are simply too multi disciplined to sit comfortably under either department and too important to be caught in an endless tug-of-war.

Paul’s corner: Taking a brand online

About a week ago, I had to give a presentation to a board of directors ,explaining the process we went through to develop a new design for their website. A large proportion of that presentation focused on the issue of brand identity. This organisation had a very well developed style guide and we spent a lot of time and effort getting that guide to work online. My presentation talked about the various steps involved and it occurred to me this might make an interesting podcast section.

I have also put together a blog post on the subject of “taking a brand online” and it is this that I cover on the show.

Marcus’ bit: Information architecture review

I am currently in the process of carrying out an information architecture review for a new Headscape client. I have done a fair amount of IA work over the years but I have found myself particularly enjoying this one so I thought I’d waffle on about what I’ve been doing.

We have covered the various aspects of IA work in previous podcasts – Expert Review, Stakeholder Interviews, Card Sorting and Wire Frame testing. This section is looking at the first of these, expert review, in a bit more detail.

I think it’s worth explaining what I mean by Expert Review. When we carry out an Expert Review we are effectively analysing a client’s existing site content, site structure and naming conventions with a view to creating a new IA based on our experience of using and developing websites. This is a collaborative process with the client – it has to be; we can make logical, usability based decisions but cannot claim to be experts in the client’s particular field.

First things first

I make sure that I have a good grasp of a number of things prior to carrying out an IA review. At the kick off meeting make sure the following are covered:

Target audience – this is crucial for the development of the IA. It may be that the existing site caters for one group well but another poorly.
Site aims – is there a stepped process that the client wants their users to go through.
Design – things like horizontal over vertical navigation can affect the IA.
Homepage requirements – find out what the killer apps and content are as these will need to be linked to from the homepage.
Finally, have a general discussion about content and site structure. See what the client thinks is important and what’s not.

Map out the existing site

The first thing I do is map out the existing site’s IA. This is a fairly slow and laborious task but it is the best way to not only learn about a site’s content and structure but also to understand what they do and what they offer.

Be logical, captain

Usually, the goal of this type of exercise is to streamline content into groups and name those groups so that users will understand what’s inside them.

Site’s that have grown organically over a period of time tend to spread content all over the place. It is usually fairly easy, though time consuming, to group content together. There are various methods for doing this; I tend to print out the existing site IA (that I usually create in Excel unless it’s a particularly small site, then I might use Visio) and scribble all over the printout until I’m getting somewhere. Some people like to use cloud/cluster diagrams (either on paper or using software) or there is always the age old method of creating ‘cards’ where each page name is written onto a scrap of paper. This is a bit like doing card sorting on your own where you group the cards into piles and give names to each pile.

Naming

We come from the ‘it does exactly what it says on the tin’ school of page/section naming. Marketing departments often don’t! A good example of this is the trend to verbs as section names over nouns. I remember one client wanting to call a site section ‘Enjoy’ when the section covered ‘Leisure Activities’. No prizes for guessing what we recommended!

Labels should be as descriptive as possible. Sometimes this can be difficult when:

there isn’t much space, for example, ‘How to register for our newsletter’ won’t fit on the average button, even ‘Newsletter Registration’ would probably be too much for a top level, so I would go for just ‘Newsletter’. It’s fairly obvious that the content underneath will relate to the organisation’s newsletter and should logically include registration, whereas ‘Register’ leaves the user asking ‘register for what?’
Sometimes sites are so big that main sections can include too much differing content to be labelled descriptively. In this case, I would recommend either shortcuts on the homepage replicating the main sections that include descriptive words or create drop down navigation that displays the lower level links.

Section ordering

This should follow some sort of desired path through the site. For example, the client may want users to get a bit of background, followed by an understanding of what the organisation offers, followed by some examples of previous work with a view to finally making contact. This would translate to:

About Us | Services | Case Studies | Contact Us

Conventions

Users don’t want to have to think (that sounds familiar!); they want to look and understand straight away. Following conventions helps with this process. For example, many sites include an About Us section as the first main section. This usually includes some history, annual reports, job vacancies and contact details. Users looking for this type of information don’t want to have guess that this information might be under, for example, ‘Company Background’ which is located at the far right of a horizontal navigation.

Collaborate – to a point

When you have created your first draft it then needs to be reviewed by the client, discussed and iterated until everyone is happy. Take on board any changes that are based on your lack of understanding of what the client does but be prepared to stand your ground on issues relating to web conventions and usability – after all, they’re paying for your expertise.

Ask an expert: Ian Lloyd on screen readers

On this week’s show we have Ian Lloyd giving us an introduction to the world of screen readers. I vividly remember the first time I heard a screen reader being used. I was gob-smacked by how painful an experience it was and I am still amazed that anybody manages to use them effectively.

It struck me that many of you listening to this show might not have heard a screen reader before. Hearing what blind people have to work with really makes you take their needs seriously and so I thought I would get Ian on the show to give you a taster.

In his segment, Ian takes us through some classic problems that screen reader users experience. Unfortunately to best understand what is going on in some of the examples you need to see what he is doing. In order to get around this problem Ian has made a screencast to accompany the audio. There was too much detail to make it available online or via your video pod but you can download the screen reader .mov file here.

What follows is a transcript of Ian’s section of the show…

Hello Paul, Hello Marcus and hello to listeners of Boagworld. This is the ‘Ask the Expert’ section and today I’m going to be talking about screen readers.

Now, I don’t actually qualify [meant to say classify!] myself as an expert screen reader user simply because I don;t use one on a day-to-day basis, because I’m not forced to; I do have good vision. As such, the way that I would use a screen reader would be different from someone who has to use it on a day-to-day basis. That said, I still think it’s useful to demonstrate to people what a screen reader sounds like. And the reason for this is that as far as I am aware on your podcast although you’ve talked about accessibility a lot and mentioned screen readers I don’t believe we’ve ever had a demonstration of what they actually are like for people when pages are built incorrectly.

So, today I’m going to be showing a few problems using a screen reader. I’m also going to be doing this as a video, so this is a screencast. I understand that at the end of this you will be providing a URL for listeners so that they can access this and view what’s happening on screen. Because of course it’s all well and good to listen to this stuff but to get the full context it would be good to actually see the video as well. I will try my best to describe what’s happening on screen throughout this podcast though.

Now the first example we’re going to look at is Amazon dot com. And somewhat cheekily I’ve brought up the page for my own book on Amazon. And, er, just having a look around at what I can find on the screen and there are some issues there. So, let’s have a look at this.

[Screen reader reads out page graphic correctly 'Build your own website the right way using HTML and CSS, Link graphic']

Oh, so that’s not too bad. I’ve just found an image there and it’s announced it correctly because it’s found a suitable alt attribute but underneath there are a couple of thumbnail images which, if I want to access those, it gives me a whole different … well, hear for yourself:

[Screen reader announces: 'See larger image, Link' then moves to next link, the thumbnail image and reads an unintelligible string of characters - numbers letters and underscores - out to the listener].

Mmm, doesn’t make an awful lot of sense does it? Let’s try the next image:

[Screen reader reads out more unintelligible characters and takes almost 8 seconds to read it out]

So, what’s happening there? Well, it’s quite simple: there’s no alt attribute defined for that image and so JAWS tries to fill in the gap and, er … oh I didn’t mention earlier that JAWS is the name of the screen reader that I’m using. So it tries to fill in the gaps because it doesn’t have an alt attribute it uses the file name instead and the filename, as is often the case on Amazon, is a right load of old gobbledegook! So it doesn’t give it any useful information about that image.

Here’s another example of the same thing.

[Screen reader reads out an image gallery as 'thumbs slash zero, thumbs slash one, thumbs slash two' etc]

So this is actually a photo gallery, erm, with a bunch of thumbnail images hence it’s reading ‘thumbs’ because that’s the folder where the thumbnail [image] is actually in and it’s reading them sequentially as well. It doesn’t sound quite as painful as the Amazon example but it still doesn’t tell you any useful information about the images on the page.

[Screen reader announces more examples from the same page]

So let’s listen to a slightly improved version of that:

[Screen reader announces the same images but with appropriate alt attributes, e.g. 'The Mystery Machine, driven by Scooby' for a photo of a camper van that is painted like the Mystery Machine from the cartoon Scooby Doo]

If we were to look at that on the video I’m showing that page with the style sheet disabled and the alt attributes displaying inline next to the image. As you could hear in the second example it was far more usable – you could actually understand what the image was about (as long as you understood some of the VW terminology used in there), whereas in the first example none of the images actually had alt attributes so it was just trying to read out the location of the file.

So let’s look at another example.

[Screen reader announces content of new page 'Page has no links' and then starts reading subsequent page content before I stop it]

What I’m looking at on screen is a page that seems to have a page full of links. But if you were listening carefully to the beginning of that, the screen reader thought otherwise. I’ll just try to find that again for you.

[I scrub back in the video clip to find the part where the screen reader says no links]

According to the screen reader the page doesn’t have any links. And the reason it thinks that is, well, there *aren’t* any links. What’s actually happening … is … we have a whole bunch of text on the page that is styled using CSS and the behaviour for the link is added using JavaScript. So, we have a <span> element that has an onclick event, location.href=’somewhere.html’ and that’s [the span] wrapped around the text that says ‘This is a link – click me’. Um, but of course it’s not a link. The screen reader can’t find it because it’s not an <a href="">, it’s something else that’s been styled to look like a link and behave like a link. But it’s not. Thankfull that’s not too common but you have to just be aware that what may look great on screen for you may not be any use to someone using a screen reader. You have to use the right markup for the job.

So, you could have a page that’s full of links that say ‘click here’ but of course that’s another problem all in itself. Let’s have a listen to that:

[Screen reader reads 'Click here to view' repeatedly as I tab through the links on the page]

Yes, so … the problem there is that it doesn’t give you any information at all. And this is actually still quite common. In fact just yesterday I was looking at Facebook dot com (for my sins) and, er, I was quite shocked to find that they were using a lot of this where the link phrase was ‘click here’ as opposed to the phrase that you would really want to have, so for example instead of saying ‘click here for more information’ and having ‘click here’ as the link phrase you would have ‘for more information about our products’. That would be the link phrase. Erm, but if you just use ‘click here’ and you’ve got a whole page of links that reads ‘click here’ this is what you get:

[Screen reader once again reads 'Click here to view' repeatedly as I tab through the links on the page]

Basically, completely unusable.

Now the next example I have is of a form, and in this example, er, the form has been laid out using a table. Thankfully, these days, tables are being used less for layout and people are using CSS for page layouts. However, for forms it’s still not uncommon to see someone put a table in there. And, er …

[screen reader interrupts as page loads]

OK, so in this example what I’m looking at on screen is what appears to be, um, well … four text inputs, and then there is a radio button and it’s basically asking for some personal information, first name, surname, your age, place of birth and then a question ‘Do you have a nut alergy’, the answers being ‘no’, ‘yes’ or ‘don’t know’. So let’s see what the screen reader makes of this.

[screen reader says 'table with two columns and four rows'. I tab to the first input and it reads 'surname/family name - edit']

Already we’re hitting a problem. Because the first field that I tab to I can see on screen is *actually* [the one for the] the first name . But the screen reader believed that to be the surname.

So I’ve now tabbed to the second field which is the surname and it didn’t announce anything. So let’s tab to the next field:

[screen reader announces field as 'town/city - edit']

Again it’s getting it wrong. I’ve actually tabbed to the field that says ‘Age next birthday’

[tab to the next field, screen reader announces 'tab - edit']

And *now* I’m in the ‘town/city of birth’ field and it hasn’t told me anything.

[screen reader announces 'yes - radio button', then 'don't know', reading the radio button choices]

This is all a bit confusing here. OK, so it’s asking me the question ‘Do I have a nut allergy?’.

[I tab to the next field, screen reader announces 'Yes - radio button - unchecked']

OK, so … that thinks I’m at the yes radio button but I’m looking at it on screen and it says ‘no’. So, what’s going on here? Now this is going to be a difficult one to explain on the podcast; this is one of the sections where you really need to see the video. But what’s actually happening here is we’ve got a table to lay out the page and the text sits above the text input, so for example where we’re asking for first name, the text that says first name is in the first column and the input that relates to that is in a column underneath, sorry, I mean a table cell underneath it in the next table row. Now the reason this is causing a problem is because if you were to actually linearize that table, in other words look at it in the order of the source code you get a very different view of it. And this is what happens with the screen reader. So if I were to look at this form and read it out in a linear fashion, it goes like this:

First Name [text]
Surname [text]
Form input for First name
Form input for Surname
Age [text]
Town/City of birth [text]
Form input for Age
Form input for Town/City of birth

And so on. The problem is that the screen reader expects the text for that input to appear before that input, and because of the way this has been laid out it really really gets things confused. As I said, this is quite a difficult one to explain on the podcast but if you look at the video clip you’ll see why this is causing a problem.

[screen reader blurts a few things out as I try to manipulate it ... poorly]

Sorry about that, that didn’t add anything useful at all. Hopefully Paul can edit that out!

OK, so …. the big problem here is that you may be asking a question as we have here that says ‘Do you have a nut allergy?’ and the answers are ‘no’, ‘yes’ and ‘don’t know’. But if you do put the form elements in the wrong order you’re gonna have a problem. And the reason is obviously that with a nut allergy that could be a life or death situation. You could be filling out a form as a blind user and you select what you think is the ‘yes’ radio button but because the form has been poorly laid out and doesn’t have <label> elements that are actually helping to enforce the accessibility you may actually have been selecting the no checkbox [meant to say radio] and it really could be a life or death situation. It may *not* be as bad as that – it could end up with you booking the wrong hotel location or date. So you have to be very careful with the form layout.

OK, one final example. Now everyone’s talking about AJAX, it;s the buzzword of the moment. Unfortunately it’s also not very good for screen reader users. And the reason for this is that, er, anything that is updated on the page after page load is very very problematic to pass on to the screen readers. now the example I’m going to give here is a fairly simple one, and it’s the Google Suggest page. What Google Suggest does is let you type in your search phrase and as you type it’s calling back to the server, finding suggestions for you which it then populates in a list underneath the search input. So let’s have a listen to that.

[screen reader announces: 'google search - edit, type and text' then reads each letter of search term 'this is a test' as I type]

So I’ve just typed ‘this is a test’ and on screen underneath that is a whole bunch of suggestions that it has found. But if I try and actually access any of those using the keyboard:

[screen reader announces 'Google search - edit, Google search - edit, Google search - edit, Google search - edit' with each keypress on the down arrow]

It’s actually doing nothing. On screen I can actually see that it’s going up and down the options but the screen reader, it’s getting nothing back at all, nothing useful at all.

[more screen reader confusion]

Well thankfully with Google Suggest this is something tat you can opt out of – you don’t have to use Google Suggest, it’s not enforced on you. But it’s a very simple example and it just goes to show that a very simple technique like this can be, basically, completely unusable for someone using a screen reader.

So, that was just a few examples. Hopefully you’ve had an indication of how a poorly built website or web page can affect a user. the bottom line is, keep listening to the podcast, keep doing things right, keep using good markup and, if you can, test your own web pages or web sites using a demo version of JAWS. It really does pay dividends to find out how this works – or doesn’t work. So, thank you very much, I hope this has been useful, and I look forward to the next podcast, Paul. Thanks guys.

No show next week

Unfortunately there will be no show next week as I am away speaking at the Institutional Web Management Workshop. However we will be back the week of the 23rd July.

Show 83: iphone bollocks

Posted in Classic shows on June 19, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul talks about the importance of undo, Marcus explains the benefits of stakeholder interviews and Struan Robertson highlights some legal deathtraps waiting for us online.

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News and events

Safari for Windows

Probably the most talked about story of the last week is the fact that Apple have released Safari for windows. To be honest I am a little surprised just how much has been written about this considering I don’t think the impact is going to be that significant. Will Safari cut into Internet Explorers market share? Probably not. Will it undermine the market share Firefox has developed? Almost certainly.

If safari under windows rendered exactly the same as under OSX then there maybe some benefit to windows based web developers. At the moment it is impossible for them to test on Safari without buying a mac. This has the potential of changing that. However, in all likelihood differences will emerge and if they do then this is just another browser that we have to test against.

We will see.

Applications for the iphone

At the same time Steve Jobs announced Safari for windows he also talked about the iphone. The biggest criticism of the iphone to date has been the fact that it is locked down so third parties cannot develop applications for it. Apparently Apple have been thinking long and hard about the problem and have come up with a solution. They are going to allow developers to build web 2.0 applications that can be accessed by iphone users using the built in Safari browser.

What a load of bollocks. They are telling us something we already knew. As soon as Steve Jobs announced that the iphone carried a full safari browser we knew that web applications would be developed for it. Sure, they are now saying that methods are going to be provided to automatically access iphone features such as dialing and google maps but very little detail was given. As far as I can see Apple is not giving people anything more than they already had.

Jason at 37 Signals is excited about what this means for web apps. He says…

This is the coming out party for web apps. We are very excited about this. These are exciting times.

…and he is right. It is exciting for us web developers. However, I am not convinced the user will see it that way. David Shea mirrored my own reaction at this news when he simply posted a graph showing the astronomical cost of data calls on mobile carriers. Web applications are great for web designers but for users of mobile devices like the iphone they could quickly be prohibitively expensive.

Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work

I found a great article on Think Vitamin this week that talks about design trends on the web. One of the things you learn early on as a designer is that despite your desire to produce something completely original you never will. Everything has been done before and in this article Larissa Meek takes us through 7 styles of design that appear again and again on the web.

The article very much reminded me of design meltdown, an excellent site that showcases different approaches to design. However, what I particularly liked about this post is that the author showed examples of how these styles occur in art as well as online. This is nice because it encourages us as web designers to look beyond the web for inspiration, a subject I have spoken about before.

CSS frameworks

The final story caught my eye because it is an extension of something we have been doing for a while. A while back I talked on the show about the fact that Headscape work with standard XHTML templates. We use these templates as a starting point for development. They allow you to jump start the build process as well as ensure consist naming conventions across the entire design team.

In a new post on the List Apart website Jeff Croft proposes a similar approach for CSS, based on the concept of Frameworks. Jeff argues that certain aspects of CSS development are often repeated across multiple projects. From browser reset styles to creating horizontal menus and standard grid layouts, it seems absurd that we generate these from scratch each time. Jeff proposes that instead we create a series of CSS files that we can be reuse again.

Its a great idea and one definitely worth exploring if you work on lots of similar projects or are part of a large team where you are looking for consistency.

Agony uncle: The importance of undo

A couple of weeks back I received this email from Tom in Texas:

I am a designer currently working on developing a web 2.0 app. The developer is doing some really cool AJAX stuff but unfortunately most of it breaks the back button in the browser. He is arguing that it doesn’t really matter as there are lots of other ways of going back. What is your opinion on the subject?

Once I had recovered from the naivety of the developers comment and finished counting slowly to 10, I started to think through the role of undo. In the end this very simple question from Tom evolved into a blog post on the importance of undo. It is this subject I am looking at in todays show.

Client corner: Stakeholder interviews

Got this question from Dusted.

I’m about to begin a project to help an organization evaluate its current web site and web site management. I’m also going to perform some research and planning to help them start developing a new web site.

The organization is quite complex with a lot of different departments – marketing/events, sales, information/press, youth and more. Each person responsible for each department will be interviewed and I need some advice about what questions to ask them.

Starting off with a few…

Describe your department’s needs of the web site.

What can be done in a better way?

The results of the interviews will be used when I present my evaluation (and research/planning) to the board.

Any advice, links to articles, books… help of any kind would be deeply appreciated.

We have done quite a lot of stakeholder interviews over the years so this question seemed like one I could help with.

Stakeholder interviews can often be confused with user interviews, as they can often happen during the same process. I tend to differentiate the 2 by calling them internal and external stakeholders. These groups will always require a very different set of questions.

This piece refers to internal stakeholders only; those people that:

Will be paying for the project!
Are content owners
- Some won’t know or want to be content owners – “that’s X’s job”
- Some will consider their content considerably more important than everyone elses – “there should be a tab called ‘Corporate Accountancy’ and a big ad on the homepage”!
Will be users e.g. sales

There are a number of good reasons for talking to stakeholders, as follows:

Politics

Most organisations involve some sort of tension between departments/stakeholders/teams/whatever. Giving representatives from each of these groups (make sure you don’t leave anyone out!) provides everyone with a voice. It ensures that everyone has said their piece and it’s down in writing. Ultimately, it gets buy in on the project from all parties thereby creating a better end product.

Education

This applies from both sides. The interviewer is looking to be educated regarding the various points and specialisms that the interviewee has (that’s the point of the interview!). However, the interviewer also has an opportunity to educate a whole raft of internal staff about the web. A good example would be why it’s not a good idea to name site sections after departmental structure. In fact, teaching users to think of their end users early in the interview will probably affect what they have to say.

Verification

Talking to internal stakeholders can often highlight the need to develop certain functionality/facilities/micro-sites/etc that web managers only thought might be useful. Interviews can also be used as a test bed for ideas as well as feedback.

Semi-structured

Following on form the last point, make a point of telling interviewees that they can go off track. The questions are useful as guides but don’t stop writing down what someone is saying if it doesn’t fit with the script.

So, finally on to some good questions to ask&#…;

Questions will, of course, vary depending on the organisation, end user requirements etc, but looking back through a number of scripts, these seem to crop up regularly:

What does your department do?
What are your ‘processes’?
Who is your client and what do they want?
How do you think the web can help you deliver?
What is your role?
What is the biggest pain about your job? What takes the most time?
Describe your Internet understanding/usage?
Describe your software understanding/usage?
Name applications that you are a confident user of.
Do you store any information in databases? What?
The current website – what’s good and bad about it, what’s bad about it?
Are you tasked with providing content for part of the website? If not, do you want to be?

Ask the expert: Struan Robertson on Legal Issues

Today’s guest expert on Boagworld is Struan Robertson a corporate lawyer who specializes in IT law. I first met him on the .net podcast and thought it would be great to get him on the show to give us a small taster of the kinds of legal issues encountered by web professionals. In the show he answers three questions on particular scenarios to give you a taster of the kind of issues that can arise. These include:

What are the dangers of working on websites for illegal companies
Some of the issues surrounding using images when you aren’t sure about the licensing
Storing private data

Although the particular scenarios are quite specific hopefully they communicate some underlying messages and encourage you to take your legal obligations seriously. If you are interested in learning more about the legal issues surrounding web design and IT in general then check out Outlaw.com where Struan provides a lot more advice. Also Struan writes a column in the .net magazine where he covers different legal issues each month.

Show 66: Beyond HTML

Posted in Classic shows on February 6, 2007 by Paul Boag

We have a bit of an audio and video theme to this week’s show with Ian Forrester talking about online video and Paul sharing some advice on creating a podcast. Marcus also continues his series on client contracts by looking at “the statement of work”.

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News and events

Mobile internet usage increasing

This week the BBC has reported that 15.9 million handsets in the UK accessed the web in December. This is an increase on over a million on the previous month. This further underlines the fact that the mobile web is going to be the big growth area in 2007.

Headscape recruiting

Headscape is expanding yet again. We are currently looking to recruit a .net developer and an experienced css/xhtml coder. If you are interested in either position send an email to [email protected].

Great British Booze Up

If you are attending SXSW this year then come along to the Great British Booze Up. ClearLeft, Boagworld and @Media 2007 are taking over a “British themed pub” (yeah right!) to bring you an evening of traditional British entertainment.

Enhance your page performance

There are two new articles on the Think Vitamin website this week. Unfortunately Chris Heilmann’s Article is far more interesting than my own. He looks at the issue of page performance, outlining some of the common problems and how to address them. He also has an interesting discussion on page performance verses best practice.

Some handy flash tips

Robert Nyman has obviously been struggling with Flash recently as he has posted two very useful tips on dealing with that pesky plugin ;) He shows you how to embed flash without invalidating your code as well as how to place an HTML element on top of a flash movie.

Client corner: The statement of work

This week Marcus takes a look at the statement of work, which is the cornerstone of the contract between client and developer. In particular he focuses on the various stages of the development cycle and what information needs to be covered in the contract. Elements covered include:

Kick off meetings – Who will attend, what documentation will be produced?
Information Architecture – Will there be expert reviews, stakeholder interviews or card sorting? What documentation will be provided, who will do the recruiting? What about wireframe testing?
Design concepts – How many concepts will be produced? How many different pages will be demonstrated? What happens if the client doesn’t like the design?
Template development – What types of pages will need designing and building? What additional style sheets are going to be produced (print, mobile, low vision)? Will the client sign off each template?

Ask the Expert: Ian Forrester on video formats

Ian Forrester from BBC backstage and the Geek Dinners joins us to talk about online video. He talks through the different formats available (quicktime, real player, windows media and flash) as well as the different delivery mechanisms (steaming, download and progressive download).

Producing a podcast

Probably the most common question I get asked is how I go about producing Boagworld. That is why in this week’s show we combine the review and agony uncle sections to talk about the whole area of podcasting.

I share some thoughts on creating the right format as well as reviewing a range of podcasting tools including:

What is a stakeholder interview?

Why stakeholder interviews are so valuable.

How to run a successful stakeholder interview.

The importance of your questions.

Allow tangents.

Ensure they are one-to-one meetings.

Keep things anonymous.

Balancing listening and speaking.

A powerful tool

An expert review

A heuristic review

A competitor analysis

An analytics review

Is it worth it?

Housekeeping: .net awards

News

The 7 deadly sins of blogging

UX Design – Myths and consistency

Typography – Stats, facts and sizing

Volume does not equal success

Feature: Hold stakeholder interviews now or pay later

Listeners feedback:

Specialise in being a generalist

Sites like Digg are not worth your time

Failing to consult is dangerous

One-to-one interviews put you in control

Interview a wide cross section of people

Allow your interviewee to shape the interview

Spend time now, or spend it later

1. Educate and inform

2. Hold stakeholder interviews

3. Avoid group committee meetings

4. Target your influencers

5. Use third party experts

6. Rely on evidence, not opinion

7. Focus on the user

8. Control the feedback

9. Ask why

10. Avoid confrontation

Conclusions

1. Always request speculative design up front

2. Don’t get hung up on end users

3. Rely on your gut instinct, not testing

4. Form a committee to provide feedback

5. Become obsessed with detail

6. Enforce corporate style guides to the letter

7. Fit as much on the homepage as possible

8. Ensure all content appears above the fold

9. You only need to test in Internet Explorer 6

10. SEO is more important than design

Conclusions

Information Architect

Graduate web developer

About Headscape

Respect!

Ten things we’ve learned at 37 Signals

10 Tips to Managing a Creative Environment

News and events

10 Absolute “Nos!” for Freelancers

Making the most of working with designers

How Open ID will change your site

Good practice when working with Tag Clouds

Marcus’ bit: Requirements capture

Existing site review

Stakeholder interviews

Work together

Create the document

Paul’s corner: Spending your training budget

Training course give away

Ask the expert: Roo Reynolds on virtual worlds

Question of the week

Paul’s personal news

News and events

Building for the iphone

@media podcast

Common mistakes in web copy

A department dedicated to the web

Paul’s corner: Taking a brand online

Marcus’ bit: Information architecture review

First things first

Ten things we’ve learned at 37
Signals

10 Tips to Managing a Creative
Environment