If the Frequently Asked Questions in your FAQ section are really that frequently asked, why are they in your FAQ section?
Shouldn’t you think about making the information contained in the answers part of your actual site content, rather than sending it to FAQ purgatory?
I’m finding that I judge what I do more and more in terms of how useful it is, and whether people use it or merely encounter it because it is placed in their way.
It would be fair to say that I am not content, in this respect.
A thought.
Most people don’t use the Web. A large majority (80% plus) of planet Earth are not online. One of the reasons for this, maybe not the main reason, but certainly a substantial reason, is that computers in their current form are simply too complex and require too much investment of attention to be useful to these people. They are not interested in simultaneously having a computer experience doing useful tasks and managing that computer experience (opening windows, moving things about, managing apps, maintaining security, wrangling updates, etc.). Not because they aren’t clever enough, just because doing things on a computer still involves too much computer to be useful to them.
The Apple iPad could possibly be the first main-stream device to successfully push past this “too much computer” bottleneck and present a new paradigm in interacting with data and functionality. Certainly, a strong argument can be made that this could be the case. Will others follow if this proves to be the case? Certainly. Will their subsequent attempts outdo Apple’s products? Could well be. The important bit is the paradigm shift itself, rather than which particular company is driving it.
So, let’s say Apple (for the sake of argument) does create this shift and makes computers useful for people who are currently uninterested. Their expectation of how a computer works will be based on this new paradigm, which will be fundamentally different in a few or many ways to the existing one.
Let’s also say that the number of users who come to exist within this paradigm far outnumber the users who exist in the “currently interested” paradigm. The numbers certainly suggest this is a possibility.
So.
What does the Web need to become to fit this new paradigm? How many of the design and functional norms that currently exist are children of the “currently useful” paradigm and simply not applicable in the new one?
Has web design up until this point been aimed at a skewed, early-adopter demographic and we haven’t really noticed?
And, if this is the case, what happens to us when everyone else arrives?
I’m okay at working through a bit of analysis on my own. Just me, a pen, a sheet of paper and a problem (or solution) that needs looking at. Although sometimes the bit of paper is in the way and I’ll end up writing fluff down. But I can do alright, I think.
However. Replace the bit of paper with another person, focused on the problem (or solution) at hand and something else entirely happens.
This isn’t really meeting territory. If “brain-storming” wasn’t such a bullshit term these days I’d maybe try and use that. It implies the kind of mental fireworks that can occur. Actually, I think I’ll use it. Brain-Storming with liked-mind people. Talking to them and listening to them. Ideas just sleet into your head from places unknown.
Is this really obvious? Probably.
Well, it always freaks me out every time it happens. I end up grinning a lot. People probably think I’m weird, but this is the reason why.
Freaks me out. Every. Time.
Google’s foray in the social networking space, Buzz, has got a bit of kicking in the last couple of days, because of the assumptions it made about how people use email. It’s a bit weird, really, that some wunderkind at Google didn’t spot the potential for trouble before Buzz was rolled out, no consultation period required, or so they thought, at the beginning of last week.
The basic line of thinking seems to have been:
“We need some way to hit the social network ground running. People aren’t going to fancy importing or adding friends to a whole new social web app. Luckily people already have lots of friends in their email address books so let’s save everyone a load of time and just make an instant list of followers and followees from everyone’s contact lists. And make all these lists visible to everyone by default, because these networks are all about showing off anyway. And then throw in their photos and RSS feed subscriptions as well for a dollop of extra stuff. Instant Facebook-levels of content and social networking will ensue and our appreciative users won’t have had to lift a finger. Victory will be ours.”
The car-crash then ensued when this insanely naive view of what email is for (Social networking, but in an old-fashioned, clunky way. Errr… that’s it, isn’t it?) ran full-pelt into the real world, where email is a medium not a genre and used for a million more important, secret, dangerous and intimate things than Facebook or Twitter could dream of.
How do you not spot the problem here? What kind of self-obsessed corporate culture produces the kind of clearly very talented engineers who have no understanding of the real-world uses of a technology they control so much of?
Is it now just about beating the other guys? Are we back to there again? That seems to have been the driving factor here. There wasn’t the customary Google opt-in beta period. It was just there, all of a sudden. Because it was good for you. Because Google is cleverer than you are and they know what is good for you. Even if your life crashs as a result. And, actually, don’t worry if that happens. Google has backups.
It turns out you don’t need to be a genius to be evil. You just need to be really, really stupid.
(adapted from an office email I sent on Friday)
From an interview with online wine magnate Gary Vaynerchuk in the copy of .NET magazine sitting on my desk.
On social media:
“The companies that try to understand the return on investment to their social engagement don’t get the picture. I mean, of course, you have to do that, but if you have the best intentions of the brand and the company, you understand that social media is the biggest marathon we’ve ever run. This is a marathon, not a sprint. If you want to build a brand, it’s a marathon. It’s not trackable.”
I’ve been in a few meetings recently where people, both web designers/developers and normal people, were throwing around “Social Media” like it was a bit of script that you drop onto the page and *shazam!* you suddenly have a rich and vibrant community supporting your brand.
It took Gary Vaynerchuk 18 months of daily video blogging wine tastings before he found his audience and his social media strategy took off. And it wasn’t even a strategy. It was him doing what he loved and hoping some other people would love it too.
Something to think about.
One reason occurred to me earlier this week as I was looking at 37signals’ new Answers advice/tips/forum app. As with the rest of the 37signals repertoire, it does what it needs to do and not a lot else. The tag filtering is particularly nice: could be more complex (“Choose multiple tags at once?”), but isn’t (“Nope”). Focus power, Daniel-san!
So the thought that occurred to me is this: When things are simple, it very quickly becomes obvious whether they are any good or not. If you’ve built something that does only one thing and it’s a clunker, there’s nowhere to hide. This is pretty terrifying to most people, I think. It’s easier to pile on the functionality and try and convince your users that Quantity returns better value for their money or attention than Quality does.
It’s easier to do because Quantity merely requires that you have time, while Quality requires that you have skill.
I bought a couple of magazines a couple of weeks ago. Probably the first time in about four or five years that I’ve swapped cash for that kind of printed paper.
They arrived last week. In the post. By Airmail. Because they came from America. They could not have existed at any other time than this.
They are, in fact, the third and fourth issues of a magazine called Coilhouse (“A love letter to alternative culture”). Lots of weird and beautiful stuff. And very much solid, physical objects. Shiny, embossed, hefty pieces of dead wood. Full of interesting words and images sculpted by interesting people. They are sexy, sexy things. Have a taste, for flip’s sake.
That’s the blog, by the way, because… you know… of course there’s a blog, and because Coilhouse the paper-and-ink object sits on top of a much larger, much more abstract object made of ones, zeros, social engagement, word of mouth and an appreciation for things made of passion and love, rather than the expectation of a fat cheque.
The magazine, each issue, has a print run of 1000 several thousand copies (see update below). Which, given the quality of the product, is pretty amazing. Or it might have been the last time I bought a magazine. But the web and the little factories we all carry around now to access it have made the real world cheap to mould into whatever you want.
A photoshoot of Mexican “Day of the Dead”-inspired corsetry, sitting next to an interview with Comics Visionary, and Greatest Living Scotsman, Mr Grant Morrison? There it is, sitting next to me as I type this into my own little factory.
Making real-world things, like small copy-run magazines, or limited-edition whatevers, or custom-made whatnots and getting them to the people who’d appreciate them enough to make the making worth your while used to be rare. It needed a lot of luck, the right place, the right time, etc. And the only option the rest of us had left was the one-size-fits-all mediocre version of culture (to be horribly general). Where what you pay for and what you get is just the thing, the object itself, rather than the story behind it: the process and the meta and the reason why. But, to quote Hugh MacLeod, the web makes kicking ass easier, and increasingly I think that means offline ass as much as online. When you can get the mix right, playing with the best aspects of both those domains, then you really do have a piece of the future on your hands.
Update: I had a very nice comment from Nadya Lev, one of the editor/publishers of Coilhouse, offering a minor correction to the above (duly made). Unfortunately, the server this blog is on had a bit of a flakey over the weekend and all the pending comments seem to have been lost. But! I managed to save Nadya’s comment from the WordPress app on my iPhone (which seemed a bit slow on the whole losing comments thing. Hurrah!). A quick bit of copy/paste/email and here is said comment in full:
Jamie, thank you for your kind review of Issue 04. This kind of feedback means a lot to us, believe me. Minor correction to your post: 1000 copies is actually just how many copies we sell on the web, not our entire print run. We have several thousand more copies that also make their way into stores, though the copies we sell to readers off our website are really our bread-and-butter, so thank you for supporting us… both by buying this magazine, and by writing this review. All my best to you!
A perfect example of the “meta” enabled by, but not restricted to, the Web. Thanks, Nadya.
In between doing actual work this afternoon, my brain was wrestling with the idea that clients could use Twitter as some kind of marketing channel (or not, or… something). There was a PDF floating, which purported to offer detailed insight into how to do this, and it was pretty funny stuff.
The amount of effort that was required to interface Twitter with a coherent corporate marketing message was scarily large (“Have two people reponsible for posting, so one of them can always be “on call” to deal with issues!”).
It made me wonder if Twitter, by its very nature, resists this kind of use.
I think it might mimic some specific way in which we, as humans, think. The little moments of existential sparkle when we notice stuff about what we are doing and how we are doing it. The honest or not-so-honest internal monologue. The Head fluff we all share, and thus can appreciate in others.
The best of it is instinctive and authentic and even in 140 characters it will often result in a large amount of insight or humour or experience. And if there is any marketing value to be had from that it isn’t something you can work out before you start. That human fluff is required as tinder or else you just get a damp and embarrassing squib. The value emerges in an unpredictable and second-hand kind of way. And it’s fluffy human value.
I’m not sure a direct corporate marketing message can replicate that.
I find the fact that the web is barely more than a dozen years old mind-bogglingly exciting. So much to figure out, try out, fail and succeed at. An extremely addictive mix of abstract concepting and carving logic and method directly out of plain-text. At least where I live in the process. It’s great. You get a real sense of putting the tracks down in front of you as you are barreling along.
At least when everyone involved gets it.
When they don’t, the newness and comparative strangeness of the medium (at least when compared to anything else, ever) doesn’t give you much of a foundation from which to mount a forceful and authoritative argument about how things need to work. Particularly when counter-arguments are being mounted from things like printed paper. Everyone groks paper, or at least they’ll have a good go at kidding themselves they do. It’s safe, barring the occasional cut. It doesn’t do much at all, except lie there and be looked at. Stupid, but comprehensible because of it. And it isn’t the only one. Film and video is possible more stupid.
The web, by comparison, isn’t stupid. It isn’t stupid in about a thousand different directions at once. And that makes it very hard to define. Maybe even impossible to define in terms that’ll line it up nicely with the old media.
I can kind of see why the way the world operates being taken over by this thing that no-one seems to fully understand, and which in 5-10 years is probably going to be unrecognisable, can be scary. And why the people hawking it might be intimidating and make you push things back to places you understand.
I can kind of see that. I can be sympathetic. Honest.
Most days.
Not today, though.
Today was full of people literally waving paper with comfortable and stupid things written on it. Things like “consistent brand colour” and “look at this, then look at this, now stop”.
But today is done. Next?
