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?Related Posts:

• Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 1
• On Apple & Adobe Flash
• Communicating With Students Beyond Email
• Centralization Around Audience
• The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell

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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.Related Posts:

• Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 2
• Higher Ed Sites Have A Huge Advantage: A Captive Audience
• Marketing ≠ Visitor Experience
• Virtues of “The Site”
• 4 Steps to Determine the Optimal Page Width for New Sites

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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.Related Posts:

• Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 2
• CMS- Proprietary or Open Source?
• 4 Steps to Determine the Optimal Page Width for New Sites
• Content Management Systems Aren’t Just For Techies
• The Step Before Defining A Website’s Goals

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• Fewer in-person client reviews: Wayne is hired by various departments for photo shoots. After a gig, he used to schedule an in-person meeting with his client to review and choose the final photos that the client would ultimately take away with them. With the introduction of Flickr, he now uploads all the photos from the shoot into a Flickr set and gives the client access to it. The client then goes through and chooses the photos they wish to keep and deletes everything else. Our photographer saves himself an average of half a work day per week which frees him time to shoot other jobs, time to post process a client’s final selections and time to take care of non-billable, house cleaning tasks.
• Fewer photo searches: Wayne, as the sole photographer for the university, continually receives photo requests for use in various materials (marketing collateral, website, banners, etc.). Each request required him to go through his archives and ferret out an appropriate sampling of photos. Clients would either come to him in person to review or he would burn a CD with images and send it to them. With Flickr, he is now able to send people to an online archive of photos (in this case, he sends them to either the internal account or the public one). Once there, clients can download high res versions of anything they find and know that whatever they come across is approved for usage.
• Fewer variable costs: While not a huge area of servings, Wayne is able to cut down his use of CDs, jump drives, etc. because he now uses Flickr as a delivery method instead of physical media

Current Workflow

To make this work for Wayne, we plugged Flickr into his existing workflow so that his routine wouldn’t be overly disrupted. That process goes something like this:

1. He downloads photos from his cameras into Lightroom
2. He does a first pass through the raw files and throws out any obviously problematic photos
3. He uploads the photos into a Flickr set using Jeffrey Friedl’s “Export to Flickr” Lightroom plugin
4. If the set is uploaded to the public account, the set is marked as private and an automatic Twitter message is sent to one of our editors for title, description, and other metadata inclusion before being marked to public
5. If the set is uploaded to the internal account, he gives his client access to the page and waits for them to choose the final shots they want

Truth be told, the above ideas are still being tweaked as the dust settles. Even so, Wayne has saved himself a good deal of work while our department has better served our internal clients as well as expanded our content offering to our various audiences (through direct hits to Flickr as well as embedding content into our core du.edu website- our annual report site is a good example of that).

Opportunities and Problems

One other workflow idea we’re working to incorporate now is to include the university’s archive team. The holy grail here is to have Wayne send his photos to archives for inclusion into their storage system and then pull the images we want to show in our public Flickr account from their database. The benefit gained is that Wayne has to send his work to archives anyway (per university policy) and, since the archive team appends a consistent set of metadata fields to each image, we can skip the step of using up an editor’s time to do the metadata work on the Flickr site.

Another idea we may try is based on an idea from Brad Ward. The jist is to use some fun gadgets to auto upload images in real-time from Wayne’s camera while he covers an event live.

One issue we’ve encountered is whether or not to make the internal account private or not. We didn’t, for example, want to post hundreds and hundreds of photos of any single event for public consumption, but Wayne has found that managing client credentials needed in order to access the private account was becoming more work than it was worth. So at the moment, all the photos are public, but not promoted in any way.

Other little issues have cropped up, but nothing that can’t be solved. We’ve reaped a lot of benefits from this move and are happy we did it.Related Posts:

• Who is Your Client?
• The Step Before Defining A Website’s Goals
• Stick To Your Guns
• 4 Steps to Determine the Optimal Page Width for New Sites
• The Speed of Twitter

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• Similar in that the “solutions” don’t account for the real audience that matters: patients / students
• Similar in that those with ultimate decision making authority are swayed too much by lobbyists and insiders
• Similar in that those in positions of power tend to be too insular in their thinking and don’t go out of their way to listen to their constituents
• Similar in that opponents to change, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative change, use fear tactics as a mechanism to stop it (death panels / uncontrolled blog commenting)
• The end product is, at best, a grand compromise that makes everyone, even the most important people it targets, suffer in needless ways
• The old choice of “make it fast, cheap, or well- pick two” is turned into “make it fast, cheap, or well- pick all three” only to end up as “make it fast, cheap, or well- pick none.”

I’m sure there are others, but I’m already depressed having gotten this far.Related Posts:

• The 1-to-1 Relationship
• The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell
• Communicating With Students Beyond Email
• Lessons Learned: Let There Be Web Divisions
• 4 Steps to Determine the Optimal Page Width for New Sites

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We usually clammer for more people, more money and more tools as salvation. They’re not. Those things will solve today’s problems, but new ones will arrive tomorrow. No set of widgets, plug-ins or third party add-ons will stop the inevitable. No workflow, processes or project manager from heaven stands a chance. Can you think of any CMS so good that it doesn’t let anything through the cracks? I can’t. Can we supersize it to an EMS and lick the problem? That’ll probably make it worse.

I bring all this up because after two days of great information and conversations at the AMA Higher Ed Symposium, It’s clear that higher ed is lurching forward in fits and starts to leverage all the wondrous new tools and services appearing daily on the Web. But in all the excitement and drama lies the everyday needs of everyone’s website. You’ve gotta remember to take care of the small, non-glamorous details that keep your site alive and well. Don’t lose sight of the daily grind because entropy is always there with you.

Is there hope? Well… just about the only thing any of us can muster in defense is vigilance. Stay attentive, be nimble and don’t let small problems fester into big ones. Keep the daily grunt work moving along efficiently, but also keep an eye on what’s coming up ahead. If the new thing on the horizon goes unchecked until it’s too late to deal with effectively, you lose. It’ll turn your hard work and good intentions into chaos and doubt. Don’t let it get to that.Related Posts:

• Communicating With Students Beyond Email
• On Apple & Adobe Flash
• The 1-to-1 Relationship
• How To Turn Around A Problematic Site
• Flickr for Photo Workflow

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Since title tags are an exercise in telling people what they’ll find behind a link before they actually go there, the act of writing it requires you to justify the relevance of the link in the first place. If you’re at Apple’s website on the Macbook page, you might see a link to their Macbook Pro page. Makes logical sense, right? If you’re interested in a Macbook, you might be interested in stepping up to a Pro model. A title tag might say “Step up to a Macbook Pro for added performance, storage, memory and more.” The sentence establishes relevance and a reason why you should click or not click. Job done, move on.

Let’s take another example, however. Let’s say you’re on a university’s annual report site, on any page. There’s a global link to the chancellor’s site. You write a link title that says… what? “Go to the website for Chancellor so and so.” No, that’s too obvious. “Get information about Chancellor so and so.” No, that’s not relevant to the annual report as a whole. “Get Chancellor so and so’s impressions on the year’s events.” No, if that information existed, it would be part of the annual report site itself.

The above reasoning hints at the utility of link titles. Writing them forces you to double check your architecture. Why does a link exist on this particular page or in the global nav? Is it relevant to include here versus over there? How does the inclusion of this link in this area on this page help the visitor accomplish their goals or further their aims?

All of these questions should have been asked early in the process, but things slip through or circumstances change. Writing link titles help verify that your user experience goals are kept intact and on track. Try it, it works.Related Posts:

• Centralization Around Audience
• The Step Before Defining A Website’s Goals
• Flickr for Photo Workflow
• How To Turn Around A Problematic Site
• There’s A Happy Medium Between Centralization & Decentralization

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All employees at your school serve the greater ideals of the institution which, in turn, should ultimately revolve around the needs and wants of it’s various audiences. As such, an internal request must be measured against the established frameworks of the institution’s long term strategy. To say yes to every request will not only dilute the strategy and bottleneck any forward progress (because there will never be enough time and people to handle all requests), it’ll ultimately confuse and frustrate your true clients.Related Posts:

• Stick To Your Guns
• Flickr for Photo Workflow
• Marketing ≠ Visitor Experience
• The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell
• Content Management Systems Aren’t Just For Techies

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This site used to be a fun place and I’m bringing that positive vibe back. So while I may continue to talk about web matters, I’ll mostly just write about my observations of the world. I hope that suffices to any readers left out there.Related Posts:

• Health Care Bill(s) & (Many) Higher Ed Websites
• Link Journalism
• Virtues of “The Site”
• Content Management Systems Aren’t Just For Techies
• Teens & Email

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My current title is Web Designer/New Media Specialist, a moniker bestowed on me after our university’s restructuring. Before that, I was simply Web Designer. I’ll take a wild guess that these titles won’t be looked upon favorably by the admissions reviewers. After all, after 12 years in the business, I effectively have the same title as I did when I started. The cynics out there might say, well maybe you’re a crap designer. Yeah, maybe. But after 12 years in the business, my work must be somewhat passable. Maybe I’m a jerk and alienate myself into low level positions. Maybe my bosses have researched my online profiles and think I’m a liability. Whatever the real reasons, my own self diagnosis for a lack of impressive title is due to my personal motivations and the age of the web. 

So back to the meeting. I found myself in a strange, apologetic tone. Surely, I needed to excuse my lack of title. Ironically, after my meeting, I was to meet with the Chancellor and Provost to present ideas on how a new website would save the university money, allow us to be much more customer centric than ever before, produce content with less effort and, in general, be more nimble and current in our approach. Isn’t this the kind of presentation a mid level manager at a big company would give to senior management? I thought about this juxtaposition for the rest of the day. What’s in a title? Why are web world titles so… arbitrary? And how do we, as a community, effectively translate our contributions via titles to outsiders?

Do Web Titles Do Us Justice?

There’s no doubt that I’m on the low rung of my university’s hierarchy (though I consider that the university’s loss). I have a breadth and depth of experience that my organization could put to effective use. Instead, my school has proven unwilling, unable or, worst yet, indifferent to fully utilize me. Why? I certainly hope it’s not because of my title. How disappointingly sad would that be- not only for myself but for the school? Would my job, my credibility and my contributions be any different if I had a title like Director of Web Communications or Vice Chancellor of All Things Web? Given the web team’s tiny staff size, I don’t think my job nor my contributions would be much different, but credibility? Probably.

When you only have a couple warm bodies available to work on a site with tens of thousands of pages and millions of yearly visitors like we do, you can bet that lofty titles or not, everyone does grunt work, everyone sweats the details and everyone is accountable to visitors. That’s just how it is from a practical standpoint. In this regard, titles in our industry don’t matter. What does matter, at least in my experience, is the promise of making great things. The web world is littered with people who want to elevate the web, and hence the organization, to a higher level. That seems to be the major motivation rather than fancy titles, corner offices or windfall year-end bonuses (though I wouldn’t turn any of those things down along the way).

The View From the Outside

The web, as we know and interact with it today, is a very young industry- 15 years, perhaps? My executive MBA peers, in contrast, work in health, finance, sales, etc.- professions that have been around for centuries, even millennia. Is it any wonder our industry still debates what our titles should be? It’s still too young and needs to sort itself out. 

For example, I’m considered a generalist in the field- someone whose skill set crosses many specialized functions. Other people consider themselves specialists- someone who knows all the ins and outs within a particular area like Flash or Ruby on Rails. Which is the right approach? Is one type of person more “senior” than the other? Should one manage the other, but not vice versa? The web is so collaborative and job functions are so permeable, a sense of hierarchy hasn’t solidified and this causes people outside of the business to easily misunderstand what it is we do and the importance of our work to an organization. Those things are changing, but it is slow. As Jesse James Garrett in the podcast linked above says, things won’t markedly improve for us until our group begins to house the VP and C-level ranks of major organizations.

Until then, I would argue that titles act as shorthand for your professional status. That’s why people are so concerned with their titles (since I’ve largely worked in smaller organizations surrounded by like minded people, titles haven’t mattered much). But I don’t find this race to the top as prevalent in the web. Maybe our young age has everything to do with that. Since we’re all relatively young, perhaps there’s a generational shift away from placing so much power and respect into titles. I don’t know. All I do know is that the admissions people who review my executive MBA application may not understand what my title of Web Designer really means or confers upon me. Hopefully they do, but until I’m sure, it goes without saying that I need to ensure that my title doesn’t arbitrarily stereotype me, demote my contributions or limit my worth.Related Posts:

• Use link titles as a check on your architecture decisions
• Marketing ≠ Visitor Experience
• Link Journalism
• Higher Ed Sites Have A Huge Advantage: A Captive Audience
• Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 1

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