The First Key to Success – Counting to One

Like design, branding involves creating an illusion of clarity out of that which is fundamentally indeterminate.   Whether you are publishing a blog or building iPhone apps, you are looking for a singular, but simple and strong, idea at the center.  Or to put it Altman’s terms, you should learn to count to one.   “We don’t buy a shampoo that doubles as a face wash and a hand soap,” she writes.  Consumers want to believe, whether it is true or not, that “certain brands and certain products perform best at certain tasks.”   Domino’s Pizza built their mega-brand on a single promise – delivery in under 30 minutes.  There was no mention of whether the pizza was also delicious.  Less successfully, Advil tried to position their product to the marketplace with two core benefits. Fast. Strong. Advil. “Do you remember that campaign?” Altman asks.  “Of course you don’t.  Neither does anyone else.”

Practicing this sort of reductionism is harder than it sounds.  Odds are that your product or website does more than one thing well, or at least that you want it to.  For instance, if you think your express passport service is both easy and fast, you will be hard-pressed to give up one of those benefits.  You may make the mistake of naming your service ABC Passport Express as a result.  “ABC” connotes easiness and guarantees good phone book placement (a valuable business benefit before Google came along in 1997), and “express” sounds fast.  Good, right?  No, in fact, because you will probably  lose out to your more focused competition, RushMyPassport.com, who commits to the single benefit of fast turnaround.  Being perceived as having one clear benefit usually wins the battle for the prospect’s mind – which is all that matters.

The name, "ABC Passport Express," simultaneously promises ease and speed of service, not to mention the benefits of being local area specialists as captured in their tagline. The result is generic.

RushMyPassport.com focuses on one core promise, speed of turnaround time, and creates a coordinated impression that this is what they do - get you your passport fast.

The Second Key to Success – Work Fast and Loose (at least at the beginning)

Ok. So now you can count to one, but how do you arrive at the right one? The most sure-fire way is to start with the many.  Ideas are cheap, so you should generate lots of them, and you should do it fast.   The design firm IDEO, more famous for their brainstorming methods than any other design firm in history, once re-designed that most familiar and time-tested of objects, the supermarket shopping cart, in only 5 days.   “Maybe we should acknowledge it’s kind of insane to do an entire project in just a week,” said Peter Skillman of IDEO, as their team proceeded to do exactly that – on national television!   The project was done in response to a challenge set forth by the producer’s of ABC’s television news magazine, Nightline, in 1999. One of IDEO’s key premises is to throw lots and lots of ideas out in the early phases – then cull them down to the key ideas later. In The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley shares the IDEO brainstorming rules which are written on the wall during brainstorming sessions there. Go for Quantity. Encourage Wild Ideas. Be Visual. And always, always – work fast and loose in the early stages, because winning ideas will get refined in the later stages.  And, guess what? Winning ideas can come from anywhere, so generate lots of them!

And if we return to the Brandmaker Express method that Altman writes about in her book, we will find an approach for generating names and taglines that is very much in the spirit of IDEO.   For each naming challenge, Altman and her team design a set of creative workshop exercises to generate lots and lots of ideas.   The workshops are run twice, once with the employees and internal stakeholders at the client company, and once with a team of ‘creative souls’ (an eclectic group of creative professionals who do this as a moonlighting gig.)  The workshop games are developed on a custom basis for each product being named, but there are a few favorites which appear over and over.  For instance, to generate tagline ideas there is usually an exercise to write an attention-grabbing headline like you might find in a famous publication, but the publication that serves as a setting is varied based on the tone of the product (e.g. NY Daily News for “sensational” headlines, NY Times for straightforward and sophisticated.)  Then she might add another exercise to push the creativity further, such as “Now in Three Words,” where the headline has to be compressed to it’s 3-word essence.  There are also specific exercises for arriving at names, such as “Word Smash,” which involves taking two English words that fit the concept and shoving them together to make a nonsense word – like Celebrex or MaxiPro. The point with these games is to do lots of them, coming at your naming challenge from several angles.  As you are doing the exercises, you should be furiously writing down the things that your brainstormers are saying in response to the challenge.

The Third Key to Success – Synthesize the ideas into a few powerful concepts, then visualize them

My favorite part of working with Altman is when the professional graphic designer she hires comes back with about 20 full-color 10 by 14 print-style ads with names, taglines, and corresponding imagery.  This is where the ideas from the brainstorming are synthesized and come to life, and this is also the appropriate time to critique the ideas and vote on them as a group.  The book has many insights on how to get to the right 20.  For instance, find out the dealbreakers early.  Maybe your CEO hates purple so there is no use in developing the purple people eater concept that someone threw out in one of the brainstorming exercises.  Concision is essential.   You should develop taglines that could tell the story of the site (along with a name and a logo) if everything else on the page was removed.  And she provides several known pitfalls that lead to writing bad, consumer alienating taglines.  Rampant use of the gerund, e.g. using a verb with no subject and adding “ing” to the end, as in Nokia’s “connecting people,” is a big no-no.   Altman calls this kind of tone “self-congratulatory, self-praising, and seriously superior.”  She also likes second person taglines, not first person.  Telling your customer what you are trying to do in a first person tagline is not the point (e.g. Lucent’s “creating value through true convergence.”)   Second person taglines, like “you deserve a break today,” bring the customer into the brand’s narrative.

Lynn Altman uses print-style ads, along the lines of this one for monster.com, to present name and tagline concepts.

So by now, I hope you’re convinced that it’s time to think like a marketer, not a business development person or -god forbid- a designer, when you are naming and positioning websites.  Don Norman, in a recent interview in upstart UX magazine, Want, said outright that the distinction between designers and marketers is really very small.  They both ask the same question, “How do we make it so that people will enjoy the product?”  And if you are wondering who is more creative – marketers of designers? – you should sit in on one of Brand Now’s creatives-only brainstorming sessions and you will realize that we are indeed talking about two sides of the same coin.

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.

If eHow posts on paper nurses hats, you can bet someone was searching for it in Google

Looking at one of Demand’s key properties, eHow, tells the story of how this game is even more profitable than the Smashing formula.   Snooping around the Google index will reveal that  eHow has over 750,000 articles – and clocks in at a 27 on my CVPP scale (CVPP = Compete.com Visits per Page of content*)  27 is the lowest number by far of any of the sites I have looked at in the how-to or media space, but with so much content, their overall traffic is astounding.  If you accept that the CVPP number maps roughly to the levels of content quality and/or audience loyalty, you’ll see that eHow has neither.   And I don’t think they would even argue that point.  It’s clearly not their business model.  If you factor in their average production costs of $20 per article, and not much more for videos – with that kind of traffic – you will conclude that eHow must be fabulously profitable, especially if you buy their claim that they are also good at maximizing the ad rates they get for the content they choose to develop.  Now throw in their 170,000 YouTube entries and the content they produce for the other sites in their network, and you get a sense of the scale of this thing – at least 50% bigger than About.com, a first-mover and stalwart who has been building up content online since 1996.   And what’s really scary is that Demand’s goal is to get to one Million pieces of content a month.

Compete.com Visits Per Page of content (CVPP) - Sep.09

This leads me to a broader point about algorithmic content generation.   This is clearly going to be a problem for Google if this trend continues.   You can catch a glimpse of this dystopian future of robo-content in the world of online wine information.  The Wall Street Journal called out the miserable state for wine consumers online back in April in What’s Wrong With Wine on The Web? While complaining broadly about a number of bad shopping experiences from online wine retailers, they cited the number one problem as being “phantom” inventory.  If you try and Google a specific wine online, you’re odds of getting a useless result from the likes of Cork’d or Snooth is amazingly high.   Both of these sites automatically generate a blank review page for every wine in their database, whether or not they have anything to say about the wines and whether or not they can link to someone who actually sells the wine.  Sometimes they have a single generic  50 word review, a page of stale comments, or even nothing at all, and get surprisingly good SEO in Google.   All the insightful commentary about the wine is either with the bloggers or the wineries themselves (who are much less well SEO’d), or locked behind the paying subscriber wall at WineSpectator.com.     But thanks to the likes of Demand media, there is a thriving online market for generic how-to information on such topics as How To Open a Bottle of Wine.  C’mon now, really?  This is where The Algorithm tells us where to invest our energies as publishers?  Just how uninspiring will the learning experience of the future be if one chooses Google as their entry point?

eHow's How to Open a Bottle of Wine tutorial.

But Demand has one thing in common with Smashing – they both take the guesswork out of online publishing success.   They are both forward-looking and focus on audience needs.  One does so with mathematical precision and a cynical emphasis on profitably answering the little questions of daily life (every last one of them); the other does so the old-fashioned way, by cultivating an audience, asking them what they want to read about, and publishing great, timely content.   And together, they’ve managed to overturn some conventional thinking in the world of online publishing.  The main insight for traditional publishers:  repositories of existing content aren’t nearly as valuable as you think they are if you are not publishing to an online audience who is waiting for that content.  That’s a scary thought, of course.  Because that means a publisher’s true assets are what it does in the future online, not monetizing what it has done in the past.    How are  traditional publishers, the great and worthy stewards of our culture, going to rise to meet this challenge?

Related Posts on SolidStateUX:

Things I Lose Sleep Over – Smashing Magazine.com
*see this post for more information on the CVPP measure

Related Posts from Around the Web:

The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model – Wired

The Age of Mega Content Sites:  Answers.com & Demand Media - ReadWriteWeb

Tim Armstrong’s Secret Project Is To Turn AOL Into A Low-Cost Content Machine – TechCrunch

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.

Smashing has less than 850 hundred articles and covers 12 categories – all focused on web design and presentation-layer programming.  About.com has hundreds of topics and over 700,000*  articles online.  If you compare Compete.com’s Unique Visitor statistic for each site in September 2009, About.com gets about 57 visitors per piece of content compared to Smashing magazine’s 900.   (note: Compete uses a proprietary method for calculating unique visitors that does not correspond to the number reported by most web analytics programs, so these numbers are much lower than the official numbers.  But the relationships are what matters here.)  If I do the same calculation on various other media sites and blogs, I see that nobody is even close to Smashing Magazine’s traffic per piece of content ratio:

Compete.com Unique Visitors by Relative Size in Google Index

Smashing’s guide to Photoshop tutorials alone has over a million visits – a single post!  I personally follow most of what Smashing publishes and it’s no surprise that they have this great traffic. They post twice daily – each post is like a treasure trove of useful content, packed with images. And the truly impressive thing is that even though they cover a small niche – the design community – they are clearly a profitable venture, with 11.9 million pageviews in September, 2009 from a specific, high-value audience.   To put it in perspective, A List Apart has almost 4 times the number of high quality articles targeted at the same community with some of the same contributors and seems to get about a quarter of Smashing’s traffic.    These guys are clearly doing something right.   And it’s all being done with what presumably is a small staff in a slightly tricked out installation of Wordpress.

In another bit of quick analysis, I started typing urls and shortening them in bit.ly for the past 25 articles published on various how-to sites, including Smashing, A List Apart, and About.com.   Bit.ly tells you how many total referrals it sends for each shortened url, so it’s an interesting glimpse into competitive data at the individual post level.   (Note: About.com publishes, or at least updates, a lot of articles every week, causing them to be re-indexed by Google.. so take “latest 25″ with a grain of salt in that example.)   Then I tried checking SEO on those articles by typing in the keywords referenced in the article’s title and seeing how high they ranked in Google – e.g. what % of the articles appeared in the first page of Google search results.

Comparison of Last 25 Posts (through 10/17)

I know what you’re thinking.  This is a real ‘apples and oranges’ comparison. Why compare totally different kinds of sites to one another?   Well, I find a couple of things interesting about this statistic.  The main thing is that Smashing posts are immediately finding an audience, which leads both to great traffic and great SEO.   A List Apart posts are getting good traffic when published but it’s not translating to great SEO, probably because of the way they are written (more literary in style, and less direct) and that Google does not favor them as a highly trusted source in their PageRank algorithm.   I put About.com in there as a control – just to contrast this new wave style of online publisher with the old wave.   There’s no way of knowing what sort of traffic About is getting on these particular 25 posts, but I can confirm that there’s not a lot of Twitter buzz about them.  I do know from other experiments that it’s hard to top About.com in getting automatically SEO’d on a random topic… they have a strong first-movers advantage and Google seems to favor them accordingly.     Also, it’s getting increasingly hard to be the first on any topic anymore.  If there’s one thing AdSense has done, it’s hugely raised the numbers of people trying to make a living as online publishers and being first into a topic niche is getting nearly impossible.

So Smashing has really stumbled across the formula for success- deliver high-quality content and cultivate an audience.  Online publishers can no longer publish into the void and hope Google will find the content.  The insight is clear – be more like Smashing.  Now, only if it were that easy… and if only I could get back to sleep.

* based on custom google query to count content detail pages. method is a rough guestimate of a content websites’ size

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.

2. Designing Web Interfaces

by Bill Scott & Theresa Neil

This book was published by an arch competitor earlier this year, but I just can’t say enough about its value.  Most amazing to me is how I pick this up infinitely more than its predecessor – Designing Interfaces.   Why?  Well, basically because of it’s emphasis on rich interaction on the web.  This book has taken what used to be considered “nice to have” techniques associated with the likes of Flash, Ajax, and fancy Javascript and proven why moving beyond the ‘page’ and ‘form’ as the only building blocks of design will be the future of the usable web interface.  What’s more, the book is a practical guide to designing and specifying such rich  interactions as drag-and-drop, in page editing, progressive disclosure, and tons more.   These techniques are still not mainstream, and your average IA still seems to shy away from putting rich interactions into their wireframes (perhaps long conditioned to getting too much pushback from programmers about using the fancy stuff), but this book demystifies and categorizes the techniques, and provides plenty of context about why they work as well as the risks of using them.  Bill Scott works at Netflix, a true pioneer in rich but usable web UI.   This book is invaluable for the UX professional who is trying to push their organization’s web interfaces to the next level.

3. Observing the User Experience

by Mike Kuniavsky

Now on my third copy of this, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson not to loan it out anymore – but it’s just so damn useful!    I used to be a commercial usability consultant, so I wasn’t expecting to use this book nearly as much as I do.  But an in-house Director of User Experience has to do a lot of improvising when it comes to reaching out to users.   For instance, I’m largely a qualitative guy but I find I have to write and review a lot of survey instruments all of the sudden.  Where do I turn? Kuniavsky.  If I have to create a comparative grid of competitor sites and their features, where do I turn to make sure I’m doing something valid and useful? Kuniavsky.  If someone is running a focus group and wants a few pointers on moderating or recruiting? You guessed it. Kuniavsky.  Card sorts?  Ok. You get it by now.   The fact is, I do a lot of DIY studies now, and even more often, I’m in the position of advising others on how to do their own user research.  This is where having a book like Kuniavsky’s really comes in handy – all the basics are in there in a form that’s easy to communicate to others.

4. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

by Avinash Kaushik

Here’s one major difference between being a user experience professional who works at an agency or consultancy versus one who works at a company – you are still around after the site is designed, programmed, and launched.   It won’t take long before you develop a keen interest in web analytics.   The most holistic and sensible voice in modern web analytics is indisputably Avinash Kaushik – who advocates cutting through the crap and paying attention to what matters.   The Pre-Avinash universe was one in which websites were managed by looking at whatever reams of traffic data the monitoring tools were capable of spitting out, without being able to answer even the most basic questions about who was visiting the site and whether they were having a good experience or not.   What’s even better is his success at breaking analytics out of it’s marketing silo and incorporating user experience values (not to mention, common sense)  into the field.   This book has directly influenced an initiative at Wiley to manage websites and improve them incrementally – constantly adapting to the changing marketplace – rather than relying on a cycle of periodic redesigns.   The new version Web Analytics 2.0 is due out soon, and I can’t wait.

5. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

by Al Ries & Jack Trout

This one’s a bit of an outlier, given my theme, but a large part of my role is talking people out of ideas for new websites and features.   I probably add as much value if not more for what I advise not to do online than what I do in shaping what gets done.  This book clearly lays out conventional marketing thinking and makes it clear why companies make the same mistakes over and over.    While the book isn’t written with websites in mind, every principle is just as applicable to what we do online as it is for other types of product marketing.  Sample law:  The Law of Leadership teaches you that it is better to be first in a new category than to try to enter or dramtically improve your position in an existing category.   The book also teaches that working hard and delivering quality solutions is important – but not nearly as important as working smart and winning the battle of the prospect’s perception.   The best UX people contain shrewd marketing minds and no other book gets you ramped up faster than this one.

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:

• Design with purpose
• Limit design feedback and put boundries around the way the feedback is considered
• Push the design into a few technologically intensive areas, then become expert in those technologies
• Kick start the finishing process by hiring a professional programmer, but only for a few key pages
• Finish it yourself using a robust, easy-to-use web platform (which in her case is Expression Engine but could just as easily be Drupal or Wordpress).

Ok. So she’s a professional web designer putting up her own website.  Most do, probably… and with decent results.   But within this workflow lies what I think the most important trend is in our industry.   Before long a lot of us will be planning the user experience from a pattern library of interaction design possibilities, getting a few designs in PSD form back from a designer somewhere, getting those designs sliced up by a good HTML/CSS person who is likely somewhere else, and bolting it all into a modified Drupal or Wordpress theme with a few custom plug-ins.   Real websites… designed by pros, relatively customized for the purpose – for $5,000.   Of course, innovation will continue and many projects will be done that cost more than this but we all can benefit from challenging our thinking and finding cheaper ways of working.

So I’m looking to talk to people who have created really great results by containing costs.  I’m especially interested to hear from people who have done this who are not highly skilled technical people or talented designers… people who needed to seek out help, but found ways to do this affordably.  After all, my favorite band – Minutemen – recorded my favorite record of all time – the classic double-alblum Double Nickels on the Dime - in 40 hours of studio time for under $1,200.   Sometimes huge constraints lead to great results.

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.

Tip 1 – Skip The Video

Getting an edited video as an end result of ethnographic research is great – it’s like having an entertaining and informative documentary movie of the customer’s behavior.  But unfortunately it costs about the same as making a feature length documentary.  The editing time is the deal-breaker here.  You return from the field with a minimum of two to four hours of source footage for every respondent, which becomes two to four minutes of finished video in your report.   Getting from hours to minutes requires multiple passes at sequencing and culling the clips – moving from the ’select reel,’ to the ‘rough cut,’ to the ‘final cut’ – with multiple client and research team review milestones at each phase.   The media management alone (e.g. screening, logging, digitizing, and compressing clips) requires an experienced video editor to be anything less than overwhelming, so this kind of research is virtually always outsourced to specialist market research firms.  My advice – skip the video and bring only a portable DAT recorder and a small digital camera along with you.

Olympus DS-40 DAT Recorder

I love my Olympus DS-40 which I use with their ME-15 lavalier microphone (purchased separately).  This recording rig cost less than $150.   I press record, clip the mic to respondents lapel, drop the recorder into their pocket, and forget about it.  Then I use my point-and-shoot digital camera loaded up with a huge SD card and take photos of everything – including any screens on the computer we might look at.  The audio and pictures can even be combined in the final PowerPoint report for an experience that’s not that far from watching a video.   To pull this off, use transcripts of the audio recordings to identify clips you want to use in your report and have the transcription service pull the clips for you once you’ve identified what you want to use.  Transcripts are expensive, but transcribing a whole research study of 6-10 respondents is cheaper than one respondent’s worth of outsourced professional ethnography with video.

Tip 2 – Hire a Good Recruiting Firm

Don’t even think about doing your own recruiting, unless that’s your business.  Even if you have your own customer lists, turn them over to the recruiting service.   Finding, contacting, scheduling, and confirming qualified respondents for a user study requires constant attention and will become your main job for the 2-3 weeks before the research dates if you try and do it yourself.   Then when the study is over, you will be busy mailing out incentive checks.   Why not sit back and get daily updated spreadsheets of scheduled respondents instead?  Good recruiting firms will also help you write your screening questionairre, advise on the liklihood of finding who you are looking for, handle all participant communication including confirmation emails, reminder calls, etc., and disburse incentives.    Different firms operate in different regions, so it will require some legwork to find a good firm that covers the market where you are fielding your study.  Whenever possible, I try and use the amazingly responsive and organized folks at Focus Forward.  Or if you are using a full-service research firm like Sachs Insights or Catalyst Group Design (in NYC) or Serco (in London) you don’t need to worry about this.

Tip 3 – Ask for The Tour

Don’t take the trouble to visit a respondent in their own environment and then have an interview you could have had on the phone!   For in-home or in-office interviews I structure the discussion guide in a slightly different way than I would for an in-lab interview.  The key difference is that 15 minutes into the visit, after I’ve warmed up the respondent with a little chit chat and background info, I say “Hey, can you take us on a tour?”  This tour becomes the rest of the interview.   Start pointing at things, asking them to open cupboards and drawers, explaining as they go.  Write observation notes into your guide so you remember what sorts of things you should be looking for.  I’m usually interested in how things are organized and setup… what sorts of things wind up out on a table or desk vs. buried in a drawer?  How do they have their browser favorites folders set- up?  What sorts of ad-hoc customizing have they done to support their workflow? etc.   This may not be the fly-on-the-wall method of an anthropologist, but we’ve got a limited amount of time here and need to learn what we need to learn, so it’s time to force the agenda.

Tip 4 – Bring along a Prototype

Designs Always Feel Different Out in the Field

Theoretically, the design minded ethnographer should go into the field with few assumptions about what the final product will look like.  The main goal of any contextual phase of user research is to wind up with a good sense of the audience’s workflow and a list of their unmet needs.  Only after uncovering the customer’s unmet needs should the true product brainstorming begin.   But the reality is that we rarely have the time or budget for multiple rounds of discovery research.   If  we’re lucky, we’ll get the opportunity to get our ideas in front of customers once or twice before we have to commit to building something.   I like to bring concepts into the field.  If it’s for a website, which my work almost always is, I like to see mock-ups on the respondents’ real computer in their real environment and get them to talk about them.   What looks viable from the desk in our offices can be seen in an entirely different light in the field.     Load your sketches or design mock-ups on an extranet and access them from the respondent’s computer in the field.  If you’re interested in watching them react to real websites, create bookmarks on Delicious so you can find them quickly when you need them.

Tip 5 – Be Reflexive

The practical ethnographer still must be an effective and ethical ethnographer.   Most important of all is to exercise reflexivity, which for the field researcher, translates into the mental state of being aware of your own presence and impact on the environment that you are observing.   If there is a super star in the world of user anthropology, it is certainly Jan Chipchase – who vagabonds the world on behalf of Nokia.   Having recently heard Jan speak, I was impressed by his reflexive stance and sensitivity to his surroundings when he works in the field.   For instance, he always stays in the same places his respondents live (which for Jan, who works in the developing world extensively, is really saying something) not the Four Seasons across town.  I’m also pretty sure he doesn’t show up at the respondents’ homes with his iced grande frappacino and his Blackberry.   I recommend Mitch Duneier’s published ethnographic study of the Greenwich Village homeless street vendors, Sidewalk, to learn more about ethnographic field methods.  The appendices of this book alone are invaluable insights into how a truly reflexive researcher works.

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?

Once they get a chance to type in a search term, or express interest in a topic by clicking on it in the main menu – they start to become more aware of what the site is trying to tell them.  The deeper into the site they navigate, the more this mindset becomes true.  This is the principle of “just in time” information.  A relevant feature box that is on a page where a user has self-navigated to is a more effective selling tool than a general one on the home page.

About.com is Massive but it's Home Page is Clean and Focused

The trend, I’d say, is for cleaner home pages, with clear starting points, that make impactful branding statements.  The trend is away from piling the home page high with sample product, teaser items, marketing promos, and news flashes.  Savvy site producers have realized this stuff rarely performs on the home page – rather only when it’s deployed in a more thoughtful and targeted manner throughout the site.   If you know a user is flying through the page and will spend very little time taking it in, then you are better off thinking of it as “billboard” rather than its traditional role as a “portal.”  The more you make your central message clean and simple to take in, the better the chance is that someone will notice…  in the same way that billboards are designed in such as way that their message can be digested while someone drives by at 60 miles an hour.

Another trend is that fewer and fewer users are entering via the home page at all.   When a majority of the traffic comes from users googling their way deep into a site, then every page on the site needs to function as a home page.  Thus you will notice a rise in page-level “general” elements such as expanded merchandising-oriented “footers.” (see the “inside nytimes” feature at nytimes.com for an example.)  Marketers should not lament the decline of the homepage as an effective space to ply their trade.  Instead, they have an opportunity to leverage actual user behaviors to deliver more targeted, more effective cross-selling strategies than ever before.