Tonight, OHO Interactive picked up the MITX award in the Educational Institutions category for its design and development of the Uncommon Schools family of websites. OHO worked with Uncommon on the relaunch of its online brand. The MITX awards were held at the Boston Sheraton and attended by over 900 interactive, development and advertising professionals.
Congratulations to our client partners and to the OHO design and development team.
Last night nearly 100 people gathered at Microsoft's NERD Center to celebrate World Usability Day. The event in Boston/Cambridge was one of 172 events that happened in 40+ countries.
Jason Smith from OHO Interactive spoke on making web application people love to use in his talk: "From Usability to Lovability." A group of researchers from Bentley University presented new research on using iPads in education.
We've had a wonderful two days at the Power of eMarketing conference in Providence, Rhode Island. Digital Marketing Manager Christina Inge spoke on two panels, on email content strategy and social media content, as well as moderating an email strategies panel. Technical Project Manager Stephanie Krol sat in on sessions on everything from CMS technology to social platforms. We've met so many interesting, and found all digital marketers share a common set of goals and challenges: getting their company's message out on a growing range of platforms, efficiently and effectively. All told, it was a great two days of sharing high-level marketing and messaging strategies with digital marketing directors and CMOs from around the world.
And our legenday tote bags flew off the table.
Last week, I had the chance to attend the Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference after presenting a social media case study at the DMEF, the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation. Yes—a social media case study Social marketing was on the agenda for much of the DMA 2011 Conference, as was paid search, SEO, web analytics, and email. Sessions explored the success of online communities, channel partner marketing, social media strategies, and email creative. It was a far cry from the stereotype of direct marketing as being all about mail campaigns and infomercials. Direct now encompasses all things digital, other than some display, and most things print. Direct is now the normal paradigm for marketing.
How did this come about? How did the DMA become the standard conference for all things marketing? For one thing, marketing has become increasingly direct. The reasons are multiple: consumers are now ignoring blanket campaigns—they tune out TV commercials, read fewer general and more niche print publications, and are handy at ignoring outdoor (when was the last time you stopped to admire a billboard?).
The best way to reach an audience now is through targeted messaging aimed directly at them—their region, their profession, their demographic, and most successfully, them personally. Direct is how consumers want to be reached, be it through email, targeted search, or even old-fashioned print. Does this mean broad campaigns are over? Certainly not—there’s still a role for television, outdoor, and broad-based social media acquisition campaigns. Often, the only way to acquire customers whom you can then reach directly is through a non-direct campaign.
But direct in all its forms is where the marketing dollars are now, because that’s where the ROI is—in the emails you send to your best customers with special offers, in the online community that mobilizes your brand advocates, in the print piece that beautifully conveys your message to a chosen audience. The ROI on email is still around $44 for each $1 spent. Marketers are projected to spend $3.1 Billion on social media by 2014, according to Forrester. Crafting your message thoughtfully with very specific groups of end users in mind is now essential to making your marketing message heard above the noise.
Direct isn’t easy. It requires far more thought, far more muscle than the broad campaigns of old. Having a good backbone of technical infrastructure is now essential-you don’t want to spend valuable time reinventing the wheel when automation and solid backend systems can take care of repetitive tasks. Integrating your testing, targeting, email, web analytics, basic SEO, and CRM into a cohesive unit provides the background for making direct work. So too, does breaking down silos within an organization to make sure that functional units within marketing talk to each other—or staying on top of trends if you’re among the many solo CMOs out there. It’s a big undertaking. But it’s also the key to reaching your customers in the one-on-one conversation they now expect from you.
Late last month, I spoke at PodCamp Boston on designing an effective social media policy for your company. Among the audience were people representing B2B, B2C, education, and nonprofit organizations, all with different needs for getting their message out, different resources available to spread that message, and widely varying organizational structures determining where social media fits in to the mix.
A few things became clear, across all industries, though: social media is becoming more and more integrated into organizational operations, and less and less siloed within marketing. This makes it all the more imperative to develop a social media policy that makes sense across the organization. Throw the growing number of online communities into the mix, and there’s even more of a need for guidelines that cover how your team engages with prospects and clients online.
When you build an online community, it becomes a touchpoint between customers and every part of your organization. Technical support, product feedback, marketing, sales, and branding—all take place within your community. And the team members responsible for support, product development, marketing, sales, and billing all need to be on board to make the community a success. Although many companies employ a professional community manager, or roll that work into marketing, successful communities tap into the professional community within an organization. It’s truly all hands on deck.
This creates opportunities to get ideas for new product features, reduce support costs, and conduct effective market research. It also creates challenges that you need to address with a good policy. The key thing to remember: a social media policy needs to tread a fine line between an “all hands on deck” spirit and the resources and privacy of teams within your organization, especially outside of marketing.
One takeaway from my talk is that you need to be cautious of how you mobilize team members on social media, so that personal brands stay personal, and any promotions team members engage in on the major social channels, such as Twitter and Facebook, remain voluntary and authentic. This doesn’t mean you lose control of your brand, just that you remain mindful of people’s need and right to control their personal brands on their personal social media accounts. In other words, don’t dictate personal use of social for the company, but by all means, activate, guide, and ask people to advocate for your brand.
In an online community you control, privacy and brand lessen as controls. Your team members are engaging using non-personal accounts as part of their work, and you control your brand through having built the community in the first place. Or do you? The reality is, brand, user experience, and customer experience are less about infrastructure and more about interaction. To that end, everything every one of your team members does in your online community reflects on your brand and is an integral part of your user experience. Setting goals and expectations, as well as clear policies and procedures, can assure a positive experience for customers. It can also help integrate your online community into operations with less friction. For “all hands on deck” to work, the impact on operations needs to be light, so that team members can work community responsibilities into their regular jobs.
Some tips for making community management work for all:
With careful planning, an online community can drive tremendous value for a brand, whether it’s in technology or consumer products. The key to effectiveness is structure and strategy. If team members who engage with customers in the community have a roadmap for success, the community can be part of a great user experience.
We're proud to be supporting the second annual DrupalCampNH on the campus of Southern New Hampshire State University. Taking place all day on October 29, the event will be a gathering of the northern New England Drupal community for networking, connections, and learning. Our Christina Inge will be giving a presentation on best practices for Implementing Google Analytics and Testing Usability in Drupal. Stop by and you may just get a legenday OHO totebag!
The web is changing. With some of the new HTML5 and CSS3 standards now being supported by IE 8 and above, more options are available now than ever before — especially for forward-thinking UI Developers.
It’s hard sometimes to keep these new techniques at bay when they are able to do such amazing things for your clients, like restructuring a web site layout on the fly with a flexible, responsive grid system — one of my favorite being designer Andy Taylor’s (@andytlr) 1140 CSS Grid System
In the spirit of collaborative development, let’s take a look at how the historic Boston Globe redesigned the new BostonGlobe.com using a flexible grid to create an all-in-one web application that scales for tablets, desktop browsers, and mobile devices. Jeff Soderman (@jeffsonderman) of The Poynter Institute has a nice, concise write-up on the Poynter blog.
Catering to the plethora of mobile devices on the market today is a new and evolving challenge, according to Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks.
“Browser support for media queries is surprisingly decent. Internet Explorer 9 will be supporting it, but IE8 and below do not. If I wanted to deliver the best possible experience in IE 8 and below, I'd either fake it with JavaScript or use anIE specific style sheet and style it in the same style as the most common browser width (sic).”
Implementing Flexible Grids
To really embrace these new standards one must dig in and apply these technologies to their designs. Earlier this summer, I had an opportunity to embrace these new standards when I worked on several iPad applications. As you may know, Safari browsers use WebKit as their rendering engine, making Safari one of the most progressive layout engines in use today.
The joy of working with a WebKit browser (like Chrome or Safari) is that that it supports most of the latest standards and you rarely have to employ fixes or hacks. In addition, the iPad has a fixed height and width for both horizontal and landscape display, so we had a progressive, stable development environment that really allowed us to push the UI envelope.
Immediately after wrapping up these projects I wondered how these technologies could be applied to standard web sites. You know, the ones that have to respect antiquated browsers like IE7.
In A List Apart article in May of 2010, Ethan Marcotte, a fellow Boston designer, coined the term Responsive Web Design. Since then, he’s published a book on the subject and has prompted some very interesting challenges and questions for modern development. 
In the book, Marcotte compares web architecture to traditional architecture, and the new trend of having spaces, like walls, mirrors, and other dynamic construction materials, adjust to building occupants. Have a dinner party with a crowded room of people on a summer night, and then maybe your LCD-enabled wall changes from a warm red color to a cool blue. Some walls are actually able to sense when a room is filling to capacity and adjust to expand the space of a room. As web architects, we can take several cues from the architectural community.
At the end of the day, the web is a very dynamic environment and many budgets have gone overboard trying to accommodate the various entry points to a “web business” or application. From URL redirects, to micro sites for mobile, why choose?
I suggest that a standards-compliant site can be built using today’s technology that not only adjusts its display based on whichever medium the client is using, but also responds to client feedback and allows users to customize their experience with simple browser cookies.
I always found it disconcerting to open a site on my iPhone only to get prompted to visit the mobile site. What’s wrong with the site I’m currently on, and what am I going to miss if I visit the mobile version?
A smart UI Developer should avoid tasking the user with making that decision. It is our job to stay 2-3 steps ahead of the consumer, making their web experience simple and fluid. Today, due in part to Ethan Marcotte’s trend-setting article, we shouldn’t have to ask users to choose between different versions of content when today’s web sites can be scalable, not only in design, but in structure.
Followers of this blog may remember I won a Kindle a while back in the FutureM Future of Marketing challenge, sponsored by Smarterer. Yesterday was the first day I became a Kindle owner, when I met with Smarterer’s awesome community manager, Alison Morris. Pleased with the honor, I was also pretty enthralled by the Kindle. But right now it’s at home, and a paperback copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford continues to accompany me on my travels. This, in spite of the fact that Ruth Rendell’s latest is now loaded on the Kindle.
Why?
Don’t get me wrong, Kindles are a category-changing product, and they offer a great user experience. As Jason has noted is the case with Apple products, they are immediately usable right out of the box. They have a great form factor, and are backed up with Amazon’s superlative customer support. But the user is half the equation in the user experience, and I freely admit I’m the barrier to use. The barriers break down into several different categories--all of which carry lessons for how each individual user plays a role in the user experience: 
Dependencies: Now I need a Kindle cover. I'll go buy one in my off hours, since it would damage a delicate piece of electronic equipment to throw it in a bag. Products often need other products or services to be fully usable. Or they work best in the context of optimal sets of circumstances, such as a dedicated implementation team. The need to deal with those dependencies can present a barrier to use. Dependencies can be simple (needing a cover) to complex (needing an entirely different server configuration). Bear in mind all dependencies, from trivial to major, when introducing a new product. Control over dependencies can have a real impact on the ultimate success of the product. Dependencies vary a lot from user. Some may have greater domain knowledge, and thus training and onboarding time are not significant dependencies for them, but are for less experienced users, for instance. Keep in mind the different users you have, and what their specific sets of dependencies look like.
Philosophical Reasons: I support local bookstores, and virtual books have been hard on their business model and future growth. So when possible, I buy real books. People may find a technology highly usable, but have philosophical reasons they use another one. Supporting open source, for instance, is often a reason people first think of using Drupal, only later realizing that it’s also superior in total cost of ownership to proprietary systems.
Intangible Factors: Paper books are more enjoyable to read than screens. At least for me. Others like the lightness of carrying a Kindle. But I’m a paper book person. It’s the intangible experience of using a product that somehow makes you want to use it. Here is where products like Apple (and Amazon) excel. Again, referring to the recent webinar From Usability to Lovability, it’s the intangible emotional resonance of using a great product that often differentiates a merely good product from one that dominates its category. But what’s going to resonate varies by user. There are best practices that are essential to follow and are fairly universal, such as clearly labeling all options.
There are also practices that depend on the end users. We’ll be exploring some of them in the upcoming User Experience Webinar series. One thing we’ll talk about is the importance of personas: looking at all your typical users, and developing usability strategies around the entirely different ways in which they use your product. At their best, personas not only look at concrete use cases, and the navigation paths related to performing specific tasks, but the more-intangible usage preferences of different types of users. It may mean adding product features, customization options, or going beyond the product itself to different marketing messages and strategies. It may mean expanding your product line to include different products that fit the different preferences of your many users. There’s no way to make a Kindle like a paper book, which is why Amazon still sells paper books.
Your product can be highly usable by all objective measures. But ultimately, it’s the individual user who decides on usability for their very specific use case. Good design takes this into account. I like the Kindle. I’ve got uses for it, which are probably different than the next person’s: that Ruth Rendell is awfully bulky even in paperback, and it’s only practical to take it on trips as a Kindle book. And out of environmental concerns, I may just shift some magazine subscriptions over to it. Meanwhile, though, Cranford continues to be toted along in all its dog-eared glory.
All users have their reasons for using a product, their own ways of using them—some practical, some esthetic, some philosophical. Great user experience design takes all of these into account. Usability depends on the user—they are the ultimate arbiters, and companies win market share by focusing on their real-world usage.
Yesterday, I spoke in a webinar on how colleges can retool their websites to reach more students, encourage admitted students to enroll, and attract graduate students who have more options than ever. If you'd like to see the recorded version of this webinar, we've just posted the video.
It's shaping up to be a busy fall here at OHO. Our Ed Hastings saw this sign and got one for the meeting area--a little deadline humor:
