Back in March 2011, Josh Clark presented a virtual seminar on mobile design where he discussed the importance of designing tapworthy mobile apps. In this article, we look at two of the questions addressed in the podcast follow up: Should content on mobile website differ from their big screen counterparts, and Josh’s opinion on native web apps versus mobile web apps. The follow up podcast covered even more material so you may want to give it a listen or read the transcript.

Read the article: Mobile Design- Content and the great Web-based vs. Native Debate

Josh’s virtual seminar on Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps (which you can view a recording of) was so well received, we asked him to do another one. This Thursday, January 12, Josh is presenting Button Are a Hack, The New Rules of Designing for Touch. Learn more about this seminar.

That’s what the legal secretary told me when we were studying her firm’s intranet home page. In fact, the page was pretty sparse in layout. The text was nicely laid out in a readable font, with different weights given to headings and body text. Overall, it was organized and readable. Cluttered just didn’t seem like the right word.

Yet, the legal secretary was quite firm on this. She wasn’t the only one. Half of the firm’s employees we interviewed used the word “clutter” to describe the page that looked anything but cluttered to us.

It might be tempting to rework this home page with more whitespace, more organization, more emphasis on the visual design. However, that wouldn’t have produced any better results.

Over the years, we’ve learned that users have a different meaning of “clutter” than the designers do. It’s not the visual design the users are reacting to. It’s the actual content.

The law firm employees were telling us that the page didn’t have links and resources they needed. The page was full of stuff — mostly things the firm’s marketing group wanted everyone to know — but very little of what was on the page helped the employees do their jobs. Everything they needed was on the intranet, and they knew it, but the home page didn’t lead them to it.

The page was cluttered.

Clutter is what happens when we fill a page with things the user doesn’t care about. Replace the useless stuff with links, copy, and content the users really want, and the page suddenly becomes uncluttered.

Dictionary.com’s definition of Clutter is found on a page, ironically, filled with clutter.

That’s exactly what we did at the law firm. Our design team uncovered those resources the users needed and organized the page to have exactly what the users needed to do their jobs well.

Those users loved the new page. In our evaluations, nobody used the word clutter. They used words like useful, helpful, and awesome.

Here’s the best part: We put the old and new pages side-by-side. The new page definitely had more text, less whitespace, and more dense information design. Yet, when we asked the users to tell us which one was more cluttered, they were unamimous: the old design was the cluttered design.

Are your users complaining about clutter? Maybe you should look at what they actually are seeing.

When you break it down, the elements behind content strategy, such as information architecture, copywriting, search engine optimization, and content management, are not new. But they’ve never been combined into a strategy before, where teams can plan and execute the necessary activities to keeping great content up-to-date and working for the user.

Over a year ago we featured our first virtual seminar on content strategy with Kristina Halvorson. Since then, a lot has happened in the field, including an entire conference, Confab, dedicated to content strategy. It was run by Kristina’s company, Brain Traffic. UIE lent a hand producing the conference.

We thought it was time to reprint an article that Kristina wrote from UIE’s vast article library. It’s a fabulous introduction to what content strategy is and how you can start to make it work for you. I know you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article, The Discipline of Content Strategy.

We’re thrilled to bring you another UIE Virtual Seminar that touches the content strategy field.Margot Bloomstein will present Combining Curation with Your Content Strategy, Thursday, August 11.
If you struggle with how to tackle your organization’s web content, this webinar is for you. Explore the webinar.

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How do you bridge the gap between the search engine and your site? You want that transition to be as smooth and natural for your users as possible. Ideally, they would start with their search, arrive at your site, and accomplish what they set out to do. Often times, it doesn’t work out that easily. How do you increase conversions, satisfaction, and your users’ success? Shari Thurow offers techniques and tricks to satisfy the goals of your users.

Shari is the Founder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive. She has written two books, Search Engine Visibility and When Search Meets Web Usability, which is also the title of her Virtual Seminar. We ran out of time during the seminar to answer all of the questions. Today we are bringing you the follow up podcast with Shari and Jared Spool as they go over those questions.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…The problem with a home page is that a lot of website designers think that the purpose of the home page is to look pretty. The purpose of a home page is really to act as a table of contents to a website, focusing users on the areas of the site that are most important to you as a business owner and also helping them accomplish their desired tasks. Do they need to log in? You should supply a nice log in area.

We also find that, on the home page, there’s another area where people skip the big, honking graphic image. They’re looking for the text, because a home page is a means to an end. People don’t go to a home page and accomplish their task on a website on a home page. They’re actually trying to go to a product page, a service page, or an article page. That’s what they’re doing to accomplish their tasks. So, I think big, color photographs on the home page tend not to be a good design.

We found that the same photographs just scaled down with a little more text to get people to go to certain sections of the website actually performed better. A hundred percent of the users that we tested were able to complete the task. But, the one with the big, honking, graphic images, only 14 percent of the people completed their desired tasks…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Shari address these questions and more:

• Can you optimize Flash content?
• Is there a need to optimize for all search engines or to pick one specifically to optimize for?
• Are there any advantages to presenting headings as images with alternative text?
• Would repeating a call to action at the top and bottom of a page make search engine bots suspicious of spamming?

As always, we welcome your thoughts and comments. Please share in our comments section.

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When approaching your information architecture, you’ll realize most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. You need to figure out which works best for your audience, your content, and your project’s goal. There are many approaches to choose from—alphabetic, geographic, format, organizational structure, task, audience, subject/topic—just to name a few. In her UIE Virtual Seminar, Organization Schemes for Web Content, Donna shares the most popular approaches, and offers tips on when and how to use each.

Donna’s a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer, and happens to be one of our favorites in all of those categories. She is the author of two fabulous books: Card Sorting from Rosenfeld Media, and more recently A Practical Guide to Information Architecture, part of the Five Simple Steps series, which takes her seminar’s topic even further.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…Sometimes with the information architecture work coming up with the categories and the concept and like what schemes are you going to use and things is relatively easy. Sometimes the real trick is coming up with the words that you are going to use to describe them so the labels.

And this could be really tricky. When somebody approaches your staff and they got something in their head and they are looking for it on screen we need to make a connection with what they have in their head and what they are saying. So, we really need to make sure we understand the terminology our users use and make sure that is available to them.

Said like that, it sounds not too hard, you do some user research, you understand what your users say, and you make sure you use those labels.

The trick with that and boy this can be hard is that often users use terminology that might be out of date. So in Australia the thing you get at the end of the tax year from your employer that then you use to do tax stuff is called I think it’s called now “pay as you go certificate.”

However, for years, it was called a group certificate. It has not been called for, oh man, at least 15 years I suspect but people still use the word group certificate.

So people will use old terminology, they will use the accurate terminology and if you try to use that in an interface people who prepare the content and who know the most about the content [laughter] will have kittens and validly because language is all about trying to be fairly privies so were communicating well with each other.

So, people call things particular things so that you communicate an idea. We definitely do not want to use terminology that users use if that terminology is inaccurate because people who do know it will go, ‘what?’ and you just never win that war with your content office because it is wrong.

The thing we really need to do is build bridge between those two things. So, if you got something that leads straight forward you can use the user terminology. But, if you got something a bit more complex, sometimes scientific, we’ve got to bridge between them…”

If you thought that was interesting, you’ll also hear Donna address these questions.

• Do you always start an IA by doing a card sort first? How strictly do you adhere to what the users suggest in a card sort?
• How do you test a scheme once you hit the magic point?
• With a very large site which includes a wide variety of topics, how would it be best to test that scheme?
• How do you deal with competing or multiple schemes on the same site?
• What are some of the best practices for naming tasks so that users can recognize them easily?

As always, we welcome your thoughts in our comments section.

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We have a special podcast for you today, a sample of a session recorded live at our recent User Interface 15 Conference.

At UI15, Kristina Halvorson presented “Message and Medium: Better Content by Design.” With the sheer number of delivery possibilities these days, content is seen in many different ways. But how the content looks on these various platforms won’t matter if the message itself isn’t right to begin with.

This is where content strategy comes in to play. Communicating a clear, focused, and current message takes coordination. Without this coordination, it’s difficult to distribute your message across multiple platforms.

According to Kristina, messaging architecture is where your content really begins. She says that your message should not be about marketing, instead you should focus on why people come to you. Your primary message is about why you exist. Thinking this way will help you prioritize your content, guide your design choices, and keep your content consistent.

Kristina points out that we all have websites because we want people to do something, some call to action. Identifying those calls to action will help you make decisions. These decisions help determine what kind of experience your users will have. She says you need to consider the “One Second Impression” in order to alleviate frustrations of your users and get them to stay on your page. It is within the 4-10 second range that they begin to take in the actual content of the page. In those first 5 seconds, Kristina says that “you need to work to convey that primary reason, why it is that we exist, and that we see you. We understand why you are here.”

Next, she talks about the types of messages. Your primary message begins to spawn the 3-6 secondary messages you should have. Those secondary messages then go on to produce thousands of details which support and guide your content.

She says that in order to develop a strong primary message, you should focus on three key questions. Who are you, what do you deliver, and what do I get? These questions will help develop content that is appropriate for your users. She says that every word of you primary message needs to have distinct meaning, it has to be air tight, and that you can’t let any words go to waste because all other messages on your site are born from this one message.

Once you determine your primary and secondary messages you can begin to determine exactly what types of content will be on your site. Very quickly, you realize that you’re into structure, which is your information architecture. Kristina says that your structure and your substance need to work together and inform each other to deliver on the experience.

The full recording of Kristina’s talk as well as the other seven Featured Talks are available for purchase as part of UI15 OnDemand. Included in the proceedings are the handouts and presentation slides from the Featured Talks and also from the 8 full day workshops. Get more information or place your order for UI15 OnDemand.

From our research in what makes up the most successful teams, it turns out they are both right. And they are both wrong.

A team with three people, each of whom has basic skills in visual design, information architecture, and content design, will produce about the same results as a three-person team where there’s a specialist for each area. But the teams that do the best have three individuals, each of whom have advanced skills in all three areas.

The implications of this are clear: if you want to create a best-of-breed team, you need to constantly be raising the skills and capabilities of every team member in the critical design areas. Specializing in three areas is much more valuable than specializing in one.

In this issue of UIEtips, we revisit an article from 2009. In the article, I discuss the interplay that happens in-between visual design, information architecture, and content design. I talk about how the areas interact and how to ensure you’re creating the best designs. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article, Information Interplay: Visual Design, Information Architecture, and Content.

By the way, if you’re looking to advance your skill set, you should attend this November’s User Interface Conference. Some of the full-day workshops include visual design, designing with scenarios, and content strategy. Review the all the workshops at UICONF.com.

What are you doing to boost your skills in these three areas? We’d love to hear from you. Share your experiences below.

Explore the 8 workshops offered at this year’s conference . Register for UI15 by October 8 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

We had to provide more than just inspiration. We needed to make sure attendees left with new tools, ideas and processes they could immediately implement. We needed to make sure that the conference was going to impact their day to day work. Improve it, refine it, energize it.

As we put together the Masters, we realized we had something really special. A group of people you’re unlikely to see present ever again at one single event.

We knew we hit the mark when we received comments like this.

“Absolutely one of the BEST conferences I’ve been to. Each speaker brought valuable lessons we can take away with us.” Philadelphia attendee

“First conference I’ve been to in a while where I was very glad I attended every presentation. Content quality was excellent.” Philadelphia attendee

“A great 2 days. I could build the rest of my career on what I learned at this conference.” Stan C

Even though we broke up the band, you can still experience the Tour

With the Tour Proceedings, you can listen to over 13 hours of audio from 12 sessions, view all the PDFs of the presentations, hear interviews with many of the speakers, and get discounts to their books.

Order your proceedings by August 31, and you’ll pay just $249 – $50 off the regular price. You’ll immediately get access to the proceedings and make an impact on your web applications.

You’ll hear from these Masters

Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Designs. Luke masterfully blended entertainment and information in his presentation. He focused on ways to improve web forms, where they need to grow and change, and what to consider when designing for mobile applications.

Bill Scott, co-author of Designing Web Interfaces. Bill showed us rich interaction design principles in action on several web applications. He explained his concept of interesting moments — opportunities to engage with the user, and that these moments can actually be mapped out in a grid.

Doug Bowman, creative director, Twitter. Doug gave us a fascinating look at how Twitter helps new and one-time users become loyal repeaters. He discussed how users fall into 3 main groups – curious, casual, committed/core and how they track the users in these groups.

Ken Kellogg, director of user research, Marriott. Ken told us what it takes to redesign a web site with dozens of internal stakeholders involved. He discussed how negotiation was an important tactic during the redesign and the importance of never harming the corporate cash cow.

Jason Fried, co-founder, and Ryan Singer, lead designer, 37signals. Both Jason and Ryan talked about solving design problems. Ryan takes a more hands-on approach and shows you the methods 37signals uses for designing—from low fidelity sketches to using Photoshop. He emphasizes the lack of wireframes and detailed designs. Jason’s approach is more around the dynamics of the team—their communication around a design and how ownership of a design evolves.

Hagan Rivers, co-founder, Two Rivers Consulting. Hagan’s session covered several ways of tackling navigation in web applications. She carefully details the four types of navigation to consider: local navigation, global navigation, cross navigation, and dashboard navigation. Hagan’s session was very in-depth and detailed.

Christian Crumlish, co-author of Designing Social Interfaces. Christian lead us on a journey around social design principles and patterns. His talk covered five social principles: pave the cowpaths, talk like a person, embrace openness, learn from games, and respect the ethical dimension. He then continued on with five social pattern groups and five social anti-patterns.

Stephen Anderson, creator of the Mental Notes cards. Stephen explained how to use psychological concepts to motivate users. He engaged the audience with exercises on how to make mundane tasks fun and engaging.

Jared Spool, founder, User Interface Engineering. Jared delighted attendees with two presentations on current findings from UIE research. In his first presentation, Jared discussed the importance of vision, feedback, and culture. His second presentation looked at the importance of creating an experience vision.

Julie Zhuo, designer, Facebook. Julie gave us an inside look at how designers at Facebook work. She covered Facebook’s design strategy of designing for the system, not the individual, and how design decisions are data focused. It was fascinating to hear how a team of 35 design for over 400 million users.

Get all the details on each presentation.

So What Are You Waiting For?

You’ll want to order before August 31 to save $50 and pay just $249. Ready to order? You won’t regret it. As soon as we receive your order, you’ll get the information to immediately access this bundle of goodness.

Get $50 off the Tour Proceedings when you order by 8/31/10. Learn more about the proceedings

Your site’s search engine produces all sorts of useful information. Spending time with your site’s query data—data that is semantically rich—will help you answer questions about your users’ behavior and intent. You’re likely to learn some unanticipated lessons about your site.

Why spend time with your search log’s data? It will give you more usable content, improved search engine performance, as well as better navigation and metadata. Your users will achieve more on your site. You’ll sell more, engage more, and reduce frustration.

Lou Rosenfeld, who helped establish the field of information architecture, will show you how to take advantage of your site’s query data, data that’s sitting on your server right now. He’ll show you how to set up and run simple reports and queries to get you started towards better dialogue with your customers.

Do you spend time on your site’s search analytics? Maybe you use Google analytics or some other tool? What sort of time does it require? Other resources? Share your experiences below.

It’s no surprise why. After all, content is the substance that draws and keeps the users at the site. It’s what sells our products, describes our services, and provides our support. And it’s what teams struggle with the most.

When you break it down, the elements behind content strategy, such as information architecture, copywriting, search engine optimization, and content management, are not new. But they’ve never been combined into a strategy before, where teams can plan and execute the necessary activities to keeping great content up-to-date and working for the user.

In today’s UIEtips, you can read a great article Kristina wrote on just this topic, The Discipline of Content Strategy. It’s a fabulous introduction to what content strategy is and how you can start to make it work for you. I know you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article, The Discipline of Content Strategy.

We’re thrilled to have Kristina tell us all about Content Strategy in her upcoming June 3 UIE Virtual Seminar, Content Strategy: Maximizing a Business Asset. I can tell you, from first-hand experience, you’ll be just as inspired as everyone else to employ a sound strategy and get your content under control. Kristina will show you how.

Are you struggling with keeping your content under control? What have you tried? Share your content strategy experiences below.

Thankfully, Dan Rubin can show you the simple steps to create solid visual design. Dan is a talented designer in his own right, but has a special knack for teaching visual design for people without an artistic background. That’s why we’ve asked him to present our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers, on May 13, 2010. He’ll teach you how to recognize common design mistakes and effective ways to make your site look good, whether you’re a natural artist or not.

Register with the promotion code BRAINSPARKS and get lifetime access to the recording of this seminar at no extra cost. Anyone in your organization can watch it whenever they want, as often as they want.

How do you create a visual design that matches your great ideas? When you look at a web page, and something isn’t quite right, how do you know what to do about it? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What tips or tricks can you share that have helped you improve your visual design?

Ok, really it’s just the story of the links. (We’ll talk about the content later, I promise.)

About 10 years ago, we started looking at how users decided to move from one page to the next. Curiously, we found a consistent pattern, independent of the users’ previous experience or the design of the page. Upon reaching a page, the users scanned the page for the phrases or words that were important to them. If they found them, they’d try to click on them (or the link that seemed to go with them).

We call those magic phrases “Trigger Words”, because they trigger the user into action. They are key to understanding the secret to getting your users to the content they’re seeking. Hardly a day goes by where we don’t talk about their importance to one client or another.

That’s why we decided it’s time to republish the article we wrote about them, The Right Trigger Words. While we wrote this back in 2004 and the examples have aged a little (Analog’s home page, for example, now uses flyout menus instead of listing all the trigger words right on the page), the article is still the best resource we have to explain what we mean. I’m betting you’ll enjoy it.

Bringing this article up is timely, because it fits perfectly with Shari Thurow’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, When Search Meets Web Usability. Join us on the 12/16 webinar, and you’ll see how Shari uses trigger words to make sure you’re getting the most out of your search engine optimization efforts.

Are trigger words important to your design strategy? What techniques have you used to identify and integrate them into your site? Share your experiences below.

On January 7 Peter Morville will discuss Search Design Patterns, and in the same session, Mark Burrell will tell you how to then use them.

Later in the month, on January 28, Steve Portigal will present to you his thoughts on studying your users in their own context, Ethnography.

During last year’s UIE Roadshow, our audiences couldn’t get enough on the topic of personas. So, on February 18, we’ve asked Tamara Adlin to talk about The Power of Ad-hoc Personas. Personas can be your ticket to lasting organizational clarity… and it doesn’t take a ton of costly research.

With his book, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide just hitting the bookstore shelves, Todd Zaki Warfel will help you flesh out your design ideas, test your assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users on March 29.

In the Spring, look for Kristina Halvorson to help you with your content strategy and Louis Rosenfeld to dive deep on Search Analytics. And there is much more in the works.

Until December 3, you can still sign your team up for the UIE Virtual Seminar Subscription programs . Not only is it a tremendous savings, but you get the benefit of lifetime access to each recording and the ease of registering and paying just one time.

We also plan to unveil our plan for our User Experience Training Library. Believe it or not, there is a method to our madness.

Have you ever attended a UIE Virtual Seminar? What do you like best about them? How has your team maximized what it gets out of these learning events? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

What we found in our research over the last 10 years is that practically every measure of users’ performance correlates strongly with the users completing their task. Users who achieve their objective believe the web site looks more professional, rate it as more fun, tell us it runs faster, and are more satisfied with the site. There’s no doubt: if you want users to love your site, make sure they complete their tasks.

Yet, even though we know task completion is important, many teams don’t have a strategy for it. They adopt a “launch and leave” approach to their sites, moving on to the next project once they’ve pushed something out the door.

To prepare for this issue of UIEtips, I talked with Gerry McGovern about how teams are managing their tasks. This is a hot topic for him right now and he’s got some really interesting insights. I’m sure you’ll find the article fascinating.

We’ve released the interview as a podcast. It’s definitely worth listening to.

If you’re looking to adopt or upgrade your own strategy for managing tasks, there are still a few seats in Gerry’s full-day workshop at the upcoming User Interface 14 conference in Boston next week.

Have you employed a strategy to manage your users’ top tasks? We want to hear what you’re doing. Leave us your thoughts below.

But there are times when a PDF is beneficial to use on your web site. Understanding when it’s appropriate and how the audience uses the PDF will help you decide if placing a PDF on your web site is the right thing to do.

To help us with this task we turn to Ginny Redish, renowned usability and web content expert. In today’s UIEtips, we finish the 3 part series from Ginny on breaking up large documents for the web (read part 1 and part 2 if you missed it last week ). This article is based on a chapter in Ginny’s book Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. In this excerpt, Ginny examines these key areas:

• Should you rely on PDF files for your web content?
• When might a PDF file be appropriate?
• When is a PDF file not appropriate?
• How accessibility plays into the use of PDFs.

We found Ginny’s article to be insightful, and I think you will too.

Is writing and organizing web content one of your responsibilities? At this year’s User Interface 14 conference in Boston, MA, Ginny has a full-day workshop on planning and writing for the web. Her session, on November 1, is sure to be a popular one. Besides talking about the key to a great web site, by starting a conversation with the visitor, she’ll cover selecting and organizing your site’s information, and developing a cohesive content strategy for your site.

Do you use PDFs on your site? How do you determine when to use a PDF? Do you offer the same information on the screen and in a PDF? Share your thoughts below.

In today’s UIEtips, we continue with part 2 of a 3 part series from Ginny Redish on breaking up large documents for the web. The article is based on a chapter in Ginny’s book Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. In this excerpt, Ginny asks four key questions when deciding to use one page or several pages.

• How much do people want in one visit?
• Am I overloading my site visitors?
• What’s the download time?
• Will people want to print?

I think you’ll find her responses to these questions quite informative. Part 3 will come next week.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of Ginny’s article.

Are you involved with writing and organizing content for your web pages? You’ll want to see Ginny’s full-day workshop, Planning & Writing Web Content that Works, at this year’s User Interface 14 Conference on November 1 in Boston. Ginny will show you you how to uncover users’ needs with personas and scenarios, deliver users to their content by carefully selecting and organizing your site’s information, and how to develop a cohesive content strategy for your site.

How you display your content so visitors can easily find what they came for is critical in keeping them there. If visitors are overwhelmed with unorganized content, or can’t easily figure out how content is broken up, they’re likely to leave and find what they are looking for elsewhere.

In today’s UIEtips, we hear from one of our favorite speakers and writers, Ginny Redish. In this excerpt from Ginny’s book, “Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works,” Ginny explains how to break up large documents for your web pages by using specific topics and subtopics — time or sequence, task, people, type of information, and questions people ask. I think you’ll get some good pointers in part 1 of this article. Part 2 will be coming later this week.

Read Ginny’s article.

If planning and writing web content is part of your daily activity, then you won’t want to miss Ginny’s full-day workshop at this year’s User Interface 14 Conference in Boston, MA on November 1. Ginny will show you how to uncover users’ needs with personas and scenarios, how to deliver users to their content by carefully selecting and organizing your site’s information, and how to develop a cohesive content strategy for your site.

What’s your process for breaking up information and documents on your web site? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

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A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets.  As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in how to make the jump from a standard on-site search to faceted search, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Faceted Search.

During the podcast, Adam asked Pete and Daniel to dig into these questions:

• Should we show counts for each facet? What about when using multiple selection?
• Can you elaborate on the mixing and matching of precision and recall results to construct facets?
• Is there a best practice for deselecting facets?
• Most search interfaces assume a flat list of results. What happens when you mix up different types of results, and how would you distribute them across a page?

Tune in to hear more about designing for facets. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

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One of the most popular speakers in the history of our User Interface Conference is Gerry McGovern. Certainly most of that popularity is thanks to Gerry’s no-nonsense, customer-centric approach to content management strategy. Perhaps a small portion is due to his dulcet Irish brogue. Gerry coined the term “customer care words”, which are distinct words and phrases that visitors are looking for that lead them to success and satisfaction. This is complimentary to a concept we at UIE call “trigger words”, but not quite the same. Trigger words are content-related and navigational–words that help lead you along the path to what you seek. Care words are task-related not content-related; they are the words that visitors need to see to complete the task they are on your site for. These words are not always found in your search logs or in keywords that have led people from Google to your site. But, through polling, testing and observation, care words can be discovered.

Customer care words are both a concept and a eponymous technique that Gerry uses with his clients. When enough participants take part in his processes, his technique both shows top words people are attracted to and, perhaps more importantly, reveals the top tasks the customers are visiting the site to accomplish.

Top task management, quite simply, is what Gerry thinks your site’s whole design should revolve around. Most site owners view their sites as places that house information, but your visitors are on your site to accomplish a task. You should optimize your site, mostly through language, so that it excels in helping visitors accomplish their most common tasks. Traditional site management concentrates on technology, like search engines, and content. But all site projects should ultimately be judged by the satisfaction and success of the users… not by whether your new CMS transition went technically well.

Once the content management system is in place, many organizations write and publish copy without knowing how it will be used. Optimizing your content for top tasks can produce increases in customer satisfaction and task completion. Gerry has seen this with many of his own clients, some of whom were skeptical at first. The biggest objection to optimizing for top tasks is the fear that your customers look to do many things on your site, not just these top tasks. However, if customers have trouble with their common tasks, why would they trust your site to dive into the other ones? In some cases, the top tasks weren’t the most obvious ones to site owners, underlining the importance of both talking to your customers and observing users on your site regularly.

Measuring your customers’ success rate, time-to-completion and their disaster rate–when they think they’ve successfully completed their task, but actually have not–will show you whether or not your changes are beneficial. What’s key is to measure and to revisit these areas until we have them right. Too often, Gerry says, there’s a culture of “launch and leave” with sites: build it and then never revise. Constant, incremental improvement is a better culture to work towards. Gerry has seen seen customer satisfaction rates “sky-rocket” after such changes.

There’s so much more Gerry and I discussed. Please listen to him in his own words on the podcast; your customers will thank you.

How are you ensuring your customers are completing their top tasks successfully on your site? Discuss your methods in the comments below.

Interaction with a product is more than how it’s used or how it behaves. It’s about a connection between two sides. One side is the customer, but the other side is much more than a product or service. To many people, the character and essence of a product and its company are identical. So, what is the essence of your product?

When your product behaves like a machine, your company is perceived to be a machine. It’s just another company – rigid, mechanical, and cold. Yet when your product displays a bit of humanity, your company gains a face and becomes another human.

In this webinar, you’ll see examples of how humanity exists in the design of products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. You’ll explore how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.

This presentation generated quite a buzz at Web App 2009. It’s a talk that’s sure to get you thinking
about your products, and how you foster the connection between your products and your customers.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How do you gain an edge with your products? How does your organization show its humanity? Share your thoughts, questions, and concerns below.

There’s an on-going debate in the design community: are teams better off with generalists or specialists? Those taking the generalist side argue that a breadth of abilities helps more. On the specialists’ side, they claim it is the depth of specific abilities delivering the benefit.

From our research in what makes up the most successful teams, it turns out they are both right. And they are both wrong.

A team with three people, each of whom has basic skills in visual design, information architecture, and content design, will produce about the same results as a three-person team where there’s a specialist for each area. But the teams that do the best have three individuals, each of whom have advanced skills in all three areas.

The implications of this are clear: if you want to create a best-of-breed team, you need to constantly be raising the skills and capabilities of every team member in the critical design areas. Specializing in three areas is much more valuable than specializing in one.

In this issue of UIEtips, I discuss the interplay that happens between visual design, information architecture, and content design. I talk about how the areas interact and how to ensure you’re creating the best designs. I hope you’ll enjoy the article.

By the way, it’s no accident that this November’s User Interface Conference has full-day workshops on visual design, information architecture, and content design. We recognize these are critical skills for every team, so we made sure we found the best experts to show you what it takes to succeed. You’ll want to bring your entire team. And if you register by Friday, August 28, you’ll get the lowest conference rate available.

What are you doing to boost your skills in these three areas? We’d love to hear from you. Share your experiences below.

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One of my favorite people to speak with about the state of content on the web is Ginny Redish. She’s one of those people who cuts to the point so decisively that you’re left asking yourself… “why didn’t I think of that?”

Ginny has made her career by helping organizations engage their users with captivating content. I had a chance to speak with her regarding what she’s up to and what she plans to talk about at our upcoming User Interface Conference and I was not disappointed.

Ginny is using a new analogy in her workshops. Navigation and search, design, and technology are the three legs of a stool. In the stool sits the content: what your visitors are coming for. Why do we spend all of our time building the stool, then all-but ignore what the stool is built to support? It’s like putting a beautiful front door on your house, and having nothing inside!

Another analogy Ginny shared was “the web as a telephone.” You’ve put all this stuff up on the web so people won’t have to call you and ask for information. But if you don’t give it to them in that conversational, informative manner… they’re going to call you up anyhow! People come to your web site to answer the questions they have about your organization or your products. Have a conversation with your customers though your web site’s content just as you would have through the telephone.

You can create significant savings for your organization by writing your content as a conversation. Ginny regularly travels the country to work with organizations and their content. After one of her clients re-wrote their site’s content following the techniques in her book, her client told her they were able to reduce the number of people staffing the phones by three full-time positions!

One way to avoid success is through FAQs. Ginny says if you have FAQs on your site, that’s a sure-fire sign that the site content covering that topic has failed. If you’re receiving questions frequently, that means it’s time to update your site content because either the content is missing or isn’t findable by your customers. Remember, each topic should be a complete conversation with your customer.

Ginny has found that writing toward personas can help produce this successful form of content creation. Of course the next step after writing is to test the content with your customers to see if it indeed answers their questions. But there’s an important next step, especially if you’re a larger organization. You must work cross-silos to make sure different departments are not having contradictory conversations with the same customers. You also have to ensure that all the information on your site is current. If one department updates data, they all must still agree!

There was so much more in our conversation, so please tune in to the podcast for more inspirational ideas to get your site’s content fully tuned up.

Ginny will be presenting Planning & Writing Web Content that Works, Content as Conversations at the User Interface 14 Conference this fall in Boston. Clearly, it’s not one to miss.

What stumbling blocks are you hitting with your organization’s content? Let’s discuss in the comments.

In this popular presentation, Ethan Marcotte teaches about the collaborative process through four detailed case studies. The case studies demonstrate important before and after detail of the lesson to be learned. They also happen to be major sites you know of and can visit today: The Today Show, The 2008 Sundance Film Festival, W3C, and New York Magazine.

If you’re a designer, a developer, or manage a team, you’ll want to see this presentation. Ethan will show you ways to be successful in critical project transitions. There’s no better person to see both sides of the designer/developer relationship than Ethan Marcotte. Many in our industry greatly respect him and consider him to be someone who does groundbreaking work. Ethan has worked with New York Magazine, Harvard University, Disney, and State Street Bank, just to name a few.

UIE Virtual Seminar
Comps vs. Code: Case Studies on Collaboration Between Site Designers & Developers
with Ethan Marcotte
Thursday July 30, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

Read more about Comps vs. Code, or see the 3-minute preview Ethan put together, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.

Users arrive at your web site with the simple goal to find something that’s important to them. If they find it, whether they search or not, they’ll be happy. When they don’t find it, frustration follows.

Teams often turn to a sophisticated built-in Search capability to help their users find what they seek. However our research has shown that technological magic isn’t going to make the users successful. Instead, it’s a simple understanding of what the users are seeking and how they look at it. We’ve put together the next UIE Virtual Seminar to address this Search issue.

Be prepared to see how Search fits into your site in an entirely new way. Not only will you come away with solid insights from the most up-to-date research, you’ll be chomping at the bit to start making improvements right away. And you’ll be on your way to the world of User Happiness.

UIE Virtual Seminar
Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit
with Jared M. Spool
Thursday July 9, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

Read more about the Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit, or see the great preview Jared put together, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What does your team struggle with when designing for Search? What type of feedback do you get from your users on how well they accomplish their goals on your site? What does a successful visit mean? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts below.

Robert is thinking about this concept more than anyone we know. So much so, that we’ve asked him to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on Wednesday, May 27 — Web Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks .

We’d love for you to join us at the Virtual Seminar next week, but you don’t need to wait to be exposed to this concept. Earlier this year, Robert wrote a great article on frameworks. If design patterns describe cross-application behaviors, and design components are the place within an application where the behaviors and the implementation meet, then an interaction design framework is a systemic view of a specific portion of the system. An example? Let’s say you’re developing a site where users will need to log in. You know you’ll need a “username/password” login form. But, did you also remember the “Forgot Your Password?” feature? Or what you’ll need to create the user’s account? Or the functionality to change the password? Frameworks are the place where behaviors meet enterprise-wide thinking.

Are you involved in making web-based applications a key development platform? You’ll want to understand how frameworks make large-scale projects much easier. Robert’s article is a good introduction as to why that is.

Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks

By Robert Hoekman, Miskeeto
Originally published: Feb 02, 2009

UIE Virtual Seminar
Web Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks
With Robert Hoekman, Jr.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

In your project, you’ll need to ensure you’ve got all the essential features along with those new, super-cool, hip capabilities that will dazzle your users. By using these interaction design frameworks, you’ll have a ready kit of necessary components so you’ll create the best possible design.

To help us understand how interaction design frameworks help us think through our designs, we’ve invited Robert Hoekman, Jr to tell us how they work. Robert’s been thinking about Interaction Design Frameworks more than anyone we know. He’ll show you how frameworks fill in the gaps left by design standards, best practices, and libraries of individual patterns. You’ll see examples from major web sites, where the frameworks helped predict missing functionality and critical design elements. Avoid these costly mistakes, and you’ll deliver a top-notch experience for your users.

Robert put together a great preview for you, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.
Click here to visit the site page with the preview.

If your team needs to quickly come up with designs that are both creative and usable, Robert’s seminar is a must for you. You’ll want to watch this with your entire team, so they come away knowing how interaction design frameworks will dramatically simplify your organization’s design process. Reserve your spot today!

UIE Virtual Seminar
New Ways to Think about Taxonomy:
The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization
May 7, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

We’ve asked Seth Earley and Stephanie Lemieux, experts in creating and maintaining sophisticated taxonomies, to broaden your thinking about how a taxonomy can make your life easier, whether you’re designing a public-facing web site or a large-scale intranet. In this 90-minute online session, you’ll see detailed examples of taxonomy applications and how to leverage key design principles across your organization. Stephanie and Seth will provide a better understanding of your own taxonomy and the navigation of your information. You’ll get your content management system under control and improve your search results.

To help you understand what to expect out of this seminar, Seth & Stephanie put together a great preview for you:

To help you understand what you can expect out of this seminar, Scott has put together a preview for you:

Don’t miss this presentation! Register with the promotion code THREEPOINTS and get both our lowest rate of $99, and lifetime access to the recording of this talk at no additional cost. Share it with others in your organization to watch whenever they want, as often as they want.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How is failure perceived in your organization? When is the last time you celebrated a failure? Or do you think failure should be avoided at all costs? When failure does happen, how does your team address it, or is it the “white elephant in the room?” Share your thoughts below.

To help you understand what you can expect out of this seminar, Hagan has put together a preview for you:

Don’t miss this presentation! Register with the promotion code STPADDY and get both our lowest rate of $99, and lifetime access to the recording of this talk at no additional cost. Share it with others in your organization to watch whenever they want, as often as they want.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What challenges do you face with your web application’s navigation system? What advice can you pass along to others? Are you planning to be at the Web App Summit in Newport Beach this April? Share your thoughts below.

Determine if this seminar is right for you and your team by reviewing  Jared’s preview, just press the green “play” arrow.

As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded presentation. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

Register Today!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How does your team currently come to consensus, and how can you be sure the right decision has been made?  What criteria is used for your decision making?  How do you get everyone on board, and how do you overcome objections?  Share your thoughts below.

I haven’t had a chance to watch voters use either site, so I chose four scenarios that I thought would be common tasks for a voter visiting each site. I rated each site on a scale of one (very frustrating) to five (easy and delightful) scale. (Because I was interested in the design of the site, I didn’t take any points off about the candidate’s positions or message.)

Current News task: What has the candidate said or done about the debates and dealing with the economy in the last 24 hours?

For this task, I looked for any details about what I’ve been hearing in the news. Will the candidate show up for the debates? What is the candidate proposing to solve the economic strife we’re dealing with?

BarackObama.com: 4
There’s an article on the home page that leads to the information. It has a ton of information on both issues in a 16 minute video, but it’s not transcribed, so you have to watch the entire thing.

JohnMcCain.com: 5
There’s an article on the home page that leads to his statements. The site provides a detailed transcript of his statement (which is a good thing, because the audio for the statement is not very coherent).

Specific Issue task: What is the candidate’s position on stem cell research?

For this task, I tried to locate what each candidate feels about stem cell research.

BarackObama.com: 2
The categories in the Issues menu make no mention of this issue. Not found in Ethics, Family, Technology. There is no search function on the site. The Issues page doesn’t mention it. External search found it under Women’s issues.

JohnMcCain.com: 3
The categories in the Issues menu make no mention of this issue. I found it in theHuman Dignity and The Sanctity of Life category. (Sometimes listed as “Values”.) The Search function returns a large number of links, 2 of the first three have no mention of stem cell research. You have to go the seventh result to get to the Human Dignity page (labeled “Values”), but the blurb talks about McCain’s POW experience.

General Issue Task: What differentiates the candidate from his opponent?

I tried to see if there’s any easy way to tell what makes this candidate different. Guess what? There isn’t.

BarackObama.com: 2
They have a 33-page report available for download. The report’s pages don’t print on standard printer without chopping of edge text. Elements of the report are dispersed around the web site, but there’s no summary of positions without bouncing through pages.

JohnMcCain.com: 3
I couldn’t find any summary of entire position. Multiple levels of detail (good!) spread across many pages (not good!) with no way to see the entire story.

Make Donation Task: How do I contribute to the campaign?

BarackObama.com: 4
Easy to find the donation page. URL is for the same site. Instructions at the bottom on how to mail in a check (instead of paying by mail). Error messages tell you where problems are. First time small donors still need to put in employer info (not clear). Very little small print. Page design is simple.

JohnMcCain.com: 3
Easy to find the donation page, but it opens in a different window and the URL is for site not associated with the campaign (will people be concerned about phishing?). No instructions for mailing in a donation. Error messages don’t say where entry issues are. It’s clear you always need to put in employer info. Tons of small print. Page design is more convoluted and feels like an eBay order form.

Winner: JohnMcCain.com

If you want to average the scores, BarackObama.com came in with a solid 3. JohnMcCain came in with a 3.5. Both sites have a ways to go to get perfect 5s, or even a solid 4.

The big problem, I think, is the sites don’t do great at letting the meat of what the candidate stands for come to the surface. If someone wants to do some solid research on what these guys are really about, it’s hard to get that from either site.

They may be running for President, but content is king!

The same is true of the article topic in this week’s issue of UIEtips, Design cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs. Like site maps, breadcrumbs are hard to do well. And they are also a treatment of the symptom, with the real problem that the user is on the wrong page to begin with. Work to ensure the only place users end up is on the right page, and you’ll no longer need to provide breadcrumbs to rescue them.

Read the article – Design Cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs

Information architecture — organizing the site’s content to make things easy to find — is just one of the full-day, in-depth seminar topics we’ll be covering at the User Interface 13 Conference, October 13-16, in Cambridge, MA. If you want to learn state-of-the-art techniques from the world’s most renowned experts in design and usability, this is the place you need to be.

What are your thoughts about breadcrumbs, site maps, and other design cop outs? How have you tackled the key challenges in your site’s information architecture? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Leave us a comment below.

Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation
Date: Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Time: 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT

When looking over someone else’s design, how do you ensure you’re delivering valuable insights that bring new perspectives to the table?

The best critique not only delivers value to the original designer, but to everyone involved, because it raises the discourse to the underlying fundamentals and goals, not just the specifics of color and font size. Learning to critique well is like many other skills: the more you practice, the better you get.

You’ll know you’ve delivered a great critique when:

* The designer is receptive and engaged in the discussion, instead of being defensive and argumentative
* The designer becomes introspective and talks about how they want to revisit some of the underlying precepts of the design
* Other team members use the critique to look at other on-going work

You can read the full seminar details here.

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. Last week, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

In this episode, we discussed where you can find your users’ trigger words, talked about our 7-12 word link recommendation, discussed if you should replace your home page with your site map, and shared some examples of sites that handle long links well. Tune in to hear these and the answers to other questions from our seminar attendees.

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of the session is available for viewing. See The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content for details.

Still have questions about our research into the Scent of Information? Ask them in the comments below!

In this 90-minute online presentation, I’ll share the results of years of research examining how the best sites navigate users to their content. I’ll introduce you to the concept of the Scent of Information, the biggest secret to successfully getting users to the content they’re looking for on your site.

You’ll learn:

• How the successful sites provide a strong scent and what happens when they don’t
• How users follow a scent trail and the different ways your design could be blocking scent
• How the quality of links, page length, page density, and graphics affect whether users find their content

There’s still room to sign up for the live event. You can gather your team around a computer and watch it together! (If you can’t see it live today, we’ll make a recorded version available in a few days.)

More details about today’s UIE Virtual Seminar.

Time and time again in usability testing, I watch users struggle with web sites. I’d like to say that the problems I see in testing are always unique and novel, but they aren’t. We’ve been seeing very similar problems with all of the sites we’ve tested.

What problems did the designs have? Well, first, users couldn’t find the most valuable content on the site. Every user knew exactly what they wanted and all of the information they were looking for was available – they just had no idea how to find it.

Second, once users make it to the page with their content, they still often struggle. One main reason for user failure is because the content was written so poorly that users weren’t even sure they were on the right page. They had to work very hard just to identify the critical portions of the descriptions, let alone understand what they were trying to say.

Many of the sites we test are disorganized and confusing. Fortunately, we know exactly who to turn to fix these content challenges. In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, Gerry McGovern, one of the world’s experts on delivering successful content, wrote an excellent article dealing with how to develop a systematic formula for publishing content successfully.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Also, to help our clients tackle their content issues, we’ve asked Gerry to present at the User Interface 12 Conference this November. We’re really excited about Gerry’s seminar. Gerry is the expert we turn to about content management issues. In just one day, Gerry will show you how to simplify your site’s organization.

What content management approaches do you use in your organization? How has it affected your design process? I would love to hear
about your adventures. Join the discussion below.

The U.S. Census Bureau has an interesting way of handling one of these complexities associated with displaying large amounts of tabular data. At the top of many of their population characteristic data sheets, the Census Bureau site designers have installed a very nice header that tells you which data sheet you are in, the population estimate for the certain characteristic you are looking at, and the margin of error. In this case I was looking at general demographic characteristics for 2005.

As you begin to scroll down the page, the header moves along down the page with you, not only reminding you what it is you’re looking at, but also providing a mechanism to clearly read across the table without getting the different subcategory or number rows mixed up.

How do you handle the complexities associated with large amounts of tabular data? What do you think of the floating header? What do you think about the design of the rest of the tables?

Give users what they need.

Your users probably don’t care about the history of your project. Nor do they want a flashy intro page welcoming them to your site. If this content is important to you but not to your users, it needs to be either cut entirely, dropped to the bottom of the page, or set aside in a link to another page. Knowing what your users value creates value for your site.

Cut! Cut! Cut! And cut again!

Most web users don’t want to read a lot of content. Instead, they want to be able to visit your website, grab the information they need, and move on. Read aloud what you’ve written: does it convey all the information your users want or need in a concise way? If not, don’t be afraid to cut it! Pink is the new black, iPhone is the new Razr, and less is the new more.

Begin with the key point.

I know this goes against everything you were taught in high school or college writing; trust me, I was an English major. While we’re used to the traditional style of writing as intro, body, and conclusion, this narrative style will not serve your users well. Instead, begin with your main point, and follow it with any supporting information you feel will be relevant to your users.

Ginny is an expert we recommend all the time to clients looking to write successful web content. If you haven’t checked out Ginny’s book yet, I highly recommend you take the time to read it.

Do you spend a lot of effort editing the words on your site? How does your team assess what content is valuable to your users?

 In his book, Gerry talks about the U.S. Government’s FirstGov, a site that understands its users’ wants and needs. Although many citizens perceive government as being slow and unresponsive, the government’s web site is anything but; knowing that benefits and grants are the top two things people search for, they are the first two links on the homepage. The design team is doing a good job of understanding their audience and what is important to them.

 Unfortunately, many design teams don’t have such a close relationship with their customers and don’t always focus on their customers’ carewords. For example, McGovern notes a trend among airline sites to use the words “low fares” in place of “cheap” because of the negative connotation associated with “cheap.” However, how many people do you know search for “low fares” when booking a vacation? When customers want a cheap flight, they will search for just that.

 Do you think about what words will best drive users to action on your site? Have you tested your users for the carewords that matter to them?

Technical writing was born of the post-war fifties, amidst a heavy push in technological industrialization. Factories were mass producing goods at a tremendous rate, for consumer, industrial, commercial, and military use. These goods were taking advantage of the new sciences, which brought forth new capabilities and features.

In these early days, human factors and ergonomics were not for consideration in the product development process. Making the product work at all was difficult enough. The product developers expected, having made the investment in the technology, the user would take time to learn to use the device properly, starting with reading the manual.

Thus, the profession of technical writing came into its own, as a way to shift the responsibility of usability from the development process to a post-development documentation effort. Any complexity was “written up in the manual” for all to read.

Translating complexity into a manual was a difficult skill, but one suited for english majors, playwrights, and poets. Since it was a difficult skill, salaries were higher than other jobs for liberal arts graduates, so it attracted some very talented folks.

In the sixties and seventies, we saw a huge explosion of technology, much of it exceptionally complex. This made documentation creation even more important. Tight development schedules and the need for clear documentation put demands on the profession in new ways. The skills for producing clear documentation quickly became highly valued.

In the eighties, we saw the advent of personal computers. Ironically, as the size of the technology decreased, the size of the documentation was growing. (The documentation Digital Equipment Corporation’s MicroVAX, for example, weighed three times the hardware it described and required an entire palette for delivery.)

The late eighties brought several trends to technical writing:

• Minimalism suggested a task-oriented approach to describing only what the user absolutely needs, allowing the interface to be as self-descriptive as possible.
• On-line help required braking narrative description into self-sustaining chunks, which the user could read in any order (or not at all).
• User-centered design brought a new awareness to the design process, simplifying the knowledge necessary to operate the devices.

At this point, I began to see the writers really starting to struggle to find their place in the organization. As the development de-emphasized large manual, the talented writers quickly shifted their emphasis into usability and interaction design.

The web, which would seem a natural place for the writer with its heavy emphasis on good copy, wasn’t an easy transition for most technical writers. It quickly became a haven for copy writers, a different skill, focusing on more persuasive than descriptive writing.

Even worse news, today’s design environment emphasizes multi-discipline generalists, instead of especially-skilled specialists. Writing is no longer a separate function of the design team. Instead, it’s now integrated into the design process with other functions. Everyone on the skill needs good writing skills, along with the other skills necessary to produce quality designs.

The writers left in the field today are feeling pushed out of their jobs. Salaries have dropped considerably. Demand is significantly down. Young writers are not entering the profession at the rate they used to, leaving an aging technical communication community.

It’s no surprise that the two most popular topics at the annual conference are user experience and interaction design. Both are growing areas, while the art of writing manuals is going the way of blacksmiths and radio operators.

Technical writing won’t be gone until the last writer dies, but it will be curious to see what happens with the field as we move into a world where intuitive design implies a manual-less existence.

These specialized languages serve a purpose. Until Jesse James Garrett coined the term Ajax, we didn’t know what to call those asynchronous http request calls that allowed us to update data on the screen without page refreshes. Ajax is a shortcut. Once we learn the meaning of a shortcut, we can communicate succinctly and accurately.

It’s natural, once we learn some shortcut for those hard-to-explain-otherwise concepts, they become part of our common parlance. Over time, we use them so frequently, we forget their origin and they fall into our regular vocabulary.

This is great, as long as we never leave the office or try to talk to anyone else. As soon as we do, we might as well be speaking Estonian. We’ve all had experiences where we’ve let one of these terms, intended for use only with our colleagues, slip out in discussion with an outsider. The look of puzzlement on their face is always warranted.

Unfortunately, we can’t see that look when we accidentally leave one of these shortcuts sitting on our web site. And that’s just what BestWestern.com did when they included terms like “Trip Planner”, “Promotions & Programs”, and “Packages” in their tool bar.

I’m sure, within the walls of the Best Western marketing department, these terms are well understood by all. The distinction is clear between a promotion and program. The marketing staff knows exactly what they get when they click on the trip planner. They understand what makes up a package and how it differs from a promotion.

But do the users? Will they understand the distinctions in these terms. If they do, all is well and the links will do their job nicely. But if they don’t, they are likely to cause confusion. At best, users will pogostick through each tab. At worst, users won’t click on any of them, leaving potentially useful content unexplored.

The problem arises because we become so comfortable with our specialized language, it becomes no longer specialized to us. It’s part of our normal vocabulary. We can separate out the jargon from the common language.

This is particularly true for words like “packages”, which have a similar meaning in the real world, but not the meaning we’re intending. The words blend into our design and we don’t even realized the jargon has escaped from its cage.

It’s fairly simple to test for jargon, though we rarely see teams take advantage of the technique. We use a simple vocabulary test, like those from your grade school days. We ask users to write down or tell us what a phrase means to them. With a dozen responses from randomly selected typical users, you can get a pretty good idea where the jargon isn’t working.

In our research, we’re seeing more and more evidence that a web site’s success depends on its ability to help users find the information they want quickly and efficiently. Yet, we still commonly see chaotic sites where users find it impossible to find the content they want.

Why are these content and information architecture problems still so prevalent? This week’s UIEtips article, written by our good friend Gerry McGovern, deals with tackling this question. Gerry explains how many organizations fail to focus on what’s most important to a site’s success: the site’s ability to help users complete key tasks. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

As always, I want to hear your thoughts on this topic. What content management approaches do you use in your organization? How do you manage the common tasks your customers want to complete? How has it affected your design process? Leave your thoughts and join the discussion below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

[If you find Gerry's article interesting, you'll really want to check out his full-day seminar on Creating a Task-Based Information Architecture at UI12. Gerry is the expert we turn to about content management issues. He has spent the last ten years consulting exclusively on issues pertaining to information architecture and content management systems. You can read more about Gerry’s session here: Creating a Task-Based Information Architecture .

If airports were built like most modern websites, finding your way around would be a nightmare. In order to extract the most money from visitors, the airport would be littered with signs for shops and restaurants. These would take priority over less revenue generating signs for gates or toilets, which would be placed wherever there was space. The marketing department would insist on huge banners advertising their latest offers, and the maintenance men would hang them wherever it was easiest to reach, often covering up existing signage.

The problem is, this type of thinking is very short sighted. Travellers would start missing connections or get frustrated that they couldn’t find the bathroom after a long flight. People would start spending less time at the airports, or if the option was available. switch airports altogether. So by trying to increase revenue in the short term, you end up frustrating your users and potentially damaging future profitability.

Thankfully airports take a much more user-centerd approach in their design…

You can read Andy’s full article here: Airport User Experience

You can find out more about contextual inquiry and customer-centered design by reading Christine Perfetti’s Driving Innovation and Creativity through Customer Data.

1. 5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages
2. The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch
3. What Makes a Design Seem ‘Intuitive’?
4. The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities
5. Branding and Usability
6. The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site
7. Using Ajax for Creating Web Applications
8. Testing Web Sites with Eye-Tracking
9. The Truth About Download Time
10. Testing the Three-Click Rule

We have about 100 more articles in our article archive!

Crutchfield understands this. This week, they are conducting Tweak Week, a series of quick tips aimed at people who’ve recently purchased electronic products to help them get the most out of their products.

Crutchfield customers (interestingly, including those who haven’t purchased anything this season) received an email introducing Tweak Week:

When users clicked on the GO button, they landed at a table of tips for everything in the Crutchfield catalog:

Clicking on Digital Cameras gave a list of tips about getting the most out of your camera:

Supporting the post-purchase experience is difficult to do well. Crutchfield has made an interesting first attempt at doing it–something a lot of e-commerce vendors don’t even attempt.

There are lots of benefits of doing this well. If the vendor provides quality post-purchase support, they’ll see higher brand engagement going forward. It gives the customer a reason to keep coming back to the site, giving the vendor the chance to sell more product.

For example, the section on Managing home A/V cables suggests the purchase of flat, paintable speaker wire, a product Crutchfield happens to sell:

My fear is the library of tips at Crutchfield are a little too generic and simplistic for most of their customers to really do the trick. Yet, building out a serious library of tips and techniques for the wide spectrum of customers they have would be a very expensive proposition.

However, I think it’s a good start. If they can keep it up, it’ll provide a real advantage over the many competitors in their space. If 2006 has proven anything, it’s that there is an economic advantage to providing a quality customer experience.