Lateral Movement

Bruce Lee, as he taught martial arts, lectured about the economy of motion. This is the belief that no effort should be wasted. Every ounce of your energy should be direct, to the point, and with no extraneous movement. It’s about cutting out what’s not essential. To do this, is to be efficient, or economical. And to be economical, you need a goal. Without a goal, you might as well sit there and swing your arms around like a three year old.

This idea is just as relevant to business today. Even though it seems obvious to have a goal, I don’t know how many times that mistake is made. People start to work on things without really thinking about what they are trying to achieve. I know it’s not easy to clearly define goals. It does take some time to sit down and hash it out.

So if you have poorly defined goals, or as I have seen lately no goals, and a room full of people who are working with no clear direction, what happens? I call it lateral movement. Everyone is doing something, but the work is not moving towards a real solution. Since there are no goals and therefore no clear way to qualify an idea, any idea is fine, just as long as it suits someone’s sense of contribution. In that situation, you could pull anyone in off the street and ask their opinion and it would be valid.

The point is if you can’t tell me how an assignment, a task, or even an edit gets us closer to our goal, then it’s not worth pursuing. It’s not how a business should operate. It gets worse when someone dumps a ton of lateral movement work in your lap at 5:00 pm that’s due the next day. Not only is it pointless, it’s also stealing away your personal time now. I am actually involved in the process right now with a client who doesn’t seem to understand that the computer screen is horizontal, but the vertical comp she sketched for some reason doesn’t fit right. Got to love marketers like that, they don’t have an ounce of design skill, but they don’t let that stop them.

Back in the day one of my Web sites I designed was featured by Communication Arts Magazine online. It was right up there between Nike.com and Audi.com. This happened when I was working for Dan O’Saben. I learned a lot from Dan. The day he reviewed that design he had nothing to add to it. There were plenty of designs that did need his help, but not this one. No lateral movement and our reward was a site that got national attention.

Good direction will lead to good work and it starts with a goal. But, it’s the bad creative directors, account directors and executives that are driven by ego and control more than goals and leadership who are at the root of lateral movement. Clients can cause it too, but it’s hard to complain too much about the people who are paying you.

It’s 2010, so why are we designing sites like it’s 1999

Having a process is a nice thing. It helps you to understand what you typically need to do and when it needs done. Someone once explained to me that a process is like a woman’s dress. It should be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting. I agree, not too much and not to little. What I find all too often is that interactive, when ran by outsiders (you know who you are), always looks to sell a design first while ignoring the majority of the work they should have done to get to that design. I guess who needs a process when you just can just wing it. As long as no one looks at the reporting, we can all do whatever we want, right?

I say it’s designing like it’s 1999, but now that I think about it, we had a process at StudioPointe.com in 1999 thanks to Patrick Garrett. Maybe, it’s just the path of intellectually lazy people who don’t care if their work actually solves a business problem. They complain that the clients want to see pictures, but then that’s what they give them whether or not they asked for it. It’s like complaining your kids are fat as you pack chocolate milk and candy bars in their lunch.

I’ve read it a million times, start with a problem you want to solve. Then define strategies that solve the problem. Next, tactics that support the strategy. Simple. Online we deal with site, content, and technology strategies. These are expressed through information architecture, interaction design, usability design, information design, navigation design, and brand standards. Once you understand all that, THEN you design an interface. And yes, I understand that in the case of a competitive RFP response, you need to show creative, but you should develop the thinking behind it too. I promise if you can justify every pixel of your design and someone else can’t, you will have something that will be more successful as both a pitch for new business and as a Web site.

If you were designing a print piece, you wouldn’t begin to think it was okay to show creative before developing the concept. Interactive content is like the concept in the advertising industry. A site’s content and features are “the big idea.” No concept, no creative. Assuming you can have an interface without the content or idea is seriously narrow minded and insulting to anyone who has ever produced a good Web site that people have adopted. If you somehow got a job at Yahoo! or Google and said hey, we’re gonna design this site but we don’t know what the content is or the scope or who the audience is, you’d be fired, on the spot, that day.

The shame of it is we just did this for AB it got us nowhere. The entire conversation focused on information architecture and content strategy. Then we got grilled over having no user center design research. At least we had our pretty pictures to take home and hang up on the fridge.

The Software Adoption Funnel

Getting people to use the software you have written seems to be a crucial step marketers tend to ignore. I say this from experience in working with Microsoft, Intel,  AB, and Coke. Obviously, there are serious efforts within those companies to make sure people use the applications they create, but I have not witnessed it for anything I have produced for any of them. Of the 34 million dollars or so spent on BudTV, I think I saw a single 5 second mention of it on TV. That was it. No  concerted effort to drive people to the site, certainly no advertising platform.

Budgets are completely spent in making applications. This is odd to me because an application is like a product, and products need marketing. This is why I created the software adoption funnel. It’s similar to the retail purchase funnel, but essentially it’s a guide on how to segment, target, and proposition marketing communications contingent to where a user is in the process. Each part of the funnel should be driving the user to next phase.

This conversion should be nurtured as studies have shown that delays in moving users down the funnel leads to an attrition of the adoption process. Information recall is chief among issues that arise from any delay.

The process starts with awareness. Strategically, this is addressed like mass advertising and communications should have a very creative appeal to spark interest.

Once a user signs-up or a downloads the application you now more towards a more direct marketing model. Lifecycle e-mail marketing can begin. Communications should focus on getting the users to play with the application.

Now the user is in the evaluation phase, test driving the application. This is the most crucial phase where usability can make or break an application. If the experience is relevant to their needs and it’s easy to use, the users will come back. Communications should focus on helping the users get past any sticking points. It’s about customer service and reassurance.

Through repeat trial our primary conversion goal is achieved, we have breached that cultural penetration threshold with a user who has made it to adoption. Strategies to drive frequency are now considered. Both putting out fresh content and marketing it are important. But we can go further and should.

The final stage is advocacy, where super-users become software evangelists promoting by word of mouth and social media. These people need to rewarded for their dedication or least have their voices amplified through any channel available. They can effectively drive other users through all phases of the funnel.

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Google is useless. It only gives answers.

I think Google is useless. It only gives answers. If you know your Picasso, I am steeling his “Computers are useless. They can only give answers” statement. Now, I don’t think Google is completely useless, but it depends on what you are looking for. If you’re looking for a creative solution, a search engine is not going to help you. Your results are only as good as the questions you ask. Ask a dumb question, get a dumb answer. Garbage in garbage out, as the old programmers say.

Computers aren’t creative or intelligent. They are just another tool. Like any instrument, in the hands of the experienced they can make beautiful things happen. But, many times when you read any article about being creative they will tell you to first get off the computer. And I mostly agree with that. You need to query your own brain to get a good question. And those result depends on your creative intelligence and experience.

Answers are less interesting than the questions anyway. Once you ask the right question, the answer is just a matter of research and time. A truly creative solution comes from a truly creative question. There’s no chicken and egg puzzle here. A great answer comes from a great question.

I was mainly thinking about this after a previous blog I had written about how some people positions themselves as experts after obviously spending just a few minutes online. It’s true; the availability of information is great. Anyone can just look a few things up and have an opinion. But, is it a good opinion? Is it a creatively inspired opinion that was derived from asking interesting questions?

I love how Google can help me research, but it’s one of many tools I use. However, I will never use an answer tool when what I need is a good question.

B2B Marketing, Emotional Or Not

I recently read an article that made a blanket statement that B2B marketing was logical and B2C was emotional.  I’ve equally worked on both in my career and it’s not so cut and dry.

Say you’re evaluating a SaaS. You’ve narrowed it down to three solutions that pretty much do the same thing. Who do you choose? Probably the one that makes you FEEL the most comfortable using. That’s called an emotion and it can make a real difference, especially among similar products and services. Trust can be gained through logical arguments, but trust is emotional and can be addressed from an emotional proposition. The main point here is that most decisions are made from making comparisons. Who stands out is often the one playing to your intellect and heart.

I’ve seen sales made with some awful presentations that stated opinions as facts and had no shred of logic to them. They looked logical, but if you were to start picking them apart, you’d realize there’s nothing of substance there. Yet they worked and were not logical.

I have also seen higher ups ignore logical arguments in favor of gut opinion. They will say things like, “there’s just something about it that doesn’t feel right”, if you even get that much out of them.

What about fear. Fear isn’t logical, but you can make all kinds of logical arguments to stir it up. If I propose a solution and follow it up with saying, if you use our competitor you risk blah, blah, blah. Isn’t that both logical and emotional.

The head and the heart work together to make decisions. Marketing, no matter what kind, should proposition logical arguments wrapped up in emotional packages.

Don’t Fall In Love With An Idea

I was designing a logo recently and was reminded of a lesson I was taught by an old teacher of mine. The lesson was to never fall in love with an idea. To the uninitiated, that basically means don’t get an idea stuck in your head because as soon as you do it stops you from moving to more sophisticated solutions. It’s a lesson I wasn’t thinking about as I wasted hours and hours developing a great logo design that was completely inconsiderate of the brand. Love of an idea often will have you hammering a square peg solution into a round hole problem.

What’s interesting too is that it doesn’t matter if the idea is a solution to a marketing problem, a Web page design, or a programming framework. When I started thinking about it, it’s a universal lesson of creative problem solving.

Love is not objective and makes for bad evaluation criteria. That’s true of many things (including ex-girlfriends). It’s something I try not to do, but have been guilty of from time to time. It happens when you have something that seems too clever to pass up. It may not solve the problem, but omg is it cool. Sure all ideas deserve some time to grow and develop, but it important to know when to move on.

The evolution of an idea is often more about finding a better solution to the problem than the one you have. However you look at it, if you’re solving a problem, it’s a process with an intended outcome that will be evaluated against the problem. Sometimes, I am amazed at how the most seemingly effortless solutions can be so obscure at first and take weeks to reach.

If you’re not careful an idea can be like can be like a siren luring you to certain doom. Sure, if we have an infinitive amount of time to play, then it wouldn’t matter. But time, money, and client expectations are the gods of the world we live in. Don’t like it? Well, they call them starving artists for a reason.

In the end, it’s always better to love creating ideas than an idea itself.

Account Service Needs Heros, Not Just Wikipedia and Google

The next time you are in a meeting with someone from account service who put together the information architecture for a Web site ask them who their favorite information architect is.  Then ask what their favorite book on information architecture is. Next ask what information architecture blogs they read, what information architecture twitter feeds they get. Some of the time you are going to get a blank stare. Most of the time you will get some magical redirection of the conversation.

You may be thinking if the Web site only costs X amount of dollars, they can’t afford a specialist. Unfortunately, this has happened on sites and applications with budgets from 300K to over a million, where there are qualified architects on staff. It’s bad, but I don’t think it’s intentionally negligent.

To quote someone I used to work with, they don’t know what they don’t know, meaning they may not understand what is really involved or that it is a discipline in and of itself. Most importantly they may not realize what’s at stake when it’s done poorly. If you don’t have a full fledged information architect (by title), you should look to your user experience designer. Programmers are usually astute as well, and in some cases can be the most qualified depending on their background. But, if no one understands what card sorting is, then someone needs to go get a book.

Unfortunately, the thing I have witnessed on a few occasions are proposals from account service that detail some aspect of the user experience (like information architecture) with copy that was directly ripped from Wikipedia or from the number one ranked search listing on that subject. I love Google and I love Wikipedia, but spending 5 minutes on those sites does not make someone an expert. It’s how you start to learn. It might account for one percent of what you should know.

Really, I am making a case for personal education. If you want to do digital you need to study, constantly. And you need heroes. These are the people who are making waves, leaders of their discipline. Sure anyone can research and find decent information on a subject. But the usability heroes and marketing heroes may not be featured on the first page of your search result. Ogilvy is my hero for social media, Jesse James Garrett is my hero for information architecture, and I have plenty more that won’t show up in search under generic terms.

Account service touches on all aspects of a project. They don’t need to be experts, that’s the job of the people doing the work. But it would help if they could understand what the most talented people are doing. Moreover, they should know what they know and know what they don’t know.

Usability and Development Time

After recently finishing a wire frame process, I was congratulated by a project manager who announced my contribution to the team as having saved development time. Hmm, well that’s true and I’ll take the compliment, but there’s a lot more going on than just  that.

Without wireframes, I have seen development stumble down a path with a very myopic set of solutions when facing problems as they arise. The usability process always looks toward the big picture, the experience from start to finish. Factoring in cognitive and hierarchical task analysis, benchmarks and stats, and let’s not forget good old fashioned creativity and you do more than just help the process. You build a product that at worst saves users time and at best becomes a cornerstone of success.

One thing I know is if you don’t make things easy to use, people don’t use them, end of story. User centered design doesn’t guarantee success, but without it the probability of failure skyrockets. With it, there is the potential to destroy your competition.

When the iPod was released it was just another MP3 player, but the usability they put into that device made it something special. From September last year, Apple says it has 73.8 percent of the market, followed by 18 percent held by “other”, SanDisk at 7.2 percent and Microsoft at 1.1 percent share—http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/19294.cfm. With their closest competitor 55 percent behind them, I can guess they aren’t forced to spend hours and hours attempting to prove the ROI on usabiliy.

Anyway, saving development time is good. Realizing that the discipline can make or break you is better.

Good Web sites don’t win design awards or Addys

We all know what a good Web site looks like. Just look at the ones you use everyday. Google, Facebook, Yahoo (Yahoo! If you’re on your third cup of coffee), and eBay. Here’s a complete list of the top 100, http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1. With the billions of dollars of business that is done on these sites, you bet your ass they are paying attention to user experience design and digital marketing. But that type of design and marketing isn’t something advertising agencies do well. So the reason why the best sites don’t win Addy awards is because they were not designed by ad agencies.

Most advertising shops don’t think about branded utility and creating meaningful conversations, they push ideas that win awards. If it’s not pretty or clever enough to win an award, they won’t dream it, much less pitch it. Everyone in adverting knows it’s about the awards; they just keep that fact to themselves when selling to their clients. Now, not all advertising shops and advertising creatives are the enemy of the Web, I have seen really strong interactive work from a few, but it’s not typical.

So who should be designing Web sites? Well, interactive shops and marketing agencies have been creating the sites you use on a regular basis. These are places that know how a site functions and what it does is infinitely more important that how it looks. Information design takes just as much creative talent and thought as creating pretty pictures. I would argue more, actually.

Adverting agencies have added interactive capabilities, pulling talented interactive people into the mix. Don’t be fooled by this. True interactive people in advertising are often treated like a necessary evil. They get ignored when they have ideas and are wholly disrespected. Everything they do is subject to the approval of someone who is unqualified to judge their work.

For an interactive to get respect at an advertising agency, he must abandon user centered design. And that designer must be prepared to have his site taken down after 3-6 months when the user base drops off to nothing. I say this because I can think of one individual who has done just this. And yet, for the stream of failed interactive experiences, his agency just loves every potential award winning site he designs. I guess that will work for them as long as they can misguide their clients.

Think an advertising agency would have developed an idea like blogging, an online auction, or social networking? Not a chance, those ideas came from interactive people, not advertising people. Advertising’s structure and focus is best used for that commercial you DVR past or possibly the banner ad you don’t look at and never click on. I would have thrown newspaper ad in there, but in 5 years those won’t exist.