Content practice lead

This is a content analyst role, as well as a management one. Are you analtyical, creative and a great communicator? Can you get things done under tight deadlines? Then apply for our Content Practice Lead.

Analytics practice lead

Like our content role, the analytics practice lead is an analyst role as well as a management one. Can you analyse complicated data? Can you create business strategies based on that data? Are you a great mentor? Then apply for our Analytics Practice Lead.

We’re taking applications until the 20th of August, so send your CV and cover letter to jobs@iqcontent.com.

Wisdom in the Crowd - Mark Little, Storyful

So what is Storyful? Mark didn’t give away all the answers, but instead started with familiar territory: how the quantity, quality and immediacy of news sources has changed with the advent of social media. Where journalists once had to go digging for information, the new challenge is now curation - how to extract the real story from all the layers of information out there. This is the essence of Storyful - making news from noise.

Mark encouraged everyone to stop thinking about gadgets/apps and to start thinking about process as a means for innovation. Traditional journalism was about polishing and refining before release to get the story perfect, but Mark is embracing the mindset of a software developer - launching to get help testing, and then refining. To find out what that means for news and media keep an eye on Storyful - they are opening to the public for testing soon.

OMG TMI!!!!!!!! –  Interacting with large data sets on the web - Martha Rotter, Microsoft

Martha gave a really interesting live demo of Pivot (http://www.getpivot.com) - their new tool for visualising and analysing large sets of raw data and also content - even your browsing history. The interactions are really beautiful - check out Gary Flake’s TED talk below to see it in action.

Business, Experience, Technology - Des Traynor, Contrast

Contrast works almost exclusively with startups and since a portfolio of failures isn’t impressive, they are very selective about who they work with. Des talked about how they make these decisions, using Bill Buxton’s BXT (business, experience technology) framework:

Business: Freemium has serious limitations (eg. Ning - 120M in funding, but just had to cut 40% of staff) - or as Des put it, “When did it become okay to have a business that didn’t make money?!” Think hard about your pricing model - choosing non-traditional revenue streams can be a huge differentiator eg. Ryanair sells flights at cost price, puts huge margins on everything else (luggage, food, etc.). Read Ron Baker’s Pricing on Purpose for more detail.

Experience: UX is not UI design - you can have a product that looks great but if your customer is unhappy after using it, that’s a broken experience. Everything matters from pixel to package - think about all the touchpoints your customer has with your product (purchasing, use, customer service) and then take every opportunity you can to delight them.

Technology: This got skimmed over due to lack of time but I think the underlying principle was to make sure you build right. Technical strength can also be a huge differentiator eg. YouTube - no one else can duplicate the same volume of video uploads and streaming. Also check out Heroku - a great cloud application platform for building and deploying web apps using Ruby.

Usable Language: How content shapes the user experience

iQ’s Randall Snare and Elizabeth McGuane also gave a deep dive on one of our favourite topics of late: content. If you missed it, the slides below will give you some practical (and cheap!) ways to improve your website through language alone.

The best of the rest

• Gerry Power from Sysco gave a great introduction to everything cloud computing, including the downsides
• Keith Maycock, NCI discussed future trends such as augmented reality, ubiquitous computing and robotics
• Iarfhlaith Kelly from Webstrong showed how to build a Twitter app in 10 minutes with @Anywhere

Unfortunately I missed the afternoon talks, but keep an eye on the dotconf page for the videos - especially the inspirational finale from Robin Blandford from Decision for Heroes.

A big thank-you to Deryck and Emma from NCI for inviting us along and congrats on a great conference. If study is your thing, make sure to check out the NCI’s new MSc in Web Technologies - a lot of great Irish tech minds (including our own John Wood) have been involved in advising on the content, and it’s a great blend of both technology and entrepreneurship.

This is where classic user-centred design comes in - knowing your audience and designing for their needs, as opposed to making condescending assumptions. It also means not designing too young or indeed too old.

Let’s take a look at people who get it.

The Beeb

The Beeb have a number of channels each with programmes suited to specific age groups. This is also reflected in their suite of websites.

cbeebies, www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies

CBBC, www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc

BBC Switch, www.bbc.co.uk/switch

BBC, www.bbc.co.uk

As you can see from the above, we have websites which differ in content and design for the age group they are designed for.

Looking at Nick Jr.

Now, for the purposes of contrast, let’s take a look at Nick Jr. - a website aged at preschoolers (under 6).

On the face of it, they’re nurturing my child’s development with their very own curriculum, which as parent, really appeals to me.

Nick Jr., www.nickjr.com

However, via the “more” link in the top global navigation, in just a few short clicks, I’m introduced to Candy.

Who is Candy? Well, she’s the Naughty Cheerleader who is “likes to drive you crazy”…and who ”is looking so hot that you can’t resist her charms”.

But hey! it’s okay, you’re going to “use your brain to chase away your classmates so you can have some private time along with your secret passion” so perhaps it is educational after all. An introduction to gynecology, perhaps.

Update: Nick Jr. has since removed this link since I drafted this post which I’m delighted to see.

From the examples above, hopefully you can see how important designing age appropriately is. And how, in designing for multiple age groups, it may also be necessary to clearly delineate the boundaries between those groups and make it hard to cross those boundaries.

Next week: I’ll look at Club Penguin, the social network/massively multiplayer role-playing game for kids to see what we can learn from it.

Visual design: not just for those who can draw

If you’ve ever had your carefully crafted wireframes or content go awry in the visual design stage and haven’t been sure how to address it (or had the confidence), Dan Rubin’s “Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers” is for you.

Dan will cover a range of topics aimed at UX and content professionals:
- Common design mistakes
- Tips for layout
- Designing for content
- How to conduct a design critique

The details: where to be

We’ll be showing this seminar for free here at iQ this Thursday:

Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers
Thursday 27th May
2nd Floor Clarendon House
34-37 Clarendon Street (opposite Saba - Google Map)
6:00pm - 6:30pm Drinks and pizza
6:30pm - 8:00pm Virtual seminar (and more drinks and pizza)

RSVP: Space is limited so please email cory.joseph@iqcontent.com or reply on Twitter @iqcontent if you’d like to attend - first come, first served!

Postscript: thanks and links

A big thank-you to everyone that came along. Unfortunately we can’t republish the slides, but here are the list of links and tools that Dan mentioned:

Kuler - Adobe’s online colour palette tool, create colour schemes from photos
Widon’t - Plug-in to prevent widows
960 Grid Systems - Grid templates for all major design programs
Stefan Klocek’s blog on conducting a design critique
Scott Berkun’s blog on how to run a design critique
Ethan Marcotte’s article on Fluid Grids

There’s a good chance we’ll be running more of these in the future - keep an eye on our blog or @iqcontent for details.

On May 14th, I gave a talk at UX Lisbon about User Experience Design for Kids. Now, for a bit of background:

Back in November, we embarked on an ambitious project in collaboration with a major elearning company. The challenge? To design an application that would cater for US students, aged 6-18.

As part of the initial discovery phase of the project, we undertook desk research as well as three rounds of usability testing with different groups of students based on age.

From our desk research, there wasn’t a whole lot out there in terms of user experience design. So we had to look elsewhere, specifically in three areas: games, education and entertainment.

Why were we doing this? Because desk research is a relatively quick and cheap way to get on top of a topic. Complimented by usability testing we were able quickly discover what differences, if any, we’d need to cater for when designing for “kids”.

Setting out our stall: creating design principles

The practical outcome of this phase was a set of “design principles”. These design principles gave us our parameters. They were there to help us focus the direction of our designs, communicate our designs to everyone involved and to help us validate our designs.

So, here are just some of the design guidelines or principles we came up with.

Principle 1: Kids are different, but user centred design process isn’t

“We are immigrants in the land of our children”, John Perry Barlow, lyricist with The Grateful Dead and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. What I think he was saying here is that kids are now wired differently. They’ve grown up in as digital natives and we’re, for the most part, immigrants in that world. (Mark Prensky explores this “divide” in more detail - PDF)

Kids are different. Not just from adults or “big people” but from each other (and even they know it).

“Sesame Street? Nah, that’s for babies” - 6 year old usability test participant.

Where it could matter, in design terms, is in how we catered for reading ability, dexerity or cognitive reasoning. One example where we saw the impact of these differences was in usability testing, in a number of areas.

• Boredom: the younger age groups got bored after about 15 minutes of testing and it was difficult to help them keep their focus.
  Key lesson: make usability testing shorter and make it more fun.
• Prototyping: We had created a pretty high fidelity interactive prototype. We were pretty happy with it. Yet, younger kids could spot the lack of polish. They found it more difficult to get over the inadequacies of our prototype and fill in the gaps.
  Key lesson: make it as real as you can.

“It doesn’t look like fun coz it looks like people stuff, not kids stuff”, another 6 year old usability test participant

Despite all these differences, however, one of the big things we took from this is not to silo kids into different groups.

The important thing was that we engaged with them as part of a thorough user centred design process. In terms of approach, then, they aren’t that different - we needed to engage with them to figure out what they needed, classic and established user-centred design.

Next week, Principle 2: Designing age appropriately and some good examples of this in action.

From Lisbon to London and in-between, iQ hits the road this month - volcano permitting of course.

May 12-14 UX Lx, Lisbon

This week’s UX Lx conference is sold out, but if you snapped up a ticket look out for Laurence Veale’s open session on ‘UX for Kidz‘ on Wednesday. While designing an e-Learning application for the US market we found there weren’t many resources on designing for kids - Lar will share our findings and current best practice in the area.

May 17-19 Future of Web Design, London

Our resident analytics guru Niamh Phelan is running the Google Analytics Masterclass on Wednesday morning, and she’ll be covering topics from setup for novices through to advanced goals, funnels and front-end tracking.

Tickets are still available for FOWD London. This year’s conference boasts a really diverse and practical program, covering CSS3, HTML5, interface design, UX and accessibility. We’re thrilled to be involved with Carsonified for the second year in a row, so join us there!

May 19-21 UX London

UX London is another sold out event you’ll have to put on the wishlist for next year. But if you’re there, look out for iQ’s Colin Bentley and John Wood - who will be attending and taking copious notes on behalf of the other 25-odd iQubers that can’t make it.

May 20 IIA Congress, Dublin

Once again we’ll be at the IIA Congress with goody bags and giveaways. Stop by the iQ stand for a much needed sugar hit, and drop in your business card to win a €100 Brown Thomas voucher!

June 24 IIA/iQ Workshop - Mobile Web: Creating effective mobile web experiences, Dublin

Run in conjunction with the IIA, Peter McKenna will be taking you through the fundamentals of web design and web strategy for mobile. Peter will cover content and design specifics for mobile, user research techniques in the mobile context, and the current state of the industry and trends.

The IIA have given us a special 20% discount for all our blog readers - just use the code ‘IQMobile’ when you book online.

The Government narrowly won a Dail vote against holding an immediate by-election in Donegal South-West this evening after two Fianna Fáil TDs voted with the Opposition.

Deputies Frank Fahey and Timmy Dooley “pushed the button the wrong way” in an electronic vote, according to Government chief whip John Curran. The vote was drawn at 76-76 and the casting vote of the Ceann Comhairle was required by Government.

Reminds me of this clip from Monsters versus Aliens:

I’m so glad we don’t have a nuclear arsenal at our disposal.

Before reading further, you should first go check it out for yourself, make up your mind about whether we hit the mark with this one, and then come back here to read about the design thinking that went into it.

Budgeting apps are boring and painful

Our task for this project was to come up with an idea for a personal budgeting app, and to make it something that was actually a bit of fun so you’d share it with your friends.

Problem number 1:

Here’s your choice — figure out your personal spending budget or pluck off your own fingernails. Tough choice, isn’t it?

Think about it — tot up your rent/mortgage, all your utilities (TV, broadband, mobile phone, electricity, gas…), how much you spend on your daily commute, your food shopping, childcare, home insurance, petrol, the list seems to never end. For a lot of us these days, a full home budget is a necessary evil, but the whole process unavoidably stinks.

Our reflexive cringe at the idea of doing a home-budget disguises the critical failing of most budgeting apps: the app does almost none of the work for us. It’s easy to take an expense and multiply it by 12. What’s hard is figuring out how much something costs you in the first place. For a lot of these, you’ve got to go dig out your bills from the last several months and figure out the average spend. Ugh.

To calculate that, I need to check my credit card bill, my laser bill, and start keeping track of all the cash I spend (retroactively).

Another problem with the standard approach of budgeting tools is that they focus on expenses you can’t really do much about anyway. I mean, if you spend 50e a month on the bus for your commute, are you really gonna consider walking the 10 miles into work? Changing these types of expenses requires a lot of effort. And a lot of effort is exactly what we set out to avoid with spendometer.ie.

The big idea: forget your mortgage, think about those coffees

There’s another big problem with your standard budgeting apps — they ignore a lot of places where we do spend our money — our vices. I’m talking about the obvious ones, like smokes and drink, and the more innocent-seeming ones as well, like take-out coffees. Consider that person in your office who gets a couple of take-away coffees a day. Do they have any idea how much they spend each month on those café lattes?

So in a workshop with the crew at permanent tsb, we came up with a big list of spending categories, and we rated them based on five criteria:

• are they discretionary
• are they items you frequently spend money on
• are they easy to calculate
• are they provocative
• are they common to most working folks in their 20s and 30s

Here’s a partial list of the big table we came up with:

So by switching the focus from your mortgage to your coffees, we do two key things:

1. We make the process and the results much more interesting.
2. We make it useful, too. It’s a lot easier to cut down on the number of take-away coffees you drink than it is to re-mortgage your house.

The challenge: Make it a bit of fun

The brief on this project was to come up with a budgeting app that people would want to share with their friends. Given problem number #1 (budgeting does not equal fun), this was a tall order.

The heart of the solution is the spending categories themselves — as described above.

But we tried to make every other component of the site contribute to a sense of playfulness about the whole thing.

Visual design

The casual, sketchy feel of the app belies the effort involved to create and implement such a custom design. The visual theme was carried through the entire site: the images, the borders, the font, the bars in the results graph, all the way down to the drop-down menus.

Copy

We kept this to a bare minimum, apart from one-liners for each of the categories. Despite their appearances, these one-liners aren’t throw-away copy. Rather, the hope is that they gently nudge you to make it through to the end of the 11 categories.

Interaction

The whole point of this app is to make people aware of their hidden spending habits. You can’t just ask them point blank, “So how much do you spend in the pub each month?” Nor do we want people digging into their receipts or credit card statements — that’s equally pointless. So instead we used simple equations, getting people to think about the things that are easier to remember, and then doing simple calculations to get a yearly cost. Sure, it’s not super-accurate. But the point is that it’s close enough to your actual spend to be useful, and to be interesting.

We used a UX form-filling pattern that recently has gotten a bit of attention: the Madlibs style. But when we initially sketched these pages, none of us had ever seen this style before. It just seemed like the most natural way to get people to put in the information, and most importantly, to try to hide the reality that you’re basically filling in a spreadsheet.

You gotta test it

This was a small project, but that doesn’t mean there’s not room to do user-testing. We quickly knocked up an HTML prototype, brought it into the permanent tsb branch on O’Connell street, and plopped down a handful of people in front of it. The tests confirmed a few assumptions (that it was easy and quick to use) and also highlighted a few tweaks we needed to make,  like the Skip button, which we hadn’t thought was necessary.

Make it social

These days every app tries to be social. But when it comes to money, there really is a voyeur lurking in all of us. So we spent a lot of time designing the results page to draw the user into their own data, and then encouraging them to compare themselves to other people. The more people engage with the data and the comparison tools, the more likely they are to share it.

And the Facebook Connect integration adds another level of engagement, because you can snoop around the spending habits of your own circle, which gives an even stronger incentive to share the app.  And at the end of the day, that’s the critical success metric for this app — the number of people using and sharing it.

Give a call-to-action for the client

permanent tsb’s goal with this app is first and foremost to be useful and to be interesting, but getting some interest in their savings products was the way they could justify building this app in the first place. We came up with two options for the design of the call-to-action: one above the fold; the other integrated into the results screen.

Version 1: CTA at the top

Version 2: CTA integrated with the results at the bottom

I’m really happy they opted for the one that’s integrated. Being above the fold is a valid focus for something as important as the CTA on a page, but we felt the first CTA would suffer from banner blindness — it was simply too easy to ignore. Whereas the second version actually is woven into the visitors results, and thus looks and feels relevant.

So what’s your verdict?

This project was great fun to work on. But will people like it, use it, and share it? Only our analytics will tell us that. And I’d love to hear you own reaction to the design.

Volcanoes and web trauma

So sure, I could talk about how traumatic web usability problems become when you’re stranded abroad and want to get home.

I could talk about the awful customer experience of being unable to contact anyone from your airline to rebook your flight. About being left on hold for 4 hours with a recorded message repeatedly mispronouncing the word ‘alternatively’. Or about being told that you can rebook online for free, when in fact your airline’s website offers no such option, and instead wants to charge you $6000.

I could talk about how a well-designed content page - hell, well-designed link text - can actually change lives.

For example, if I’d been able to scan Aer Lingus’s ‘volcano’ page (see below) well enough to see where I should click to rebook my flight, I may have been able to get onto the morning flight with my colleagues, after my original journey was cancelled, rather than being shunted onto a later flight because, in my panic, I couldn’t distinguish which of the scattered ‘click here’ links was the one I needed.

aerlingus.com's volcano disruption page from April 18

But then that rebooked flight didn’t go anyway. C’est la vie.

Paris and food anguish

But what I started thinking about most, while I was stranded, was that in Paris, you can only do certain things at certain times - such as eating dinner. This may have cropped up because food is important to me, and because travel revolves around mealtimes.

In Paris, there are set ways and means of doing things; a rhythm and a pattern to life that Parisian inhabitants just understand, but which they must somehow communicate to their tired, hungry, dusty, gauchely dressed visitors. I don’t think they mind if we don’t really ‘get it’, but we must get it enough that we don’t embarrass everyone and upset the balance of city life.

Everything works smoothly in Paris when you know its rhythms. But when you don’t, figuring out these cultural transactions, these engagements, can be disconcerting.

So here’s what I think.  This mentality sort of describes how most businesses deal with their website content.

OK, hang on and see where I’m going with this

When you know how a company website works - that is, when you work within the business - its content is opaque to you. You see the missing pieces between the blocks of content that are actually there. You skip over words, you skim entire pages. You see the banner ads and the flashy bits that refer to products you own. You don’t see the full experience. You know where to look, and what to click on. You have a shorthand.

So it’s hard for you to understand why it doesn’t make sense to outsiders.

This is why content strategy for the web is so important.

When you come to a website from the outside when you’re a tourist - if you’ll allow me to drag the metaphor out kicking and screaming - you have no clue what’s going on.

Why tourists will adapt to Paris

If your website were like Paris, this would be fine, mostly. Because Paris rests (stylishly) on the laurels of its own awesomeness.

People want to figure Paris out because it’s filled with good stuff. And we’re not just talking about cheese.

But your website is not Paris. It cannot be insular. It needs full translation, from company-speak to its users’ language. Even if it is a website that wants to seem enigmatic and cool, it must still do something to reach out to its audience. And the best way to do this is to acknowledge that they are there, that they are human, and then try to understand how you sound to them.

That’s tourism. That’s service. That’s what web content strategy is for. You can’t speak to all of the people all of the time, or cater to all users in every situation. But you can have content that is mindful of the fact that it has an audience; content that’s created for the purpose of clear communication and engagement.

Creating this content, as with so many things in life, requires planning and forethought. This is what a content strategist – a web communications expert – can help you do.

What, though, about creativity – whither the web version of that Parisian mystique? Do we have to ‘dumb down’ our content to pidgin English, to make things easy for our users in every case? Shouldn’t they have to make some effort, particularly if we’re not just talking about the corporate web?

Conversation and curation are the keys to great content

Anything is possible in web design if the content works. People will make an effort to explore an unconventional website  - that is, unconventional by design, rather than poorly designed - if the content invites them in.

So test your content. Listen to your users – engage with them online, and observe them in controlled circumstances in user tests. Content is not tested rigorously enough as part of the usability process, and this needs to change. Simply reporting that ‘the content is bad’ is not enough anymore.

You need content strategists to figure out not necessarily what your users expect to hear, but how to speak to them in a meaningful way. And perhaps, to help you say something unexpected sometimes. It’s the unexpected that sparks our interest. And isn’t interest and engagement, in travel, business, and on the web, what we’re all aiming for?

The CS forum was overshadowed (literally) by volcanic ash, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t momentous. For me at least. Here’s a roundup of the first Content Strategy forum in Europe, which though overdue, was great.

Conference | Day 1

The Conference was housed in the FIAP near Montparnasse, which looked like a giant ’80s French high school. There were posters of countries crowding wall space in every room, and smooth brightly coloured furniture.

The morning workshops were led by Kristina Halvorson, who I like to call the leader of Content Strategy, although she would probably prefer to be called a disciple. She runs Brain Traffic and wrote the definitive book Content Strategy for the Web. If you’re not familiar with her, acquaint yourself.

Her competitors for the morning slot were Rachel Lovinger, content strategy lead at Razorfish and Karen McGrane, a senior partner in Bond Art + Science. They are other leaders in the field and they were humbling to follow. Respectively they discussed the overall purpose and practice of Content Strategy and how best to analyse content.

The afternoon workshops were led by Elizabeth and me - with our Evolution of Content session, and Rahel Baile, founder of Intentional Design, Inc, who talked about applying Content Strategy in the workplace. Amongst other things we made our attendees do, we led them into a mini agile workshop, which we think they enjoyed because it involved cardboard and blue tac.

But let’s talk about what’s important shall we? Because we were in France, lunch was 2 hours and involved wine.

Conference | Day 2

The second day was an orgy of content strategy ideas, debates and commiseration. The two keynotes were led by the aforementioned Rahel Baile and Kristina Halvorson, who compared the junk content crowding the internet to the pile of garbage littering the post apocalyptic earth in Wall-E. Since most of the breakout sessions that followed overlapped, I can only give what I thought were highlights, which was basically everything I saw.

Clare O’Brien, managing director of CDA, talked about her company’s content auditing system, and how they use metrics. But mostly she talked about how metrics for the internet are different: for the first time, we can see exactly how people engage with our content.

Jeff MacIntyre, principal of Predicate, defined editorial strategy and how it operates within the larger context of content strategy. My favourite quote/argument: “Your website is a publication.” So we have to get better at publishing.

Kenneth Yau, a content strategist at Baddit, Ltd, started his talk by saying “I have a voice for writing.” His talk explored localisation, and it was fascinating — not just because most of his slides were pictures of food. There’s a lot more to worry about with localising content than just translation. Do you translate URLs? Metadata? Should google give you search results based on your IP address? Can localisation make you money? Short (and only) answer: Yes.

Rachel Lovinger is really good at making the complicated sound uncomplicated. She led a talk on the uber complex, yet really interesting semantic web. She made it so clear that I felt like a developer. The name of her talk sums up her argument: ‘There’s no semantic web without content and data.’

Panel: let the rage flow. The panel discussion that closed the talk included our own Elizabeth, along with Jonathan Kahn (from Together London), Clare O’Brien, and Sylvie Daumal (from Razorfish France). They were led in discussion by Jeff MacIntyre. The point of the panel was to explore content strategy in Europe, but the audience slowly veered it towards answering the questions:

• “Why doesn’t anyone appreciate us?” and
• “Why do we complain all the time?”

Valid points from an emerging field. All four panelists answered by giving specific examples from their own company and work, which is the only way to actually answer a content strategy question, unless you say, “it depends.” We haven’t come to a conclusion for the audience questions, but we did decide that forums like this are a good start. And constant evangelising to our UX, developer, IA and designer peers.

Did I mention there was a river boat dinner cruise?

Elizabeth and I on the dinner cruise

And a closing cocktail hour, that was Mexican themed for some reason? Paris is a really good host. Even when you’re trapped there.