I Get to Be Batman

I love all of the work we do, but I’m especially stoked about our newest new business. Earlier this week we kicked off a project with Rebecca Bernstein and her team at University at Buffalo. An aggressive, five-month timeline of what I call extreme IA, as we develop, test, and refine structures for eight websites. It’s a special treat for me in three ways:

First, the project gives us the opportunity to really explore how the needs, expectations, and behaviors of site visitors have changed over the years. I’ve been producing university sites way before mStoner was founded in 2001 (Mosaic and NetObjects Fusion, anyone?), and I’ve learned a lot. This project gives me the opportunity to validate some of what I’ve come to expect, but also hopefully to flex and adapt my understanding to new trends and possibilities.

Secondly, this work allows me to use a new way to develop information architecture. We’ll be using Indi Young’s Mental Models as our framework—I’ve been a fan of her work for years, and this project provides time and budget to do justice to Indi’s process.

Finally, the expert-on-expert factor. I don’t know anyone who’s won more awards for eWork in higher education than Rebecca, and she’s got an incredibly bright, talented team by her side at UB. The chance to come to the table with them and share ideas, debate, discuss, push, pull and hopefully arrive at moments of collective brilliance … very cool. Rebecca and I were talked yesterday, and she commented that it didn’t feel like she’d hired a vendor—it was more like she expanded her team. Or, to riff on our lunchtime discussion during immersion earlier this week, it’s like the Justice League of America. Each of us a superhero in our own right (or own mind), bringing a special skill, talent, and approach to the task-at-hand.

I get to be Batman. Why? Consider the character: incredibly wealthy and handsome man, strength and brawn and fighting skills beyond belief and bolstered by cool gadgets and immense technological resources, haunted by a tragic past, only slightly to the right of the villains he pursues, and looks great in form-fitting latex and a cape. The parallels between us are staggering.

We’ll be sharing what we learn by blog, so stay tuned for some exciting stuff. Same bat time, same bat channel …

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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Respecting the Site Visitor and the Medium

This week, workshop madness! I just completed a series of four of them for a local client-they had selected four pilot units within the college to go live with new sites for their specific areas at the same time that the main, public site launches later this year. In a three-hour format, we reviewed the principles of visitor-centered design, information architecture, writing for the web, and navigation development and then wrapped up with a chalkboarding exercise in which we started to wireframe the new homepage for that unit, based on principles that we’ve discussed earlier in the day.

The goal: to help pilot units understand how and why we’ve created the information architecture and navigation for the main college site and to help them flex that model to their specific needs. In one workshop, someone asked me if the goal was to design to the lowest common denominator. In another, one participant asked if the goal was to design for a 20-year-old (the reason he asked was that he, as a seasoned academic, had come to expect text-dense, very long, and formally worded prose). Both questions really caught my attention and made me think. And in both cases, the answer was "no, not really." I personally think that the goal is to serve your site visitors well by respecting both them and the medium.

Steve Krug’s book "Don’t Make Me Think" was published in 2005 (eons ago, in the web world), but it remains a touchstone for me in all of the planning and training that we do. Its main premise: that websites should be so intuitive that people don’t need to question "where will I find this" or "how do I accomplish that?"

Business school taught me to think in threesthe top three principles I cover in our workshops: 1. Sites should be designed with your site visitors in mind. And those site visitors don’t think in terms of organizational charts or industry jargon (in one workshop, someone explained to me that course articulation translated into "will I get credit for this course;" who knew?). 2. Some site visitors self-identify. Some wayfind from topic to topic and link to link. Some search. Some think in terms of tasks or "I want tos…" Most will do all four, depending on the information they’re looking for. 3. People skim pages more often than they read. When you based site design on these principles you inevitably gravitate toward labels that are simple and straightforward and clear. You also offer multiple entry points to accommodate the different mental models that people use for parsing information. And you write with ruthless journalistic discipline-being as compelling and concise as possible.

I’d argue that sites designed in this way actually broaden your reach and appeal, and that’s a good thing.

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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This Electric Life: BSG Lives Forever as a Lesson to Us All

Or, lessons. I’m home, sick, sucking on cough drops and green tea laced with manuka honey. What better time to catch up on the roughly 800 new articles in my RSS queue. My favorite:

10 Business Lessons from Battlestar Galactica

Starbuck, where are you? Starbuck! STARBUUUUUUUCK!

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Usability Testing Notes

After all these years of building sites, I still breathe a quiet sigh of relief at the end of usability testing. Indeed, after awhile one develops a sense of what will and won’t work for various sites, but it’s always nice to know find that one has planned and executed well.

One of our clients just launched a resource site for parents in Illinois—a project for which we’d built in both wireframe testing and post-launch testing. Yesterday, we sat down individually with nine participants and had them complete various tasks and comment on the site as whole. Some good feedback fell under “things people are always happy about,” like “the bright and crisp photographs of people” and “clear and consistent navigation.” My favorite takeaways from this particular round of testing:

1. Interactive doesn’t always equal added value. Early in our planning, the client asked about creating an interactive map for all of the counties in Illinois-flashy rollovers and animation and such. I’d remembered that for another projectone involving countries and continents-we found that some people were hard-pressed to locate places like, uhm, Europe. That in mind, I wondered whether most people could rightly recognize their county. It seemed that the expense of programming that map outweighed its actual value, and the client agreed. I knew when one of the testing participants located Lake Michigan and Chicago on the left side of the state that we’d made the right decision. Sometimes, a low-fi alpha list just makes more sense.

2. Except, when it does equal added value. People’s appetite for video-and their tolerance for lower production-quality stuff-has increased so dramatically. I was astounded and impressed with the requests for additional multimedia on the site.

3. If you think it may be a little confusing, it’s really confusing. Both the client and I thought that certain acronyms-even with explanatory text around them-wouldn’t make sense to people outside the organization. We were right. Duh.

4. Paper prototype testing still has value. Four years ago, I had client take me to task for recommending that we test wireframes—”SO late 90s,” she said. Well, now it’s late 00s and I still find wireframing has a lot of value. We tested wireframes for this site early on and came to clarity (at a fairly low cost) on the sorts of titles and site structures that would make the most sense to target users. As a result, the list of changes we need to make post-launch are few and mostly simple—nothing that requires a fundamental restructuring of the site. Paper prototyping, it’s a good thing.

P.S. We’ve used MORAE software for years, but for those of us craving mac-native testing software, Silverback is wonderful. Give it a try if you haven’t seen it in action already.

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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This Electric Life: Bearing Bad News

“That’s the thing. Danny wants to be liked, and that gets tricky.”

She was speaking about a man who had just been drowned in a huge pot of gazpacho. Midsomer Murders, Season Three, brilliant!

The scene reminded me of something that one of my high-school professors once said. Fr. Hal Stanger told me “If you want to be liked by everyone, you’re going to be an unhappy little cowboy.” Tricky advice, for a consultant. Got me thinking about some of the bad news I’ve had to deliver lately …

“No one reads your welcome message.”

“Everyone has small classes, professors who know your name, opportunities for leadership, and a strong alumni network.”

“I don’t think the library belongs on the homepage.”

“That’s a tagline, not a brand.”

“That’s a wonderful idea … and totally out of scope.”

“Senior cabinet shouldn’t be choosing the design direction for the site.”

“Your timeline is optimistic to the point of impossible.”

“People don’t understand or care about how your division is structured organizationally.”

“This is a process, not a project—the work doesn’t end when the site launches.”

“Migration hurts.”

I often joke with our clients about how part of our fees are purely hazard pay, but there’s a ring of truth to that. The hardest work oftentimes isn’t the design or content or testing or programming—it’s successfully swaying people’s opinions in a different direction, helping them not to make bad decisions out of good intentions, and setting reasonable expectations not only for our work, but for what people will expect of the internal team that will have to support what we put into place together.

P.S. Off to sunny L.A. for a few days of R and R. Have a terrific week!

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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Migration Madness

Whew, it’s been a busy few weeks—just wrapped up migration on a couple of projects, and it’s nice nice nice to end the week with a go-live!

I have a love-hate relationship with migration. There’s a part of me that really enjoys the sense of accomplishment and the feeling of organization that migration can bring. There’s another side of me that wonders whether it was worth the MBA tuition dollars to spend parts of my day cutting and pasting. What I’ve realized through all of our projects is that migration isn’t for the weak or undisciplined or haphazard—doing migration well requires tenacity, attention to detail, basic knowledge of HTML (yes, even with a CMS), a good understanding of information architecture (those hyperlinks don’t link themselves), and, IMHO, some background in copyediting and design (check out http://tinyurl.com/aveqrm, please, it’s a fantastic book for those of us who didn’t study design in college).

Migration has been on my brain lately because one of our clients who planned to do their site buildout internally asked me if I could put together a guide of sorts to let her know what to expect. The excerpt below is my top 10 list for making migration as easy and painless as it could be. Hit me up at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you’d like a DPF of the guide in its entirety.

10. Lock and Load. Prepare everything you need (site outlines, edited copydecks, metadata, images and their alt tags) ahead of time. Having well organized and clearly labeled files is essential.

9. Save the dates. Give yourself the time that you need. When we first started building websites, we told people to budget 15 minutes per page. Now we tell them to budget an average of an hour per page. It really does take that long.

8. Be label-conscious. This is really important for digital image assets that start out with filenames like IMG_0303.jpg. Converting these names to something more sensible like deangodenzi.jpg will make migration much smoother. Apply the same principle to clearly labeling PDFs and other documents you plan to post to your site.

7. Keep it tight. It’s better better to have a small team of good workers than a large pool of people who generate more work than they actually accomplish. And choose your people well. You want migrators who pay attention to details, because it’s the details that matter.

6. Let migrators play in their own sandbox. Assigning each of them entire section(s) for which they’re completely responsible allows them to become very familiar with the content and eliminates confusion that ensures when several people have their hands on one page.

5. Save early, save often. The page that you’ve worked on heavily—adding hyperlinks, graphics, formatted table data, and the like—will be the page that you lose when your browser crashed before you’ve remembered to hit “save.”

4. Strip. The content that you’re migrating usually comes from two places—the existing site (for pages that didn’t require any rewriting) or from copyedited manuscripts created in a word-processing program. The content that you copy and paste will carry with it some formatting that you don’t want to keep. And even the “strip formatting” function that most CMS packages have doesn’t do a very good job. Use a three-step approach to eliminate that legacy code: copy the content from the HTML page or Word document, paste it into TextEdit (PC) or a program like TextWrangler (Mac, http://www.barebones.com), and then copy that content and paste it into the appropriate CMS field.

3. Break for Life. Realize now the migration is tedious, and you can’t do it for long stretches without going a little insane. For this same reason, you shouldn’t expect migrators to get a full eight hours of migration in each day—more likely, five hours. Past that threshold, work tends to get sloppy.

2. Have one list to rule them all. Provide a single master list of edits and changes as reviewers comb through the site. And make sure that they provide clear, actionable feedback.

1. Know that it’s never over. Once you go live, expect to spend the majority of the next two weeks fixing, changing, and adding to your website. It’s normal, really. Please don’t cry.

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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Getting Past the Smile

“And then he showed me the burn marks.”

The setting, mStoner’s planning room (picture the batcave, minus the bats and the really cool car but with plush microsuede couches and a shag leather rug). The quote, from Laurel, explaining that the best story she ever heard was from her father, who as a child ran into a burning house to save his dog and to this day has the scars to prove it. The impetus, Dark Kevin wondering whether the personal profile had died but had yet to be told it should bury itself. Death of personal profiles? In the face of such a challenge, we did what we always do: we ordered in, and hashed it out.

Since we launched the firm (almost 10 years ago now), every project has incorporated some sort of personal profile. Everyone agrees that these profiles help to connect prospective students to the school’s community, to show donors the life-changing impact of their generosity, to strengthen the bonds between alumni and their alma mater, and to humanize the organization for the people whom it serves. Profiles help to tell an institution’s story and to create a sense of authenticity in communications.

Problem is, we’ve seen so many profiles, on so many sites, of so many shiny happy people laughing, that the smile ceases to register. How do we get past the smile and into some substance?

Earlier today I went to a lunch meeting (Potbelly’s sandwiches, yum) on the subject of storytelling with Laurel, DK, James, Doug, Patrick, Jeremiah, and our good friends from Gaper’s Block, Andrew Huff and Naz Hamid. We shared some anecdotes from our personal experiences with interesting and unusual stories. As we talked, it became clear (to us, anyway) that the biggest problem with profiles used for storytelling is simply that a profile in and of itself isn’t a story.

The Center for Digital Storytelling outlines seven key elements for a story told online:

Audience – Stories have a particular audience in mind.
Purpose – Stories are trying to accomplish a task (inform, educate, entertain, scare, etc.)
Content – Content must be meaningful. Digital content adds to the story.
Voice – Stories are told from a specific perspective(s) and uses the tellers voice to enrich the story.
Technology – Technology is used to extend the story.
Connections – Good stories connect with the participants.
Economy – Stories tell enough to get the point across and no more.

How many profiles have you seen recently that incorporate these elements? I think “economy” is particularly hard. It’s a huge task to cover diversity, collaboration, a supportive community, opportunities for leadership, the chance to see the world, friends for a lifetime, faculty members who know your name, and a brilliant post-degree future with a far-reaching alumni network in 300 words or fewer.

Several sandwiches later, we landed on the simple idea of taking the focus off of the person … in favor of that person’s story. One discreet experience or encounter, told purposefully through a compelling, real voice, crafted carefully, and augmented by content (images, audio, video) that help make that experience come alive for the people the story was meant for. It seems like a small thing, but I don’t think it is. Imagine the difference between responding to “tell me about yourself”  and “What will you remember most about the first week of your freshman year?” Specificity, the primacy of the experience rather than the individual, a beginning and an end to the narrative, and most importantly, an actual point to it.

Doug once said to me that he thought everyone had at least one good story in them. I’d agree. And most haven’t really had the chance to tell them yet.

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Bespoke Design

Looking at our most recent site launches (Kent School and Boston College Graduate School of Social Work) brought to mind a recent conversation I had with creative director Doug. He was telling me that one of the differentiators he’s found in working for mStoner is the way that we approach creative. In some firms, he was telling me, it doesn’t matter which designer is working on a project—it will always end up looking like a Insert-Name-of-Chief-Creative-Officer Here design because those designers create for that person’s sensibilities. Eventually, everything converges. I don’t know that this is a bad thing (love or hate it, you know a Gehry building when you see one), but it’s not the mStoner way. Doug told me, in fact, that you can’t really look at an mStoner-developed site and immediately say that we created it.

This dovetails with a comment that a new client made to me. He said that one of the reasons he hired us is that he looked at our portfolio and thought that every single design we showed him looked absolutely tailored to the institution it represented. “The Kellogg site looked like the Kellogg School, and the George School site felt like a Quaker boarding and day school should,” he said. That comment (and the contract) made my week.

At our best, we’re designing highly usable, visitor-centric sites that scale well on the back end, and on the front end really capture the place and people that the sites are meant to represent. And if that’s the way you ultimately can tell something that comes out of our shop, it’s a non-label I’ll happily wear.

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This Electric Life: Paper

You know there’s potential for magic when you meet a prospective client for the first time and you both pull out your Levenger notepads and then you bond over their index cards, notebooks, and fountain pens.

Yes, ma’am, I’m back to paper.

It’s a switch I’ve been contemplating for awhile—something that started last summer while I was wandering through a Filofax store in Paris and I only just suppressed the urge to forego my iPhone for the old-fashioned comfort of a weekly planner and contact book bound in tan pebbled leather. Only just.

One day a few weeks back-during a break between intake sessions in the city-I strolled over to Macy’s in the Water Tower, up the escalator to the Levenger nook, and picked up a three-pack of gridded paper, a workhorse fountain pen, and a box of Empyrean ink cartridges. And after years of typing notes into my laptop, I began to write again.

Which felt strange; it literally took a full half-day to get my cursive groove back, and my hand cramped a few times as I scrawled my notes through the afternoon.

But I think it was-and continues to beworth it. There’s something to be said about the absence of bright shiny objectstweets, inbox counters, facebook notifications, and document icons-in front of you when you’re really trying to think and listen. For this technogeek, paper’s the new must-have gadget.

N.B.: Voltaire spends his weekends trying to figure out how Andy Rooney got his sweet gig. Until 60 Minutes calls him to fill Andy’s spot, The Electric Life must suffice.

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This Electric Life: Two Apps I’m Loving

My mom called me earlier this week to get my advice on mobile phones. Blackberry or iPhone, she asked. I asked in return, how important it was for her to be able to dial out. Let me be clear, I love my iPhone with the same blind and loyal passion of people who adore their VW Jettas (repair records be damned!). And once I wrapped my head around the idea that my iPhone is a nifty little mini-computer that has a bunch of cool specialized apps and sometimes dials out and almost reliably drops every call I make, I was all smiles. And of those specialized apps, two are proving indispensible to my life-at-the-moment:

1. Gratitude! (http://www.happytapper.com/, $0.99)
This little app allows you to keep a daily microjournal of things you’re grateful for-it also allows you to rate each day and assign a picture to each entry. Simple, yes, and just small and easy enough to make the thought of daily journaling feasible. And I really appreciate the fact that this app is about keeping a record of things you’re grateful for-after all, we don’t need any help remembering the bad stuff.

2. Lose It! (http://www.freshapps.com/lose-it/, free)
Another year, another resolution to lose weight. This app actually helps the cause—fully featured with a fairly large database of foods, it lets me track my meal calories and my exercises in real time. Nice, clean interface, too! And for those who are wondering, 2.5 pounds down, 22.5 pounds to go.

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