If a customer cannot complete their top tasks quickly and easily on your website, why would they trust you to help them with other tasks?

You’re in a giant shopping mall. You urgently need to go to the toilet. You go to the Information Desk. There’s a big queue. After waiting for ages your turn comes and you ask directions. You’re told to head down the hallway, take a right, go up an escalator, turn right, walk down to the end of the hall, take another escalator, turn left and walk down to the end of another hall where you will find the toilets.

You hurry towards your destination wondering why they have made it so difficult to find the toilets. When you finally get there you find to your despair that there are no toilets. You have been given bad directions. This sort of experience will color your whole view of the mall. And if you do go back a next time you’re not likely to go to the Information Desk looking for directions to other areas of the mall you’d like to visit.

There are certain basic things your website needs to do really, really well. If it doesn’t then the customer is likely to get a very negative view of the entire website. If you can’t easily book a room on a hotel website, then you don’t think much of the hotel website. For that matter, you don’t think much of the hotel either.

If you can’t quickly find contact details on a website then the brand is undermined. We need to reclaim branding. It has been hijacked by a very narrow visual interpretation, as if the essence of the brand was the logo and the graphics.

The essence of the brand is the experience customers have with a product or service. There is of course a visual component in branding but it has been vastly overemphasized. When we think of Google do we think of a colorful logo or a fast way to find stuff? Web brands, in particular, are functional. The successful ones help us do useful things.

When we arrive at a website for the first time we are impatient and highly skeptical. If we try to complete basic but important tasks on that website, and we fail, our whole impression of the website is undermined.

Every website has a small set of top tasks (usually no more than three, definitely no more than five). After getting off a plane I remember going down an escalator to the trains section of the airport. At the bottom of the escalator were three signs: Trains, Tickets, Toilets.

What are your Trains, Tickets, and Toilets? How easy is it to complete your top tasks? Branding is about how well you help people succeed. It is about how much time you can save them. It is about how easy and convenient you can make their life.

On your website there are top tasks that customers expect you to do extremely well. If you don’t perfect those tasks, you lose your customers’ trust. A brand that is not trusted is not much of a brand.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

ESPN.COM is counting on less clutter and more advertising options to bolster revenue at a time when its sister cable channels are battling rare weakness.

ESPN, the Walt Disney Company’s sports media behemoth, is unveiling Tuesday a substantial redesign of its primary Web portal in a test form, with a formal introduction planned for Jan. 5.

About a year in the making, the overhaul represents at least one significant shift in strategy. Instead of inundating visitors with its intense coverage of every major sport from the get-go — something that the company now believes can drive away certain fans — ESPN.com is moving in a less-is-more direction, at least on the home page.

“If we are frustrating people, they’re not going to spend as much time as we want on the site,” said John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content. “There can be a thing as too much.”

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ESPN.com, for instance, currently greets users with 36 links displayed in a block near the top of the home page. There are links for golf, racing, men’s basketball, college football, blogs, online games and podcasts, among other things. The redesign pares this list down to 19 links.

Making ESPN.com as appealing to visitors as possible — and thus to advertisers — has taken on greater importance as the economic recession in general and in auto sales in particular have put pressure on the company’s television ad sales. The young male audience ESPN serves up continues to be prized by advertisers, but Disney singled out soft ad sales at the channel as one reason profit growth in the company’s media networks unit slowed in the most recent quarter.

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The new ESPN.com will give advertisers eight options for displaying messages on its most heavily visited pages, up from three. A spokesman said the site will introduce in January a new video advertising option specifically with movie studios in mind. Ford has signed up as the redesign’s presenting sponsor.

Over the years, ESPN has come to dominate every corner of sports media, operating a suite of highly profitable cable channels, publishing a successful magazine and pumping scores and video clips to mobile phones. The company is also a leader on the Web, with ESPN.com capturing roughly 50 percent of the total minutes spent by Internet users watching sports video, according to Nielsen Video Census.

Growing even bigger is the goal, and to do that ESPN needs to reach beyond hard-core sports fans — it already has them — to people whose interest in athletics is more casual, analysts say. A less chaotic Web design is one way ESPN managers are tackling this challenge.

At the same time, ESPN must keep its primary audience satisfied and increase the amount of time these people spend on the site, which could allow the company to charge higher ad rates. To that end, the company has built a more efficient search engine — “Our old one, frankly, was just not very good,” Mr. Skipper said — that is intended to allow heavy users to delve deeply into the site with greater ease.

Expanded user customization also comes into play, with visitors being able to do things like personalize the scores displayed on the home page for the first time, said Rob King, the Web site’s editor in chief. “We’re also working hard to make sure that personalization follows you through the site,” Mr. King said.

Traditional managers often lack the skills required to understand if an intranet is successful or not.

I was once talking to a manager about how the intranet could save staff time and make things easier, when he shook his head dismissively. “It’s not the job of management to make life easier for staff,” he told me. “And the only time I’m interested in is firing time. If you say you can save me one man year, I want to know which man I can fire. Otherwise, I’m not interested.”

Some time later, I was telling another manager that if we made a particular task easier we could save 5 minutes every time that task was completed, and that many thousands of staff members needed to complete that task every month. He shrugged. “5 minutes saved? They could be out smoking a cigarette.”

Indeed they could be. But it is management’s job to manage time effectively. Properly managed, those 5 minutes could help make another sale or help a customer solve a problem. But because of a poorly designed intranet this time was being lost every time a staff member needed to complete this task.

Organizations are simply not structured to allow for time management when that time runs across the organization. Managers manage within the framework of departments or units. They also tend to be obsessed with head count rather than efficiency.

Let’s say that Organization A has 30,000 employees. Let’s say each employee does a particular task on average 50 times a year. Let’s say it takes 10 minutes longer than it should because it’s badly managed. This is costing the organization 15 million minutes a year in lost productivity. That’s 250,000 hours. Or 33,333 days. Or 150 person years. It’s significant.

By improving this task you can save the entire organization 150 person years; but that doesn’t necessarily mean firing anybody. What it does mean is making the entire workforce more efficient, more productive.

Most managers will not be very impressed. They want to know which 150 people they can fire. Otherwise it’s not real savings, not real efficiency. But you can’t fire everybody. Surely it is still logical and practical to make sure that those employees who are still left with the organization can do their jobs more efficiently. Shouldn’t management also have a role there?

The origin of management, in the late Nineteenth Century, was about making the tasks factory workers carried out on a day-to-day basis more efficient. However, when management pioneer Frederick Taylor said that he could make the job of shovelling coal faster and easier, he was initially met with skepticism.

The intranet is the factory of the information worker. And it’s not in a very good state at the moment. No organization would allow its physical factories to be managed with the level of messiness, carelessness, confusion, waste content, and general untidiness that occurs daily on most intranets.

There is a much better way; focus on time and efficiency.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

When it comes to electronic publishing, one cliché virtually always rings true: the devil is in the details. In undertaking the development of any electronic newsletter you will probably discover that the most gain, and the most pain, comes from using templates to manage formatting and content layout. Used correctly, templates can be your best friend, and will save you enormous time and energy. Used incorrectly, templates can be your nemesis by consuming both time and energy. But don’t despair, if you have a roadmap and approach it carefully you’ll have made a new friend.

From a top-level perspective, a template is a collection of rules that govern content on a newsletter page. The objective of this month’s column is to cut through the fog and outline the different components that comprise a template, and some practical tips to maximize the experience for both publishers and subscribers.

Once you have decided upon the overall structure of your document, then it is time to roll up your sleeves and get down to the nitty-gritty of working with templates to manage how content flows into your publication.  But before working with template components, there is an interlinked question to consider: what is your content?

The issue of content type is partly related to its media format – text, image, sound, video, flash etc. – its source, and its classification.  Is it static content that sits in a flat file somewhere, or is it dynamic content from a database or content feed that updates over time and displays different content to different user profiles?

One reason this distinction is important is that the content type and associated categorization will dictate which template components – called Template Elements in IMN-speak – will be used to layout the document structure.  IMN uses a content library that stores the actual media, and the IMN platform utilizes rules in the form of Content Topics and Template Elements to decide not only which content should be placed where, but also what kind of users should be able to view particular kinds of content.

At this stage, we must digress to the subject of content tagging.  This is important because IMN can categorize and tag different articles with user-defined content descriptions.  These descriptions, called Topics or Categories, are used by templates to place content in specific places on a page.  For example, when you setup a section for News, you can specify that this section only displays content tagged as News, and not any other content (for example, editorial, or features or case studies).  Thus, it is important to plan your content tagging strategy and categories at the outset.

When you create a new issue, IMN will use a basic 1, 2 or 3 column template as a starting point for your newsletter.  While very basic, this does place template components such as Footer and Header elements on the page for you.  From there, you need to decide what kind of content flows into your publication, and where you want it placed.  In order to manage the different content types and locations, the IMN system uses what are known as Page Elements and their corresponding Attributes.  Page Elements and their Attributes are the building blocks of your templates.

In order to get into the details of Page Elements, if you navigate to the main screen, the Layout button will take you to the section where you can edit your template. The most often-used template component is, not surprisingly, the Article element. While other types of Page Attributes, such as Survey, Header and Footer all play a unique role, the bread and butter of the system is the Article element.

There are two types of Article elements; Single Article and Multiple Article.   You will find the Multiple Article most useful because you can use it to define sections of articles, and have the system dynamically generate the newsletter depending on articles in the content library and attributes of the intended audience.

Each Page Element has different attributes that govern the way a template component manages both the display and behavior of content within that published page.  Attributes include such specifics as display styles, link information, borders, margin and colors, content order, and other specifics.

So, to provide an example, use the Multiple Article Page Element to define a section that will only display content defined in the library as News (using content topics), and display that in a section with a header “News”.

A more common trick is to use the Custom HTML element, and also the custom HTML (before and after) attribute with each of the Element screens, to do some more imaginative content layout.  Using custom HTML, you can get greater control of layout of graphics and text.  For example, by creating a table without borders, you can then place an image – such as a headshot – within the table then get text to flow and justify either to the right or left hand side.  It makes for much richer layout than can be done with just using the normal image dialogue boxes.

Custom HTML can be used for more than headshots, however. You can indent entire columns, or do headers in multiple languages, or simple graphical line breaks with much more control than is achievable otherwise.

One hint: use an external editor, such as Notepad, to save any custom HTML if you are doing revisions.  One forgotten “>” could ruin the layout of your whole document.  It is much easier to revert if you copy your custom HTML to a local application such as Notepad in case something goes haywire.

Once you have polished your template, and proofread it for prime-time, save yourself time and hassle by saving your template as a default for your publication, enabling you to focus on the content in subsequent publishing cycles.  To do this, select Edit Issue Properties from the main screen, and under Option 3, give your template the name it deserves.  You’ll then be able to use the fruits of your labor in subsequent issues.

There is probably no worse strategy for an intranet or public website than content migration. It is doomed to failure from the very start.

Joe the manager picks up a jug. Inside that jug is milk that is curdled, sour and foul smelling. As Joe shakes the jug the solids and water separate and slosh about and the smell rises further, choking the air. Joe has a problem.

How is Joe going to solve this problem? Here is the traditional web management solution. Joe decides he needs a new jug. Joe gets a team together to decide what sort of jug is needed. They specify a really cool, all-dancing, all-singing, high-tech portal jug and they go out and spend a lot of money on it.

Then what happens? Another team is assembled to take the old jug and migrate its contents into the new portal jug. Once all the putrefied milk has been drained into the new portal jug there’s high-fives and lattes all-round. Job well done, Joe! Project complete.

If you’ve been involved in the Web for a while then the above story will be all-too-familiar to you. It is nothing less than shocking how little attention and genuine strategic focus most managers give to their websites. Even in 2008, I’m still coming across stone-age strategies that revolve around buying cool new technology.

From a management perspective, content has little or no value. It does not even deserve to be managed. Whether it is good or bad is irrelevant. Just shovel it onto the website. If it was written for print, so what? Just shovel it onto the website. The old website didn’t work? Buy new technology and hire a fancy graphics agency. The content? Just migrate/shovel it over from the old website.

You get the website you deserve. Quality content is at the heart of all great websites. This sounds like a self-evident, no-brainer statement. However, as we approach 2009, it still needs repeating.

Taking your old intranet content and migrating it into a new software system is doomed to failure. If your website isn’t working then ask this question: why isn’t the website working? Is it because of the technology? Is it because of the graphics and the layout? Or is it because of the content? Nine-times-out-of-ten it will be the content.

Content migration—and its first cousin, website “redesign”—are all about pouring sour old milk into new portal jugs. At some stage, we have to address the core web management challenges. Why do we have such bad content?
1. We allow the organization to publish puff, fluff and vanity, instead of focusing on the needs of our customers/staff.
2. We don’t hire web content professionals. Instead we find the most junior person in the department and give them the job of managing the website.
3. We don’t see the Web as a unique medium—we just take print content and print thinking and shovel it onto the Web.
4. We don’t review and quality control. We have practically no processes to take old content off our website.

By Matthew Lasar | Published: November 19, 2008 – 11:14PM CT

Stuck in the Netscape era

As Ars Technica readers know, the blogosphere is now saturated with guesses as to who President-elect Barack Obama will select as the next chair of the Federal Communications Commission. And there’s no shortage of input about what the FCC’s priorities should be over the next several years: net neutrality, improving U.S. broadband penetration, fixing the Universal Service Fund—everybody’s weighing in with free advice.

Here’s mine: somebody’s got to do something about the FCC’s web site: www.fcc.gov.

Nota bene: the following should not be construed as a dig at the FCC’s dedicated personnel, many of whom I have the pleasure of communicating with on a regular basis. Clearly an enormous amount of work has been put into the site. But this effort has not been accompanied by coordinated planning or design. That’s the fault of management, not staff.

Remember the Internet in the Netscape 3 era? The FCC sure does

Let’s face it, fcc.gov still looks like it was thrown together six weeks after Netscape went public over a decade ago. The result: the only people who can really access it are telecom lawyers, public interest groups with their autoforms, and wonks like me who have dedicated years to exploring its mysteries. The tens of thousands of Americans who want to intelligently participate in the FCC’s many proceedings are almost instantly stymied by the Byzantine nature of the site. Except, of course, if they want to make an indecency complaint.

Clearly, the next FCC needs to blue pencil into its upcoming Congressional budget a request for funding for a serious overhaul of the portal. It’s time to bring in a team of designers, database programmers, and scripting grunts to transfer its data to a good content management system. Short of that, here are four suggestions for making fcc.gov more usable and accessible.

1. Make it easier for the public to comment on proceedings

Want to comment on an important issue facing the FCC like net neutrality or product placement? No problem, just go to this link and upload a statement. Oops. You’ve already been stopped dead in your tracks by field one, right? Field one requires a number for the proceeding associated with the issue. You have no idea what this number is, and, absurdly, when you click the proceeding search link, it requires you to input a proceeding number to look up the proceeding!

Most people who, often for the first time, want to give the FCC some individual feedback on an issue don’t know that every major subject has a docket number. For example, the docket number for net neutrality is 07-52. Without that, you can’t use the FCC’s comment page to file a comment. To be fair, the agency has thrown up a page of popular dockets with quick links, but it’s hard to find, contains only about 20 of the Commission’s proceedings (some of which have expired), and only allows you to send a brief statement.

Would it really be so difficult to attach a link to the main comment form that leads to a page that explains docket numbers and offers a wiki with all current dockets? The FCC should post a link to that form at the top of every proceeding- or order-related news release it publishes in pdf, word, or html. And fcc.gov should post that link prominently at its top left hand corner, right under the search form.

And speaking of which…

2. Make it easier to search for comments on proceedings

Maybe you’ve heard that Clear Channel or the FBI or some public interest group has filed something interesting with the FCC? Maybe you want to look up the latest comments on a hot proceeding? So you went to the Commission’s search field on the top left of the site and entered the appropriate data, right?

Forget it, you’re lost already. That search engine only ferrets out what the FCC publishes about its activities, not the comments and statements that the agency receives from interested parties. What you really want is here, safely hidden three links away from the main page. And if you try to search that engine for a proceeding—again, you need the docket number.

Good luck finding this on your own. At least it was updated this century

In the long run, the FCC needs to modernize its comment database. It needs to grab some open source program like Lucene and make the millions of PDFs stored in its tables searchable by text (or at least as many as possible). In the short run, it needs to add that same link mentioned in suggestion one—a wiki of dockets so people can make informed use of the right search form. And again, the site should link to the form from the top left of the main page, not three clicks inside.

read more…

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.

I recently worked with an organization that had managed to delete a substantial quantity of content from its website. It was not an easy process. In fact, it took years of effort to build up an internal consensus that actually deleting content was a good idea.

“You can’t delete that,” people would say, “because you never know when someone might need it.” Even content that had become out-of-date and was now actually misleading was defended. “I don’t have time to review or delete,” was another excuse.

Working with another organization I found a page that was old and contained content that was now clearly wrong and misleading. “You can’t delete that,” the web manager said to me tersely.
“Why not?” I replied.
“It will hurt our search engine optimization.”

It will what? This web manager—to call him a manager, I know, is stretching the meaning of the word—had become a search engine optimization fanatic. (There are quite a few out there.)

Blindly, he believed that the more pages he had, and the more content he had on each of these pages, the more likely he was to get found in search engines. (As if getting found was the Holy Grail of web management.) Bringing customers to a page with wrong content is like bringing customers into a car salesroom to show them your cars that won’t start and have scratches all over the paintwork.

Back to the website that deleted lots of its content. It was hard going. It took leadership. Compromises had to be made. Some content was not deleted but was changed so that it would not be found when customers used the search engine.

The results were more dramatic than anyone could have imagined. Customer satisfaction with the website had remained stubbornly low for several years despite many other initiatives. Well, when they deleted the content, customer satisfaction shot up. Why?

Most customers come to your website to complete top tasks. The more irrelevant and out of date pages of content you have, the greater the chances they will arrive on these pages. There is simply nothing worse than presenting a customer with useless content. It infuriates them, wastes their time, and drives them away from your website like a plague.

Every time I hear the word “redesign” I shiver a little. The website has grown more and more useless because of badly managed and out-of-date content. Management should have mandated the boring, politically difficult and thankless work of regularly removing poor quality content.

Instead, many web managers—particularly the newly appointed ones—want to do a redesign. This is much more fun. It involves hiring latte-drinking, cool-haircut web designers, who will eulogize the brand and dress up the first couple of levels of the website in shiny new graphics.

But the rot of out-of-date, badly organized content remains. The organization feels good because it has ‘done something’. But what has it done? It has engaged in the classic, ever-popular pastime of putting lipstick on a pig.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

Listening to customers is not enough. You must listen to the right ones.

Is the feedback you are getting for your website truly reflective of the needs of the majority of your customers? Too often, websites get feedback that reflects the ‘squeaky wheel’ syndrome. (The squeaky wheel gets oiled.)

Are the customers who give feedback reflecting the top tasks of the average customer or do they have exceptional tasks and demands? Because if their tasks and demands are exceptional then changing your website to meet them may be the worst thing you could do.

Management’s job is to use limited resources to achieve maximum return. This is true whether we are talking about management in a government, non-profit or commercial environment.

Even on a government website, management’s job is not to serve everybody. That is not a good use of limited resources; of taxpayer’s money. One of the major complaints about governments is that they don’t use scarce resources wisely, and this complaint has never been truer than on many government websites.

But this complaint is not just true of government websites. Many commercial websites attempt to do and be everything for everybody. The intentions are good but the results are not.

Listening to customer feedback is of course usually a positive thing to do. But if what a particular customer wants does not reflect general customer demand then, in most circumstances, you should not respond to that wish. Here’s why.

Let’s say you have five features in a web application or five pieces of content on your website. Customer B wants you to add a sixth feature or sixth piece of content. You face two problems.

Firstly, you have limited resources. The time and money you could have spent improving and refining the five features/content now needs to be stretched in order to develop and manage the sixth piece. (I don’t think I have ever come across a web feature or piece of content that couldn’t be improved.)

Secondly, you have added more complexity to the environment. The five features have now got to share space with the sixth. The sixth piece of content might now come first in the search results page, thus being more likely to be clicked on.

There are always a small set of top tasks within an environment that have huge demand. Then, there is an almost limitless supply of exceptional tasks and demands from customers. If we pursue the exceptions we reduce the time we have to make the top tasks better and add complexity for the customers trying to find and complete these tasks.

Just because one customer asks for something doesn’t mean we should do it. We must decide if this is a top task that is emerging or that we might have missed. We must also calculate the cost to our resources and to our other customers’ time and attention.

Your website can be like a mirage, promising an endless space full of limitless possibilities. But if you keep filling it up you will turn it into a desert of complexity where everything seems to be in reach but nothing really is.

It often seems that the primary purpose of localization is to create unreadable English that is cheap to translate into unreadable German.

A great many organizations do not believe content has any real value. They see it is as a cost, a necessary evil. Thus, they want to produce content for the lowest possible cost.

This approach leads to awful websites that lose sales, infuriate customers and damage the brand and reputation of the organization. What senior managers in particular have failed to realize is that these days the first impression many customers get of an organization comes from its website. First impressions last.

Let’s say that the primary market of the organization is America. Whatever attention the American website gets, you can be pretty sure the Japanese or German versions will get much less.

A large European multinational once ran a workshop in Japan with a view to helping it do a better job on its Japanese website. During the workshop the team was shocked to find out that hardly any of the Japanese customers in the room were going to the Japanese website. Instead, they were going to the English version. Why?

“The English version at least has a chance of being up-to-date,” one Japanese gentleman stated. “And the quality of the Japanese is not very good.” I dealt with a Danish company once who I’m sure had a very good Danish-language website, but whose English-language version was awful.

I want to let you in on a secret: You don’t get brownie points for trying on the Web. Web customers are ruthlessly impatient, skeptical and cynical. They don’t look at your badly translated content and say: “Well, at least they tried. I think I’ll buy from them.”

Do you know what some organizations are doing in order to address the problem of having to have multiple-language websites? You won’t believe this unless you work for a large multinational. Pull up your chair. Take a deep breath.

What they’re doing is reducing the quality of the content of the primary language so that it’s cheaper to translate. Here’s the way a typical conversation goes:
“You can’t write it like that.”
“Why not?”
“Those words are not easily translatable. You have to use these words that are easy to translate.”
“But these are not the words that our customers use.”
“Doesn’t matter. You still have to use them. Saves money for the organization.”

You may have heard the old saying: “penny-wise, pound-foolish.” Well it truly, truly applies to how many organizations manage—mismanage—their content. Somebody please tell these people who run these content sweatshops that in a race to the bottom everyone ultimately loses.

Cheap, badly-written, awfully-translated content spends its toxic life circling the drain. But it never really flushes away. It just leaves a stain on your reputation and brand. And if you don’t believe that then you don’t believe in the power of the Web.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

If you’re a teacher of a particular class in the K-12 bracket, and you would enjoy a quick and inexpensive way to piece together a website with all the necessary trappings to a schoolroom environment – such as a homework page, contact field, calendar, and perhaps even a grade report to be privately or publicly accessible – a service called Classtell maybe just what you’re looking for.

For starters, the end product of the Classtell service isn’t the most beautiful you could imagine. Apart from a half dozen color options, it’s fairly plain. But few rooms in the average elementary school are very visually captivating, either, so it probably is not expected that a class website will do much to impress a user. Instead, utility is key, and that Classtell does have.

For the sum total of $20 CAD per year (a price which follows a free 90-day trial), you’re given a reasonably detailed editor in which to place whatever files, text, images, etc., that form the basics of the class syllabus and any things pertaining to your curriculum as school days progress.

Planning a school trip? Jot down the date, and any details of what it is you intend to do can be written up in the blog space provided. If special occasions call for blog posts – during vacation periods, for example – it can be employed as well.

It’s really open to anything you can think of so long as it keeps to the technical limits of the Classtell service. And while you can be thorough with your data, the editor is never too complex to traverse. It’s intelligently designed, for sure. Basically, everything that should be there seems to be there. You’ll just have to forgive the place for not being so pretty. (Frankly, the website editor offers a nicer picture than what lives on the other side.)

The fact of the matter is that students and teachers alike are more connected than ever in numerous areas across the world map. But if you as an instructor are still in need of better organization between yourself and your pupils, Classtell is qualitatively of grade. It’s cheap enough to cause little or no concern, and lacks few things, if any, that a teacher might miss or wish for. All in all, a real good reference to your workflow and the workflow of students and their parents.