146. Obsessive

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

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

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Housekeeping

Two pieces of housekeeping before we begin:

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

News and events

24 Ways is back

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

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

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

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

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

iPhone designers kit

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

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

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

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

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

5 Ways to Get Usability Testing on the Cheap

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

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

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

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

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

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

Site search options

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

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

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

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

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

Interview: Nicholas Felton on ‘Designing Data’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas: That’s fantastic.

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Well I found the whole thing incredibly inspiring.

Nicholas: Thank you so much.

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

Nicholas: Thank you Paul. Thank you.

Paul: Good to talk to you.

Nicholas: OK, take care. Bye bye.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

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

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

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

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

The stickiness of community

Posted in Marketing on November 29, 2008 by Paul Boag

For many, the Holy Grail of a successful website is ‘stickiness’. How do I keep users coming back for more?

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

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

I have written about the importance of repeat users before. These are the people who develop brand loyalty, complete calls to action and regularly purchase. For example, according to data from WebSideStory Inc. repeat users are eight times more likely to make a purchase on an ecommerce site. Repeat users are the lifeblood of most website.

One of the best ways to keep users coming back is to foster a community. However, a thriving community provides a lot more benefits than repeat traffic. An online community can also:

Improve your offering
Change brand perception
Promotes your site
Reduce your costs

We have covered the benefits of community on the podcast before. However, that was back in 2006 so my thinking has moved on since then. I therefore hope you will forgive me if I clarify what I mean when I say ‘community can help your business’.

Improving your offering

A good community is not just about users speaking to one another through a forum or chat room. It is also a two way dialogue between you and your users. It is an opportunity for you to hear from your users and discover what they want from your website.

In an attempt refine their products or hone their marketing message, many organisations spend substantial figures on focus groups and customer survey. However a healthy community is constantly providing feedback on your offering. This gives a superior insight into how your product or service should develop at little or no cost.

However, listening to your users does not just improve your offering. It also improves their perception of you.

Changing brand perception

People like to be heard. They like to feel their opinion matters. Engaging with your users and really listening to what they have to say about your products and services is incredibly powerful. It is even more powerful when they see their suggestions acted upon.

Both Dell and Microsoft have significantly improved the way their brands are perceived by talking to customers and engaging the community around their products.

Often this involves nothing more than a speedy response and apologetic tone. However, openness and transparency with a community can also go a long way.

It is possible not only to undo a negative brand perception but also nurture a positive one. And once users feel positive about your brand they start to recommend it to others.

Promoting your site

An community that is enthusiastic about your site or products can be one of the most powerful promotion tools available. Sites like Digg.com have become popular largely because of their passionate community. Equally, Apple’s success is at least partly reliant on their obsessional ‘fans’ who constantly push and promote their products. Nothing is as valuable as personal recommendation.

If you include your users in the process of developing your site they feel invested in it. They feel the site is as much theirs as yours and so will promote it as their own.

A successful community will always be seeking to draw others in, so growing and promoting your site. This ‘evangelistic’ tendency in a community can also lead to substantial cost savings.

Reducing your costs

As I have already said, a passionate community can provide free advertising and save money in focus groups and product development.

However they can also save money in customer support. This is particularly true if your site provides customer support. Rather than users sending queries directly to you, they can post them in support forums and allow others in the community to answer their questions. These forums also become a repository of knowledge others can draw upon. This reduces the support burden (and therefore cost) on your organisation.

Finally, communities have a lower cost of sale. Because they are already enthusiastic contributors to your community, they are easier to reach. This is especially true for repeat ordering.

Hopefully that has convinced you of the benefits found in community and given you some ideas of how to keep users coming back for more.

145. Baby Jack

Posted in Classic shows on November 26, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show Paul looks at how to communicate better with your users. Marcus examines ways to improve your contracts and Ryan has a baby (not actually on the show).

Download this show.

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Watch the behind the scenes video

Housekeeping

Two pieces of housekeeping before we begin:

First, congratulations to Ryan Taylor our producer and Michelle on the birth of their first child. We want to send our love to them all and welcome Jack Taylor to the world!
Second, just a quick note to say we will be holding our live Christmas special on the 8th December at 2.30PM UK time. The show will be an open question and answer time so either send in your questions in advance or come along and join us in the chatroom. We will also be doing a feature on this years top Christmas gifts for geeks. You can vote for your suggestions over at UserVoice.

News and events

Google goes social

The biggest and most controversial story of the week is the addition of SearchWiki to Google search results.

SearchWiki is a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. You can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future.

However, most controversially you can also share some of these changes with other users. This has led to fears of spamming and negative commenting as users attempt to manipulate the results.

Personally, this feels like a storm in a tea cup. It is an interesting new feature but I really do not see it catching on in any significant way. Only the most extreme power users will bother using these features and the majority will never see the change.

For example, even if website owners do attempt to manipulate users by spamming notes or adding negative comments about competitors, the vast majority will never see these notes. Users have to actively choose to view other users notes from a tiny link in the footer.

I say let stupid website owners spam these comments. It will keep them busy doing something which ultimately will make no difference to the popularity of their site.

Where this could be useful is when I can identify friends who I trust. Being able to see their notes or reordering of results would be of interest to me. Until then, this is non-starter.

In browser web development tools

In last week’s show we listed your top web development applications. Interestingly several of those applications were browser addons such as the web developer toolbar and Firebug.

This week Smashing Magazine has reviewed 15 in-browser web development tools that offer a variety of debugging and coding features.

The list ranges from the web known like FireBug to the more obscure like Fangs (for showing how a screen reader might read a page) and ColorZilla (for quickly listing all the colors on a particular web page).

Other tools featured include:

YSlow – a Firefox extension that analyzes a Web page for front-end performance.
Fiddler – an Internet Explorer extension that analyzes and profiles a Web page’s HTTP traffic.
DebugBar – a debugging extension for the Internet Explorer.
Web Accessibility Toolbar – an extension for Internet Explorer and Opera that quickly evaluating and analyzing your Web content’s accessibility.

If you are regularly coding this list is a must read.

From tables to CSS and back again

Kevin Yank, the co-author of Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong has written an excellent article on Think Vitamin telling us it is time to build websites using tables.

Before you all start sending Kevin hate email I should point out he is referring to CSS tables.

Let’s face it, the worst thing about CSS is its support for column based layout. Sure, it does a great job at absolute position but floats just make no sense! As Kevin writes…

You couldn’t come up with a more convoluted way of expressing page layout if you tried!

Fortunately with the imminent arrival of IE8 all major browsers will soon support CSS tables. This means any group of elements can be made to display like rows and columns within a table. Suddenly designing layout in CSS is as easy as using HTML tables.

I know what you are thinking… ‘what about IE6 and 7?’ Kevin addresses this in his article. He suggests that because it is so easy to layout using CSS tables we will have the time to design in CSS tables for modern browsers and the fall back on floats for IE6 and 7. He goes on to suggest that perhaps it is worth simplifying your design slightly for these older browsers to further speed up the process. He believes (and I agree) that clients would agree to this if they understood the cost savings.

Overall, I think this is a very exciting transition and one that will help bring across those hold out ‘table based designers’.

Advice for long term success

Our final news story today is some advice from the founder of Amazon. Jeff Bezos has done an interview with the ‘US News and World Report’ on how to run a successful business. The advice he shares is something that applies to all of us whether we are running a website or building a freelance career.

From reading the article I took away three lessons…

Have a long term strategy – Whether in business or running a website, you need to look ahead. Too many of us are thinking about the short term. What feature should we implement next? Where is the next salary is going to come from? Jeff encourages us to look further and work towards long term and visionary objectives.
Do not be distracted – Jeff also encourages us not to be put off by others who do not ‘get’ your long term vision. Stick to your guns and keep going. It is easy to have your confidence knocked by the criticisms of others or problems you encounter along the way.
Take risks – I am a great believer in taking risks from time to time. A part of this is excepting failure. If you want to double the amount you succeed you must also double the number of times you fail. As Churchill once said Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

Sure, the interview is not about web design and is written by a guy who can afford to think long term, ignore others and take risks. However, it is still good advice and something we need to take on board both as web designers and website owners.

Feature: Successful communication

We put a lot of time and attention into the content on our sites, but what about our other communications? We send out newsletters, post blogs, participate in forums. All of these reflect on our brand and the way we are perceived.

In this week’s feature Paul examines how to improve our communications with users.

Listeners feedback:

Sign-off and payment

We have this question from an anonymous listener:

I have a designer’s contract in front of me and I am getting a ‘feeling’. The contract doesn’t discuss much in terms of scope; just really limits risk for the designer. Though I can understand the need, I raise an eyebrow to focusing more on ‘not getting burned’ than ‘providing a good design’ … so here is the big question. The designer wants 50% upfront and 50% on an arbitrary completion date or “prior to file relinquishment, or upload and/or assembly of website on clients web server.” My thought is I am not paying $X for a pdf mock-up … I am paying for a site redesign and would like to see it work live prior to getting signoff. (or payment) Inevitably, there is a trust issue; I believe we have both been burned in past client/ designer relationships and are treating each other cautiously. Is there an industry norm which could help the situation? My perspective is how it will look live, especially considering different browsers, am I off base as a client to see the design work live prior to payment?

Ok, so picking this apart from the top:

Firstly, having a contract is a good thing. Full stop. But, you don’t have to blindly agree to whatever is put in front of you. If you don’t like what you’re reading then amend and send it back. This may also mean that you want to get legal advice – I guess that depends on your confidence dealing with the legalese involved in most contract documentation.

Contracts should be made up of two parts:

the terms and conditions (the legal stuff) that should cover obligations, deliverables, rights, liability etc.
the Schedule that should be a detailed description of the project – tasks, timescales, price, payment terms etc. It should also include detail on what the testing process is, what browsers/operating systems etc.

Ideally risk should be limited for both parties. A good contract makes expectations clear for both sides and lays out what should happen if something goes wrong.

Regarding payment terms, it is perfectly normal for a contractor to ask for a percentage of the total cost up front. But, it doesn’t necessarily have to be half up front, half on completion. We often spread invoicing over 4 or 5 different points over a project. This is good for our clients as it is an incentive for us to reach certain milestones along the way. One question I have here is – does this particular designer want payment literally on commencement? We provide 30 days for our clients to pay bills, so even though we may invoice on commencement, we will be a month into the project before we receive payment.

Ok, more detail… the contractor wants final payment:

On an arbitrary completion date – you should not agree to this. Payment by a particular date is not acceptable as the work may not be completed and the delay may not be down to you.
Or “prior to file relinquishment” – this is not unheard of. Basically, they are saying ‘you pay us and you’ll get your stuff’. Which is fair enough as long as you (quite rightly point out) have witnessed the site operating correctly in a ‘live’ environment. I’ll come onto this shortly.
Or upload and/or assembly of website on clients web server – this is what you want I believe.

A ‘live’ environment doesn’t necessarily have to mean your web server. We test all our web development work on our own development server prior to making it live and we ask our clients to sign-off on this environment prior to pushing live. We do, however, rarely invoice until the site is live because there are possible issues with the live environment that we may not have envisaged. Particularly, hosting platforms often need to be able to support certain technologies – if they don’t, you have a problem. If the designer is providing the hosting then that is unlikely to be an issue. It also gives them an option of taking your site down if you don’t pay. That way, they can happily make the site live prior to sending you the final invoice. Do they offer hosting?

So, in conclusion, I would push for the final invoice to be on live and tested release of the website. I would also propose that payment is split into 3 points – on commencement, on design look and feel sign-off and finally, on live and tested release.

Successful communication

Posted in Site content on November 21, 2008 by Paul Boag

We put a lot of time and attention into the content on our sites, but what about our other communications?

We send out newsletters, post blogs, participate in forums. All of these reflect on our brand and the way we are perceived. How can we improve the way we communicate?

Good communication is dependent on two factors:

When you communicate
How you communicate

Get this wrong and you risk seriously damaging the relationship with your users.

When to communicate

The schedule of your communications are always important, whether posting to a blog or sending out a newsletter. Send too many communications and it becomes irritating, too few and they forget about you.

There is no frequency that is always right. To a large extent it depends on the nature of your site. If your site sends out stock market tips then users may expect updates every few minutes. However, if you sell a service that is purchased once every couple of years then sending out communications every few weeks will be enough to keep you in their minds.

The key is not so much frequency as regularity. Users should come to expect your communications. Communicating on an ad-hoc basis becomes frustrating, especially with blog posts, newsletters or podcasts.

However, communication does not have to be completely dictated by a schedule. You can also have trigger based communications. These are normally emails sent to a specific individual rather than the whole community. They are sent in response to a specific event rather than a schedule.

A common trigger based communication is an email sent to somebody who has just purchased from an ecommerce site. These typically include an email confirming the transaction but also one when the goods are dispatched. These emails are extremely important and yet are often overlooked in the development process.

Trigger based communication are also useful in encouraging repeat traffic. Most website communities have a large number of ‘sleepers’. These are individuals who have signed up for your site but have stopped using it. It is possible to monitor user activity and if they stop using the service an email can be automatically sent tempting them back with incentives or new content.

However, never forget the golden rule of user communication; do not contact users without their permission. Nothing will damage your sites reputation faster and destroy your community than spam.

Take a few moments to consider your communication strategy. When might it be appropriate to send out trigger emails? Are you collecting user’s contact details and is it legitimate to contact them? What methods you are going to use to communicate and on what schedule?

Your communications with users needs the same attention you gave your sites copy. This includes not only when to communicate, but how.

How to communicate

There are lots of communication tools out there including blogs, podcasts, email and RSS. However, these are just technologies and don’t get to the heart of how to communicate. Communication is about what you say and how you say it.

Always remember when communicating with users to make it personal. Whether it is in a forum or posting to your blog, people like to talk to people not faceless corporations. Whenever possible write as ‘Jim from Marketing’ rather than as ‘Acme inc.’ People are less critical and more receptive when dealing with a individual rather than an organisation.

Although your aim is to demonstrate that your organisation is made up of ‘real people’, that does not mean you do not need no unifying voice.

Know your voice

The danger individual employees engaging with your users is that your organisation sends out mixed messages about its identity. All copy should have a consistent tone, from the content on your website to the emails you send existing customers.

At first reading this may seem contradictory. On one hand I demand a consistent identity and on the other I want users to see the people behind your organisation. However, this is actually an approach newspapers have been employing for years.

Most newspapers have regular columnists who readers come to recognise. However, each newspaper has an overall identity. For example in the U.K. tabloid newspaper "the Sun" has a very different persona to that of "the Times".

Deciding on your persona will underpin all communications with users. Ask the question – if your site was a person, what type of person would it be? Would it be a young hip teenager or a boring middle aged business man? These characteristics help define how you communicate and the tone you set for your site.

However, whatever persona you create it should always be as open and transparent.

Be open and honest

Many organisations feel they need to maintain a flawless facade with users. This serves to create a barrier, reinforcing the feeling that the user is dealing with a faceless corporation.

A better approach is to be honest and fallible. Nothing is more effective in getting users trust than admitting when you get it wrong. Take for example photo sharing site Flickr.com. Their site suffered a series of outages in which users were unable to access their photos. Unsurprisingly the mood in the flickr community was pretty negative. However, flickr was able to turn that negativity around with a simple blog post entitled "Sometimes we suck". They acknowledged the problem, apologised and promised to do better. They did exactly that and before long flickr was seen as a shinning example of how an organisation should run a community.

In fact it is possible to turn a critical user into an evangelist for your site simply by responding in a timely and open manner. In a world where users can instantly broadcast their frustrations via blogs, social networks and other methods of online communication you cannot afford to ignore them. However, if you respond in a positive and open fashion those same users will be broadcasting their pleasure at your response.

This post is an edited extract from Paul’s book – The Website Owners Manual.

144. Scale

Posted in Classic shows on November 19, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show Paul talks to Joe Stump from Digg about scalable websites, we review the best apps for web designers and investigate services for sending bulk emails.

Podcast: Download (28.3MB)

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News and events

How much should you charge?

If you are starting your freelance career the number one question you will have is ‘how much should I charge?’ It is important and yet strangely it is not something you are taught at college. Perhaps they don’t teach it because it is a damn hard question to answer. It is certainly something we have avoided talking about on this show.

Fortunately an article entitled ‘Six things to consider when setting your freelance rate‘ has been released this week. Although the article does not give a magic number, it does provide 6 valuable insights that will inform your final decision. These include…

Young freelancers and recent grads almost always ask for too little.
You can do things your clients can’t.
Your rate influences your perceived value.
You don’t get to keep it all.
An hour worked is not an hour billed.
The higher you start, the less you’ll need to increase.

I couldn’t agree more with everything said in this article. However, the one that really resonated with me was ‘You do not get to keep it all.’ Your rate has not only got to cover your billable hours but the cost of sales and marketing, as well as your various overhead. The article has a link to a superb rates calculator that helps you work out your chargeable rate based on these various costs. Definitely worth checking out.

A plethora of accessibility posts

With the implement arrival of WCAG 2.0. we are seeing a resurgence of interest in accessibility. This has led to a plethora of accessibility posts over the last few weeks. These include…

Writing good ALT text – This is a simple post about the use of the ALT attribute. It suggests two rules of thumb when it comes to writing ALT text. First, if you were to describe the document to someone over the phone, would you mention the image or its content? If you would, the image probably needs an alternative text. Second, does the alternative text of any images in the document make sense if you turn off the display of images in your web browser? Simple advice, but well worth remembering.
Designing for Dyslexia – This is a series of 3 in depth articles that look at the subject of Dyslexia. It asks what Dyslexia is and how we as web designers can improve our sites to accommodate the needs of Dyslexia users. Its interesting stuff. Part 1 defines what Dyslexia is. Part 2 looks at some of the conflicting requirements with users who have visual impairments. Part 3 suggests some specific things you can do to improve the legibility of your designs.
Accessible forms using WCAG 2.0. – This extensive post aims to provide web developers and others with practical advice about the preparation of accessible HTML forms. It compares the WCAG 1.0 accessibility requirements relating to forms with those contained in WCAG 2.0. Important stuff but not a 5 minute read!
Too much accessibility – The RNIB explains how the LEGEND tag can cause more harm than good if not concise and relevant. The reason? LEGEND text isnâ€™t read at the start of the FIELDSET, it is read at the start of the label. It repeats at the beginning of every single text label in that FIELDSET.

A business case for deleting content

I find myself using the word ‘simplify’ a lot when I talk to clients these days. So many website owners are constantly wanting to add features or content to their site. However, in reality we should be removing not adding to our already bloated websites. This is particularly true for large institutional websites. However it does also apply to smaller sites.

Take for example the Headscape website. When we started the redesign process for our site, I sat down and really thought through what information prospective clients wanted. The answer was very little. In the end our large text heavy website was reduced to a single page. That is the power of simplicity.

Gerrry McGovern summed it up perfectly this week in his post entitled the ‘Business case for deleting content‘. He wrote:

The more you delete, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you increase the chances of your customers succeeding on your website.

We may think that we cannot delete content because ‘somebody might want it’ or because we believe ‘it will help our search engine ranking’. However, bloated sites bring complexity and with complexity comes confusion. The more content on your site, the less chance a user will be able to find the content they need.

12 principles for keeping your code clean

We finish today with a great post for those who need help with their HTML code. Whether you are a student learning HTML or a designer who is more comfortable in Photoshop than Coda, this is a very useful article.

The post provides 12 excellent tips for keeping your code clean. These include…

Use a strict doctype
Set your character set and encode those characters
Indent your code
Keep your CSS and JavaScript external
Nest your tags properly
Eliminate unnecessary divs
Use better naming conventions
Leave typography to the CSS
Add a class/ID to your BODY tag
Validate
Order your code logically
Just do what you can!

The article explores each of these points in depth and communicates clearly current best practice in coding HTML. Well worth the read even if only as a reminder.

Interview: Joe Stump on Building a Scalable Site

Paul: Ok, so joining me today is Joe Stump from Digg. Good to have you on the show Joe.

Joe: Oh, good to be here.

Paul: Have we had you on the show before?

Joe: Ah, not that I’m aware of.

Paul: Oh, wow, well we need to rectify that then. It’s good to have you on. Well, I have to say, this interview was arranged by Ryan, who is our producer. And he’s a developer, and I’m a designer. And he suggested we got you on the show, not that I wouldn’t like you on the show, obviously. That we got you on the show, obviously about scaling websites. Now, I’m going to be out of my depth very quickly here, so you’re going to have to be very gentle with me Joe.

Joe: Sure

Paul: So, in fact, it was so bad, that as I sat down to write questions I thought: "I don’t know what I’m doing here" , so I went and talked to some of the developers at headscape, and I asked some of the Boagworld listeners, and so we’ve got a little selection of questions for you, that, hopefully we can learn a little bit about how you go about doing things at Digg. Lets start off, what’s your job title, what is it that you do at Digg?

Joe: Ah, I have a really fancy job title that doesn’t mean a lot of anything, but ah, my official job title is "Lead Architect" and um, I think what best describes it, is that I manage the technical implementation on the code side.

Paul: OK

Joe: So, Digg’s broken up into a lot of different arenas on the tech side, we’ve got, R&D, which is headed up by Anton Cast, we’ve got operations, which is headed up by Scott Baker, and then under that are the people that I work with, ah, probably most closely in implementing solutions for Digg. Ron Gorodetzky is our lead systems engineer, Tim Ellis, also known as timeless, is our chief DB wonk, and then, Mike Newton is our lead network guy. So I think us four kind of steer the technical implementation along. The managers, ah, the manage, and handle the strategy and partners, and stuff like that.

Paul: You managed to say the word manager with real distain.

Joe: Oh, no actually, I have a great manager, John Quinn, he’s our VP of engineering, he’s by far the best direct manager I’ve probably ever worked with. Yeah, he’s really good.

Paul: OK, well lets go back in time a little bit. And start by, well, when was the point when you realized, that you were going to start having scaling issues with Digg? When did you start thinking about the whole subject of scaling?

Joe: Um, well Digg was pretty big when I came on board, so Digg was about 10 – 12 million uniques when I joined on.

Paul: Wow.

Joe: And I think we’d just cleared 35 million last month. So scaling was obviously an issue, but the big difference is that, I think sites generally go through a few different levels of scaling, where like the first one’s like, "I’m just going to throw it on a virtual server, or an Amazon server, you know, you’re basically just seeing if things are going to just "stick to the wall", and then they do. Ah, so the first thing you normally do is start breaking services off onto separate boxes. I want to put my DB on one box, my server on another box, and maybe memcached on each of them. And then you hit, read saturation on that one DB server, so then you go to the kinda next level of scaling. Which is where Digg was when I started, where you start dangling, a whole bunch of read slaves, off of your DB master, so, and for those who are not familiar with the master / slave terms, you send all your writes to one database server, and then that disseminates those writes to a whole bunch of slaves, and then you send all your read traffic to those slaves. So that’s where Digg was when I started. It’s write http traffic across a whole bunch of servers, its read traffic across a whole bunch of slaves, and then we have one master. And we’re now going through, what I think is the third phase, where you hit write saturation on your master, which is a bigger problem, because you then need to start sending some write traffic to some masters, and we’re actually going with a strategy that’s common with Facebook, and Flickr, and those kind of websites, where it’s called horizontal partitioning, where you put some of your records on one server, and the other records on another, so it’s like, you can say, for users, all users whose names start with A through J, would go on this database server, and K to Z live on this other database server. So we’re in the middle of implementing the first swipe at that. So we’ll be pretty aggressively into where everything will be federated and partitioned across a whole bunch of servers.

Paul: OK, one of the questions which kinda came up, which kinda relates to that, is, once you start spreading things across multiple servers, how do you handle things like user sessions, which have obviously got to be persistent.

Joe: Aha, so there are a couple of ways to handle that which, I’d say most people are handling it by.. There’s two ways, probably that you can do it easily. One of them, is if you have what they call "session affinity" on your load balancer, so the load balancer will say: "Oh, well this person, last time I had them here, they went to server A, so we’ll send it back to that server". So the session always lives on only one box. That’s one way to do it, we don’t do that here, we have a custom session handler in PHP which sorts the session in Memcache, and that allows you to.

Paul: Can you just clarify what memcache is, for idiots like me who don’t know.

Joe: Sure, memcache is a distributed caching system that’s actually, basically what it allows you to do, is expose a machines RAM over the network, and cache stuff into another machines RAM across the network.

Paul: Ah, OK

Joe: Yeah, it’s insanely fast, it was developed by Danga back in the day, and Brice Fitzpatrick, yeah so it’s heavily used by anyone whose scaling with LAMP, even a lot of people who aren’t. They all use memcached.

Paul: Wow

Joe: So, yeah, we store all of our session data in memcached, so PHP creates a unique session id, and we just stuff session data into that in memcached, and we can distribute that across, I don’t know, 50 or 60 memcached servers, and what not.

Paul: So how many servers do you guys have, it must be a staggering number by now.

Joe: Um, yeah, it’s kinda funny, every time I ask Ron that, he’s always like "Ah, I don’t know"

Paul: Laughs

Joe: Because we really can’t I mean, I couldn’t give you a specific number because on any given day, we’ll pull or push into production, a dozen servers, so, hundreds, there’s definitely hundreds in production. So.

Paul: I mean, with that many servers, so obviously you’re talking about taking servers on and offline, and all that kind of thing, I mean, making updates to the site, when Daniel comes up with some stupid idea, that you’ve got to apply to the site, of a new feature that he wants to apply on the site, and you’ve gone through the process of making it work. And you’ve then got to push it live.

Joe: Aha

Paul: How does that work? How do you go about pushing something like that live when there are so many servers involved.

Joe: So we have Ron Gorodetzky our lead systems engineer guy. So us developers have a bunch of M4 make files, that, when you check the code out, you run basically Make, Install, and it, for lack of a better word, it builds or compiles the website into a cohesive package, and then Ron pushes that to each server, I think he is still doing it by rsynch, but I know we are migrating over to Puppet, so it may happen via Puppet soon. The production side of things, is something that’s handled completely by operations, so I couldn’t tell you specifically how it happens, but generally, we make a tag of the website, and tell Ron, we need you to push "9.4.15" or something like that, and he does a checkout, builds it, and pushes it to all of the different servers.

Paul: So is that – do you actually have to take the site offline to do those updates? How do you minimize the downtime that’s involved with that.

Joe: Oh, well there’s a bunch of different ways. Um, we don’t bring the website down normally for pushes, it depends on the size and complexity of the push. But like, day to day pushes, we probably push I guess, a minimum of once a day, just little bug fixes and stuff like that. And those happen generally in the middle of the day, and nobody notices, it’s no big deal. Ah, the outages these days, are completely dependant on database activity, you know, like database fixes and stuff like that. And the ways that we’re getting around that these days, is using a different method of partitioning called vertical partitioning. Where, like for instance, like I think our comment Diggs table, of like, who’s dug a comment, up or down, that’s like 15 billion records in it.

Paul: Wow

Joe: that’s like, yeah, if you’re like to alter that table, you’d probably crash mysql, but if you were, it would probably take a week to alter it. So instead we probably create another table, where we have like comments, and then we have another one called comments_made_up, or something like comments_diggs, comments_diggs_beta, and that has a couple of extra fields in it. And so we’ll say, OK, we’re about to push the code, at the end. When we push the code, the first comment id that was added to the table was 15,000,000,001, so then you start at 15,000,000,000 and work my way back in the table. So we do some of that live as well. For the next push that we’re doing, we’re using a migration table, which will tell us how far along each record is, and which records we’ve actually migrated, and stuff like that. And then we’re going to use this package called "GearMan" which is a queuing system which we’ve had in production for a while. And we’re basically turning our servers into a giant BotNet, so we’ll back fill all those partitions quickly.

Paul: Wow, that kind of amount of data, it must create huge problems, even adding a new piece of functionality onto the site, to actually code it in a way that’s not going to have a momentous impact on the database. This must be something that’s always constantly on your mind I guess?

Joe: Yeah, I’ll tell you a really funny story that highlights that perfectly, we have these little green badges that are on the Digg button, and they indicate, that a friend of yours has dug that story. And when you hover it shows the last four friends to dig it or something. So that’s a pretty knurly query, against a very big table, and we’ve actually had to, what I would call "dial it down a bit", so that it only shows up on the stories that are 48 hours old, and it won’t show up if there are more than 500 diggs or something. So the features fairly usable, but it’s not like… Well before if someone went to the top of 365, it was basically crashing our servers. So we’ve been rewriting that, and we basically, the way that we’re rewriting it is: If you write something, we take that Digg and we drop it into each of your followers buckets. So we make a bucket for each story for each person. Any time one of their friends digs it, we drop that dig into their bucket, but the problem is, like Kevin Rose is followed by 40,000 people, so every time he digs something, I need to drop 40,000 things into 40,000 different buckets. And we did the math, and just to get that feature up and running in a vast sane manner, so that it will scale, so we can bring it back in full capacity so everyone can use it all the time. We need 1.25 GB of storage, and we need to be able to sustain 3000 writes per second in order to keep just that small feature online.

Paul: So that really kind of illustrates that a relatively small feature that someone comes up with, has massive ramifications from your point of view.

Joe: Yeah, this is something that has kind of been something that I always talk about. I mean even back when I was doing consulting, I’d kind of have clients come to me, and it would be: "Check out this awesome design", and I would be like "that designs awesome, but that little feature down there, that’s going to cost you know, $100,000 in servers, and 500 man hours. But it’s, like, well the designers think of sizes and shapes, and so Daniel always jokes around and says: "Well I can make it purple" if that will make it easier for you" you know, it’s like…

Paul: Laughs

Joe: Laughs – well that doesn’t make it easier!

Paul: Well, we’re going to get you and Daniel back on the show to talk about this whole design / developer relationships, so you can lace your side of it now, and get your side in first. Before he defends himself.

Joe: Sounds like a plan.

Paul: So are you at the point now where you’ve got an architecture that’s kind of infinitely scalable, or are you going to have to go back to the drawing board if Digg just goes even more, you know off the scale than it already is?

Joe: Yeah, well we’re actually at the drawing board right now.

Paul: Yeah?

Joe: Yeah, Ron, myself, and some of the other senior peeps, about 8 or 10 months ago, we started putting together… well we knew that we were going to start to have serious limitations, especially since we were going to be scaling internationally. You know there is a problem with latency. With you guys across the pond hitting the west coast and other things like that. So we want to be in multiple data centers. We want to be actively serving traffic from multiple data centers, so we’re are, well we need to horizontally partition, we need to make sure we can do that. And we need to live in two different data centers. We need to be able to survive one data center disappearing. So we spent basically a week in front of the white board, and we created this thing called IDDB, which is kind of an elastic storage engine, built on top of SQL, and memcachedb, that we’re going to be putting the first bits and pieces into production, probably over a month or so. And really, the whole partitioning thing isn’t the difficult thing to figure out. The difficult thing is basically spanning multiple data centers, and also we’ll have a couple hundred gigabytes of data, and I need to spray that across, you know, a couple dozen different servers, without bringing the site down. So we have a couple million – 3 or 4 million users, and I need to take all of their records, and all of their auxiliary records, here’s like your user record, and there’s also a bunch of cruft related to that. So I need to take all of that, and migrate it to different partitions. But I need to do that while the site’s still up and running, and I need to do that without breaking the site for you. So, that’s the more complex problem at this point.

Paul: I mean you talk about spreading across multiple data centers, and if one of those data centers goes down, the site does too, and whatever. How are you currently handling redundancy? How are you making sure the site stands up at the minute?

Joe: Right now, our only single point of failure at this point, is our actual data center, so if the data center falls off the planet, then we’ve got problems. But we’ve got a general architecture. We’ve got a couple of general balancers up front. And those two have, what we call a "heartbeat" between them, and if one of them falls off, the other instantly takes over traffic for it. And that balances traffic across, I couldn’t even tell you, dozens and dozens of web servers, and of course, the load balancer does help checks on those, so if any of those falls over, it will drop it out of the pool. Behind that, we have, I think, 4, I guess our masters are technically single points of failure, but we have multiple masters as well, and we have dozens of read slaves hanging off of them. I think right now it takes about 10 minutes to bring a new master into production if one fails. So, and then we have, to store our files, we have a thing called MogileFS, which is a distributed web dav storage engine of sorts, and we can loose multiple nodes on that, and not have any problem with that as well.

Paul: Yeah, so at the moment it’s a physical problem that you have, that if your data center gets hit by an earthquake or whatever, then you have problems. Please tell me it’s not in San Francisco?

Joe: It’s not in San Francisco.

Paul: Ha ha, yeah, you’re not actually going to say where it is are you?

Joe: No I can say we have one on the west coast, and we have one on the east coast.

Paul: Oh, well that’s at least something. Um, I mean so far we’ve concentrated a lot on scaling technology, but there’s kind of another side to this, as well, where you get something like Digg, that has grown incredibly rapidly, over a very short length of time, and that is, kind of scaling the team behind it. You know, I don’t know how many developers were working on Digg when you joined it, but there would certainly be a heck of a lot more now. And I’m quite interested in how you went about growing the team. And how you deal with that kind of rapid growth, and making sure everyone knows what they’re working on, and not overwriting others work, and all the complexity that goes along side of that. How have you dealt with that?

Joe: Sure, I guess, to put things into context a little bit, when I was hired, we had both Kurt Wilms and I, were both hired on the same day, and were respectively employees 18 and 19, and developers, I think there were 7 of us. So, now we’re at the low 20′s as far as developers, and we’re in the mid 80s, as far as total employees, and that’s been in a year and 9 months. So as far as scaling the teams go, some of the building blocks were well in place by the time I got here. Like, source repository, stuff like that. But I think the crucial things that we’ve done, since I’ve come on board, that were, we had some coding standards that were out there, but they weren’t really in force. And then we had, we didn’t really have any frameworks in place. I think one of the problems, you know, when Jay, our CEO, was asking, where do we find more senior developers, I told Jay, like that’s not the right question, the right question is like, how do we get the code, and how do we get the technology, in a position, where we don’t have to hire really senior people. So I think the keys to that are, we do have pretty strict coding standards, so we do enforce those rigorously, through continuous integeration environment, and code reviews. Every piece of code that gets pushed to production has to be reviewed. And that’s literally 4 or 5 coders, sitting in a room, going line by line through change sets, and stuff like that. And that sounds really time consuming, but without question, on every code review I’ve sat in on, we’ve found one show stopper bug. So, those have been crucial, in getting things put together. The other things we did as we grew, is we broke the team up into smaller teams, so we have a development team of 20 – 25 developers, but that’s broken up into teams of between 3 and 5 developers. This really helps in a couple of areas. 1, it enforces code ownership. So everybody has this problem. I code this, then I go and work on something completely different. And 6 months later I come back to this code and I’ve forgotten. I don’t remember any of that. Where as if you’re always working in the same area of the sites, not only do you remember a lot more, you’re a lot more familiar with that. But also, you feel a bit more of a sense of ownership over that. You’re not just this hired gun that’s come in and ploughs through this feature then moves on to something else. You have your own territory that you need to keep track of. You need to keep really nice and what-not. So we did that, and then we have a bunch of core frameworks, that we’ve built. We have a small application framework, we have an AJAX framework, and now, we have this data access layer that we’ve been building up called IDDB. So I think those are pretty crucial too. It’s difficult to find coders that are intimately aware of memcached, and race conditions that exist in memcached, and um, we have to be very selective about what fields we add indexes on in mySQL. We also have to be very selective about how we store that. Normalization flies totally out the window, if you’re a DBA guy. A lot of concepts, they are not bad developers, by any means, they do great AJAX work, they do great application level PHP work, but if you don’t have frameworks in place for them to not have to worry about the super-super complex stuff. It’s going to be really difficult to hire, and it’s going to be really difficult to, you know, get a lot of stuff running in parallel and stuff.

Paul: Wow.

Joe: Yeah, and then we also, another one of the things we’ve adopted, is the agile SCRUM. So we’re doing sprints, and we’re running those in parallel now across all the teams. So right now we have 4 major projects going on right now.

Paul: Ok. So you talk about a sense of ownership there, and the developers are split down into multiple certain areas. You know, does that not get boring, for the developer, having to work on the same bit of code long time, or do you rotate people?

Joe: Well, we don’t currently rotate people, the team structure’s been in place for about 4 or 5 months now. And you know, most of the work they get is fairly immediate, and we’re moving major projects like Facebook connect, so the "Tools and integration team", their doing facebook connect now, and after this, they will maybe work on a new version of the API and so on. It’s written out to wide swaths of the site, so that we have "Site Apps" which does like, all the different applications on the site. And then we have "Tools and Integration" where we have the external projection of Digg, then we have "Core Apps" which is like, search, R&D stuff like recommendation engine, and what not, and then we have "Core Infrastructure".

Paul: So it’s probably enough to be interesting?

Joe: Yeah, we have pretty broad teams, and also, when we put people on those teams, even if someone has an amazing core infrastructure background, but they say, look, like, one of our UI guys, used to be really heavy into core infrastructure stuff when he worked at Quest, and managed massive warehouses, but he says, like, "That’s not what gets me up in the morning any more". It’s like, "Javascript UI interfaces are". So we try to put people on the teams where, you know, where their passions lie. And that’s kind of another thing that people need to recognize. And that’s like, not all developers are driven by, or interested in the same things. We have some, what I would call "UI / Frontend" developers, where like, they could care less about PHP, but we have PHP guys who could care less about Javascript. So I think, recognizing strengths and weaknesses, and capitalizing on those, is pretty important too.

Paul: OK, one last question to finish off, and that is, well you know, the kind of things that you’ve been talking about are fascinating to hear, about the kind of challenges that you have to face with the size of Digg, and the amount of traffic you have to handle. But obviously a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, aren’t at that stage. They are not working on massive projects like that. So I’m really interested in what advice you would have, for those who are just beginning to suffer from scalability problems, and they feel that it’s coming, and it’s something they need to be paying attention to. But it’s not on the enormous scale that you have to deal with. What things can they do right now to prevent problems down the line?

Joe: Um, I think, the easiest things you can do, is you need to re-think the LAMP acronym, because that stack is actually no longer really that stack. I would take Linux, and I’d take Apache out of that stack, and it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re running on a Unix. And as far as Apache goes, Lighty and EngineX are much better at getting a lot more money out of your box, as far as scalability goes. The two areas, that I think people, they sound hard, but they are really easy. One of them is installing and using Memcached, and the other one is installing and using a queuing system of some sort. And I think, like, recently I went through this with a little side project, called "Please Dress Me" which AJ and Gary Benashack and I did.

Paul: Oh, yes yes.

Joe: And we had a very small virtual server at MediaTemple, that survived pretty crushing blows from TechCrunch, Digg, BoingBoing, with almost no load. And that was like, beforehand, memcached is so second nature to me at this point, that I was just like, "Oh, well I’m just going to cache everything in memcached", and it was literally just like this RAM spewing machine. It didn’t actually hit the database. Actually my sysadmin at MediaTemple was like "Something’s really weard, MySQL is only doing like 1 query a second, and you’re doing like 500 requests per second from BoingBoing. So I’m cached. Yeah memcached is just like, it takes literally 10 minutes to install, and probably another hour or two to implement.

Paul: Wow, that sounds excellent, that’s really good advice. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show, and I can’t wait to get you and Daniel fighting with one an other in the not too distant future. I’m hoping to get a good violent argument about designers and developers, just because I can.

Joe: Laughs.

Paul: I was a little bit disappointed when you guys sat down at Future of Web Design, were far too nice to one another, compared to the evening before, when you’d had a bit to drink, and you were talking in the restaurant. That’s the kind of conversation I want, that real vicious session.

Joe: OK, I’ll make sure that Daniel and I get liquored up before coming on then.

Paul: Yeah, that’s the answer. Ok, thank you so much Joe, that’s really good advice, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Joe: Thanks Paul, bye.

Thanks goes to Nathan O’Hanlon for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Top web designer applications

Often this section of the show consists of questions for myself and Marcus. However for a change, I thought we should ask the questions. Via the forum, the boagworld site and twitter I recently asked you to vote for your ‘favourite web designer application‘. The response was overwhelming and you can see the complete list of suggestions on UserVoice. However, here are the top 5…

Firebug – Firebug is a Firefox addon that puts a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. A less popular suggestion was the Web Inspector in Safari.
Web developer toolbar – The Web Developers toolbar is a Firefox addon that provides a variety of web development tools. You can disable CSS and Javascript, visually highlight elements, manage cookies and much more. A less popular alternative was the IE developers toolbar.
Adobe Photoshop – A professional image-editing and graphics creation software from Adobe. It provides a large library of effects, filters and layers. This is the grandfather of such applications and many (like myself) use it out of habit more than anything else. Less popular suggestions included Fireworks, Illustrator and Inkscape.
Coda – Coda is a one window development environment for the mac. It includes FTP, text editor, browser preview and even terminal window. A beautifully designed app it appeals to the more visual web designer. Simple, easy to use and elegant.
TextMate – TextMate is a powerful text editor for the mac with an extensive plug-in architecture. From its code highlighting in near endless languages to support for numerous version control systems, TextMate is probably the most powerful text editor out there.

If you disagree with the Boagworld Listeners top five or want to see the other entries then head on over to UserVoice and vote for yourself.

Sending out bulk emails

My second listener contribution comes from the forum. It is a question from Richard about sending bulk email.

Richard writes: I need to send out bulk emails to approx 200k registered (opted in) users on a monthly basis.

Does anyone have any recommendations for an outsourced bulk email provider?

As with the previous contribution I want to focus on your responses rather than my own. This is what the Boagworld community had to say…

Jamie was the first of a number of people to recommend Campaign Monitor. Judging by the feedback from the forum they offer an excellent service but are expensive when compared to others.

As well as recommending Campaign Monitor Nick mentions Silverpop, which he described as ‘an enterprise affair’. Apparently it is not as polished as campaign monitor but considerably more powerful.

Phil recommended two more, Mail Chimp and Mad Mini. He hasn’t used them personally but the prices look good and he says the user interfaces appear polished.

Doug doesn’t recommend a specific service but does refer Richard to a post on Creative Tips which provides a comprehensive review of Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, AWeber, and Constant Contact.

If you have suggestions for Richard or would just like to share your experiences of using bulk email services then contribute to the thread in the boagworld forum.

A partnership of cooperation

Posted in Web strategy on November 7, 2008 by Paul Boag

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

I am horrified by some of the stories I hear from clients and web designers about failed web projects. In most cases the problem has been not with the project itself, but with the relationship between client and supplier.

Although we are learning at Headscape, we have discovered three principles that will help both designers and clients work better together. To run a successful web project you need:

Mutual respect
A defined relationship
A positive attitude

By building these characteristics into your relationships there is a much greater chance of success. Let us look at how.

Learn mutual respect

It is disturbing to hear how some web designers refer to their clients. There is an underlying feeling that clients are stupid and just hamper the development process.

In reality clients are normally a key component and extremely knowledgeable. The client usually has a better understanding of their business objectives and target audience. They know what they want to achieve through the website and will have to work with it over the long term.

The client is the sites advocate, evangelist, defender, content provider and more. He is the driving force behind the site and deserves the designers respect.

However respect is a two way street, and clients often undervalue web designers. This is especially true in in-house teams although it also occurs when hiring external agencies.

Clients often reduce the role of the web designer to a pixel pusher. They micro manage designers effectively ignoring the extensive experience the vast majority bring to the table. Everybody has an opinion about design, but good design is not about personal opinion. It is about fundamental rules of layout, typography, colour theory and more. It is the designer who has expertise in these areas, and the client needs to respect this.

This lack of respect is often because both parties misunderstand their respective roles.

Define the boundaries of the relationship

Both designer and client have expectations of their role and that of their opposite. However, these expectations often differ. For example, if a client has not worked on a web project before they are unlikely to be aware of their role. This can lead to the client straying onto the designers territory or failing to fulfil their own obligations in the eyes of the designer.

At the outset of a project define the boundaries of the relationship. The client’s role in particular needs to be clearly defined.

Clients should be focusing on three things:

The business objectives – The client understands the business objectives associated with the website. Therefore, they should be constantly asking whether the design fulfils these objectives and if not explaining to the designer where they believe it falls down.
The needs of users – A good client should have an insight into the behaviour and character of their target audience. The client should assess designs not based on personal opinion, but within the context of the target audience. They should ask how users will react to a design, not what you think of it personally.
Problems and not solutions – Many clients endeavour to find solutions to perceived problems rather than communicating the problem to the designer. For example, a client should not suggest that a design is changed to a specific colour. Instead they should express concern that the target audience may not respond well to a particular colour. The designer can then decide on the best way to resolve the problem. If the client does not communicate the underlying problem, but merely suggests a solution, he is straying onto the designers territory. This prevents the designer from doing his job properly.

Of course, it is not just what you say but the way you say thing.

Build a positive attitude

Interestingly that both designers and clients perceive the other as a barrier. Designers believe that projects would run smoother without the objections of clients. Client perceive designers as negative and constantly undermining their ideas and suggestions.

Personally I rarely say ‘no’ to a client. Saying ‘no’ ends the discussion and leads to confrontation. It also fails to communicate the problem or identify a way forward.

Does this mean I do everything my clients ask? Not at all. Instead I provide them with enough information to realise that their suggestion may not be the wisest decision. In short I say ‘yes we could do that’, but then go on to explain the consequences of their suggestion.

However, you should not stop there. Also ask the question ‘why’. The other party may make a suggestion that seems ridiculous, but they will have had their reasons. You need to know what those reasons are. By understanding them you maybe able to provide an alternative that keeps everybody happy.

Maintaining a good working relationship between client and designer is not an exact science. However these approaches have gone a long way to improving the way we work with clients. Hopefully they can do the same for you.

142. Community

Posted in Classic shows on November 5, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show Ryan and Stanton cover the news in Paul’s absence, we’re joined by Mark Boulton to discuss design by community and Marcus reminds us to keep positive.

Download this show.

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News and events

Typeface.js

There are many solutions to insert custom fonts into your designs, whether it’s the good old CSS image replacement techniques, SiFR or FLiR, we’re really just biding our time until font-embedding through the @font-face rule becomes widely supported in the browsers (we’ve covered font-embedding before in show 129) But for now, there’s another technique on the block called typeface.js which uses browsers’ vector drawing capabilities to draw text in HTML documents.

Browsers have, for a while, supported vector drawing – Firefox, Safari and Opera support the canvas element was well as SVG, and IE supports VML. The Typeface.js project uses this vector capability to ‘draw’ the fonts within your webpage.

There are a couple of caveats, while the ‘drawn’ text is selectable, it’s not highlighted (though this should be remedied in future versions) and the fonts have to be converted first through a tool available on their website. But this might be a nice little fallback if the users browser doesn’t support @font-face.

Sell Your Web App

In our next news item Ryan Carson, owner of Carsonified, has this week published a blog entitled “Sell Your Web App: Lessons I Learned From Selling Dropsend” and as you would expect from that title he shares his tips and mistakes when selling his app and it’s a very interesting read.

He talks about considerations like choosing the right merchant account, anticipating high lawyer and accountancy fees and off course being discreet, don’t blog about your sale!

He’s also prompted for people to leave their own tips in the comments so if you’ve sold a web app yourself head over to thinkvitamin.com and share your experiences as well.

Lessons learned while building an iPhone site.

Theres a nice article on the Flickr Blog which details some of the lessons they learned while building the popular iPhone version of the Flickr site. They go into detail of subjects such as “don’t use a javaScript library or CSS framework”, “Load page fragments instead of full pages”, “optimize everything” and making sure to tell the user what’s happening through visual indicators.

If you’re developing iPhone apps, or are even just thinking about it I’d recommend giving this article a read before you start work, it may save you a lot of time down the line.

Free Site Validator

Our final news item brings our attention to a service blogged about by Roger Johansson at 456bereastreet.com. Roger was looking for a way to validate his site without having to do every page individually and what he found was freesitevalidator.com.

The service automatically craws each page of your site and checks it for validation, as well as giving you a report of any broken/dead links. Also known as Link Rot!

The service looks really useful so be sure to check it out.

Interview: Mark Boulton on Design by Community

Paul: So as I said at the start of the show, joining me today is Mark Boulton. Good to have you on the show Mark.

Mark: Good to be here.

Paul: It’s nice to finally talk to you, we met up for the first time just a few days ago now.

Mark: Yeah, it was it was about a week ago.

Paul: It was great to do so. I talked about you a few weeks ago on the show as well when we were talking about a recent blog post that you wrote. But we will come on to that in just a minute. What we are going to talk about today with Mark is that he has done the unthinkable from a design point of view. Haven’t you really?

Mark: I have really yes.

Paul: You’re totally insane and so I wanted to pick you brain about why you have chosen to do the unthinkable. Before we get onto that, all of this resolves around some work your doing for Drupal. Tell us a little bit A) about what Drupal is and B) what you are doing.

Mark: Drupal is a Content Management Framework I guess, that allows people to build websites and its an open source project, it’s been going for quite a while now. I think seven years or so. The software is on version six now and it has a very large user base. Probably three hundred or so registered users.

Paul: Three hundred users?

Mark: Three hundred thousand!

Paul: Ah ok.

Mark: So it’s a pretty enormous project really, and with it being Open Source these are all very passionate developers. It’s quite a developer centric platform.

Paul: Ok.

Mark: The community, with it being open source the community contribute quite a lot to it, with modules and themes and that kind of thing, plugins. Our involvement in the project is redesigning drupal.org, which is kind of the home on the web of the framework, so you can go there and download and read documentation. But it’s also the home of the community, which is a pretty huge one. So it’s very exciting.

Paul: So tell us a little bit about the design process that you’re using, and this is what you blogged on and what kind of caught my attention and struck me as a ridiculous idea and what on earth were you thinking about?

Mark: Yeah, well I’ve been working with Lisa Raquelt who is a user experience researcher and kind of strategist. She started very early on in the process. She started blogging about it with the Drupal Association, who represent the Drupal community, who engaged us on the project. They are very happy with this being an open source project. They’re very happy with us to talk about it. Which is completely opposite to the way you normally work with a client.

Paul: Yeah, totally.

Mark: Normally you sign NDAs and it’s very closed doors. You don’t want to tell the competition, its the complete opposite, which is terrifying. Lisa started blogging about it and got really really great feedback from the community, really valuable feedback. Then I then started blogging about some of the design work we were doing. We are redesigning the wordmark and the branding currently. And I thought I may as well just jump in feet first here and see how this goes, which is totally contrary to the way I’ve been working in the past and the way your mind tells you you should work. You just shouldn’t openly talk about design because you’d think that it’s very subjective and everyone is going to have their own opinions, which is true. But we blogged about it a couple of weeks ago and it’s where my blog post on my own site, markboulton.co.uk, came about was I had a lot of people including yourself Paul. Who were saying I was insane, why are you doing this? And it’s this notion of design by community that’s very different to design by committee. Which is what a lot of people was telling me, "You can’t design by committee, it never works." Which is true, it never does.

Paul: So why do you think we are so hesitant as designers to talk openly? Is it fear of the subjective, is it that we don’t like people looking at our designs before they are finished? Why are we so hesitant do you think?

Mark: It’s a really interesting question that. I had an interesting conversation with an architect a couple of weeks ago about the exact same thing. A lot of architects don’t open up. A lot of designers, maybe product designers. An insight into the way somebody works and as designers we all work very differently and sometimes it’s a very private process. To expose that it’s almost like going out shopping with no clothes on. Suddenly you’re exposing the way that you work to everybody, to judge you, and people will judge you. It is a terrifying thought. I think part of it is also schooling. If you’ve done art at school, which most designers have done, most visual designers. You slave away on a piece of art and it’s not finished yet and it’s not finished and you don’t want anyone to look at it until it is finished, so I think there is an element of that as well. When I released two versions of the Drupal wordmark, for feedback they were very much just sketches. They were right in their first iteration. I would normally never do that but I thought let’s see what the community thinks.

Paul: So what happened when you released those two sketches?

Mark: It was carnage. Initially it was quite painful sometimes to listen to some of the comments to be honest. I think anybody takes their own work personally. If someone then attacks some of your own work with necessarily seeing any of the context and that kind of thing, then it can smart a little bit. But I’ve written my own blog for a while now and I’ve got reasonably thick skin, so it wasn’t that bad. What did come out through all of the comments were trends. Trends started to emerge. So from people’s subjective opinion, if enough people were having the same kind of subjective opinion, then that becomes less of an opinion and more of trend. And it was really those trends were looking to identify, that we could feed back into the development of the design.

Paul: It’s interesting there you talked about the fact the people who were seeing this stuff didn’t have the context. Did you not prepare the ground in any way? Did you not tell them why you took the approach you did? Or did you literally just put out the branding there and go, "What do you think?"

Mark: Yeah, there is a reasonably sticky situation with Drupal, particularly with the wordmark. They have a kind of logo at the moment, which is a kind of drop with a face on it. And that logo at the moment is under GPL so it can’t be trademarked which means the Drupal Association can not protect their own property, as it were, because this logo is under GPL. Which means that anybody can take it, change it, completely mess around with it. Which is fine, the community have been doing that for a long time now. So when I took on and blogged about this redesign of the wordmark, there was not the context, the business context, was perhaps lacking because I felt that I could not provide that business context. Because I was the designer and that should really come from someone else, and that was a little late in coming. Which is why the first blog post really didn’t go down too well, because I assumed the audience knew that this project was happening. As it turned out, it actually wasn’t. They didn’t know and it was all a bit of a mess, but it’s kind of smoothed over now, with later iterations and there’s been more blogging done by the Drupal Association. Which has provided the rationale for redesigning the branding.

Paul: Right, so there is a lesson to be learned there I guess of the importance of providing context and why stuff is happening and why you are taking the approach you are I guess.

Mark: Absolutely yeah, I think context is really important, especially for branding and logo design and that kind of thing. Just providing, and I was very aware of this when I blogged it. We all saw what happened with the London 2012 logo, when that is released very early without any context, it’s either misunderstood, or just hated or really liked. I’d rather have that kind of opinion anyway, than somebody kind of going, "Yeah, its alright."

Paul: You prefer to create a strong reaction.

Mark: Yeah, either positive or negative, because those are the reactions you can act upon. Anything in the middle is kind of gray, middle ground. That’s actually very very difficult to take on board and move forward with. So any kind of negative or positive reaction, you can take that on board, which we did. But the context for the Drupal logo is going to be the other stuff around it, which is the branding, the tone of voice, what is said on the page, the design, the other design elements around it, how it interacts with the existing kind of drop because they are still keeping that as a mascot. So it’s how all of that works together was perhaps lacking at this early stage. Which is why perhaps, going back to your initial question, designers don’t actually release very early on because the context isn’t there yet.

Paul: Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. When it came to the feedback, so you were obviously asking for feedback here, were you setting any kind of constraints on that feedback? From time to time I’ve talked on the subject about how to get design signoff and that kind of thing and one of the things that I always say is, "Don’t just say, ‘What do you think?’" but actually kind of try and guide the type of feedback you want and give a context to it, is that something you did?

Mark: Yeah. Not initially, which was why we had to.. The initial blog post didn’t really go down so well from an actionable sort of feedback point of view. Because I felt that a lot of the design questions I wanted answered. I think it was too early and I hold my hands up for that. I think it was too early in the process for me to blog about that. The second post that I put up I asked for specifics on whether or not the word mark needed a capital D or a lower case d and whether or not it needed, we were developing the idea of a secondary icon with it which is a splash and whether or not it needed the splash or not. We got some really great feedback because that focused people’s attention. That provided a really great selection of trends which have fed back into the next iteration. The first post was a bit of a free for all to be honest. Nothing really useful came out of it, which was a shame.

Paul: I mean you kind of, you talked about trends. Do you think that that is kind of, those trends that you see emerging, have the way that you have taken those on board has it been a kind of anecdotal trends or are you talking statistics here? Were you kind of marking down how many people you know said, "Yes, there should be an uppercase D." or whatever or are you just kind of taking on a feeling? Does that make sense?

Mark: Yeah. It was kind of taking on the feeling. More qualitative than quantitative at this point. However, for the cap D or lowercase d we could have just run a poll which in hindsight we should have done, is just had a tick box for each question as it were. However I’m always a little, I actually quite like a lot of the qualitative feedback because people were saying, "Yes cap D and splash," but then they go on to say something else. If we just reigned it into a simple poll then we would have lost all that really great, valuable feedback, because it’s that that provides context for their answer.

Paul: Yeah, I mean you won’t necessarily know why they’re saying a capital D.

Mark: Exactly, and there was enough of people saying the same kind of thing in those comments for it to be a pretty good trend for us to act upon. And it also throws out more heads about them on as it were. There was a lot of valuable comment from the Drupal community especially. And that we would have spent six months trying to research the ins and outs of that community, the history and the culture because there is an awful lot, you know. It’s been going seven years and there’s a lot of people in there. I would have been around â€˜til next year trying to fully understand that community if I hadn’t adopted this open way of working.

Paul: It’s quite interesting, isn’t it? I mean when they were coming back and you were seeing a trend emerging very definitely one way or the other over something, were you always going with that decision or were sometimes you saying "Well actually, although everybody’s saying we should go with a capital D or whatever, I’m not going to because of X, Y and Z."

Mark: Yes. I think there does have to be somebody who is willing to make a decision on something that needs to be decided upon. If fifty percent of people said, "I like a black website," and fifty percent of people say, "I like a white website," the compromise is that you end up with a gray website and nobody wants gray. So, what we’ve done especially with the cap D and lowercase d for example there was pretty much an overwhelming response to, "Yes it should be lowercase d," because it’s kind of more attractive aesthetically and all the rest of it. However we’ve chosen to go with uppercase D and that is because of business requirements and also because of the ties in with the documentation. We’ve revised the word mark now where the uppercase D is actually a lot better than the previous version. Perhaps when I posted initially the lowercase d and the uppercase D were not really on an equal footing design-wise. The uppercase D needed a lot of refinement and again perhaps that skewed the results, skewed the comments and so we’ve actually reversed the general trend there and said, "Actually no. We think we should go with the uppercase D for this reason and this reason," and that will continue throughout the whole process. We’ve got to remember, and it’s very important, that the Drupal Association hired us for our expertise and if we feel strongly about something then hopefully we’ll go ahead with that and we’ll push back on any feedback.

Paul: I mean it’s quite interesting. You talk about, "as we go through this process." So it sounds like you’re gonna keep going down this line, that you’re gonna, you know, as you create say, the website interface that you’ll expose that.

Mark: Yeah we are. If you have a look on groups.google.org and do a search for the redesign group in there we have set in a bunch of dates in the calendar for gathering community feedback. So we will be posting up a link on Thursday to the prototype we’re developing and we’ll be doing that for the next six to eight weeks. Every other week we’ll be posting a link up there to gather feedback throughout the weekend. So we’ll be posting it up on Thursday/Friday morning and then we’ll be kind of locking off comments on Monday and then all of those comments will hopefully try and establish some trends and feedback. That’ll then feed back into the next iteration. So we’ve pretty much set a precedent here and we’re gonna be designing in the open â€˜til the final curtain call, as it were.

Paul: Excellent! So how do you feel this differs from design by committee? Because from chatting to you when we met up whenever it was I got the distinct impression from you, you saw this as a very different kind of experience, but why, what makes it different?

Mark: Yeah, well I’ve been involved in design by committee quite a few times. I’m sure a lot of designers have and generally in those instances you’re in a boardroom or a meeting and there are several people, maybe twelve tops, and they all have very strong opinions. Generally, as I said in my blog post, there might be an alpha male in there or two sometimes. People can rally around the loudest voice, so all of a sudden that becomes the opinion. It can be a very, very difficult environment to work in because there are so few people, all with a very loud voice. Design by community is a different kettle of fish really because we’re designing for essentially 300,000 clients and the wider web community as well, we’re not just asking the Drupal community for feedback here, we’re also asking the wider web community for feedback. Anybody can get involved in this, it’s not just for the Drupal community. So anybody can. So if you feel like, talking to the listeners here, if anyone feels like weighting in with their comments, please do. Because it’s very important to us that the wider audience is reflected in this redesign and not just designing for the Drupal community. So it’s a very different process I think, because we’re kind of staffing back a little bit. We’re not in a meeting room with twelve people trying to come up with a solution. We’re putting stuff out there. We’re asking for comments from a lot of people who are thankfully providing comments, which is great. Really thoughtful feedback, then we can try and establish trends and then it’s those trends that we act upon. It becomes a little less subjective. That’s the idea anyway.

Paul: It’s the scale that turns it into trends rather than just an opinionated person I guess.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right. And you do have to, like I said initially, sometimes it’s difficult to read a bit of a flaming going on on your blog posts, you know, because there are quite a few people out there who will be very passionate about this project. They’re very passionate about Drupal because they’ve got a lot of time and money, a lot of people their livelihood is dependent upon this platform. So we have to really take that into account that this is serious for a lot of people. We’re not just redesigning a website here, we’re actually providing a platform for a community to do their work. So it’s pretty important stuff.

Paul: So, I mean do you think that this is a kind of a peculiar situation? You know, is the Drupal project unusual or would this be a kind of approach you would encourage for other designers working on other types of projects?

Mark: It’s a really interesting question. I mean I’ve worked waterfall methodologies in the past so you get your, you do your research, you do your initial designs, they get signed off and then you build your website, it’s very linear. And after working at the BBC for so long I realized that, because we worked very iteratively at the BBC that actually a more iterative approach was actually more valuable so to take that client-side approach, and the agile software development approach, to take that commercially with design is actually very difficult. But with the clients we are currently working with, that’s the way that we work. So we don’t work in a waterfall methodology, we work very iteratively upon fixed time scales. So we have a week per iteration for example. Now the feedback thing, the only difference really between Drupal and any other big project is the fact it’s open source and has a very, very big active community who are used to working in this way. I think that’s the critical thing is that they’re used to people putting software updates out early, feedback and they get changed and honed down until the final version is released but it’s just the way that they’re working so we have to kind of slot into that culture and it’s not a culture that design thrives in actually.

Paul: No, I can imagine.

Mark: No it’s a very difficult environment for design because, and it goes back again to one of your initial questions about wanting to sit there and craft a solution until it’s finished. Well that goes counter to the way that this open source culture works. They want to see stuff early. They want to feed back. They want their say. So as long as you kind of understand that and they’re not being grouchy or attacking you in any way they just want the very best for the project. So yeah, it’s worthwhile considering it as a working approach. Certainly the iterative approach is worthwhile considering for any project but the getting feedback early, if your audience is big enough then give it a go and see how it works. You know if you speak to me in six weeks time I may have a completely different conversation. This is really very much a work in progress and we’re just seeing how it’s going. It’s not been done as openly in the public before. I can’t really remember any projects from a design perspective that have been like this. It’s fairly unique. Which is really great, it’s exciting. So we’ll just see. We’ll see what happens.

Paul: Yeah, very interesting stuff Mark. Thank you very much for coming on the show.

Mark: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Paul: And we will wait with baited breath to see future blog posts as to how the experience goes to the bitter end.

Mark: Please do because I’ll be blogging about it pretty much constantly throughout the life of the project.

Paul: We’ll keep an eye on that. Thank you very much for your time and we’ll get you back on soon enough.

Mark: Great! Thanks Paul!

Paul: Bye bye.

Mark: Cheers. Bye.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich and Andy Kinsey for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Keeping Positive

Got this question from Bill (remember him?!)….

I have just found out that the potential new project I have put loads of work in to winning is not coming my way. I wrote an extensive proposal, did some unpaid mock-up work, attended a presentation and jumped through every hoop thrown my way.

I was told by the client that it was ‘very close’ but on this occasion I had not been successful. Gutted.

How do you guys at Headscape cope with these types of rejections?

To be honest, and this is from a lot of bitter experience, it’s hard and some are harder to take than others.

I do, however, have a few thoughts and pointers that may help. Firstly, you can help yourself by weeding out the enquiries that you will never win.

Are these people worth your time?

Check out the email address of the enquirer. If it’s gmail, hotmail, yahoo or similar then chances are your potential client is just looking for free consultancy from you. I.e. they have an idea and have no idea what’s entailed in making that idea happen. And they certainly will not pay you to research it.

Secondly, and I am only aware of this possibility in the UK, but you can check up on a company through the Companies House website. This tells you all sorts of useful information about how long they’ve been around, their liquidity etc. You may change your mind about responding to a tender sent from a dissolved company.

Talk money

There is nothing more frustrating than being told that you are ‘way out of the ballpark’ after putting hours, even days, of effort into a proposal.

Ask people, up front, what their budget is. Explain that you need to know it to respond with the most appropriate solution for them. An example I often use is usability testing. Everyone knows that testing, preferably many times throughout a project can only be a good thing. But that said, not doing any testing doesn’t automatically mean that your client will get an unusable turkey for a site.

If you don’t get anywhere by asking then create a 2 or 3 paragraph solution with associated tasks (a mini proposal I guess) and email that to the potential client with an associated ballpark price. If they still want you to deliver a ‘full’ proposal then, chances are, your ballpark is within their range.

Ask/listen

Ok, so assuming you think that responding to the proposal is a good use of your time, you now need to read their brief in detail noting questions you have along the way. You will make a number of assumptions about what is the correct solution for this client while you are reading.

You need to talk to the client to confirm their answers to your questions but you also need to listen to their responses to ensure that your assumptions are correct. It’s very easy to arrogantly assume that ‘you know best’ because you’ve been doing it for years.

This also applies to your written proposal. Don’t describe and price up what you think the client needs – go through every point in their brief and respond to it accordingly. If it is plain obvious that something they’re asking for makes no sense at all, then tackle it head on and explain why they shouldn’t be doing it.

Stick to your guns

We decided, quite a while back, and for very good reason, that we would not do any unpaid mock-up design work. In some cases this has been seen as a positive thing (once it has been explained) but with other potential projects I’m sure it has adversely affected our chances of winning the work. However, we should stick to what we believe is right. Chopping and changing presents a negative image to both potential clients and our staff.

If you do decide to present initial mock-up ideas don’t be tempted into iterating them further. Any client who asks for is again asking for free work and is most definitely to be avoided.

Be gracious

Sometimes you just have to accept that you’re not the right fit with certain companies – even if the initial phone call or meeting went really well. It may well be that someone else delivers just the thing that really swings it for the client – sometime you just don’t know what that is.

If you do lose then you need to accept that you win some, you lose some. It often happens that these things happen in streaks which can be very frustrating. We found ourselves turning away superb opportunities earlier this year simply because we were too busy.

But always try to bring a positive attitude to any rejection because it is possible that these people will contact you again for further work (though beware that you are simply making up numbers!) or they may recommend you to others. They won’t do either if you react badly to the rejection!

141. Feedback

Posted in Classic shows on October 29, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show, Paul Annett joins us to discuss how he pushes the boundaries of CSS and we look at how to improve your website through user feedback.

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News and events

Working from home

I suspect the vast majority of people listening to this podcast spend at least some of their time working from home. In today’s world, doing the type of work we do, there is no reason not to.

However, home working is not the utopia some believe. It has its own challenges and problems. For me it is a constant sense of guilt that I am not pulling my weight in the business. For others it is a lack of motivation or fighting the distraction of housework and family.

With some many of us struggling with the relatively new environment of home working it is great to see people sharing their experiences in a new A List Apart article (Working from home: Readers respond).

This article has some great advice and although it contradicts itself in parts (different people deal with home working in different ways) it is full of ideas that I either already implement or will be soon.

While I am talking about A List Apart I want to quickly mention "Progressive Enhancement with CSS". This is a follow up article to "Understanding Progressive Enhancement" an article we mentioned in an earlier show. It is a great article that explains one possible technique for ensuring your CSS squeezes the best out of as many browsers as possible. If you have a chance, give it a read.

Everything you know about CSS is wrong

Talking about CSS, yet another book on the subject has been released this week. However, this one is different. Written by Rachel Andrews and Kevin Yank, "Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong" is aimed at web designers who already know CSS well. The emphasis is on emerging techniques and future CSS support.

I haven’t read this book yet (although I do have it on order), but it looks very exciting. It has been a while since I have got to experiment with CSS and so this will hopefully point me in the right direction.

It tackles subjects like Internet Explorer 8, CSS tables and CSS3. These are all topical subjects and so the book appears to have a lot of potential.

I will review the book once I have read it and we intend to get Kevin on the show to talk about some of the techniques.

Reduce your business costs with free stuff

With the economy in tatters and a general sense of impending doom, we are beginning to see posts on how to cut cost and tighten belts. One such article is "Reduce Your Business Costs With Free Stuff" on the Think Vitamin website.

The article is a mixture of ideas on how to save money in your business. Some will save you thousands and apply only to larger companies, while others save only a few pounds a month. However whatever type of business you run, from a humble part time freelancer to a multi-national design agency, there is something in here for you.

Ideas include:

Cutting costs on your phone system without reverting to VoIP
Subletting office space
Open source versions of basecamp, Microsoft office, campfire and much more
Moving email and hosting in house

Although I think some of the suggestions are somewhat short term (Managing email internally would quickly become an expensive headache) I generally agree with most of what is suggested.

If you are beginning to feel the squeeze then this one is worth the read.

HTML Email: What mail clients are people using?

Finally this week there has been an interesting evolution in our understanding of HTML email clients. This has been nicely summarised by Alex Walker on the Sitepoint blog. He writes:

There are lots of reasons for hating HTML Email, but perhaps no#1 on most people’s hit list is having to produce HTML Email to deliver to potentially hundreds of different mail clients and configurations.

Now, clearly it’s completely impractical to test your work on hundreds of mail rigs, but the question is, where do you draw the line? Generic browser usage statistics are reasonably common, but mail clients stats?

In the past you could confidently make up whatever numbers you liked on those question without fear of being caught out. But that may be changing.

Litmus, who produce an excellent web-based browser and email testing suite are now publishing email client usage statistics from their new Fingerprint email analysis system. It makes very interesting reading.

Alex goes on to summarise the key findings which include:

60% of people use web based clients
Just over 80% of the HTML email market is dominated by Outlook, Hotmail and Yahoo!
Business still generally stick with Outlook although they seem reluctant to upgrade to 2007

Interesting stuff.

Interview: Paul Annett on Pushing the Boundaries of CSS

Paul Boag: Joining me today is Paul Annett from clear:left, good to have you on the show Paul.

Paul Annett: Thank you very much. Nice of you to have me here.

Paul Boag: So Paul is, with a few others from his company, the people who really make clear:left happen, rather than Andy and Jeremy and Rich, which we know, well Richard does work, but Andy and Jeremy certainly don’t do anything do they?

Paul Annett: Well, you know, they fly around the world a bit you know?

Paul Boag: Yeah that counts. I guess..

Paul Annett: No, we all chip in, obviously. Everyone does their fair share, so we say.

Paul Boag: Very diplomatic of you. I feel like I can insult them over this as I do the equivalent of no work in my role as well.

Paul Annett: I was going to say… Well there’s eight of us at clear:left, yeah we all just chip in. We’re all caught making the tea, that sort of stuff.

Paul Boag: Cool. Well tell us about your role. What is it you do at clear:left?

Paul Annett: Well, I’m a user experience designer. So that means, well it’s more than just making a web site look pretty, which were are accused of sometimes in the trade; to make sure that the sites are easy to use, as well as a pleasure to use really. That’s something that’s often overlooked with some web site design companies, obviously none of your audience.

Paul Boag: Obviously not.

Paul Annett: It’s a vital ingredient in the mix really. My job does overlap with some of the other guys in the office. Basically, we all know each other’s jobs fairly well so we chip in and share some responsibilities. My main focus is UX design. We’ve also got the others guys doing information architecture, they tend to start the project off with handing over wire frames or prototypes to me. Then once I’ve finished my bit I then hand over the designs to our front end developers who then code up the HTML and CSS. As I say we do overlap a bit more than that but that’s basically how it works.

Paul Boag: I’m quite interested in how that works. You are saying you don’t do too much HTML and CSS, or how does it work.

Paul Annett: I don’t do a lot right now, I used to when I was freelance before joining clear:left. I used to do pretty much everything on a project. I don’t do a lot now; I don’t really have time to. The occasions when I do get time to are when we are working on our own projects. I especially seem to have had a bunch of project holding pages or client holding pages in the past where Natalie and Jeremy who do the front end are busy doing other projects and we need to just get something up there while the design is being made. So I will code up that kind of thing. I don’t really get to work on a lot of the big life projects, but then I’m no where near as proficient as Natalie and Jeremy are at those kind of things. I think they would have a fit if they considered my code going live.

Paul Boag: See that’s quite interesting, isn’t it? You’ve begun to build a bit of a reputation as somebody that does-I don’t know-CSS embellishments for want of a better word on some of your designs. You know the kind of thing that other web designers go oh. The most kind of well known example would be the Silverback holding page where you have the clever resizing background How did that come about? Where did that idea come from?

Paul Annett: It comes from… it’s fortune, really, that I happened to be building that page because it was one of the holding pages. I always look for something unusual to do, or something that’s going to catch someone’s eye, that kind of thing. That particular technique was quite appropriate because the site has quite a niche audience, in terms of web designers. People who wouldn’t necessarily pick up on the subtleties and things that I like that are in there, they’re like hidden gems, wouldn’t care. Web designers seem to catch on to that, it’s something they haven’t seen before. The particular technique itself was just a happy accident, really, because I virtually designed the site, it’s a very simple little holding page with the gorilla icon, designed by Arch Nemesis podcaster, John Hicks.

Paul Boag: Well he designed our logo as well so he can’t be that arch nemesis

Paul Annett: That was fantastic drawing on it’s own. But then when I put the vines there, I was just thinking finally give it some kind of depth. I was fiddling around with some of the CSS, and because I don’t know, this is a benefit, because I don’t know CSS like the back of my hand. I do sort of dip in and out. I might make mistakes. Those mistakes might accidentally do something that makes me go oh hang on maybe I can actually use that for something, which is what happened in this case. I happened to position the only layer of vines that I had a percentage off the screen. It moved in relation to the grid. That got me thinking, well maybe I can do this with multiple layers of vines. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I happened to mention that I had launched the holding page on twitter and a few people.

Paul Boag: All hell broke loose.

Paul Annett: Yeah the few people that follow me thought oh that’s nice and they twittered it, and other people twittered it. Before we knew it, a day later, we had 25,000 views on the web site and we were thinking wow we’ve hit something here. 50% of those people signed up for more information about our product, which it didn’t even exist yet, and the web site didn’t even say what it’s about. So they were just intrigued to find out more based on the what they had seen.

Paul Boag: So that caught you very much by surprise then?

Paul Annett: Oh yeah We were kind of overwhelmed. If it had been, in an anyway, some kind of planned INAUDIBLE machine, then we would have waited until we had actually started building the app probably. We had over 10,000 people signed up for something we were thinking we’ve really got to pull something out of the bag here. Hopefully we did.

Paul Boag: Well you do have very good feedback on it. That really demonstrates well the power of design, that even something that, let’s be honest, is maybe, gimmicky is not the right word but you know, isn’t fundamental to the functionality of the site, yet had a huge marketing impact. So it was very worthwhile.

Paul Annett: Exactly. These things, they are gimmicky. They’re things that people come back to and play with and just want to fiddle around and look at it again. They don’t mean anything. The idea is that they entertain me and maybe some other web designers. It just happened that it entertained 25,000 web designers.

Paul Boag: Is this something that you do regularly? Do you sneak things like this in a lot?

Paul Annett: It is something that I like to do, as I said, to entertainment myself. But I do now look for places where I can sneak these things in. I think I’ve always done it really. I always strive to do something unusual. Back in the days of my freelance site, which is nice-design.co.uk, which is still there but not updated since IE8 so if you are using IE8 it will break. Even then, that was one of the first sites where the header and the sidebar were fixed and it was only the content that scrolled. It’s an unusual thing to see, other than the framesets, obviously, back in the day. I always try to sneak these things in. And when I’ve been working here at clear:left, last year’s de-construct site where we snuck in an Easter egg. There’s a style switch on it, I don’t know if you saw it, but when the site launched it was like a wire frame and along the top there a time line which said the progress of the site as it was being built. It was played as if it was being built live as the event got nearer. The time line at the top was actually a style sheet switcher and we deliberately hid the mouse cursor and made it not look like a bunch of links so that if people found it by chance then they would be pleasantly delighted at the surprise of these extra designs on the site that they’d found. Actually we had a few people email us and say terrible usability, they don’t look like links and the mouse cursor doesn’t look like a hand when you move over them. They kind of missed the point, it wasn’t supposed to look like a link, it was supposed to be a hidden little gem for people to find. That got good feedback as well.

Paul Boag: It’s that creating a sense of satisfaction from a user that they found something special or you know, it’s that little bit of wow factor.

Paul Annett: Yeah. When people are then able to say their friends oh go on look at this, then they feel like part of an exclusive little club of people that are in the know. Definitely.

Paul Boag: You talked a lot of the Silverback example of how basically that came about because you were fiddling with CSS and then something didn’t behave as you expected it to and you saw some potential in there. So that was very much a technology driven way of coming to it. Is it always like that or are sometimes these things planned in from the start. I guess in others words, do you have the ideas and implement them or how does it happen?

Paul Annett: It really varies. Sometimes it’s design driven, like with the de-construct site last year, that was design driven and we wanted to have something which resembled the process that building a web site out there. The silverback one was kind of technology driven but also slightly design driven because I wanted to give it that depth. To take that one step further, I’ve used the same technique on the UX London site. UX London is another conference were running next year in June, uxlondon.com. The technique that I used on silverback is reimplemented there. There’s no three dimensional movement or anything like that, but as you resize the window, the logo changes color. That’s just done by having a transparent window through the logo in the shape of the U and the X, so as you resize the window, the background color behind the whole page slides sideways and changes the color of the logo. This kind of this could be done with Flash, it could be done with Java Script, but I don’t know Flash, and I don’t know Java Script, so it is me trying to find my own little work around and quirky way of doing things really.

Paul Boag: I guess the thing that you know when you start thinking about these things is browser support. Some of these things you are doing are kind of either very advanced CSS or very hackerish CSS so either way you come up with browser support issues. Do you worry about that or is it just that they’re extras and it doesn’t really matter.

Paul Annett: Well fortunately because the audience for the sites that we’ve done in this sort of extreme way are web designers so you know they are going to be using the latest browsers. They’re going to be using firefox and they’re not going to be using IE6. We wouldn’t go to that sort of an extreme on a client web site and everything that we do, everything that leaves our doors is valid CSS, valid HTML. It wouldn’t be allowed not to be if you know what I mean. We’re very standards aware as a company, but I do like to kind of push the boundaries on things a little bit and see what I can get away with. Not in anyway inaccessible, but just not very conventional and if it doesn’t work in IE6 and doesn’t work in other browsers then as long as we implement something that looks the same but without the effects then that’s fine. The silverback site, if you look at it in IE6 is just a gorilla in front of some vines, no movement, nothing lost. Nobody coming to that site will be like there’s something missing here, but they just won’t get that extra little embellishment.

Paul Boag: It’s that graceful degradation.

Paul Annett: Progressive enhancement really. Most people that do have the technology get the extra stuff. This isn’t a company policy, but personally I’m usually in the favor of, I’ve seen quite a couple of sites recently that had a browser upgrade nag bar where if you’ve got IE6 then it says hey just upgrade your damn browser, you’re missing out on stuff. We’d never do that, we wouldn’t put that on a client site here, but I might put that on my own site. I haven’t, but I might.

Paul Boag: Sounds like a good idea to me. What’s the kind of process you go through in getting these extras added in? Are they kind of planned in from day one. When you, say for example, did the UX London web site, did you have it in your head right from the beginning that you wanted to do this with the logo, or something occurred to you further down the design process? When did it happen, is it in the design stage, the build stage?

Paul Annett: With that particular one, that was something that I tried out on a previous site. It didn’t really work 100% and we thought we’ll do something else with the site. But I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to do it from the start on that project. But in general, again it varies really. If, sorry to be so vague and unspecific.

Paul Boag: No no, that’s the nature of design isn’t it?

Paul Annett: One thing I do advocate is that with all our client’s stuff, as well as our own stuff, I always present mock ups in a browser. I never send out a JPEG of mock ups to clients because for start, they are going to view it at the wrong size, they are going to look at it in preview or some kind of windows equivalent, image viewer, and it’s going to be resized to fit their screen, so they’re not going to see it in the context of the web site anyway. Not only that, but it also gives you the opportunity to actually build part of the site so you might have the header as a flat JPEG and the footer as a flat JPEG and the left hand side as a flat JPEG but the right hand side, where you want some kind of interactivity, you could spend a little bit of time building that so that it kind of explains to the client that this is what I want to happen here, roughly. Obviously it wouldn’t be the final thing because you don’t want to invest that much time up front, to give them that little bit of insight. That’s what I do when I am building holding pages or whenever I do get the opportunity to do something like that in house here is that I’ll code up some bits I think is the unique, gimmicky bit of it, and all the rest will just be a flat JPEG. It’s just to sell the idea internally, if you like, and to have everyone gather around my Mac here and ridicule me and laugh at you.

Paul Boag: It makes sense that more and more web design that we are doing these days has got so many interactive elements with use of Java Script and various other things, that a static JPEG doesn’t always cut it anymore does it?

Paul Annett: No, exactly. Another thing we do to combat that here at clear:left is that we often build prototypes of a site, instead of having like a paper wire frame which we often do as well but if there are interactions that need to be explained to the client we’ll build a flat wire frame of it in HTML just using framework and Java Script libraries and simulate the AJAX side of things just with hard coded Java Scripts. It’s also not production quality code, but the prototype wire frame and the flat JPEG combined will give the client a better idea of exactly how the finished site will be.

Paul Boag: Sounds good. We’ve talked a couple of time about is this gimmicky, is this not you know… I’m quite interested as where you feel the line is drawn between good design here and tipping into that naff gimmick area. Do you know what I mean?

Paul Annett: Yeah. There are a couple of things that haven’t seen the lights of day yet, which maybe they will one day. I guess it depends on how much time it’s going to take and how much value it gives us at the end of the day. Using a similar kind of thing with positioning elements we’ve got these great big letters in the clear:left office and we regularly rearrange the letters that spell clear:left to spell different words on the shelf at the office. To simulate this online I’ve built a little page which has got the word clear:left across the page when it’s at full screen at 1024 pixels wide and as you resize the window all the letters swap places because they’re all positioned at different places at different percentages off the screen, blank bits of image and all this complicated CSS positioning going on. When you reach 800 pixels wide it says elf:cartel. So it doesn’t have any fundamental reason or… it doesn’t do anything, it’s pointless, so it’s not going to be anywhere probably. But that is too, possibly gimmicky. There are some ideas which are not necessarily web based which are gimmicky but do work like when we were planning this year’s de-construct and INAUDIBLE wants to get some silverback promotion in there. I talked to him why don’t we just have a gorilla one day running around dishing out silverback branded bananas. Everyone laughed and thought it would be stupid, and then we did it. And then it was really successful and everyone loved it. Yeah, it was a bit of a gimmick but again it kind of fitted with the brand so it worked.

Paul Boag: It’s a fine line isn’t it, you walk in things like that? Because you know you could have been absolutely ridiculed for something like that. How do you know what is going to go down well and what’s not? I guess you don’t.

Paul Annett: Yeah, luck. I was ridiculed for that here in the office but we went with it and it seemed to work. It was great fun.

Paul Boag: I’ve seen pictures. It looked entertaining if nothing else. Going back to the online stuff, even if you develop something like that, it never sees the light of day, you never know that technique may come in use in a future web site that you develop and it might be appropriate.

Paul Annett: Yeah there’s always like a library of that stuff that we’ve kind of half developed and ideas that we’ve got, notes, that kind of thing. It might well see the light of day in the future

Paul Boag: Let finish off with just a kind of general advice that you like to give designers out there that they look at some of the cool little things that you do and they think I’d really like to do that but I don’t want to just go out and copy him because there’s nothing imaginative in that. I want to kind of get into that mentality of looking for opportunities to do this kind of thing. What advice can you give them? How can you start them off?

Paul Annett: There’s loads of stuff that’s come out as a result of the silverback hype, if you like. There was an article that I did on ThinkVitamincom which kind of explains how to achieve that technique. People have taken that and done all sorts of other things with it. I’ve seen someone creating moving 3d images and that style of a zoetrope(?) toy thing, which uses the same kind of principles but applied in a different way. So by all means, the best advice in all cases of web design is to look at the code, see how someone else has done something and see how you can adapt that to your own stuff. One thing that I really rely a lot on is, especially in these hidden Easter eggie things, is alpha transparency and thinking of how you can create a window through the front layer of a web site so you could have, instead of having a white background on the web site, put a white foreground layer with a window through it, shaped in the shape of whatever, and see how you can make that interact with the background layer so as you perhaps scroll down the page something becomes visible through this previously invisible transparent window. There’s a site called webleeddesign which does this brilliantly. That’s my ultimate, I would have loved to have made something like that, it’s really good. Only that one page, but it’s really nice with that alpha transparency in the front there. Think about what you can do with resizing the text on a browser so-we redesigning the clear:left site at the moment, hopefully it will be online soon-now I’m giving up an Easter egg that’s coming up on it.

Paul Boag: No one listens to this podcast so it’s fine.

Paul Annett: There are certain things hidden on certain pages and if you bump the text size up a couple of points then those things would become visible because of course you can control the position of things based on ems. As you resize things, your font size gets bigger, it perhaps moves in relation to the other things and things begin to peak out from behind something that was previously in front of it. I play around with that kind of thing a lot. That’s the advice I’d give you in terms of this particular way of doing things.

Paul Boag: That’s some great advice there, there’s lots of possibility. I like what your saying that it only takes a small number of techniques, you talked about transparency there, you talked about the background stuff, and you talked about the font resizing, but the possibilities of just those three things are endless really. You could do all kinds of things with them.

Paul Annett: Exactly, combine them in different ways. Again someone take this and do something with it, but imagine a line going diagonally across the screen but in font of that you’ve got a completely white page and across that white page is a very narrow slot of transparency, so if your line starts at the top right hand corner all you see is a dot in the top right hand corner but as soon as you start scrolling down the screen, that dot moves to the left because it’s visible through that hole. That’s a very basic example of how you could use windows of alpha transparency interacting with the background to do something which moves horizontally as you scroll vertically. I haven’t done anything with that yet as I haven’t thought of anything good to do with it but maybe someone can.

Paul Boag: That’s absolutely brilliant Paul, there’s some really good advice in there and thank you for taking the time to come on the show. I hope we can get you back on before too long.

Paul Annett: Thanks. Thanks very much for having me.

Thanks goes to Troy Oltmanns for transcribing this interview.

Feature: Improving your site with user feedback

Users can be invaluable when deciding how to move a website forward. We should always listen to what they say. However, sometimes that is easier said than done. Read more here.

Improving your site with user feedback

Posted in Site content on October 27, 2008 by Paul Boag

Users can be invaluable when deciding how to move a website forward. We should always listen to what they say. However, sometimes that is easier said than done.

Whether you are a website owner or a web designer, listen to your users. Whether you are running a web application like GetSignOff or developing content driven websites, listen to your users.

We all know that user feedback can be invaluable for improving our sites. However, knowing something and putting it into practice are different things.

There are two problems with listening to users:

How to listen to them in the first place
How to decide what is valuable feedback and what is not

We will never pay more than lip service to the idea of users shaping our sites unless we overcome these obstacles.

Collecting user feedback

Everybody thinks they know their audience. However, in reality they probably do not. When was the last time you actually asked a user his opinion? You may think you know what they want but you can’t be sure unless you ask.

Fortunately there are a number of ways to collect feedback from users:

Face to face

From focus groups to usability sessions, meeting users in the flesh provides unparalleled feedback. Meeting users allow a level of interaction unavailable through other methods because they allow two way real-time interaction.

This creates a better empathy and connection with users. You can get inside their heads by watching their mannerisms, listening to their tone of voice and even observing the way they dress. All of these subtle elements help construct a picture of the type of person they are.

Admittedly face to face meetings can be difficult to arrange. However I would encourage you to settle for nothing less. You may not do it extensively, but make sure you do it at least once.

Web stats and search queries

In my post ‘use web stats for more‘ I explored what could be learnt from analysing web logs and search queries. I explained that web stats could be used to find and resolve problems with usability, accessibility and content. I also looked at how monitoring search queries reveal what users really want from your site and the mental model they use to find your content.

In short, web stats are an invaluable source for identifying trends in behaviour and expectations.

Questionnaires and surveys

Probably the most traditional and most favoured form of collecting user feedback is the ‘survey/questionairre’. One reason they are favoured is because they identify broad trends in much the same way as web stats.

Personally I am not a fan of this approach, especially when used in isolation. Tracking broad trends through statistical analysis does not encourage empathy with users. As is pointed out in the book Subject to change, empathy is an important aspect of successful web development. Without empathy you will not truly understand your users.

Also, in my experience there is a difference between what users say and what they actually want. Users often request features and functionality when in reality they value a simple user experience. Without a two way discussion with users it is hard to identify the underlying needs.

Finally, unless users feel strongly about a site they are unlikely to complete a survey. This polarises results suggesting extreme opinion where it does not exist.

I am not suggesting surveys are useless. The problem is how they are acted upon. Many treat survey results as absolute. In fact it is necessary to ignore some results and read between the lines of others.

Third party web applications

The final way of collecting user feedback is through a new generation of community tools. Sites like Get Satisfaction and User Voice allow two way interaction with users. Users can submit suggestions, questions and complaints online and you can respond in kind. This happens in an open forum allowing anybody to participate in the discussion.

This open format (when compared to the predefined questions of a survey) encourages a more personal discussion and provides opportunity for a deeper level of discussion.

As with surveys the people responding are likely to be more polarised in opinion. However, because of the interactive nature of these services it is possible to dig a little deeper and understand the underlying issues.

Personally, I have found these services an invaluable way of building a closer relationship with users and better understanding what they are looking for.

Of course, whatever method you use to collect feedback it must be assessed. You need to determine what must be acted upon and what can be safely ignored.

Assessing user feedback

Once you have engaged your users, you will be amazed at the quality and quantity of suggestions. The problem becomes deciding what to implement.

I have had this problem for some time with both Boagworld and more recently GetSignOff. I have established 4 criteria I use to judge whether I act on a suggestion or not. These are:

Level of feedback – How many people are making the suggestion? If it is a substantial number then you should seriously consider implementing the idea. However if it is just a vocal minority then you may wish to think twice.
Source of feedback – Who is making the suggestion? Are those people your core audience? It is easy to find yourself implementing functionality for a group of users who provide no value to your business or site.
Cost of implementation – Consider return on investment when deciding on whether to implement a suggestion or not. If it is time consuming to build and expensive to implement, then the benefit to your users and your business must be high.
Impact – Finally, consider the broader impact of adding new functionality or content. Will it introduce complexity into your site? Will it break another part of the site? Will it distract users from your call to action or undermine business objectives? Often implementing a suggestion can have surprising consequences.

There is no doubt that listening to users can be an invaluable way of improving your site. However, ask yourself how you intend to gather their feedback and respond to the results.

GetSignOff goes public

Posted in News on October 20, 2008 by Paul Boag

Today GetSignOff finally opens to the public. It has been an interesting journey.

Part of my reason for writing this post is obviously to pimp GetSignOff and to encourage you all to check it out. However, I also want to take a moment and reflect on the lessons learnt so far. This is Headscape’s first application and we have got some things right and some wrong. I wanted to share all that I have learnt.

However, let me begin with the blatant advertising…

What is GetSignOff?

GetSignOff is an application aimed at web designers. It allows you to present designs, manage feedback and handle multiple iterations of a design concept. However, most of all it is designed to help you get sign off from clients.

It has loads of cool features…

Can be used to approve mood boards, interface elements, imagery, personas, storyboards, site design concepts or any other element of the web design process
Fully customisable CSS and visual appearance
Use your own customised domain name
Up to 30GB of storage
Manage unlimited numbers of clients, projects and designs
Create and manage multiple versions of each design
Add notes directly on your designs
Check to see if a client has viewed a design
Receive notifications via email and RSS
Each client can support multiple logins
Restrict client logins to specific projects
Easy to use interface (ideal for clients!)
Clear sign off procedure to ensure everybody knows when a design is approved

Okay, I have pimped it enough now. Signup for a free account and try it yourself.

What we have learnt?

Building a web application is nothing like building sites for clients. It has been a real eye opening experience and we have learnt a lot on the journey. At the minute my head is spinning but I wanted to share a few random thoughts. Apologises for their rough and ready nature…

Beta users rock! – The best thing we did was release a beta. Getting feedback from real users blew away our carefully laid plans and ‘all knowing’ attitude. Our beta users came up with some awesome ideas, and found horrendous bugs. However, even when they criticised the application they were amazingly encouraging. I can never thank them enough and would encourage anybody building an application to take a similar approach.
Cherish your users – I know saying ‘customer service is important’ has become a cliché but that is because it is true! People are so grateful when you answer their enquiries quickly and efficiently. You can defuse an angry customer by simply being helpful and attentive. It is not difficult.
Keep it simple – The temptation to add more and more features is overwhelming. People come up with great ideas and you have the overwhelming desire to use them. However, resist this temptation. I am so glad that I have read both Subject to Change and The Laws of Simplicity while developing this app. Both have encouraged me to keep things simple.
Don’t rush into features – There is also a desire to implement great ideas quickly. Somebody suggests something so good that you just have to add it. The trouble is this can lead to all kinds of complications. I have learnt it is better to consider an idea for a couple of weeks before implementing.
Pricing is a bitch – I hated this part. We looked at the competition, considered the value to the client and still couldn’t settle on a price. Unfortunately, it was hard to rely on feedback from beta users in this area. After all, they wanted it to be as cheap as possible. In the end it was Ryan Carson who helped the most. He warned against under pricing and rightly so. I think we all have a tendency to devalue our own work.
You only get one chance – This is currently terrifying me. You get one chance to make a first impression. I know the current wisdom is to release early, but if you release crap then users will never come back. Hopefully we have struck the right balance between quality and getting to market quickly.
Treat it like client work – This project stagnated for ages. It was something we wanted to make happen, but slipped because of paid client work. The way we kick started the project was by pricing and running it as a piece of client work. Only then did it get the priority it deserved.
Don’t fear competition – The first time we heard about a competing product we were gutted. By the third and forth we were in danger of slipping into despair. However, actually there was no need. Competition is good. It spurred us on and we even learnt from mistakes our competitors made. However, most importantly of all it made us focus. Until then we were trying to build an application that met the needs of anybody wanting design sign off. After we became aware of the competition we focused our app on meeting the needs of web designers. We decided to go niche and it was the best thing we could have done. While our competitors struggle to meet disparate needs, we focus on the requirements of a single target audience.

In reality we are just at the beginning of our journey. We have so much more we want to do with GetSignOff. However, there is no doubt that today is a significant milestone.

All I would ask of you is that you give the product a chance. If after signing up for a free account you like it, tell your friends and blog about it.

Using web stats for more

Posted in Site content on October 19, 2008 by Paul Boag

We all use web stat tools like Google Analytics for tracking marketing campaigns. However, they can also be used to improve your site.

As I continue my efforts to finish the website owner’s manual, I have reached a section on web stats. What struck me was how little most of us use the power of web stats. They can do so much more than monitor your marketing efforts. In particular they can:

Help find and resolve problems on your site
Improve the quality of the content you deliver

Let us look at how.

Finding and resolving problems

When it comes to web stats one of the most popular figures to monitor is conversion rate. Conversion rate compares the number of users visiting your site to the number that complete a call to action.

If your conversion rate is low, this could reflect a problem with your site. This could be due to:

Usability – The user is unable to find the call to action due to poor navigation or other usability issues.
Accessibility – For example a particular browser does not render the site correctly and so users cannot complete the call to action.
Content – The site does not provide adequately convincing content to encourage users to complete the call to action.

But what consists of a low conversion ratio? That entirely depends on your call to action. For example, an ecommerce site could have a ratio anywhere between half a percent and eight percent depending on the sector and product. On the other hand, a call to action that does not cost the user money should expect a higher figure.

The best approach is to compare a conversion ratio against itself over time. As you make adjustments to your site does that harm or improve conversion rate?

Fortunately website statistics can also help establish what changes will improve your conversion rate. Start by looking at where users exit your site.

Dropout points

When looking at where users exit your site exclude those who only view one page. If you do not the homepage will be at the top of your list. This is because people click through from a search engine, discover this is not the site they wanted and leave immediately. Although this may indicate a problem with your SEO, it does not reflect badly on the site.

Once these anomalies are excluded take a look at the remaining pages. Why are users leaving at these points? Is the content relevant and clearly presented? Is the navigation usable? Are you suggesting a next step to the user or are these dead end pages?

Look at the history of users who dropout at a particular page. How long have they been on the site by this point? What other pages have they viewed? How long did they spend on the exit page before leaving? Does this reveal trends which help to identify the problem?

Sometimes the problem will be obvious, other times it will not. In such cases try usability testing. This will uncover potential issues. If usability testing is not an option try using a tool like Click Tales.

Click Tales picks up where traditional analytical packages leave off. It allows you to see what users do on an individual page. It record user sessions anonymously showing you what they click on, hover over and how far down the page they scroll.

Although a technology like Click Tales is impressive it cannot replace traditional usability testing. It does not provide you the opportunity to question the user. For example it will not explain why users abandon shopping carts?

When the website owners of ecommerce sites start examining their website statistics they are often horrified by the dropout rate experienced on shopping cart pages. They worry that there is a fundamental usability flaw. However, in many cases that is not true. Questioning users reveal they abandon baskets for a host of reasons ranging from ‘I was saving the items to buy later’ through to ‘I wanted to compare the price on another site’. Like the homepage, shopping carts will always have a high exit rate and no amount of statistical analysis can change that.

However statistical analysis will allow us to improve the content and products we provide on our sites.

Identifying popular content

There is a real benefit in understanding what users want from our sites. From what content they want to what products they will buy, understand users requirements allows you to mould the site to user needs.

Website statistics can help identify popular content but not in the way you might expect. Looking at the most visited pages will not provide answers.

Popular pages can be misleading for three reasons:

Pages can be visited by mistake
Page can be popular because their prominent
Pages can be popular because they are gateway pages to deeper content

The homepage is a good example of these problems. I have already explained that the homepage is visited my mistake from search engines. It is also a prominent page and used as a navigational tool for finding other content.

Looking at how long users spend on a page can help to weed out ‘false positives’. However ultimately this is a flawed approach and can only give a partial indication of the popular content on your site.

A better approach is to look at the search terms users entered into search engines to reach your site. Almost all website analytical packages provide this information and it helps define users priorities. However, this is only going to show content that already exists on your site. If a user entered a search term for content you do not have, your site would not have been returned. The user would never come to your site. What you really need is a way of identify content that you do not offer but users want.

This is possible by examining the phrases users enter into your own sites search engine.

Approximately half of your visitors will use internal search. Every time they use search they are telling you exactly what they want from your site in their own words. That is incredibly valuable.

You need access to these search terms and particularly the ones that return zero results. This is the area where you need to do work. Users are expressing an interest in a piece of information you do not have or your search engine does not recognise.

Once you have access to these search phrases, start tailoring content around them. If the content does not exist, add it where appropriate. If it does exist but is not being found, introduce the exact phrasing your users are searching for. Better to use the language of your users than sticking to internal jargon nobody understands.

And there you have it. Proof that website stats can be used for a lot more than just tracking marketing campaigns.

139. Brand

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

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

Podcast: Download (33.1MB)

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News and events

Understanding progressive enhancement

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

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

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

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

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

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

A free conference (kind of)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design Float

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we stop supporting text scaling?

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

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

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

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

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

Interview: Ryan Carson on Building an Online Brand

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

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

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

Ryan: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan: But it’s the truth.

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

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

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

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

Paul: That’s interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: That’s very cool.

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

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

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

Paul: That’s nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: What a genius idea. I love it.

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

Paul: Any others?

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

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

Ryan: Thank you, it’s an honor.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Site promotion with minimal budget

Our first question is from Adam in the boagworld forum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Office Or Not

This from Brad:

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits of a virtual company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A dedicated follower of fashion

Posted in Development on October 15, 2008 by Paul Boag

My name is Paul and I am an addict. I lust after anything new and shiny. But is that really wrong?

I cost Headscape a fortune. If its new and shiny I want it, and being an impetuous child I am I normally get it. Whether it is a new online service or the latest Macbook Pro, I spend company money like no tomorrow.

In many ways I feel guilty about this. However, should I really feel guilty? Is there value in my addiction?

Normally I try and justify my new purchases individually, arguing I need them to do my job. Although, these argument have some truth I think there are better justifications for my ‘habit’. In fact as I have been agonising over whether to purchase the new Macbook Pro, 3 things come to mind. The new and shiny…

Inspire me
Cause innovation
Give me confidence

Let me explain what I mean.

Inspiration

There is no doubt that the ‘new’ inspires me. It encourages me to look ahead and think about where design and technology is going. The ‘shiny’ also inspires me. It inspires me to produce something better. Something easier to use and more attractive to interact with. The joy I get from playing with a well designed gadget or a beautifully crafted web application, makes me want to give that experience to my users. Experiencing the exceptional work of others makes me want to be exceptional too.

The opposite is equally true. Experiencing the disappointment of using something that did not meet my expectations can inspire as well. Learning from their mistakes and a desire not to repeat them, are valuable experiences.

The new and shiny also inspire me to innovate.

Innovation

One of my most valuable roles within Headscape is to cause us to innovate. Whether it is introducing new approaches and techniques into the company or sitting with a client inspiring them about the potential of their site. This role is vital in the ever changing world of web design.

But how do you innovate? By being inspired by the new and shiny. I learn so much from good design wherever it is. For example the design principles of Apple has fundamentally altered my attitudes towards the web. From them I have learnt that simplicity is more important than features. Would I have learnt this from reading a book about Apple? Possibly. However, the experience of using Apple products everyday has helped drive that message home.

Equally, if I was a person always happy with what I have then I would never innovate. Innovation at its heart is about wanting more, wanting better. Without those of us who lust after the ‘new’, technology would never improve and design aesthetics would never change. It would be a dull stagnant world.

Confidence

This last point may cause you to laugh, but the ‘new and shiny’ gives me confidence. This happens in two ways.

First, it gives me confidence in my sales role. Gadgets impress. Sad, but true. Walk into a sales meeting with the latest gadget and people respond. I remember walking into a number of presentations back in the day when tablet PCs were the ‘in’ thing. Every time I would get comments and every time it put the presentation on the right foot. Am I saying we won work because of my gadget? Not at all. However, it did break the ice and start a conversation.

However, the more important way that the new and shiny give me confidence is through a knowledge that I am exposing myself to the cutting edge. I do not want either myself or my company to be in the long tale of web design. I want us to be at the forefront of our industry and to do that we need to be experiencing the forefront of design and technology.

So there you go. Am I putting forward a valid argument or deluding myself to justify my habit? You tell me.

Don't get blacklisted by Google

Posted in Marketing on September 25, 2008 by Paul Boag

There are so many SEO companies and so much advice about how to get ranked highly on Google. How can you tell the good from the bad?

Jason from Toronto recently wrote to me with a questions about search engine optimisation:

I am desperate to improve the search engine ranking of my company website but I am confused by the contradictory advice online. We have even considered hiring an SEO company, but aren’t sure who is reputable. The last thing we want is to be blacklisted. Do you have any advice which might help?

It is true that Google comes down hard on sites who disregard their webmaster guidelines. Probably the highest profile example of this was when they effectively removed car manufacturer BMW from their search results for using doorway pages.

With many search engine optimisation companies still using these ‘black hat’ techniques, it is important to be able to tell the good from the bad.

Later we will look at some of the SEO techniques that can get you blacklisted but first lets examine ways to identify a less than reputable SEO company.

Spotting the black hat operators

Always be sceptical of any company that contacts you out of the blue. If you are going to hire an SEO company, ideally you should use a personal recommendation.

Definitely beware of companies who guarantee a particular ranking. If a company promises that you will be ranked number one on Google, ask for more information. It is relatively easy to get a website ranked number one on Google for an obscure term. However it is much harder to get ranked for something that is useful from a marketing perspective.

Also ask what happens if a company fails to live up to its guarantee? Is there any real value in their promise? The answer is probably not.

Finally ask the SEO company to clearly explain the techniques they are intending to use. If they are evasive with their answers they should be avoided.

If you do discover the techniques they are intending to implement, this will enable you to judge whether you are in danger of being blacklisted.

Know their techniques

Most search engines provided guidelines about unacceptable SEO techniques. Google in particular provide excellent documentation for website owners looking to improve their rankings. They provide advice on selecting an SEO provider and layout what it considers unacceptable techniques. These include:

Hidden text and links – Some SEO companies use hidden keywords and links that provide no value to the user, but are designed to increase search engine rankings. Techniques include adding text that is the same colour as the background, hiding content with CSS, setting the font size to zero or hiding text behind images.
Search engine only content – Using techniques such as redirects and cloaking it is possible to show different content to a search engine than to a real user. This approach is often adopted on sites built using Adobe Flash. However, this breaks Google’s terms of service and could led to you being removed.
Sending automated submissions to Google – Many website owners and SEO companies use software packages such as Web Position Gold to automatically submit their websites to multiple search engines. Again, this breaks Google’s terms of service and could led to you being removed.
Duplicating content – Although Google recognises that some content is duplicated for legitimate reasons (e.g. a separate print version of your site), it frowns on websites that deliberately duplicated in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings.
Doorway pages – These are pages that are created with the sole purpose of ranking well for certain keywords. They often have poor content and exist solely to funnel users into the main site.
Keyword stuffing – This refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking. This can results in a negative user experience, and could harm your site’s ranking.
Participating in link schemes – Although your site ranking is partially based on who links to you, link exchange programs are still a bad idea. Exchanging links indiscriminately without considering their relevancy will damage rather than help your ranking.

Will implementing the above techniques get you removed entirely from Google? Probably not. However, they could damage your ranking over the long term and will almost certainly be a waste of money implementing.

Should you therefore avoid hiring SEO companies? Not necessarily. There are many reputable companies offering superb advice on how to improve your rankings. It just depends who you go with.

136. Stagnation

Posted in Classic shows on September 24, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show we talk about overcoming stagnation and Ed Merritt shares a technique to achieve fixed footers without the use of javaScript.

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Design by committee vs design by community

We all know that design by committee sucks, but why? What is it that makes the process fail and what would happen if you took it to the extreme, and opened up the design process to an entire community?

That is exactly what Mark Boulton has done with the redesign of the Drupal website. With over 200,000 registered users this is a significant community and not the kind of environment where you would feel inclined to design in the open.

However, according to Mark it has generally been a success.

The key would appear to be scale. In design by committee you typically have a handful of decision makers, and one or two dominant individuals who overwhelm the others. It is an environment of conflict and compromise.

However when designing by community, the sheer scale of the community drowns out anybody who seek to dominate the process. You move from an environment of personal opinion to one where you are monitoring emerging trends.

So next time you have a client wanting to design by committee, consider opening up the process rather than locking it down to one or two decision makers.

Self Directed Projects

When was the last time you worked on a personal or internal project? Do you do anything that is not paid client work? If not, then according to IdeasOnIdeas you should start.

This post interviews several designers about their their non-client work. It becomes obvious as you read that self directed projects offer real tangible benefits. These include…

R&D – The chance to experiment with emerging technologies and techniques, that otherwise you would not get to try out.

Build visibility – Higher exposure online as people are attracted to your work.

Prove capability – Demonstrating your ability to deliver solutions not in your portfolio of client work.

Increase skills – Allowing you to improve your skills in areas where they are weak or have not been maintained.

Team building – Building a sense of common purpose among your team in a way that is more engaging than client work.

Creates passion – Allowing you to work on a project that generates excitement rather than ones that simply pays the bills.

As a release mechanism – The chance to play, and let off steam after the limitations of client work.

After years of spending all my time on client work, I have now reached a point where most of what I do is self directed and I can honestly say it is a joy. I also think it has been hugely beneficial for Headscape.

Understanding Disabilities when Designing a Website

Back when I was a teenager the government launched a massive campaign warning of the dangers of unprotected sex and in particular the risk of contracting HIV. It was a very powerful campaign and led to a generation growing up much more aware of the risks. However this campaign wasn’t followed up for the next generation and the rates of sexually transmitted diseases increased.

Why do I bring this strange analogy up? Because I believe we are in danger of doing that with web accessibility. Many of us are getting bored of talking about accessibility. It feels like we are covering the same old ground. Why do we need another article about accessibility basics? We have heard it all before, right?

Well maybe some of us have, but there is a new generation of web designers who have not. They need to know what we take for granted. Also, it wouldn’t hurt us to be reminded every once in a while.

That is why I was so pleased to see Digital Web publishing an introduction to accessibility this week. Sure we have heard it all before and you might be tempted not to bother looking it up. However, I would encourage you to take the time. I guarantee it will give you at least one piece of advice which you fail to implement currently.

More ways to find inspiration

I often talk about how we need to look for inspiration beyond the web. In fact in this weeks Smashing Magazine, they post some incredibly inspiring graffiti that is worth a look. But, can we be inspired by other websites or does that always end in plagiarism?

It’s a dangerous game when you start turning to gallery sites for inspiration. Before you know it you can find yourself lifting far too much of the design.

How then can you be inspired without ripping off somebody else’s website? One way is to look at the design and ask yourself which specific elements you like. Is it the navigation, their styling of bullet lists or the way they handle the footer. By looking at individual elements rather than the whole you remove the temptation to copy the entire thing.

This is what a designer from Portugal has done. He has made screen grabs of websites and placed them in his flickr account. However, rather than grabbing the entire site, in most cases he captures only a fraction of the page. He removes the temptation to steal a whole design and yet provides himself with inspiration next time he needs to design a comment form or build an online calendar.

Take a look at his inspirational flickr feed and hopefully it will encourage you to take a similar approach.

Feature: Overcoming Stagnation

For many websites the days of rapid growth have passed and they have slipped into stagnation. How then can you re-energise a site and start it growing again? We look at this in this weeks feature.

Listeners feedback:

Fixed Footer without javaScript

Ed Merritt (one of our very awfully clever designers at Headscape) has come up with a innovative little CSS technique I have encouraged him to share with you.

Ed begins…

A client recently asked me if it was possible to have a page footer which would stick to the bottom of the browser window if the content didn’t fill the window, but behave normally (i.e. be pushed down by the content) when the content was tall enough. Read more here.

Overcoming stagnation

Posted in Web strategy on September 19, 2008 by Paul Boag

For many websites the days of rapid growth have passed and they have slipped into stagnation. How then can you re-energise a site and start it growing again?

In a recent report that I wrote for one of our clients at Headscape I explained how most websites pass through a common product life cycle. This life cycle includes the following stages…

Exploration – Most organisations begin with a series of exploratory sites, where they discover the potential of the web. This often involves low investment and slow growth.
Growth – At some point during the exploration phases the ‘penny drops’ and the organisation realises how the web can benefit their business. More substantial investment is made, the site is dramatically improved, and rapid growth follows.
Stagnation – Following the initial rapid growth there is a period of stagnation. This is because the ‘quick win’ fixes have been made to the site. Obvious problems have been resolved and so the benefits of fixing these changes have passed.
Maturity – Once the challenges of overcoming stagnation have been met, a site enters a period of gradual but steady growth. This is characterised by continual incremental changes to the site, which consistently stimulate growth.

It is easy to generate rapid growth on an early version of a website. There are so many obvious problems to fix. You can have a big impact with relatively little effort. However, what happens once that stage is over? How do you avoid sinking into stagnation?

Overcoming stagnation

Stagnation is not an entirely negative period. Although it consists of slower growth, it does not mean a decline. However it does generate fear…

A fear that growth will turn into decline
A fear of the competition catching up
A fear of losing customer loyalty

This fear can lead to knee jerk reactions that are detrimental. This mentality manifests itself in two particular reactions. First, it leads to panic decision making. Something has to be done and it must be done now. Second, it leads to the creation of additional features. These two reactions often go hand in hand. As growth slows, organisations seek ways to maintain momentum. One source they turn to is user feedback. However, instead of considering the impact of suggestions on the overall usability, they instead grasp hold of it ‘as something we can do’ and implement immediately. This leads to feature creep and complexity. Before long all vision for the site is lost and the organisation has become reactive.

This can be overcome in three ways…

Going back to basics – Step back occasionally and ask two questions. Why does your site exist and who is it aimed at? So much time can be spent troubleshooting, adding features and responding to requests, that focus is lost. It is easy to spend time placating the requests of the vocal minority, while damaging usability for the majority.
Pause and evaluate – Every website receives criticism. However, it is important to pause before responding to that criticism. Who is criticising? Are they an important segment of your audience, how many of the same comments are you receiving? How serious is the criticism? Is it a mild inconvenience or a serious issue? What are the ramifications of fixing the problem? Who else will it effect and in what way? The danger is that by rushing in to a fix a problem you create more.
Simplify – There is a belief that growth is maintained by giving the user more. However, often the opposite is true. Look to solve problems and increase growth by simplifying your site not by adding new features.

It is the area of simplicity where I believe there is most to learn.

The importance of simplicity

There are two reasons why simplicity is important…

Simplicity sales
Users have limited attention

What do I mean when I say simplicity sales?

Simplicity sells

One of the most successful products of our time is the iPod, and yet it is inferior to its competition in almost all ways. It is more expensive, has inferior technology and offers less features. The reason it has come to dominate the market is because it is simple and easy to use. This simplicity has become the trademark of Apple products and with it has come new-found growth for the company.

There are examples online too. In the early years of the web Yahoo! dominated search listings. However, as the web grew their site struggled to adapt. It became complex and hard to use. It is therefore not surprising that the minimalist interface of Google came as a breath of fresh air and quickly supplanted Yahoo’s dominance.

Google went on to apply this same simplistic approach to online advertising. They swept aside traditional banner advertising, replacing it with simpler text adverts accompanied by a ease to use administration system that allowed anybody to run an ad campaigns. The majority of users will select simplicity over functionality.

Limited attention

We forget that people have a limited capacity to process information. In fact we are only able to process 6-7 pieces of information simultaneously. That is why we find it so hard to learn to drive. It is not until we can process information on a sub conscious level that we feel relaxed driving.

As we translate this principle to the web it becomes apparent why web pages can be so overwhelming. There is simply too much going on. One technique to reduce complexity is assigning user attention points to pages. For example, lets say you have 15 points of user attention to spend. Each item you add to the page costs 1 point of attention. If you want something to stand out it needs more points. This demonstrates that you need to reduce the number of screen elements or risk a lack of focus because points are too thinly spread. This problem is perfectly demonstrated by the difference between the Yahoo! and Google home pages…

When compared to Google it is obvious that Yahoo! is demanding too much from its users and spreading their attention too thinly. By having so much content and not emphasising any particular element, the whole page lacks definition. It needs to prioritise and simplify its content.

To move a website from stagnation to maturity we need to simplify. This involves making some difficult choices.

Simplifying is hard for two reasons…

It is hard to remove functionality you have invested in.
It is hard to remove functionality people use.

Nevertheless it is necessary.

When it comes to the mental barrier of removing functionality you need to recognise that it is costing you money. Every time the complexity of that functionality undermines the user experience it is potentially driving users away and reducing profit.

Just because some people use a piece of functionality does not mean you should keep it. Every piece of functionality on your website is probably used. The question is, how much are they used and how badly does it overcomplicate the user experience for everybody else?

The above post is an extract from a report written for WFF by Headscape

135. Libraries

Posted in Classic shows on September 17, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show we talk with John Resig on javaScript libraries and address the question what is more important when we release an app: speed or quality?

Podcast: Download (27.5MB)

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The complexity tax

Don’t you hate it when somebody beats you to the punch? I recently finished writing a report for our biggest client (Wiltshire Farm Foods). It talks a lot about the need to simplify and remove complexity. It is a lesson we should all learn and so I am in the process of turning extracts from the report into a blog post which we will cover in next weeks show.

However, it would appear I have been too slow and that Gerry McGovern has beaten me to it with an excellent post on the cost of complexity. However, where I focus on why simplicity is important, he addresses the underlying causes of complexity.

For me his post is summed up in the following quote…

Most organizations are producing far too much content. Too many emails, too many PowerPoints, too many reports, too many webpages. All this content creation activity keeps a lot of people busy.

If you are part of a large organisation or work on a substantial website you need to read this post.

10 Rules for Driving Traffic Using Forums

What do you do if you have no marketing budget but have some free time to promote your site? Well, there are a number of guerilla marketing techniques you could use but contributing to forums is one of the most effective.

Sitepoint has posted an article explaining why forums are a great way of driving traffic to your site. It goes on to suggest 10 rules for doing so effectively. These include…

Build your profile
Follow the rules
Start by responding
Contribute your expertise
Don’t be a ‘me too’ poster
Don’t self promote
Explain yourself, but be brief
If you’re wrong, say so
Write intelligently and correctly
Negativity is a no-no

This is an excellent article and one that you should definitely read before using forums as a marketing tool. If you do not, you are in danger of damaging your brand, rather than driving traffic.

Accessibility in suit and tie

The life of the corporate web worker who cares about standards and accessibility can be a frustrating one; hampered by office politics and archaic content management systems. In an article on the Think Vitamin site, Bruce Lawson looks at what you can do to make sure your projects are as accessible for your users as possible.

Its a very pragmatic article, which I love. Bruce works from the premise that this is going to be tough and makes suggestions like "some accessibility is better than none". He also talks about the need for ‘buy-in from the top’ but goes on to provide practical tips about how to get that buy in. What is more, his arguments for accessibility were backed up with facts. For example…

Accessibility is good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Accessibility enhances usability for everyone. An April 2004 formal investigation into UK web accessibility (PDF) reported "all users, not just disabled people, would benefit greatly from the measures required to make sites accessible and usable by blind people".
Accessibility has many quantifiable business benefits (PDF). Legal and General, a British financial services company, redesigned its site with accessibility in mind and found:
- 40% traffic increase
- Doubled conversion rates
- Doubled online revenue
- 100% ROI in 5 months

Finally, he looks at how to get content providers onboard through education and getting them writing HTML rather than relying on the WYSIWYG editor.

UK Government Browser Guidelines

Our final story raises an interesting discussion; should you decide which browsers to support based on popularity or capability?

Apparently, the UK government believes we should test on the basis of popularity. In a draft document advising public sector websites, it suggests that if a browser appears in visitor logs as being below an arbitrary percentage of total “unique visitors”, then it should not be listed as being “fully supported”.

On the surface this appears very sensible. However, as Jon Hicks points out on his site, this can create problems. He writes…

It isn’t clear how the supported browser list would be enforced, but I’m concerned that this approach will encourage browser sniffing, a move that will exclude browsers like Omniweb, Shiira and iCab, simply because their name isn’t ‘Safari’. They share the exact same rendering engine, and therefore require no further testing. You can be more inclusive without spending any extra resources.

In other words we should be defining our list of supported browsers based on capability rather than popularity. This is the approach used by Yahoo! and it is one that I would fully support.

The Yahoo model supports all browsers through progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, without the need to test on every browser. Its a neat solution but one that the UK government guidelines specifically say they do not advocate…

These guidelines do not advocate specific development methodologies, for example graceful degradation or progressive enhancement. However, it is widely accepted that sites conforming to open web standards such as XHTML and CSS are more likely to work well across a wide range of browsers.

How come if they are widely accepted, do they not advocate them?

Fortunately there is an opportunity to change things before this is set in stone. I recommend reading the WaSP article on the recommendations and then sending some polite feedback to the powers that be.

Interview: John Resig on javaScript Libraries

Paul:Joining me today is John Resig, who is famous for jQuery and the work that he has been doing with jQuery. John, it is great to have you on the show.

John:Well, thanks for having me.

Paul:I have to say this at the beginning. I have to get this out of the way. I absolutely love working with jQuery, and it’s an absolute pleasure. I remember twittering just a few days ago that every time I start doing anything in jQuery it makes me smile, so that’s got to be a good sign.

John:Well that’s good. I’m glad to hear it.

Paul: What I wanted to do today is get you on the show and not just for me to suck up and say how great jQuery is, but to kind of look a little bit broader at the subject of JavaScript libraries. Because I have to say from a personal point of view my opinion has changed quite a lot about JavaScript libraries and I’m kind of interested in your perspective on things as somebody that’s actually created one. I think the place I want to start is for a long time I had the attitude that you shouldn’t use JavaScript or indeed any library and that you should know the underlying code yourself and all of this kind of thing. Let’s start with the question of how do you know if it’s appropriate to use a JavaScript library? When is it appropriate to use it? What’s your opinion on that?

John:Well, I guess my opinion is it’s always appropriate, and I mean the simple fact of the matter is that there’s two things. One is that when you’re developing, you’re trying to support, generally a large number of browsers simultaneously. This is the same as if you are doing CSS development, JavaScript development, you want to support a large enough market share and you want to make that development process easy. The problem is twofold that you’re going to be encountering weird browser bugs and the APIs, the different utilities the browsers provide, will be different. For example, Internet Explorer provides different ways of handling events from all the other browsers. So what libraries do is that they remove you away from dealing with browser bugs, which is huge. And at the same time they provide a simple interface that you can interact with that will just work ubiquitously.

Paul:Is there a problem there in the sense of, you know, somebody came along and they basically learned to write jQuery for example from scratch, but never learned the kind of underlying JavaScript? Is there a problem there, do people need to know JavaScript before they start using a library?

John:It depends on the library, but I don’t think you do. I don’t think you have to know JavaScript. In a lot of ways, at least in my experience with jQuery directly there’s a lot of people who have used jQuery who have never done any programming whatsoever. jQuery does embody a lot of advanced concepts but you don’t necessarily have to know them in order to make good use of jQuery. I know this sort of translates well into some of the other libraries but one point of concern you brought up was what if someone learns a library but doesn’t learn JavaScript? I used to be more concerned about that, if someone only knew a library and I guess from a purist perspective, that’s a bad thing. Fundamentally, you want people to be getting better at programming JavaScript, not this specific thing. However, I think the reality of it is, is that so many people are just using JavaScript or CSS or doing web design, they just want to get their job done. It’s not really a matter for them of becoming an excellent JavaScript programmer or awesome CSS user, you want to get from A to Z and finish their work in an effective manner that works everywhere. So I think it’s important to realize that this market, so to speak, exists. It’s a very large one. And that ignoring it completely will just leave users frustrated and going back to the simple cut and copy paste scripts that they used to use. So, I think what libraries are doing is they are instilling good standards, they are instilling good practices, even though the users don’t necessarily know about it. And then eventually what’s good is that since these libraries have these good practices that users can always open up a library and read about it and try to understand better what’s going on.

Paul:I guess that’s always been a little bit of my concern with relying heavily on a library is that if you come across something that’s a problem or a bug or something like that, you can’t fix it yourself because you don’t necessarily know your way around the library. What’s your response to people that say stuff like that?

John:Well by the same token if you encounter a problem with a browser you are far less capable of fixing that issue. There’s really no way about it other than that ultimately it would be good to have that knowledge, absolutely. I fully support people who want to do that and I’m writing a second book now encouraging people to do that, to dig into libraries, to learn more, to build their own. What’s important here is that you just don’t, you can’t force people to do it if they, one if they don’t want to or if they’re just not capable. There’s no reason I feel to force a designer, someone who’s a designer by trade to learn the fundamentals of object oriented programming, or functional programming. Theoretically that can help them some way in the future but what’s more important to them is doing good design and I think by helping people keep their focus where it should be. Obviously if a library is able to help programmers program better, that’s good as well. It’s all about helping people keeping their focus and making sure they aren’t down a rabbit hole getting sidetracked.

Paul:I think that’s the thing that really attracted me to jQuery is as a front-end interface designer was the fact that I could pick it up and run with it very easily. The conclusion I came to is, “OK. Well if I do by some chance find a major problem with it, there’s a massive community of very clever people out there that I can ask and I can get help from.” So, that kind of reassured me, I think. If then, we’ve kind of come to terms with the fact: “OK we want to use a library.” There are so many different ones out there. Run us through some of the different options available and the pros and cons and how do you go about picking which library is right for you?

John:Well it really depends a lot. There’s a coupe questions you need to answer. Probably the most important of which is you need to ask yourself, how do you want to write JavaScript? Because libraries end up augmenting or really changing the style of how you write JavaScript. So, finding a library that you like how it looks. It sounds very superficial, but you like how it looks, you like how the code feels is a great place to start. There’s obviously a lot of libraries to choose from. There’s a select group of libraries whose quality is generally above the others and the popularity of those libraries generally reflects the quality as well. Out of those I pick generally jQuery, Prototype, Yahoo UI, dojo, then also MooTools and sometimes XJS. What’s interesting is all those libraries are open source and they are all the most popular JavaScript libraries. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s just a matter of fact that in the web these open source frameworks are going to improve better and attract more users and generally have better community to surround them. So out of these libraries though you break down into a lot of different paradigms for development. I’ll try to summarize as best I can, but it really is not substitute for trying it out yourself. Looking and seeing some examples you can have a pretty good feel right away. So, Prototype and MooTools, they both extend the native objects of the language. They both try to improve the JavaScript language itself. So they add new methods to arrays, they make strings better, at the same time they provide things like object-oriented code
, and all the way out to doing things like events and AJAX. The normal things that you would expect. But at a very broad level they are trying to improve the overall quality of the language and of the experience. Then you have Dojo, Yahoo UI, and XJS and they are generally very modular, very package oriented and they have components you can easily snap in and out with nice ways of handling dependencies and it can end up being a very cleanly architected style of coding. They really support object-oriented code, and additionally events, AJAX, all the normal stuff you would expect. I would tend to group jQuery a little bit differently in that jQuery is more oriented toward improving the relationship between JavaScript and HTML and that it’s highly focused on searching through an HTML document, modifying some things, just getting in and getting out. Unobtrusive, and it doesn’t provide any language features, it doesn’t provide any object-oriented code writing features, it’s just hyper-focused at the task on hand.

Paul:It strikes me from my experience with jQuery that it’s very much a tool that’s primarily focused at helping front-end interface people implement the kind of functionality that they require from a usability point of view rather than necessarily doing, I mean would you build massive applications in something like jQuery?

John:It’s absolutely possible and people do it all the time. For example, T-Mobile’s T-Online in Germany, they built their entire user area so like their mail, their calendar, and everything using jQuery. So it’s absolutely used for very large projects. What I think is very interesting for jQuery at least is that while we don’t explicitly provide the object-oriented styles that most hardcore developers are used to we provide some very interesting alternatives especially they way it, like functional programming that I think actually end up suiting development very well. It’s very different, I will completely grant that, but it’s still very capable of scaling quite large.

Paul:So if people go out there and they have a kind of play around with these different libraries and try each of them out as you say to kind of find what fits their style of coding, once they’ve found something that kind of codes in the way they would like to, for example for me the similarities between jQuery and CSS made it a very natural fit, but what are the kind of things that you should look for from a functional perspective? What kind of things should be included in a JavaScript library? Does that make sense?

John:At the very core there should be a set of features. Of the libraries that I listed previously they all have methods for doing DOM traversal, so traversing through an HTML document, modifying an HTML document, events, so handling user interaction, animations and AJAX. All of them have some support for that to one degree or another. You can be fairly safe in knowing that if you pick a library you will have that base level. In my opinion those sets of features are probably the most important features and the ones that you end up using the most with your applications. Some people might say in their particular case that maybe animations aren’t as important, or maybe that they aren’t using AJAX, it really depends but for most of the time that set of features is fairly comprehensive. On top of that you really have to start to, once you’ve tried to use it, and once you’ve played around, there’s a whole set of secondary features that you kind of have to dig into, ones that aren’t immediately code-related. Things like the community around a library, the documentation for a library and even the health of the projects themselves.

Paul:What do you mean by that last one, the health of a project?

John:There’s a lot of things. In health, do they have an active development team? Are there developers? Are there multiple developers? It’s the famous hit by a bus; if a developer is hit by a bus will the project still continue? Is there a team will continue? Can you view the source code? Is there a repository where you can go? Is there a bug tracker where you can submit bugs? And finally is there a test suite, is what you’re going to be using going to be tested and analyzed to make sure it stays working. Another point that’s important to bring up is that a lot of browsers now are starting to integrate the test suites of these libraries into their test suite. So for example actually this is a lot of my work at Mozilla, was integrating the test suites of Prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery, MochiKit, a bunch of libraries into our test suite such that if we ever added a change that caused a regression to happen in a library we would catch it and we would fix it on our end. Obviously we would do this in a very smart way, we wouldn’t just blindly be like, “Oh something broke!” We would communicate to the library what the issue was or whatever and this has been very big because now you can, there’s an extra level of safety and security here, in that you’ll know that if you’re using a library like this that it’s going to continue to work going forward in these browsers. That’s an extra level of safety that your personal code can’t provide. I think that’s very interesting. I want to jump back here really quick to the other issues I mentioned.

Paul:Sorry, I distracted you there and we took you off topic.

John:It’s OK, it’s OK, of community and documentation. So community, it can be usually be pretty easy to determine the health of the community. All these libraries will have some sort of a mailing list or a forum that you can go to. Just hopping on there, seeing how many messages are posted, seeing what the typical response is like, how they treat new users, just stuff like that it can be really useful because if you’re just starting out, you know you’re going to have some pretty basic questions. Do they understand your problems? Do they help you out? Doing some searches on Google for example to see how many people are talking about it, or using a service like Technorati or something. Are people blogging about it? Is it positive? Are they having problems? The other thing is documentation. This is also pretty easy to tell. If you are starting out with a library, you’re probably going to start out by doing a quick test, running a simple application just to get a feel for it. When you’re doing that you’re immediately going to be in the documentation trying to figure out how things work. I think you’ll be able to determine pretty quickly if the documentation quality meets a standard that you, because if you aren’t, if the documentation just isn’t that good, you’ll immediately have problems and I guess you will have to resort to the mailing list or the forums or whatever. Secondary is, do they have good examples? Do they have books if you want to learn from a book? Do they have books that you can buy to learn from? So again there’s a whole lot of issues here but what a lot of it boils down to is looking at the libraries, looking at their style of code, does it seem alright with you? Then just doing a quick test with each of the libraries that you’ve picked out, building like a menu or just a basic form of interaction. How easy is it? How hard is it? Does it in fact mesh with you well? This is something you can do over the course of a single day and it definitely shouldn’t take you any longer th
an that. If it’s taking longer than that then you probably want to try a different library. Ultimately you should be trying to use these libraries to make your development simpler and easier. If it doesn’t improve your productivity, if it doesn’t improve the quality of your code then you probably shouldn’t be using it to begin with.

Paul:Tell us a little bit about the kind of plug-in architectures that exists around many JavaScript libraries. Certainly I know there’s a strong plug-in architecture with jQuery. Does the same kind of thing exist with other libraries?

John:It depends. What jQuery has is a little bit unique in that we provide a number of plug-in points that plug-ins can snap into and extend how jQuery works. So they can add in new CSS selector behavior, or they can add in new events or all sorts of intricate additions. Other libraries have things that aren’t quite of the same vane, in that they’ll have modules or packages that you can use. Also another thing that varies is how do the various projects treat these plug-ins? At least with jQuery there’s a dedicated plug-in repository that’s used that plug-ins are listed in that you can browse through, you can see ratings, comments, discussions and things like that. Currently no other framework has something similar to that to the best of my knowledge. It’s much looser, just people uploading, putting things to their websites or Google code or some such. So again, at least to me, what makes plug-ins, jQuery-style plug-ins important is that they are, that there’s extension points and that they are supported by jQuery fully.

Paul: The only thing that I think that I kind of struggle with a little bit about plug-ins, you know I love the idea that there are other people out there that can do the hard work for me in that they can develop something I was looking for, and I love the fact that I can go to jQuery, I can type in whatever I’m looking for and it will pull back stuff. I’m always a bit unsure mind about how reliable those plug-ins are, you know as you’ve been saying with the kind of, the core jQuery library that you’ve created I know there’s a big team of developers working on it, I know that it’s thoroughly tested, I know what browsers it’s tested against, all of that kind of stuff. Plug-ins are a bit more of an unknown entity. Is there any kind of advice that you can provide about judging whether a plug-in or module or whatever is reliable or not?

John:I mean you sort of have to use the same standards that you would use in looking at a library. Looking at, what you mentioned, is it tested? Is there good documentation? Are there, how many developers are working on it? Like for example in the jQuery project we started a sort of, sub-project called jQuery Glide in which we’ve taken a whole bunch of plug-ins and actually blessed them and proved them, given them themes, excellent documentation, examples, all this stuff and made them sort of official. We’re doing this more and more, trying to bring in more plug-ins, improve their quality and make sure that they’re up to our standards. There’s still tons and tons of plug-ins that are just excellent, but the issue comes down to that you have to sort of train your eye to look at, and be able to spot when something has good quality. The thing that’s easiest for a plug-in author or a library author to do is to just set up a page that has their code on it and has a basic example. At the very least every single library is going to have that. If you dig in and see that it has documentation, that it has tests, you begin to realize that that plug-in is a much higher quality, at the very least. I think it’s really starting to dig in to these side issues, that you begin to get a better picture of how, of the true nature and of the true health of a particular library.

Paul:Excellent! That’s really useful and I think it’s easy to just look at these libraries and indeed the plug-ins as well and ask, “Well do they have the basic functionality that I require?” But, like you say, looking at things like the community and documentation and things like that are equally important. It’s been very useful John. Thank you for taking the time to come on the show. No doubt we will get you back in the future to talk about some of the specific things going on with jQuery and maybe this book that you’re writing as well, sounds very good. Thanks for your time.

John:Thanks for having me, Thank you.

Thanks to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Quality or Quickly?

What is more important, to reach market quickly or to launch with a quality product?

I received this question from Pete in South Africa…

I have been working on a small web application, which I hope to launch soon. My problem is that I am spending ages tweaking and improving it before launch. I fear that if I spend much longer on it somebody will beat me to market. What is more important, getting the product right or launching it quickly?

It is a good question and one with no single answer. It is certainly something we have been struggling with as we prepare to launch GetSignOff.

To read the rest of this blog click here.

Quality or quickly?

Posted in Web strategy on September 15, 2008 by Paul Boag

What is more important, to reach market quickly or to launch with a quality product?

I received this question from Pete in South Africa…

I have been working on a small web application, which I hope to launch soon. My problem is that I am spending ages tweaking and improving it before launch. I fear that if I spend much longer on it somebody will beat me to market. What is more important, getting the product right or launching it quickly?

It is a good question and one with no single answer. It is certainly something we have been struggling with as we prepare to launch GetSignOff.

The advantage of launching early

The prevailing wisdom is to launch early. The logic goes that by launching quickly you can be first to market and then refine the offering based on user feedback.

There is certainly something to be said for being first to market, especially online. It is easier to build some buzz around your product if it is an original idea. You can also establish a customer basis more easily when there is little choice available. However it is not without its drawbacks.

The disadvantages of launching early

You only get one chance to make a first impression. If a user does not like your product they are unlikely to return. They will therefore never see improvements you make later. The customer is lost.

Also, by launching early your competition has the chance to adapt before they launch. Few ideas are truly original and somebody somewhere will already be developing something similar. If you launch too early they have the opportunity to adapt their offering to undermine you.

Of course, the danger of delaying launch is procrastination. That has certainly been my experience. The idea for GetSignOff was formed over a year and a half ago and we wasted far too much time. Be careful you do not make the same mistake and spend too long obsessing over details.

How to make a decision

When to release is dependant on two factors, what you are releasing and who it is aimed at.

If you are releasing a traditional website it is important that the quality is high. There is no option to slap on a beta label, and users are less tolerant of problems.

If the product is a web application the decision is dependant on the nature of that application. If it is business critical, the users will have a lower tolerance for problems. However, if it is something like twitter then downtime and problems are more easily accepted. After all, the inability to twitter is not the end of the world (not that you would guess that from some peoples reaction).

The second factor that determines when you launch is audience. For example the audience for GetSignOff are other web designers. Although you couldn’t find a more critical audience, they do understand that a new product will have bugs. They are also experienced enough to work around usability problems and muddle through. However, if your audience is not so computer literate they are more likely to give up and try another site.

Fearing competition

There seems to be a fear of competition among web developers. They have this desire to be completely original, and so rush the launch of their application.

However, competition is to be expected and choice is good. I have received numerous apologetic emails and twitters from people pointing out the competition to GetSignOff. Their tone indicates that this is the end of the world. In reality it is to be expected. Even if GetSignOff was identical to its competition it would not be a problem. There are enough customers to go around. The web is a big place.

Take baked beans for example. There are a lot of varieties of backed beans and they are all basically the same. They do not even taste different. However, all of these varieties can exist side by side in the marketplace quite happily. There is enough demand.

In conclusion, there is no need to rush to market. Take your time and get your product right. However, be careful not to procrastinate and remember that you will need to tweak your application long after launch. No matter how careful the planning, you will not get it right first time.

133. Agile

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

In this weeks show we talk to Jackson Wilkinson about Agile and answer your questions on web design courses and showing off development work.

Podcast: Download (26.8MB)

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News and events

The Target accessibility settlement

Previous we reported that the retail chain Target was being taken to court over the inaccessibility of its site. Many hoped this would be a landmark case that would clarify whether the Americans with Disabilities Act applied to the web. As with the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK the wording is open to interpretation.

Well after 2 years of legal battle Target has agreed to pay $6 million in compensation and correct the accessibility problems on the site by February 2009.

Some are complaining that the case has failed to achieve all it could. They argue that although $6 million sounds like a lot of money it is small change for Target. What is more, they argue, Target has admitted no ‘wrongdoing’ and the case has done nothing to clarify the law.

These are legitimate points but I prefer to take a more positive view. This has been a significant embarrassment for Target and although $6 million is a small figure it is substantially more than they would have paid to address the problem from the start.

Finally, as Matt May points out on the WaSP website, this case may not clarify the law, but that does not matter. As web designers, our role should be to educate clients about the importance of accessibility rather than campaign for tighter legislation. In my opinion the benefits of accessibility are considerable and if presented correctly do not need laws to enforce them.

Long live IE8. Goodbye IE6?

This week saw the release of IE8 Beta 2 and I have to say that things are looking good. Quirksmode says it is shaping up nicely and Sitepoint has even asked whether web designers will switch from Firefox back to IE (the overwhelming answer was no!).

If you build websites and have yet to take a good look at IE8 then now is the time. I suggest you start with Microsoft’s own ‘readiness’ documentation for developers. This talks about all of the new functionality. You may also want to look at their separate documentation which lists the new CSS properties supported.

As IE8 teeters on the brink of release there is a growing movement to stop support IE6. With 37Signals, MobileMe and now even Facebook effectively dropping support for IE6 it would seem the tide is turning. There is even now a site dedicated to the demise of IE6. On it the author writes…

Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.

Makes you think doesn’t it.

OS form elements

Paul Stanton sent me a link this week to a great tool for you designers out there.

When I am working on a design for a site in Photoshop, one pain in the ass is creating form elements. You have to open a browser, find the form element you want, screen grab it and then edit it to remove all of the background elements. Its not a big job but it is annoying.

If I had any sense I would keep a library of all these form elements. However, somehow I have never gotten around to it. Fortunately I don’t have to now as there is a great site which provides them all for me.

The site is called the Designers Toolbox and includes web form elements for IE, Firefox and Safari under both Windows and Mac. They can be downloaded in PSD format and even include browser windows at various resolutions.

Blogging software reviewed

Finally, it wouldn’t be boagworld if we didn’t plug at least one Smashing Magazine story each week. Damn them and their compelling content!

This week they have published a review of 10 blogging applications including…

WordPress
Movable Type
ExpressionEngine
Drupel
TextPattern
Joomla
b2evolution
Nucleus CMS
Serendipity
Mephisto

The subject of blogging software, or content management systems in general, is a controversial one. This post alone has generated 137 comments, mainly consisting of people promoting their own personal preference. People are passionate about the system they use and often it can be hard to get a balanced evaluation. This makes selecting a system that is right for you difficult.

This post does a fair job at providing some subjectivity to the discussion. It addresses the pros and cons of each system and indicates the kind of site the system would be best suited for.

It is not a comprehensive guide, but is useful if you want to see what is out there.

Interview: Jackson Wilkinson on Agile

Paul Boag: So I’m pleased to have joining me today Jackson Wilkinson. Good to have you on the show.

Jackson Wilkinson: How’s it going Paul.

Paul Boag: Very well indeed. Just for those people that don’t know of you can you kind of give people a little bit of background so that they kind of know the angle you’re coming at things.

Jackson Wilkinson: Sure. I’m a user experience strategist at Viget Labs which is outside of Washington DC in the US. We’re essentially a full service web consulting shop. As a company we do design and development mainly in Ruby on Rails. We also do sort of the pre-product, pre-development strategy, that’s a lot of what I am involved in. We also do marketing. So specifically I attack working on the web from that angle of improving and setting the user experience at a product level before hand and then usering it in to usually the design phase after that. I tend to dabble in a lot of things. I was formerly a developer and have also been a designer here and there and try to keep my hands dirty in a lot of different areas.

Paul Boag: Cool. So I mean the reason we’ve got you in to talk today is to talk a little bit about the idea of agile developement. Particularly how it kind of applies not to the developer side of things that a lot of other people have talked about but you know to the design side of things, to the design community. But before we get into that let’s take a step back and start off by explaining to those that don’t know what agile development is. Could you kind of give us a potted summary of agile development.

Jackson Wilkinson: Sure. I think the short form answer to that is that, agile is basically a process for software development, typically software development, that is the opposite of your typical waterfall process where you have this big planning stage up front. You decide what every screen’s gonna look like. You decide how every feature is going to act and so on an so forth. Instead the agile proccess focusses on short rapid bursts of development which are usually called iterations, and essentially you’ll work on your product for somewhere between two and four weeks at a time implementing little bits of functionality so that you have a completed product every two weeks or so. The idea is that you’re able to adapt to change. You know if you decide that requirements need to change two months into the project that’s not a big deal because it only affects this two to four week period of development. You don’t have to go back and redo everything that you’ve already done. I think that’s pretty much the short form version there.

Paul Boag: Okay. That’s good. So in what kind of projects is this normally used on? You mentioned software development but what other kind of things?

Jackson Wilkinson: Well the proving ground so far, agile’s pretty new in so far as development processes can be new. It’s proving ground has largely been on the web. So web apps and web products have really been the biggest place where agile has been used but that’s not to say that that’s the only place where it has been or where it could be. Many larger products, many end user pieces of software. Largley ones that affect developers or that affect designers have been used and have been developed in an agile way. Definitly if you’re thinking sort of the 80/20 rule the vast majority of agile development has sort of been on the web for web apps. That tends to push those boundaries anyway, that web industry.

Paul Boag: So this has been, this can be used on larger projects? It’s not limited to smaller more self contained things then?

Jackson Wilkinson: Sure it certainly can be used on larger projects. It really depends on the structure and the climate at the development shop where this is happening. If you’re a really large shop that has lots of beauracracy and lots of stake holders and your client needs to get approval from 5 different places then this notion of quickly changing rapid development, quickly developing specs and the rapid pace of development is probably not as conducive. But when you’re in an evironment that has senior level developers who have a lot of autonomy and everybody tends to trust each other to roll with the punches, or you just have a lot of trust in your entire team then an agile process can work on any kind of software. Whether it’s a two month project or a two year project.

Paul Boag: Interesting. I mean from what I’ve heard of agile development before it’s a technique that’s growing in popularity amongst developers. You seem to think that some of the elements of agile development can be applied to designer’s as well. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jackson Wilkinson: The main reason why I’ve been thinking about this lately and why a lot of others have been thinking about this lately is that certainly as developers work on web apps they interface with designers a lot. If you’ve got this notion of a two week iteration then, maybe an example of an iteration might be that you’re working on a sign up process or you’re working on a registration process for one iteration. Then you go on to, you know if you’re making a social network for quilters, then you’ll add in social networking features after that or something along those lines. If you’re only constraining your work to those two week batches then often times the designers will be basically in this position that they will be forced to hustle to meet the development schedule. That’s not necessarily conducive to the design process as we normally think about the design process. That’s kind of how I came to thinking on this topic and how a few others have as well. The challenge really is to take some of those elemental notions of the agile process and to try to shape the design process around them so you can best use them to your advantage. A lot of times that means if you’re a user experience type of person or an information architect you’re planning process probably won’t be 4 to 6 weeks long or even longer with lots of user interviews. Instead you’re focussing on the law of diminishing returns where you’re talking to a couple users and getting there feedback and doing a little work on some interfaces and testing them out and moving on from there or as a designer you’re working on 5 or 6 screens at a time. Sort of in the silo of what’s going to be happening on the next iteration and then those get implemented. As you see what’s worked you constantly are improving your interface and improving your design as you see these things implemented. You’re in fact taking feedback from what’s already happened and using that feedback either from internal users or external user tests or even just what the developer’s and your friends and other designers are saying about it as it gets implemented. You’re pushing that back into your own process to in fact build a better product for the next iteration and do a better job there.

Paul Boag: How does that work from a kind of, you know the broad overview point of view? You know, as somebody that’s designed interfaces for fairly large and complex sites that would go beyond the two or three week or whatever cycle. You do so many different things with the different templates that you produce. What you do on one set of screens may affect what you do on another set of screens further down the line. If you’re working on all the individual iterations or silo’s of work is there not a danger that problems get ignored because they’re outside of the current cycle of development? Is that making sense?

Jackson Wilkinson: Well that certainly makes sense. That’s a challenge that a lot of folks new to the actual process experience where your essentially thinking we’re done with this piece of the product we’re totally going to ignore it from now on. That’s really one misconception and mistake a lot of folks make. Instead you should be thinking that part of each iteration is going to be addressing observations and addressing things you’ve discovered about the work you’ve already done. You’re third iteration is probably largely based on developing new features or developing new parts of your application. At the same time you’re going back and making tweaks and making changes to the work that you did in your first and second iteration based on testing or things that you’ve discovered about it or changes you have to make based on things that you know now that you didn’t know then. That way it definitly keeps everything moving. It keeps the whole product getting better at the same time.

Paul Boag: But isn’t that end up requiring a lot of re-work? You know you kind of are constantly doing things over and over again?

Jackson Wilkinson: Ideally it doesn’t require that much re-work no more than you would spend that time in a waterfall process determining what exactly you want in the first place. Certainly the agile process kind of comes with this belief that mistakes aren’t necissarily a bad thing and that you kind of embrace the notion that you may be wrong but you embrace that notion thinking that you’re going to be quickly making decisions and quickly making your best judgements about something based on what you already know. The time that you’ve saved by quickly making those judgements will completely of set and hopeful you’ll still be in the black when you have make a couple of changes down the line.

Paul Boag: So it’s basically doing away with the laborous documentation and the specing up of a project at the beginning and okay you loose some of that when you have to then re-work stuff but overall you end up, as you say, in the black.

Jackson Wilkinson: That’s the idea. That’s the hope. It seems to work out pretty well for us. It doesn’t always work with every type of client or every type of project. If it’s a client who isn’t a really adaptable to change on a regular basis or something like that. The notion that you’re not going to have this big spec doc up front may be a little unsettling for them but hopefully on an agile team you have a client, whether it’s internal or external client, that is buying into your expertise and really trusts your process and knows that your going to end up with really what works best in the end.

Paul Boag: There are differences between how this process applies to a designer rather than a developer. Are there changes and tweaks that need to be made?

Jackson Wilkinson: Yeah. In the end changes and tweaks tend to happen pretty equally to both the development of the site and the design of the site. Essentially if you’re a designer who is taking responsibility for the entirety of the interface and you’re designing that inteface completely, then you’re going to basically be making changes that could affect the developers as well. That’s something that designers need to keep in mind. They need to work very closely with developers to understand what the changes that they’re suggesting imply and really you make changes based on the time available in this iteration and what really is going to be most effective to change in the time you have available to you.

Paul Boag: So you have to be quite strict about these time scales from the sound of it? You were saying there that you only make the changes that you can within the current iteration before you deadline runs out. Am I understanding that correctly?

Jackson Wilkinson: Yeah, one of the biggest challenges there is knowing what size changes you want to bite off of this project. So you’ll have this mountain of changes that you eventually want to make and a lot of the project management involved is figuring out what you’re going to place in the next iteration. Doing as much work as you can on those bits and then reassessing at the end and hopefully having a new product or a new potential release, even if it’s not quite ready for release, a potential release finished at the end of that end of that two week block to evaluate everything you know at that point.

Paul Boag: I mean I can imagine there’s a lot of people listening to this that may be a little bit nervous about the idea. They’ve come from a very kind of waterfall driven mentality, where you know you pass things from one person to another. On the other hand they concede the potential in it and are maybe interested in finding out a little bit more. Where do suggest people start if they want to experiment with agile development? How do you do begin?

Jackson Wilkinson: Well I think that capital A agile proponents would probably say that you really need to dive in. I’m not sure that I buy that. I’m more perhaps a post-agilist, in thinking that you really need to just do what works. What works for you might be different than what works for somebody else. If you’re really ingrained in a process that has a lot of aspects of waterfall, has a lot of upfront planning, then you know you still can do a lot of the agile things to dip your toe in. The first thing that I might suggest doing is that even if you have a long planning process upfront where you determine the full scope of work. You determine even many of the streams and many of the design elements that are going to be implemented. Still break those goals up into two to four week iterations. At that point you still have the comfort of the planning that you’ve done ahead. If you concentrate on creating a self-supporting product within two or three weeks then you’re half way along that train. You can see how that goes. You’ll probably find that after you’ve gone through a couple iterations you’re thinking about things you’d want to change back in the planning section. That then maybe that’s okay at that point. You’re realizing how this self driven process works. As you become more and more comfortable then take away some parts of the planning. Maybe put the visual design to be a piece of the iterative structure while you’re still maintaining the feature scoping and the wire framing up at the front end of the project. Dip your toe in it first and then your whole foot and then maybe eventually you’ll be in up to your waist.

Paul Boag: So mean there must be resources out there? Lets send people away from this interview with something constructive to do. Where should they be going to learn more about this? What’s the next step they can take?

Jackson Wilkinson: Sure. If you’re a designer there isn’t necissarily a lot that addresses agile in the design case right now. Most of the agile books and the agile resources that you’ll find tend to deal mostly with a strict development structure. Certainly if you’re simply interested in looking at things and what the agile process is in general then you can look for books that deal with extreme programming or agile. You’ll find countless numbers of them. I’ll certainly give a list to you Paul so you can put them on the website afterward. Beyond that there are a few websites that deal with the agile design process. Emily Chang wrote a post call the agile web design manifesto. It’s a couple years old now but most of the concepts still remain. Where you’re kind of marrying this notion of design with agile development. She offers some good suggestions and especially the comments that follow her post are super useful to look through. If you’re involvedin IXDA which is an interaction design group. There are numerous discussion’s on there mailing list about how agile processes fit in to. The whole notion of the message boards is probably a good source in this case. I’ll certainly be happy to forward along a list for everybody to check out.

Paul Boag: Excellent. Thank you very much for your time. That’s really interesting. We’ve kind of touched on agile development very lightly on a number of occasions but we haven’t really looked at it in any kind of depth I guess, or kind of broken down what it is and how it works. It’s great to have you on show. Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to looking through that list.

Jackson Wilkinson: Yeah. Absolutely thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Thanks goes to Curtis McHale for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Courses on web design

Jonathan asks: I am looking to get into web design and was wondering if there are any colleges or courses you could suggest. However, I do not have any A Levels.

I get questions like this fairly often, but tend to avoid them for two reasons. First, I went to college 15 years ago and so am out of touch with what is available (web design courses didn’t even exist!). Second, this is a country specific question, as nations have different educational systems.

However, because it is a popular question I will address it. There is certainly some generic advice I can give:

Look for practical courses – I did two courses between school and work. The first was a BTEC and the second a degree. Although the degree was supposed to be a more advanced course, the btec was far more useful. That was because it taught me hands on skills that I still use. My degree on the other hand was very academic and abstract. Where possible choose a vocational course.
Focus on web design – I receive a lot of CVs from people with computer science or art degrees. This tells me two things. First, when they selected their course they didn’t know specifically what career they wanted. Second, that if I hire them I have to train them. I would prefer somebody who specifically wants to be a web designer and already has a good grounding in the basics.
Consider an apprentice scheme – If you have not performed well in the education system, consider an apprentice scheme instead. You will learn considerably more working for a web design company than doing an academic course. You will also get paid at the same time! Even if you cannot find an apprentice course in your country there is nothing to stop you arranging this yourself. Find a friendly web design agency willing to take on a trainee and also attend a part time or evening course.
Learn business skills – Web design is not just about design and development. You need to understand business principles as well. You will be required to manage your time and potentially other people. Also, if you decide to become a freelancer you will need to understand sales, marketing, tax, invoicing and many other aspects of business management.

Showing off development work

Teifion asks: As a designer you can show off your work in a portfolio. As a programmer I cannot. What is the best way for developers to show off their work?

There is no doubt that it is harder for a developer to demonstrate his skills than a designer. However, it is not impossible. Let me suggest 4 approaches you could use:

Sandbox – Have an area of your site where you build prototypes of functionality. It is a chance for you to experiment and show off your skills. Even large organisations take this approach. For example Google Labs showcases development projects which are far from finished.
Blog – A blog gives you a chance to expose some of the code that lies behind your work. It also demonstrate your knowledge and techniques. Many developers shy away from documenting their work in this way. However, it is an effective promotional tool when seeking employment.
Case studies – If a blog feels too much like an ongoing commitment consider writing occasional case studies. This works especially well if you have commercial work to showcase. A case study should not only demonstrate your coding skills, but also your ability to interpret a brief and formulate a solution.
Screencasts – If writing fills you with dread, why not produce a series of screencasts. Screencasts allow you to show your code in action. You can demonstrate work and also show the process used to develop that approach.

You should not limit yourself to just one of the options above. Ideally look to combine approaches to effectively communicate your coding ability.

132. Drobo

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

In this weeks show Paul and Marcus return to talk about the abundance of content management systems and ask the question “Are there too many?”, as well as discussing Paul’s new Drobo and backing up.

Podcast: Download (24.5MB)

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Vote Boag

To start with we’d like to ask a favour of all the loving Boagworld listeners, would you vote for our panel at SXSW this year. We’ve called it Clients Are Stupid…? and the official description is as follows:

Why do clients seemingly make idiotic decisions? How come they fail to ‘get it’? Learn how to improve communication with your clients and enhance your working relationship. Be more successful at pitching ideas, getting design sign off and ensuring projects stay on track. Don’t let your projects become a battleground.

Check out the panel page for more information on what we’ll be discussing and we’d appreciate the vote!

Special Discount

On last weeks show Ryan and Stanton talked about FreeAgent, an online accounting and project management tool for freelancers. Ed Molyneux, FreeAgents founder and CEO, has written to us to offer a special discount for Boagworld listeners:

We’d be really pleased to offer Boagworld readers/listeners a discount of 20% on all ongoing subs if they sign up with the referral code boag99 before the 15th September 2008. They get a 30-day free trial before having to subscribe, and monthly subs range from £15 for Sole Trader freelancers to £25 for Limited Companies.

So thanks Ed, and listeners be sure to check out freeagentcentral.com to take advantage of this offer.

News and events

Step away from the keyboard

One of the curses of being a web designer or even a website owner is that we spend too much time in front of a keyboard. Whether we are writing content, coding or planning a site structure, it is normally done in front of a PC.

I have tried to escape the shackles of the keyboard but with only limited success. Sketching can help and I do a lot of information architecture work using pen and paper. However, these approaches don’t allow the flexibility and speed of a PC.

However, this week I have come across two little products that help to escape the PC. The first is called GUIMagnets. They are basically fridge magnets with GUI elements printed on them. These including text fields, radio buttons, dropdown menus and more. Used in conjunction with a whiteboard you can quickly prototype page layouts in a much more tactile way.

The second product is an alternative to whiteboards. The problem with a whiteboard is that you don’t always have one handy when you need it. They are large, static and relatively expensive. What you need is something that provides the benefits of a whiteboard but without the disadvantages. Magic Paper is that alternative. Magic Paper is made from lightweight, flexible plastic that can be rolled up and carried anywhere. When you want the whiteboard you simply smooth it onto a wall and it is held in place with static. You can then use it like a whiteboard and remove it when you are done.

Hopefully these two products will encourage you to leave the PC behind, at least some of the time!

Creating slick CSS

Next we have some tips for you CSS coders. If you have grasped the basics of writing CSS and want to improve, then you should read the ‘7 principles of clean and optimised CSS code‘. As the title suggests this post provides 7 ways that you can improve the quality of your CSS coding. These include:

The use of shorthand
Avoiding hacks
Using whitespace wisely
Pruning any frameworks or reset code you use
Future proofing your CSS
Documenting your work
Making use of compression

Bitter experience has taught me this is excellent advice. Even if it is old news to you it is worth reminding yourself of these points. It is easy to fall into bad habits.

While on the subject of CSS, I also want to quickly mention a site called Conditional-CSS. This site provides a mechanism to deliver specific CSS to specific browsers without relying on hacks. It uses either PHP or C to achieve this and uses a very similar formatting to IE conditional comments.

It would be unwise to become too reliant on this approach because it could cause problems as new browsers emerge. That said, it is potentially useful in certain circumstances and is worth checking out.

Focusing on the wrong thing

Talking of reminding yourself of best practice make sure you read Gerry McGovern’s post on Google and Yahoo! Gerry examines why Google makes 10 times the profit of Yahoo! even thought it has significantly less page impressions.

Gerry argues that Yahoo! focuses too much on its products/website and not enough on the needs of their users. In essence Gerry is emphasising the importance of putting your customers first.

Although as website owners and designers we should all know this, we often forget it in the scramble to add new features, and implement new technologies.

Screencasting beginners guide

Our final post today is an introduction to screencasting by smashing magazine. This is a subject I covered myself in show 122 and for good reason. Screencasts are becoming increasingly popular and it is important that we know how to implement them.

The article looks at why you should make a screencast, tips for creating a good screencast and reviews of the different tools available.

Its a good post that provides all you need to know to get started. It also provides some excellent tips that are worth taking on board. My favourite is…

Editing may be an option, but sometimes its better to simply start over and have a nice flow to the production rather than piecing together snippets.

Editing is for wimps :)

Feature: Too Many Content Management Systems

I know we live in a capitalist society. I know we are supposed to believe in choice. However, there are just too many damn content management systems. Another extract from the Website Owners Manual in this weeks feature.

Review: Drobo And Backing Up

Since posting on twitter about my new Drobo, I have received a number of requests for a review of this backup and storage solution.