Erickson’s report and interview discussions provide insight for digital designers and developers like Manning, but also important ideas for those in online marketing and communications.  He likens digital designers to architects and urban planners who are creating public spaces to encourage people to interact, communicate, and live together.  He suggests that we look at online spaces in terms of the interaction they support and promote.

It’s a compelling analysis well worth the investment of time.

My beautiful infographic

From the day I stepped into the marketing world, one of my first lessons was in the great debate of usability versus design. The way of thinking was, and still is for many people, that you simply cannot have 100% of both.  Meaning, you MUST sacrifice one or the other; should your website be visually spectacular and lack common navigation and web standards or should it function well and just be… kinda good looking?

For a while, I had been trying to decide which side of the fence I stood. As a digital marketer and all around #websavvy gal, I started to subconsciously analyze the websites I came across with regards to the design and user friendlessness.  What I found is that many of the websites that balanced usability and design would fall into this cookie cutter mold – logo upper left hand corner, navigation near the top, big rotating banner messages, and if the user experience was really good (these are gems) a few calls to action sprinkled in.

This led me to only one conclusion:  don’t sacrifice either!  While websites should function well, why can’t this be accomplished without the off-the-shelf templates? Designers need to abandon the quick and easy layouts and strive to create a design that addresses the needs of the client and their client’s customers.  If this happens, usability and design will go hand in hand, complimenting each other.  Set aside the preconceived notions about “scrolling is bad” and “getting content above the fold” and really consider your audience and how they would react best. Sometimes, it may be more traditional and that is OK too… just make sure that you are meeting your companies goals and that of the users.

Gone are the days where you had an online presence for the sake of it. Throwing up an attractive webpage with a plethora of content won’t do much for you, your business, or your customers. Users are expecting a dynamite experience when they come to your site, and it you should work to give them one.   We’re fortunate to be in a creative  interactive marketing community in Chicago where we’ve learned you have your  cake and eat it too.

Mobile usage is up - how does your website rate?

A while back (read: months) I happened across a very interesting survey done by Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware which focused on consumers shifting attitudes and usage of the web.

Specifically, the article I found talked about the general user’s increasing impatience with websites that are slow to load, bog down or are difficult to use. While this has been anecdotally discussed amongst folks in the web industry for years, it’s nice to finally have numbers that back up this feeling.

However, users’ ire with slow or difficult sites isn’t the part of the survey that I want to hold up for examination in this post. The second half of the Gomez survey has dedicated to the growing mobile market and users’ evolving attitudes to web access on mobile devices.

For a long time, mobile optimized sites or mobile style sheets have been seen as icing on the cake, usually regulated to a second or third phase if undertaken at all — a mere footnote in an interactive marketing plan.  Part of this hesitancy is the idea that the mobile market is still small and  so doesn’t have a solid ROI. However, according to the Gomez survey, a third of all web users currently also use a mobile device to access the internet. That means 1 in three people are potentially looking at your site on their mobile device – which says to me that the times, they are a-changin’. I know I use my droid 2 for web browsing all the time, and nothing drives me more crazy than having a site that can’t scale to the size of my screen and so requires that I move through the page 4 inches at a time. It’s just impractical and usually results in me leaving the site.

Another paradigm shift for individuals in charge of managing user experience is that speed is starting to matter for mobile users. An astonishing 50% of mobile users expect websites to load “as quickly, almost as quickly or faster on their mobile phone, compared to the computer they use at home.” This means that yes, even while on 3G and spotty service areas that are outside of your control, mobile users are going to hold YOU and YOUR SITE personally responsible for poor performance.

Now, before you start panicking and running for the hills, consider this: most mobile users have a limited set of things they need from a site. 39% of users surveyed say speed is more important for them than functionality, and herein lies the silver lining. Most of your users don’t need your full site in mobile form – they just need the actionable bits. Most users are looking to accomplish something specific when they’re visiting you via mobile – perhaps it’s making contact, submitting something or finding crucial information. Whatever it is, they’re willing to sacrifice the rest of what you have on your main site in order to quickly and easily find what they need right then.

Therefore, the trick of creating a successful mobile version is to figure out what your users really want and giving it to them. When we begin considering a mobile site, we always carefully review analytics to see where people are spending their time on the site, which action items and content types get the most traffic and longest page views, and then we consider any information regarding market exposure to different phone types and service providers. Once we know what people are coming to the site for, and how they’re already accessing it via mobile devices, it becomes much easier to decide what makes the cut for your mobile site.  Often times local content is more important — people here in Chicago are more likely to be searching for Chicago content on their mobile device.

And one last thing, just because you have a mobile site, it doesn’t mean you can’t offer your users the option of moving to your standard website. Most users are willing to suffer through the issues that a standard website creates on a mobile device if they’ve purposefully chosen to go there. So consider providing a means for these users to toggle between your mobile and full sites – it will make them happier and expose all of your content to their needs.

We’ve just launched the site and so far we’ve been very pleased with the results of our little social media experiment. We’ve used tweeSP to find gifts ideas for friends and family, or just had fun seeing what presents are recommended for celebrity tweeters.

Many people question the value of Twitter, but here’s one example of how tweets can be used in an incredibly interesting and useful way. So take tweeSP for a spin and see if you get some interesting gift ideas for the last few people on your holiday shopping list.

PS – for those of you scratching your head over our name for this cool new toy, it’s a play on Twitter and ESP. Now aren’t we punny!

]]> http://www.manningproductions.com/blog/2010/12/big-things-come-in-little-tweets-manning%e2%80%99s-twitter-gift-idea-app-launches/feed/ 0 http://www.manningproductions.com/blog/2010/07/send-in-the-marines/ http://www.manningproductions.com/blog/2010/07/send-in-the-marines/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:14:12 +0000 Doug http://www.manningproductions.com/blog/?p=2087 We have launched many websites in our time, but few were as eventful as the one we participated in for GlenviewMarines.com. Doug and I headed up to the old Glenview Naval Base for the official launch of the site dedicated to helping the servicemen and women who make up the Glenview Marines. Having donated our services, we wanted to introduce them to the ins and outs of their new site.

As part of the celebration, we were treated to the presentation of the flags by a full Color Guard and a spontaneous singing of the Marine Corps Hymn (Did you ever hear the last verse? Hilarious!). We were also joined by representatives from the Semper Fi Fund, the Wounded Warrior Regiment and Andrew Tibby, a local Iraqi vet who had received grants from the Semper Fi Fund.

Aligned with the The Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund, the group’s goal is to raise $1 million in gifts for injured soldiers around the nation. The Glenview Marines asked us to help them design a website that could be used as a fundraising tool – something that provided some background about their group and their cause; showcased the good works of The Semper Fi Fund and streamlined the gifting process.

From left to right: Jess Hara, Jim Baisley (Glenview Marines), Sara Ammuler (Semper Fi Fund), Andrew Tibby (Marine vet), Srgt. Ray Gozen (Wounded Warrior Regiment), Doug Manning

The result was GlenviewMarines.com, a slick website that emphasizes the Glenview Marines’ commitment to the Marine motto “Semper Fidelis,” or Always Faithful. Doug summed up our feelings by saying, “It’s an honor to be able to contribute to the treatment, aid and support of injured servicemen and women.”

To date, the Glenview Marines have raise just under a quarter of a million dollars and are as gung-ho as ever to hit their million-dollar mark. As one WWII vet told me with a wink, “It’s a heck of a mountain to climb, but at least no one’s shooting at us this time!”

We’ll keep you updated about progress of the Glenview Marines campaign, and invite our friends, clients and colleagues to visit the site and help support our injured troops.

Youtube's new Vuvuzela-izer. Also, a kitten in a hat.

All this attention means vuvuzela vendors are enjoying a huge windfall. One grocery store — in England no less! — has already sold over 40,000 at £2 a piece; their briskest sales measured one horn sold every two seconds so far. Vuvuzela producers are struggling to keep up with overwhelming demand, churning out an amazing 20,000 a day. These sorts of numbers show what happens when a product, idea or brand go viral – immediate, global exposure which translate into amazing opportunities for growth.

What is especially important to notice is the vital role the internet, and it’s social media features, have played in building up the vuvuzela hype. Emerging communication tools (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Mobile web and apps) have been particularly well leveraged to spread vuvuzela fever and build it into something more than just a traditional African horn. It has become THE symbol of the World Cup. This is every brand builder’s dream and shows, once and for all, that if we want to grow and communicate online, it is no longer possible to ignore these marketing tools. We have to develop an overall online strategy that takes these traffic sources into account or risk losing out on being the next Big Thing.

And social media has become a critical component of the international aid effort. The American Red Cross has set up a cell phone donation campaign, where individuals can text Haiti to 90999 to donate $10, which will then be included in their next cell phone bill

As a side note, the LA Times is featuring an interactive Flash earthquake feature that provides interesting background on the location of fault lines globally, the types of faults and the different types of earthquake waves

Email fundamentally changed the way business communicates.  But in the always-connected environment that we live in today there are a range of faster and easier communication tools supplanting email.  A recent Wall Street Journal article talks about the impact on personal communications.  The impact on businesses may be even more substantial as companies try to take advantage of and manage a myriad of different communication tools.

I grew up on internet communication.  I was reared in AOL chat rooms and was typing over 100wpm by the time I hit high school and the accompanying nights on AIM.  I was never enthusiastic about emailing as a form of communication in high school because it was too slow–I went for the instant gratification of talking to 3 or 4 friends at a time via IM rather than having to wait for email or figure out how to call, and then 3-way call, and then 4-way call and then…  I’ve kept every chat log of every conversation from every chatting application spanning my entire online history and I’ve often mused about how the collection constitutes a relatively complete history of myself from early high school to now–all the social anxieties and lost loves, all the failed plans and great ideas, etc. contained in a few megabytes of what essentially amounts to internet CB chatter.

I was thinking about all that interpersonal communication while perusing my Facebook feed–which has, of late, turned into a giant mass of everyone’s five favorite beers, and albums, and dogs, and foreign dictators, and beers… did I say that one?–and it occurred to me that people use Facebook to communicate in an absurdly broad and general manner, and yet still essentially passively.  I’m fairly overwhelmed by imagining what it would have taken 6 or 7 years ago to invite 300 people you know to do something–you wouldn’t be likely to have all those email addresses, or want to post hand bills–in an equally passive way.  Now you see someone post on a friend’s wall, “I’m coming to Chicago soon! Let’s hang out!” and there are 15 responses from other Chicagoans that know the poster directly or indirectly and want to get involved, and another 400 people who read that post and don’t respond.

Facebook is many things, but it’s not a blog like the one I kept in early college to which I posted things and expected responses (mostly in person) from close friends only.  No, the similarities run closer to the BBS systems I, curious about the enthusiast crowd at large, dropped in on in middle school; no matter how personal or trivial the information you decide to plop down on Facebook’s panorama, it’s inconceivable that no one–or only people with whom you’re close, or only enthusiasts–will discover that information, be it your five favorite movies starring Pauly Shore, or whether you’re still having morning sickness in your 12th week, or what bar you want to go to tonight.  Of course everything you post to Facebook is a reflection of your own personal tastes, but you do so in such a passive manner that it’s more like angling for interest than it is actively proposing an insight.  You never know who’s going to respond to any random comment you might make, but the atmosphere almost expects comments to be random–the feedback from the 400 people you know and sort of know isn’t going to be particularly more positive if you post something creative or exciting that you are personally doing versus simply posting a status update about how you love coffee and are going to to drink some right now because you’re so sleepy and it’s morning oh and thank goodness it’s Friday.

I love comparing what trolling a chatroom was like in 1993 with what trolling Facebook’s feed is like now: it’s an excellent comparison of the active versus passive nature of internet communication. Facebook provides a captive audience under public scrutiny, and the psychology of that is something that’s about ready to be explored.