Archive for category UX-Driven Company
How to Name Your Website and Write A Tagline like a Pro
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews, UX-Driven Company on May 24th, 2010
I am a reluctant brander. Like most User Experience designers, I like to think of myself as a high-minded design thinker – not a marketer. You know the arguments. Designers think about solving real human problems and obsess on the essence of something’s purpose. Marketers define essence as that which gets noticed and remembered. Designers are empathically creative. Marketers are exploitatively creative. Designers seek timeless truths. Marketers are trend-chasers. Designers live in Brooklyn and sell artisanal pickles between freelance gigs. Marketers live in Manhattan and coin phrases like FroYo. Yet it didn’t take me long working in this field to realize that making such distinctions is wrong-headed. If anything, I relate more to the marketer these days. Marketers trend towards the pragmatic. Designers? At their worst: ideologues, aesthetes, navel-gazers. Design and marketing ultimately chase the same goal, “marketplace magic,” so why not think like a good branding brain in order to name and position your digital business? At a minimum you should know a little about the work of Lynn Altman before you set about trying to name your site and write a tagline for it. Her firm, BrandNow, and her book, Brand it Yourself, are excellent starting points for demystifying the creative process behind successful product branding.
Things I Lose Sleep Over #2 – Demand Media
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on November 2nd, 2009
4:14am, Brooklyn
Demand Media is Profiled in the November Wired: "Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell"
Last week, I tossed and turned over the successful online publishing formula of Smashing Magazine. Simple sounding in principle, Smashing’s approach is to develop enduring, high-quality content and to cultivate an audience with it. Each post is packed with value and is published to a hungry base of Tweeps and RSS subscribers, becoming instantly SEO’d upon publication. If this was easy to do, then Smashing wouldn’t be such an outlier (see table below), and I would be sleeping soundly in a villa on Bequia instead of up right now writing this. Tonight, my insomniac ramblings are focused in another direction, on a profitable online publisher who takes the exact opposite approach: cranking out low-quality content and spending as little as possible on it’s production. Reading the new issue of Wired (November), I was fascinated and disturbed by the story of Richard Rosenblatt and his Demand Media. Quoting Daniel Roth, the author, “Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has discovered. Online content is not worth very much.” The art, therefore, is in cost control – which is done in two ways. 1) Demand channels The Algorithm to tell them precisely what consumers are searching for, where gaps in the existing online content exist, and what advertisers might be willing to pay for. 2) Demand hires a new breed of freelancer who is expert at cranking out passionless, utilitarian content at wages that would make your average Hyderabad call center rep storm out in protest.
Things I Lose Sleep Over – SmashingMagazine.com
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on October 21st, 2009
3:52am, Brooklyn
There’s not an unusual amount of stress going on right now in either my home or work life. Money’s okay. Health is fine. But I find myself often awake between the hours of 3 and 5 am. I realize it’s always the same things that are keeping me up. There are portentous trends brewing in my work as a user experience professional and a digital publisher, and in those hazy hours of early morning my thoughts are dominated by them. The first one I want to post about is Smashing Magazine.
5 Must-have Books for a Director of User Experience
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on September 24th, 2009
As a client-side Director of User Experience, my job is quite varied. The amount of web development that’s happening in a company of our size is truly staggering – so my role is as much one of providing continuity and thought leadership as it is directly designing or managing designers. The difficult parts of my job are a) giving people in the business the practical tools and methodologies to actually deliver on the promise of being “user centered,” b) finding language that achieves a common understanding of design ideas for a general audience, and c) pushing the expectations for what can be achieved online past the “status quo” state of incremental improvements and a myopic focus on what the competition is doing. These 5 books have been the most influential in providing guidance for my daily challenges:
1. Serious Play
by Michael Schrage
This is a slim book and a quick read – but it’s number one on my list. In fact, it virtually provides me with a grand unifying theory of implementing a UX culture at a large company. My mantra at Wiley is “always put a design deliverable in front of the specification and have it tested in a valid way.” By ‘design deliverable,’ I mean model, or prototype, of the end product -something vivid enough for a potential user of the product to actually imagine the experience of using it. Schrage persuasively explains the value to any organization of becoming a “modeling culture,” one in which every conversation happens around real designs and not in the abstract language of marketing and business plans. If you are in a highly design sensitive environment (I’m imagining Apple, but I don’t really know), maybe your company already is a modeling culture, but most large corporations aren’t even close. This book also conveys an important emphasis on experimentation and tolerance of failure at the institutional level. A Director of User Experience should buy multiple copies of this and give them out to business leaders in their company as holiday gifts.
The $5,000 Website: I’m Looking for Interview Subjects
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on August 7th, 2009
Minutemen's Brilliant "Double Nickels on the Dime" Was Made For $1200
Sure, anyone can put a website up for free these days, so who even needs to spend five grand anymore, right? In fact, I put this Wordpress site up in under two hours for a cost of $0 (I even piggybacked the hosting charges on another site I have.) Then there is the other end of the spectrum – agency designed sites still cost $250,000+ to design and implement. Companies are still piling hundreds of thousands into internal development of their web presence with homegrown content systems and loads of internal developers. When is this all going to converge?
As an information architect and user researcher I’m part of this machine – part of the development overhead. But I’m feeling the pull every day to work smaller, faster, and cheaper. How do we contain the scope of our projects while simultaneously striving for excellence in design? Perhaps a clue lies in this recent post by graphic designer Lea Alcantara about redesigning her own portfolio site, a project which came in somewhere between $0 and $5,000. Here’s the basic workflow she describes:
Practical Tips for Fielding Design-related Ethnography
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company, User & Design Research on August 1st, 2009
Ethnographic Insight: Manhattan Vets Store Their Extra Prescription Pet Food Where They Can
It’s been a great week in the field conducting ethnographic interviews with veterinarians and vet techs. Mostly we’ve been in Manhattan, where food storage in the animal hospitals is a major issue. We’ve seen bags of prescription chow stacked in hallways and offices, hidden in unused cages, stacked on surgical operating tables and x-ray equipment, and almost always taking over the waiting rooms and foyers of the client greeting area. Someone should devise a drop-shipping or home delivery scheme wherein vets can earn their margins re-selling the supplies but don’t have to receive and store the inventory.
I doubt this idea will be used by my employer, which for this job is our scientific, technical, and medical publishing division, Wiley-Blackwell. I’m lucky to work for a company that is committed to understanding its customers with this kind of research before embarking on a product idea. My favorite study design of late for the early, product discovery phase of user research is to do 10-12 remote contextual inquiry interviews via phone and web conferencing software, followed up by 5-6 in-home or in-office ethnographic visits. It’s a large enough of a sample to cover a couple of key audience segments and really learn their unmet needs, but still quite cost effective. And even just a few visits out to a respondent’s real environment crystallizes the findings and brings the research to life. We’ve refined the mechanics of fielding a study like this without breaking the bank, so let me share a few pointers with you.
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Don’t Fight Over the Homepage
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on July 23rd, 2009
Google's Homepage: The Web's Most Valuable Real Estate is Famously Uncluttered
The temptation is to think of the homepage as “waterfront real-estate” because it gets a relatively large amount of traffic compared to any other single page on a website. Traditionally, this has meant that competing interests within a company battle for placement on this “strategic” page, which often leads to a cluttered first impression of the company’s website for the user. And worse, a busy homepage can undermine its primary purpose – which, according to the wise Steve Krug, is to answer three questions:
-What can I find here?
-What can I do here?
-Why should I be here – and not somewhere else?
Our experience has proven that users move very quickly through home pages, especially those for broadly scoped websites that carry a lot of diverse products and content. The vast majority of clicks tend to be around the main navigation menu and search box area. Home page feature boxes tend to get very little traction. Qualitative data from the usability lab supports this data. Users assume that a home page is very general and is unlikely to provide useful information for a simple reason – they feel they haven’t told you what they are looking for yet. So how could you possibly have anything of interest to say to them at this point in the game?
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