Playing in Our Own Sand Box

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

Crazy-low budgets, tight deadlines, and scope creep. These three specters haunt many projects large and small, but they are a given when it comes to one of the most challenging projects of all. I’m talking here about the inside job: refreshing the company website.

But taking a busman’s holiday can also provide an opportunity to try new approaches and take risks. So when we set out to refresh the Projectline website, we decided to test-drive some new practices. Here’s what we sampled and tried—and what we found out along the way.

Messaging Architecture Really Works. We wanted our new website to showcase all that Projectline has to offer, but before we could tell a cohesive story, we needed to get on the same page—literally. Taking a cue from Margot Bloomstein’s Confab 2011 presentation about messaging architecture, “Message Matters,” Projectline stakeholders participated in a card-sorting exercise that led us to identify and prioritize five key values. We then used this list of principles as a litmus test at every critical juncture, from first draft and wireframe to final editorial and design decisions, to ensure we were all headed in the same direction.

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Code, content, and cocktails

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

I am neither a web developer nor a designer, but somehow I had the good fortune to sign up for An Event Apart in Seattle, mostly because I have joined the church of Halvorson and couldn’t miss a chance to hear the content strategy gospel first-hand.

Here are just a few of the things I learned over the past few days, in no particular order:

  • There’s nothing to be gained and much to be lost by not taking up Twitter. (Follow me @Naumannclature.)
  • Embrace your audience. As a content strategist (still trying that on for size) I’ve always advocated for identifying who you want to reach before you start to even try communicating with them. But that’s not enough—you also have to know what device they prefer and what browser they default to in order to engage with them on their terms.
  • Interactivity isn’t new—it’s a return to the way things were before we started to let our eyes glaze over, zoned out in front of the TV.
  • The best way to “fire” your clients is to make them think it was their idea.
  • I just love bread pudding. (The catering staff may have been more responsible for this lesson than the conference presenters, but an important insight nonetheless…)
  • To clients, developers, designers: we word-loving people (editors, content strategists, web writers) come in peace. Messaging is a tool, not something to be tacked on like a piece of gum—and definitely not a weapon.
  • Embrace feedback. Or, as Jeffrey Veen quoted from codinghorror.com’s Jeff Atwood: “The velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback will set the tone for your software, far more than any single release ever could. That’s what you need to get good at.”
  • Yes, it is possible to give a great presentation while drinking a cocktail.
  • Seek inspiration in new places – in detective novels, architecture, chalkboards, the history of refrigeration, on the moon.
  • Design for the future. It will be here sooner than you think.

My recommendation—hop on over to An Event Apart and take a look.

How to engage online and do it right: lessons from An Event Apart

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

I spent the first part of this week at An Event Apart, which is billed as “the design conference for people who make websites.” While I’m not a designer, I do make websites (like this one), and the speakers included a number of people I hugely admire, so I was thrilled to be able to go. After two days packed with presentations, great people, and good food, my head felt ready to burst with design, code, content, and interaction ideas. I came away feeling personally challenged to do better work—and with a few major takeaways for all of us who work to engage with customers online in one way or another:

  • R-E-S-P-E-C-T: find out what it means to…well, everyone. Respect your colleagues, your users, your readers, and your clients. The strength of the presentations themselves came from these presenters’ obvious respect for each other and for us as their audience. But they also preached respect: Jeffrey Zeldman talked about the importance of recognizing when clients are a good fit (and how to part ways gracefully if they’re not), while Luke Wroblewski and Kristina Halvorson discussed the need to respect users’ time and attention by keeping content to-the-point.
  • Engage on your customers’ terms. Luke Wroblewski pointed out that this increasingly means meeting them on their mobile phones, but Ethan Marcotte’s “Dao of Flexibility” presentation offered ways to get a great experience on the biggest screens as well as the smallest. MailChimp’s Aaron Walter talked about playful, humorous design, but also highlighted the need to make straightforward, serious communication available if that’s what customers need. And of course, nearly everyone talked about the need to be aware of what browsers and devices visitors are using and to make their experience positive.
  • Be nice—but first get out of your customers’ way. Playful brand identities and emotionally appealing interfaces are great (and important!), but websites and applications have to stand on a solid foundation of usability and clarity. Nicole Sullivan’s suggestions for faster websites and Jared Spool’s emphasis on truly user-centric design underscored how important it is to keep in mind that “engagement” should never mean “entanglement.” (See the difference between this concept of ‘engagement’ and this one, which was quite successful).

I left impressed and inspired. These people care about the internet and its users in a way that should inspire all of us to engage genuinely and humanely online. What’s more, they provided direct ways to start doing just that—my to-do list grew with every presentation. In fact, I’d better get to work on that!

Accenture gets a sudden branding makeover

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Marketing Musings

A visit to Accenture’s website these days is a disorienting experience. The venerable consulting powerhouse has always been a paragon of disciplined branding, but their current web presence is quite obviously in the midst of a rapid overhaul. I’m sure Accenture’s web team had a hurried holiday as they rushed to erase Tiger Woods’ ubiquitous presence from—well, everything.

Suddenly, the images of Woods golfing have been replaced with non sequitur speed-skaters, birds, stock-photo people, or (in one particularly awkward instance) an empty golf course. If I’m recalling correctly, the entire color scheme has also been changed, and the previously cohesive site is generally a little cobbled-together. It doesn’t look awful, and I’m sure it’ll be holistically redesigned and revamped soon, but the contrast with the old site does raise some questions about the dangers of hitching your brand to a star—and what to do when that star falls.

Accenture used Woods so heavily that its public brand became nearly synonymous with his. I can understand why; golf was a perfect extended metaphor for Accenture’s work. The balance of skill, deliberation, data, perspective, and equipment needed to succeed at golf made sense for consulting, staffing, and technology services. Plus, golf has always been shorthand for business leisure. It was a good fit.

But the pairing of Tiger Woods and Accenture had very little to do with his marriage or character. It was about his skill, precision, reliability, and golf’s aesthetic appeal. Was it strictly necessary for them to drop him when he was disgraced? I’m not sure. Here’s what I think their options were:

  • Freak out, take down the website, and refuse to answer questions. To their credit, they didn’t attempt this, though I’m sure it was tempting for the first few days.
  • Decide to rapidly, deliberately distance themselves from the disgraced golfer. They answered questions clearly and briefly and began the process of overhauling all imagery in advertising materials.
  • Ride out the several weeks of media maelstrom with a clear message about the private/professional division. This would have been hard (and gutsy), but given how rapidly the hubbub seems to have settled, it’s possible it could have worked.

What do you think? Did they handle it the only way possible? Where will they go next with the brand? How can brands avoid the pitfalls of star-bound branding?

Web design and business sense: a chat with Projectline’s John Shields

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Marketing Musings

I’ve been watching Dustin Curtis’s dust-up with American Airlines since his original post in May, so I was certainly interested to read last month that American Airlines had fired the employee (“Mr. X”) who wrote to explain the design process and complications behind AmericanAirlines.com.

The responses have been unusually split, with some claiming the incident is about bad customer engagement and others claiming it’s about bad self-promotion. Both arguments have been made well (I especially like this take on it), so instead of rehashing them, I took the opportunity to chat with Projectline consultant and user experience expert John Shields about why Dustin Curtis and American Airlines seem to have missed each others’ points. Here’s what I asked and what I learned:

Seems there’s a huge gap between a single person designing an ideal homepage and the day-to-day functioning of a large-scale corporate web presence. What are the biggest contributors to that gap?

  • First off, there are often several teams that need to be involved: tech, marketing, legal, and sales—at the very least. They all have different priorities and strengths, so with all that help a website can wind up looking like Frankenstein’s monster. But, at the enterprise level, none of them are optional. You can’t just throw them out in favor of an ideal design because the stakes are too high and their contributions are often vital.
  • In an established organization, you’re never starting from scratch. You can’t. There are old databases, old content, and old workflows. Each is there for a reason. In order to move from a site bound by the old processes to a site that looks and feels fresh, you need a business analyst to make sense of why the old systems are there and where they can afford to change.
  • A large website isn’t a one-time thing; it’s a process. Throwing up a new design or a new feature is all well and good, but the ongoing maintenance and support is where the real work gets done. Without a web team (or at least a person) to be the gatekeeper, even the prettiest minimalist design will be a hodgepodge in no time.
  • User experience means a lot beyond the homepage. In a large company, maintaining a smooth user experience depends completely on having someone (or several someones) willing and empowered to fight for the customer’s needs.

Wow. Sounds hard. How does anyone do all that?

It’s mostly a matter of two things: a design vision and a business unit that can drive it. A dream-design is a great thing to have, but you have to be able to take that to other stakeholders and work towards a compromise that works for them. To keep things under control and sustain that vision, you need a team in charge of the website in the long term—it might be an internal team, an embedded program manager, an external web team, or some combination, but they have to be empowered to keep putting the customer first and serve as gatekeepers for all the other stuff that tends to wander into websites and muck them up. With that in place, it’s pretty phenomenal the kind of difference you can see in usability, customer responses, and revenue. It might be tough, but it’s worth it.