It sounds like I’m selling usability when I talk about the return on investment that applied usability can bring to a project. But it’s a fact that research has shown again and again. An article on the Bentley University Website says that a user-centred design approach will benefit an organization in at least three ways:  

• Reducing product development costs;
• Increasing sales (transactions or purchases);
• Improving the product’s effectiveness and efficiency.

Read our slideshow, Why Usability Matters. And yes, I guess I am selling usability.

Here are 5 quick tips on naming your business, from the experts at BrandNewPerfect.Name:

1. We want the perfect domain name.

In the beginning, everyone pined over what seemed to be the perfect domain names – the obvious ones like realestate.com, entertainment.com and internet.com (how would you like to own the ‘internet’?). Then some creative upstarts such as Amazon.com came along and proved what everyone in the advertising world knew already…it’s not what your name is, but who knows your name. So if your brand came first before the Internet you’ll want to maintain that as your domain name (e.g. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer is MGM.com), but if you’re a new company, why now develop your brand with an original name, the way Twitter.com and Zoosk.com did (visit http://www.go2web20.net/ to see the names of new Web 2.0 companies). Coining a new name often makes it a lot easier to get the dot com you want, too.

2. Hey, that’s our name!

In many cases the “perfect name” for your company is already being used by another business, or else they’re using a similar sounding name. Before you even try to register a new business name or domain name, do a thorough search of the Internet, which can help you determine whether there are similar names being used anywhere on the planet. Check different spellings of the name, too. And even if they are being used, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to use your version. Find out if the name is trademarked. Are they in the same business as you? If not, it may not be a problem for you to call your business Purple Rose Florists if the only other similar company is Purple Rose Tattoos. You can also do a variation in the spelling of the name, or include other words in the name to distinguish it or make it more specific to your business, e.g. Great West Technology can be turned into Gr8 West Tech, or Halcyon Communications can be turned into Halcyon Wordsmiths International. Avoid trademark issues by consulting a lawyer so they can do a search for you in your own country and other countries as well, where the laws may be different.

3. We wish this weren’t our name!

Sometimes your current name and brand is a liability when it sounds too similar to something with negative connotations. Imagine if you ran a store in New York City called Twin Towers Photography? In a real life case, Greenleaf Marketing in Springfield, Missouri, decided to rebrand itself as Red Crow Marketing because their original name sounded too similar to Greenleaf Companies, a real estate company being investigated by state agencies. In those kinds of situations, it makes sense to go through the effort, expense and even risk of rebranding under a new name.

4. We need something that sounds edgy, contemporary.

Rebranding yourself with an edgy, Webby-sounding name doesn’t usually work unless you completely re-style your entire company, and even then it might just seem blatantly superficial and disingenuous to customers and business partners. If you’re a drycleaning company and you re-brand yourself as “e-Clean”, you’d better find a way that people can order drycleaning pickups online or some other Web-related services, otherwise you’ll risk sounding foolish. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to style yourself after what you want to be and where you want to be rather than where you are now. Should a name say something about what your business does? Not always. It helps if the name is intuitive to people so they can tell what you do, but once you build a brand you don’t need any further descriptors. For example, does the Coca-Cola Company need to be called Coca-Cola Carbonated Beverages? Instead of simply describing your company by what it is, e.g. American Glassworks, try creating a name that describes its qualities, what it does for the customer or client, or what kind of impact it will have. As a name, Yahoo! didn’t literally describe what the company was offering, but it did describe the exciting experience of finding new sites on the Internet.

5. We want to see our name up in lights.

Not every name will have a symbolic or visual quality, but that’s an important consideration because when it comes time to develop your brand expression – e.g. your corporate colors and logo – how would you like your graphic designer to depict your company. And is that going to be the right image for your company? The name Lion Security lends itself to an instant visual, and it suits that kind of company because it portrays power and strength, but would the same visual suit a retail story selling baby clothes? Perhaps, if it were visualized as a cartoon lion sitting beside a lamb. The point is that the way your name will be visualized is also important in the selection process, not simply the originality or availability of the name. Let’s not forget that a product or service can have its own unique name and sub-brand, too. Rather than just calling your new product “Digital Widgets,” to use a hypothetical example, find out whether your marketing experts or consultants suggest creating a sub-brand with a distinctive name (e.g. Widgetmania) that can be promoted both together and separately from your corporate brand. There are pro’s and con’s to sub-branding…but that’s another topic for another post.

Disclaimer: This article is offered for informational purposes as a free public service and should not be construed as legal advice. Consult your lawyer on all legal issues relating to domain names and trademarks. ]]> http://usabilitydesign.digitalpractices.com/2009/02/23/how-to-win-at-the-name-game/feed/ 0 http://usabilitydesign.digitalpractices.com/2008/10/03/a-dailysplice-of-social-media-for-businesses/ http://usabilitydesign.digitalpractices.com/2008/10/03/a-dailysplice-of-social-media-for-businesses/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:46:30 +0000 Garth A. Buchholz http://usabilitydesign.digitalpractices.com/?p=180 When most businesses hear about the rise of social media – i.e. blogging, podcasting, social networks such as Facebook – their reactions can be paraphrased as “Interesting, but how is that going to help our business?” or “I don’t want my employees wasting their time socializing on the Web.”

With social media, the emphasis is on interaction, collaboration, and user generated content. Unlike broadcasting or publishing an ad, getting your corporate message out via social media requires an understanding of the technology, an embrace of creativity and innovation, and a willingness to launch your corporate message and your brand identity into the blogosphere (as the world of blogs has been called), then wait to see where it lands.

There are all kinds of “social media consultants” out there selling seminars and books about how your business can benefit from it, but businesses need to look no further than DailySplice.com, a one-year-old social media software startup in Victoria, British Columbia.

Founded in 2007 by a group of business and computer science students at the University of Victoria, the company has developed a product called Splice Station that makes it easy for organizations to record podcasts (a digital recording of an audio or video broadcast delivered over the Internet or downloaded to an iPod) then deliver them on their own websites.

The University of Victoria has two two Splice Stations, one for business podcasts and one that plays Software Engineering podcasts. Vancouver Island’s AbeBooks, recently acquired by Amazon.com, is also using Splice Station to channel audio and video content through a specialized player on its website.

“It’s innovative and easy to use.” says Richard Davies, PR Manager for AbeBooks.com, a Victoria company that was recently acquired by Amazon.com. “Book lovers can find the world’s most interesting book reviews and interviews by visiting the AbeBooks.com website and looking for the Shelfsound logo.”

As if those examples from the world of business and the world of academia weren’t perfect enough illustrations of how social media can be used, another type of organization in Victoria Island has also started podcasting using Splice Station.

The Saanich Police have become perhaps the first police service in Canada to use audio and video podcasts on their website at saanichpolice.ca. Click on “Podcasts” on the homepage and you’ll find links to news and information as it happens (such as a live report about Pat Bay highway traffic) to crime prevention, safety tips, unsolved crimes, media releases and media clips.

The department’s public information officer, Sgt. John Price, says “Podcasting is the fastest growing communication medium in history…the Saanich Police want to be part of that medium.”

This article was originally published in Vancouver Island Business. Garth A. Buchholz is the President and Chief Usability Analystof DigitalPractices Media Inc. (Garth@DigitalPractices.com)

(click on thumbnail image above to view full size diagram)

However, most people use more than one navigation choice during a single session search for content, and each choice during that session is determined, more often than not, by a specific task flow. For example, if you know what you’re looking for on a retail site, you’ll want to navigate by the product or service categories, but if you encounter problems, you’ll want to navigate by organizational structure (e.g. finding which part of the organization is responsible for a product or service) to seek help.

So in the first case, your navigation is driven by a scenario where you are purchasing something, and in the second case it is driven by a scenario where you are wanting to contact someone or some area of responsibility.  

The chart below outlines some general reasons users make navigation choices, although a more refined analysis can be done when one is looking at specific case studies or organizations. Keep in mind that at any stage of the search, depending on the user’ previous experiences, they may give up and abandon their navigation efforts altogether.

Rather than feeling that their own search/navigation methods failed, or are lacking the necessary skills, most people will instead feel frustration, resentment and even anger, and blame the site design or site administrators for their lack of success.

While visiting Montreal on a business trip, my wife started having a migraine after her meetings were over, so she asked a hotel desk clerk for directions to a late night pharmacy in the area. After she ventured out alone, she soon realized the directions were confusing yet she kept wandering through the streets trying to find her way. 

She had no street map, was traveling on foot, and found herself completely lost in a dark, deserted part of Montreal, far from her hotel. Cabs wouldn’t stop for her, and she didn’t even know where she was relative to her hotel. It was midnight, and she was walking past intimidating drunks and street people. 

Thankfully, she had her cellphone. She tried calling me several times, but couldn’t reach me for two hours. When she finally reached me, she was almost in tears. She said she was on Rue St-Hubert, but didn’t know the number because there were only warehouses. 

Neither of us were familiar with Montreal streets (even though I had lived there as a child), and I even thought of calling the Montreal Police to see if they could spot her and help her back to her hotel, but first I decided to look up the street using Google Maps.

 “What number are you at?” I asked, trying to stay calm. “Rue St-Hubert is a long street. I’m not sure how far away you are from the hotel.” I opened up two browser windows and searched for Rue St-Hubert on one and the hotel’s address on the other so I could see where she was in relation to the hotel. 

“It’s dark, and there are only warehouses and alleys,” she said in a panic. My wife is a university-educated healthcare professional who has worked in critical care and emergency settings, so I wasn’t accustomed to hearing her panic. “I can’t see any numbers. I’m at a dead end now.” 

That information gave me a clue. I could see a dead end on Rue St-Hubert in the general area of the hotel.  I told her to backtrack to another intersection and turn left. She was totally disoriented, and my heart was beating fast. I used to work night shifts in the hotel business, so I knew what it was like to be on the streets alone at night in a big city.  

“Just stay on the phone so people know you’re talking to someone,” I said. I remembered some other tips about avoiding danger in an urban environment. “And walk purposefully, like you know where you’re going. Don’t hesitate or look around too much.” 

As she walked, my wife told me what streets she was crossing, confirming what I was seeing on Google Maps. “You’re going in the right direction,” I said, “Just stay on that street.” At one point, a couple of drunks on the street harassed her, but she kept moving on. 

“Where are you now?” I asked, pretending to be calm. “Rue St-Dizier” she replied. “You’re getting close,” I said. Now it was about 12:30 at night, and she was all alone on the street. “I’m on Rue St-Sulpice,” she said. “You’re almost there!” I exclaimed. Suddenly she saw her hotel and knew she was safe. I hung up and breathed deeply for the first time in at least 30 minutes. 

I work in technology so I know how user-unfriendly it can be at times. But that night, when my wife was scared and alone, and all we had was a cellphone and an Internet connection, I was thankful that technology enabled me to help my wife even though I was thousands of kilometers away. I found it amazing that I could be sitting in my home on the other side of the country and still help trace my wife’s path on a map while she was walking down a dark street. 

I guess this builds a case for buying her a smart phone with a built-in GPS device for the next trip. Or maybe she could have just called the hotel to ask for help or even called the Montreal Police for a safe but embarrassed ride home. As an anxious husband, though, it was enough that I could hear her voice and trace her winding journey on a virtual map that night.

You take your car into the shop every couple of years to get its front end aligned every couple of years, so why not do the same for your Web? In large organizations where departments and divisions develop and manage Web content on their own subsites, some of the greatest challenges are:

1. How to maintain compliance with a consistent look-and-feel across the entire corporate Internet presence

2. How to ensure that users coming into the front end of the site (the homepage or topsite) can find a consistent navigation model, even though each subsite may have very different content and navigation models, and

3. How to periodically undertake design and navigational changes/improvements without having to force the entire organization into a costly and resource-intensive redesign cycle.

As a corporate Web presence grows, all the content management technology in the world isn’t going to save you from content growth issues (“content cramming”) if you don’t have a sound content strategy to govern standards and development of the site.

What do users care that you have new bells and whistles to streamlined content management and document management? Without a content strategy developed by a team consisting of business leaders, communications managers, Web managers and IT managers, your Internet presence can sometimes become a large, confusing cluster of content.

It happens innocently enough. Each subsite continues to develop new content and publish it to their own homepage with little or no governance from a content strategy to tell them how to align with the front end of their site. Pretty soon the entire corporate site starts to look like a home renovation disaster — you know, where someone keeps adding new rooms and wings and features to their home haphazardly until it becomes a monstrosity. You can improve the whole by looking only at one part of the whole.

On the other hand, each subsite within an organization’s Internet presence has to have autonomy to develop and publish content based on its own business drivers and its own content objects. Your shipping division might not be able to use the same kind of navigational cues for its subsite that, say, the accounting department would want to use. Even some aspects of the look and feel need to be different for each to reflect their different functions and makeup within the organization. If you try to universalize everything within the corporate Web site, you’ll have to bring everything down to the lowest, blandest common denominator, and that won’t help your end users. At all.

As many organizations and usability experts are learning, the key is a corporate content strategy with strong executive support, “front end alignment” to make your homepage and other topsite pages consistent for the end user, and a centralized/decentralized content management model that allows content control and scalability, both corporately and departmentally.

If the homepage and other topsite pages are managed centrally by a corporate Web team, these pages can provide a kind of sitemap or guide or index of content to the end users (who usually start with the homepage anyway), while allowing the departmental and divisional subsites to manage their own content in their own way based on their own business drivers. That way, if users can do their wayfinding at the front end or topsite level, they don’t have to worry about knowing how to navigate the many different subsites to find what they want. This also allows you to create a user navigation model that takes a more “outside-in” rather than “inside-out” view.

As well, maintaining key global navigational panels that are applied globally through server-side includes, for example, can help ensure that all pages throughout the site show consistent navigational labeling. This also helps with partial redesigns or refreshes to the site — you can change these panels (such as a header row) centrally and apply them globally without having to require any effort from the departmental subsites.

The front end or homepage is the most important page in terms of its function as a gateway and a guide to all content within the site. It also serves as our visual paradigm for everything else we expect to see beyond that point. While periodic redesigns and revised content strategies are essential as our business evolves, our technology changes and our content expands, sometimes all you need to do is re-align the front end to make sure your corporate Web vehicle is sailing down the highway and not pulling you off the road.

A new IBM research report suggests that the best analogies for businesses in the future may no longer be the command structures of the military but the self-organising networks found in nature: schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects. This research, contained in The IBM Global Innovation Outlook 2.0 Report, reinforces Bioteam rule 10: Self-Organising Networks.
~ IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook

Imagine if core business skills and practices such as “time management” became professions unto themselves. You’d pay dues to the Time Management Institute, where you’d be credentialed as a Certified Time Manager; you’d be hired for your Time Management skills as a Level 4 Time Manager, and use only company-approved Time Management forms and templates. On every team there would have to be a designated Time Manager (certified and experienced, of course), and you would attend large “TM” conferences around the world.

Maybe Time Management is a skills and practice that is deserving of professional status give the fast pace of corporate life, but you get a sense from the example above that there is a tinge of absurdity to it. Time management, you might say, is certainly one of the core skills we use in business and government, but somehow having a formalized Time Management department and role is overkill. Why use a specialist for a skill that all business generalists should be practicing? There’s no question that someone whose profession is all about time management might have a better grasp of the issues, challenges and solutions around  it, but do we really need someone who’s only real function is to be an advisor, consultant and documentation-keeper?

I have similar questions around the formalization of Project Management over the last 20 years or so. Disclaimer: I’m a member of the Project Management Institute, and I’ve had to use project management techniques in my work as a Web manager and Web strategist. Note that I said I’ve used project management techniques, not Project Management. I’m not a certified Project Manager, though I have taken Project Management courses. In other words, I’m not one of the clergy, I’m just a layman who occasionally dons the robes to help the priests carry out the ritual liturgy.

Project Management was originally developed by people like Henry Gantt, and used by the Army Corps of Engineers in the first half of the 20th century for wartime and peacetime projects, such as building ships, dams, bridges and other structures. Engineers being the breed they are, project management as a discipline was carried into the world of technology and computer software, where it became widely popularized in the ’70s through ’90s as the role of technology became more and more essential to the world of business.  The Project Management Institute itself was only formed in 1969, even though something like “Project Management” had been around since the first World War.   

As an experienced Web architect and Web manager, I’ve seen how project management skills can provide an excellent framework for a Web design project, while Project Management proper can sometimes be a stifling, counter-intuitive nemesis to achieving effective results in usability and design. In many ways, Project Management, the discipline, has evolved into Project Management, the orthodoxy. The kind of dogma that Project Management professionals try to impose upon Web and other technology projects can result in Webs and Web services that are out of touch with the fast-paced Web 2.0 and 3.0 world we live in. Sometimes more effort is expended in documentation of project steps in overly-detailed MS Project charts and sundry PM templates than what the end product is worth in usability and creative design.

The fact is that the people who pay for expensive Web and other technology projects, the business stakeholders, owners, executives and investors, don’t really care about how you get there, but rather, what you’ve achieved when you finally get there. While some business executives pay lip service to the importance of “process” and “project discipline”, most of them also demand the right to circumvent those same sacrosanct processes and disciplines, not just occasionally but frequently, and this veto process often happens informally down the chain of command as well, as stakeholders in management positions lobby their executives to command changes to their projects. Project scope, timelines, even work breakdown structure — everything held in order with command-and-control protocols by PMs — are routinely tossed aside by the often subjective requirements of executives.

That’s okay. It’s just the way things are, and always have been. But the disciples of Project Management live in a fantasy command-and-control universe where scope creep is blasphemy, changes are “managed” (if only we lived in a universe where changes could be managed!) and dates on an MS Project Gannt chart are as constant to Project Managers as the constellations in the sky are to ocean navigators. Like litigators or medieval theologians, fastidiously detailed volumes of documentation are poured out, digitally and printerly, even though most “resources” assigned to a project and the project sponsors themselves never have time to read more than 5% of it because they’re too busy doing the actual work.

Actual work. If you’re someone who’s doing the actual work (that stuff they try to itemize line by painstaking line in the Work Breakdown Structures), you’ll find you don’t really have time to do a lot of the onerous documentation work that constitutes almost 50% of everything Project Managers do. The other 50% is mostly taken up by frequent meetings with people who are either doing the project or making the decisions about the project. Purely speaking, a real Project Manager doesn’t also act as a “resource”; their sole function is to manage the flow and output of project details,  timelines and deliverables.

Now we come to the mythical Ouroboros seen in the above woodcut, and explained in this verse from Plato’s Timaeus:  

“It had no need of eyes, for there was nothing outside it to be seen; nor of ears, for there was nothing outside to be heard. There was no surrounding air to be breathed, nor was it in need of any organ by which to supply itself with food or to get rid of it when digested. Nothing went out from or came into it anywhere, for there was nothing. Of design it was made thus, its own waste providing its own food, acting and being acted upon entirely with and by itself, because its designer considered that a being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellent than one which depended upon anything.”    

Has Project Management become a 21st century Ouroboros — a self-contained, self-referential and self-serving demi-profession whose practitioners have a vested interest in promoting PM mystique, building Project Management Office kingdoms, and harnessing business operations to their processes like oxen harnessed to a wagon? IMO, those who are creating Web services and building Web sites are well aware that projects have to be defined, resources have to be allotted, milestones have to be achieved, and deliverables have to be delivered. In the “old world”, before the Internet was popularized and digital technology was dominant, creative agencies such as ad firms, television production companies and record producers also had to channel creative projects through business requirements, and did so quite successfully through their own fluid processes without having a “Project Manager” in-house.

Back to my own experience…I use some Project Management techniques in my work, but usually in unorthodox ways. I don’t like Microsoft Project, for example, which is just a glorified spreadsheet with a few graphical enhancements. And I like some Project Management tools and templates, but only if I can customize them for specific projects. As for things like scope, it’s always easy to illustrate to project sponsors that they can expand scope all they want, as long as they can also expand budget and resources accordingly. As for deliverables, that’s often more a product of good communications and technical writing skills than “Project Management” rigor. If you’re working on a creative project, be it software or Webware, why spend all your time and effort documenting and tracking a project rather than allowing project dynamics to evolve and project “bioteams” to self-organize through hard work, good communications and creative thinking?

But that’s another topic for another day. Those who want to break out of the 20th century Project Management mold into a new way of managing projects in the 21st century would do well to investigate some of the principles behind self-organization, such as the Chaordic concept pioneered by Visa founder Dee Hock in the 1960s and 1970s when he was head of Visa International (visit the Chaordic Initiatives site or the Chaordic Commons site for more information). Or you can enlighten yourself and your organization with the ideas found in The Bioteaming Manifesto or in Ken Thompson’s fascinating blog on bioteaming, The Bumble Bee. 

Email Garth A. Buchholz

The Elements of User Experience got its start on your Web site. What are the origins of that book?

The model described in the book really grew out of my need to explain the work I did to the people I had to collaborate with. I was the first information architect in a rapidly growing design firm, and many people there weren’t familiar with IA. I drew up the model in a single-page PDF document, and when it was finished I thought maybe some others in the field might find it useful. I posted it to my site, and it was the popularity of that document that led to the demand for a whole book on the model.

Do you have any new books coming out, or are you working on a new book now?

I’m not working on a new book at the moment. My company, Adaptive Path, has been in high demand since my first book came out, and managing that growth is really consuming most of my attention lately. I do have a couple of ideas for books that I’d like to tackle; I hope to be able to turn my attention to them sometime next year.

How would you define “user experience” to a non-techie?

I define user experience as the way a product operates and behaves in the real world. In other words, what’s it like to use the product? What kind of an experience is that? The philosophy of user experience design is that we can plan that experience before it happens and build certain qualities into it.

There are professional firms that call themselves information architects (ia), usability specialists, user experience designers (uxd), or just Web designers. Is this a sign that as the Internet evolves, expert roles are changing as well, or are Internet experts are gradually coalescing into specific fields of expertise to create professional standards and self-governance, as in other professions? Are all of these different titles confusing for clients who are paying for those services?

There are certainly more experts and specialists than there used to be. But I think it’s important to remember that for every specialist, there are a dozen generalists who have to handle many aspects of site design. Most information architecture work is not done by an information architect. I think the specialist community is missing an opportunity to raise the bar for the entire field by neglecting to find ways to help non-specialists do better work.

Are many user experience designers following your five-tiered model, generally speaking, or do you see many variations of it in the field?

I think there isn’t a strong impetus for people to come up with new models these days. One of the reasons the Elements model was so popular right from the start was that it was really filling a vacuum. A lot of people were wrestling with these ideas, but there hadn’t really been a concise, visual articulation of how the pieces fit together. These days, people don’t have the same motivation because these ideas have been much more fully explored over the last several years.

Your Visual Vocabulary Model for describing information architecture and interaction design has become a standard modelling language because of its logic and clarity. Do you anticipate having to make any changes to the current version 1.1b, and if so, what sort of changes do you anticipate and why?

The current version has been stable for a few years now. For the problems I designed the vocabulary to address, I haven’t encountered anything about the system that needs to change, and I’ve been using it longer than anybody! Of course, I may find myself wanting to extend the system to tackle new kinds of problems. So any changes would probably involve a significant leap forward – a Visual Vocabulary 2.0 – that would take the system into new territory.

In your book, you talk about the pitfalls of “design by default” (when a design structure follows the organization’s existing technology structure), “design by mimicry” (when the user experience inappropriately follows conventions used on other sites) and “design by fiat” (when someone’s personal prefernces drive the user experience decisions) — what strategy can designers use when a client or (worse?) a company executive is determined to stray down one of the above paths?

It all comes down to having reasons for the choices we make, being able to articulate those reasons, and being able to trace our choices back to the needs, expectations, and behavior of the people who will be using our product. Executives are all too often satisfied to see that a product works. The question we should be asking – the question I think every designer is ultimately charged with – is not “does it work?” but “does it work well?”

How can user experience design positively impact eGovernment projects and other public sector or non-profit organizations where issues like accessibility and universal design are important?

I think the various eGovernment initiatives are very encouraging for the field of user experience. Right now, the public sector unquestionably has its hands full meeting accessibility standards. But once they’ve made substantial headway there, it seems inevitable that they’ll turn their attention to user experience. It’s just a matter of time before agencies discover that accessibility is just one part of fulfilling their public mission, and that their sites aren’t serving the public if everyone can access them but no one can use them.

Taking a longer view, where is the Internet going and will user experience issues be overshadowed in the future by purely IT developments?

If anything, the role of user experience is only going to become more important as the sophistication of our technology increases. We’re never satisfied with what our technology does for us – we’re always pushing it to do more. That ever-growing complexity means that user experience designers are going to be busy for a long time to come.