April, 2010

Content / Design / Information Architecture / Strategy — 1 comment
30
Apr 10

Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 2

Google I-O 2010Apple WWDC 2010In my previous post about the push and pull between marketing a site and making it usable, I try to make the case that the DU site leans too heavily toward marketing when all available data suggests usability is more important. However, on second glance, I believe I need to clarify my stance and I’ll use the home pages from Google and Apple’s developer conferences as an example.

My bias is toward a balance between marketing and usability, but the bias gives more initial credence to usability than to marketing. Why? Because you can market the hell out of a site, a subsection or page, but if people don’t know it exists, then it doesn’t matter. That’s my main criticism of the DU homepage- It looks great (which is valuable in and of itself), but it comes at the expense of visitors (prospective students) getting their tasks completed slower and more inefficiently. The most powerful way to manage this tension is to 1) ensure your basic usability requirements are met and 2) make that basic usable framework as beautiful as possible.

If we look at the Apple and Google examples on this page (you can click them to access full size versions), you see this 1-2 approach put into practice. Google is a usable site. It gives visitors a short overview of the conference, easy to find/use links to additional information and a big button to join. But is it beautiful? Has it leveraged good marketing principles? Well, it does provide user generated content to breathe some life into the page, but I would argue that it’s not an engaging presence. It has leaned too far toward usability by disregarding the power good marketing would provide.

Apple’s page also provides basic information on the conference, links to additional information and a big button to join. The difference is that Apple takes that basic usable form and packages it with more marketing muscle. The page is beautiful. It’s engaging, active and makes me want to go in order to be a part of the energy depicted. This is a page that has found a good balance between marketing an usability.

Both conferences, being as high profile as they are, will undoubtedly sell out (Google’s already has as of this writing) so you could make a counter argument that Google’s lack of marketing didn’t hinder them. In fact, they likely saved money and time by avoiding the marketing point of view. True enough. But which conference do you want to be a part of?

Content / Design / Higher Ed / Information Architecture / Strategy — No comments
28
Apr 10

Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 1

University of Denver's homepage.Nick Denardis of EDU Checkup critiqued the University of Denver’s redesign and gave it a 94%. Pretty good. He liked the strong visual impact of the homepage, that content was geared toward addressing student needs and that the underlying code was done with SEO and accessibility in mind. What Nick didn’t know, couldn’t know, was the drama and politics that culminated in this particular design. One aspect of this hidden world is what I’d like to discuss today- the tension between the marketing and usability camps. While I’d like to think that both can (should) co-exist to support one another, its been my experience that they don’t. An organization tends to lean one way or another, many times leaning so heavily one way or another that the overall site experience suffers and, therefore, so do visitors.

Before we dive into the details, we need to define marketing and usability. By “marketing” I mean a perspective that exults the intangible- largely subjective areas like branding and visual aesthetics. By “usability” I mean a perspective that exults the tangible- things that are perceived to be objective through testing and measurement like navigation and functionality controls, categorization and flow of information. I realize you may disagree on my definitions, but for the sake of argument, I’m not here to say one is better than the other so feel free to change the definitions in your own mind. I support both as I’ve defined them. You should ensure that your visitors are represented through testing and measurement, but you also need to be a leader sometimes and do what you feel is necessary even if it’s contrary to user’s wishes. The two can work in tandem, but so often fail to do so. However, that is not a recipe for disaster in and of itself.

A higher ed site could go in either direction. DU’s homepage is squarely in the marketing corner while the task of finding degree information is squarely in the usability corner, yet neither truly works as intended for me, not to disrespect Nick’s conclusions. The homepage does indeed have impact and bucks the usual higher ed trend, but does it work? It does if you want to grab attention and differentiate yourself from the pack (I’ll assume a prospective undergrad student audience). But do students want different or do they want ease of use or a sense of what life at DU is like or something else? Is the leadership inherent in publishing such a bold homepage good or bad? I’d argue that the homepage misses the mark.

I don’t see any reason to be bold here when so much of our own research and those of DU’s consultants over the years points to the fact that people researching what college to attend are more interested in getting the four big questions answered as opposed to being “marketed” to:

  1. Does the school offer the degree I’m interested in?
  2. Am I qualified to attend this school?
  3. Will I fit in socially/do I see myself being happy at this school?
  4. Can I (and/or my folks) afford it?

How many of these does the DU homepage answer (or how many of these questions can you easily get to if you make your way to an internal page within the DU site)? To varying degrees, there are links and clues for each of them, but they’re overwhelmed by the gigantic photo and audience links. This page is more about DU than it is about DU’s customers.

UPDATE 4/29/2010: I decided to expand on this idea using a non-higher ed example.

Technology — No comments
28
Apr 10

On Apple & Adobe Flash

There’s lots being said about Apple, Adobe and Flash support. This is the 6,342,213th opinion on the matter, but the first from me.

First off, what’s the big deal? Well, Adobe and Adobe/Flash supporters are up in arms about Apple’s increasing discrediting/dislike/disbarring of Flash on the Iphone and Ipad (no, I don’t capitalize iPhone and iPad according to Apple marketing- get used to it). They seem to think Apple owes its customers Flash support since so many websites out there power their video and whatever else with Flash. Apple says “Use open standards like H.264, HTML 5, etc.” The Flash crowd chants back “Those aren’t really open” or “Flash is as open as Apple’s narrow allowance for what can and can’t be on their products.”

All of this misses the point.

People who work in technology always prefer working on the newest, shiniest things. No one wants to code sites to work in IE 6 anymore and so we urge and beg people to upgrade while we implement more advanced tricks for the browsers that can handle them. HTML5 is the sexy new thing and people will quickly absorb it into their everyday even though much of the installed base of browsers don’t understand it yet. No technology lives forever, in other words, and Flash isn’t immune. Now, I’m not saying Flash is dead, far from it. But I am saying that it now has worthy competitors for such things as web video and, because of the competition, it’s a marked target.

By not allowing it on any of its devices, Apple is pushing the envelope of progress. Remember the criticism Apple endured when they decided not to ship computers with floppy drives anymore? Same thing only that this time, there are no analogous third party floppy drive makers to soothe people’s withdrawal. Apple has simply become more efficient at pushing us into the future whether we like it or not. But believe me, in the long term, we always like it.

UPDATE 4/29/2010: Steve Jobs posted a message about all of this. I get the sense that he makes the same basic claim I do: it’s time to move on.