Giraffe Forum

There is a chasm between those who create content and those who consume it. The Web allows us to bridge that chasm.

I once knew the editor of one of the world’s most prestigious magazines. He told me how over the years the magazine had invested millions of dollars and countless hours in trying to understand exactly what was read in each issue.

They came up with all sorts of convoluted formulas, but they ended up throwing all of them out. The decisions on what got published remained an art. It rested on the shoulders of those with many years of experience and a keen understanding of their readers.

But these brilliant editors still felt pangs of doubt and uncertainty. They often learned anecdotally that a story deep in the magazine, gained far more interest than the story they decided to lead with.

With the Web, it has become much easier to find out which content is working and which content isn’t. This will have a dramatic impact on the professional lives of those who produce content.

For too long, the producers of content have been divorced from the consumers of content. Marketing people have created product descriptions without knowing if customers actually understood or reacted positively to what they wrote. Human resource professionals have written policies without knowing if staff actually understood the policy after reading it.

This chasm between the producers of content and the consumers of content has led to huge quantities of marketing waffle and unintelligible policies. Thousands of people today are involved in creating content that is not just useless; it’s counter-productive and a tremendous drain on time and efficiency.

Until the Web came along we never had a way to identify the useless content. How do we do this? For starters, it is now cheap to ask customers to complete top tasks on the website. The best results are achieved if the customer is at home or in their office, and we are conducting the test remotely. (There’s lots of cheap, quality software to capture their voice and screen movements. We use GoToMeeting.)

Web content exists within the context of a task; something the customer wishes to do. By measuring the ability of the customer to quickly and easily complete the task, we measure the quality of the content. Because the better the content the faster and easier the task will be completed.

We can also have rating systems imbedded in our webpages that allow customers to rate the quality of the page. If our content is more news-oriented then we can track how much it has been viewed; whether it is being blogged about; how much it is being linked to; how much it has been tweeted.

As content creators we have lived in a vacuum too long. It will be scary, certainly, to find out whether what we write is actually useful or not. But it’s hugely exciting too. We can now figure out what works and do more of it, and figure out what doesn’t work and stop doing it.

A great many of the content and tools for employees are badly designed and managed because management does not respect employee time.

For salary-based workers it would seem like the world is going backwards. Longer and longer workweeks are being demanded by employers all in the name of productivity. But over 100 years ago, Frederick Taylor, the father of modern management, found that the longer you made people work, the less productive they became.

“There’s been a flurry of coverage praising Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, for leaving the office every day at 5:30 p.m. to be with her kids,” Geoffrey James writes for TIME in April 2012. “Apparently she’s been doing this for years but only recently “came out of the closet,” as it were. What’s insane is that Sandberg felt the need to hide the fact, since there’s a century of research establishing the undeniable fact that working more than 40 hours per week actually decreases productivity.”

James goes on to state that, “In the early 1900s, Ford Motor Co. ran dozens of tests to seek the optimum hours for worker productivity. It discovered that the “sweet spot” is 40 hours a week — and that while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.”

Sara Robinson, in an article published in Salon magazine in March2012 stated that, “for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.”

“It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say),” Robinson continues, “but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits — starting right now, today — is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.”

It is heresy to try and say to a typical manager that a good intranet will save time for employees. “The only time I care about is firing time,” one manager boasted to me. “If you claim you can save time I want to turn it into man-years and then I want to find that man and fire him.”

How has this sort of management thinking de-evolved? Nowhere is it better reflected than with the appalling digital workplaces that are forced on employees. Irony of ironies is that these places are supposed to make employees more productive.

I am optimistic that the tide will finally turn because the evidence is so overwhelming that productivity is enhanced by a well-motivated, wide awake and alert workforce, and you achieve that by working reasonable hours but working those hours as intelligently as possible. Frederick Taylor showed that he could dramatically increase productivity while at the same time REDUCING work hours.

How did he do that? By getting more out of less time. The intranet / digital workplace is currently a swamp of gross inefficiencies. It is ripe for a Taylor-like revolution.

Bring back the 40-hour work week

Stop Working More than 40 Hours a Week

Great websites have a clear function, purpose and use. What does your website help your customers to do?

Craiglist is used by more than 50 million in the US alone to buy and sell stuff, find apartments, work, etc. Craigslist epitomizes anti-marketing and anti-design yet it is hugely successful. Why? Because it is useful; and being useful is the best form of marketing and design on the Web.

According to Nat Garun writing for Digital Trends, while Craigslist is “a lifesaver when it to comes to help finding apartments, roommates, deals on used furniture, gadgets, event tickets, and more,” there is a consensus out there that, “the site is much too ugly, text-heavy, and terrible on the eyes.”

This is contradictory. On the one hand craigslist is a “lifesaver” but on the other hand it is “ugly and terrible”. A Techcrunch article on the subject contains the same contradictions, describing craigslist as “recognizable, fast-loading, but outdated as hell.” Shane McGlaun writing in Geeky Gadgets states that, “When I have junk to get rid of I prefer to use craigslist to eBay … If ever a site needed a user interface overhaul, it’s craigslist.”

So, according to the above, craigslist works really well at doing what it’s supposed to do but is ugly, text-heavy, terrible, outdated and is in desperate need of an overhaul. Does that make sense?

A different point of view is put forward by Casey Chan writing in Gizmodo, who asks, “Is functional but ugly Craigslist trying to ditch its terribly outdated layout for something prettier? But would you want a redesign to Craigslist? Probably not. The layout is stupid, minimal and efficient to a fault sometimes but it’s also the magic behind the classifieds website too.”

I have talked to many web designers about craigslist over the years. While they accept that craigslist is hugely successful—it would be hard for them not to—they claim that it is successful despite its terrible, outdated, text-heavy, ugly non-design. If only craigslist did some nice design it would be even more successful, according to conventional design wisdom.

Craigslist is design. It is web design. You are unlikely to find this sort of design being taught in design schools or marketing programs. But it is design. Could the craigslist design be improved? Certainly. Better designs for dealing with spam, managing postings, etc., would be helpful. But would craigslist become a better, more useful website by having a graphical redesign?

“We already know that click-through rates on online display ads are abysmal,” Jason Del Rey of AdAge states. “Now a study from the startup Pretarget and ComScore revealed that even when a user clicks on an ad, the correlation between that click and a conversion is virtually nonexistent.”

Online ads embody the essence of traditional graphical design thinking. They are designed to be eye-catching, to be up-to-date, to be vibrant, to enhance the brand. According to the study that AdAge writes about, practically nobody clicks on these ads and even those that do rarely turn into customers.

The old model of marketing and advertising is about getting attention. On the Web this model is broken. We need to pay attention to the customers’ needs on the Web and the best way to do that is by being useful.

Click-Through Rates May Matter Even Less Than We Thought

Craigslist

Judge your success based on how successful you make your customer.

There once was a business-to-business website that sought to bring buyers and sellers together. When it started out it had a simple philosophy: Have as many sellers as possible and the buyers will come.

Its web team focused on getting as many sellers signed up as possible. They had signup targets every month. They met them. Within six months the website boasted thousands of sellers. They had an aggressive search engine optimization strategy that brought lots of visitors to the site. But these buyers weren’t buying. The website was a flop.

A few years later the organization decided to try again. This time the metric became: get as many leads as possible for our sellers. They defined what a lead meant and put a monetary value on it.

The new web team focused on quality, not quantity. They worked with the sellers to ensure that they were describing their products and services in a way that buyers could easily find and understand. They had less sellers on the site, but the ones they did have were of a higher quality. It was a lot of work but it paid off. Leads started flowing to the sellers and the website became a success.

The first attempt to launch the website was measuring inputs: how many sellers can we get? The second attempt was measuring outcomes: how many leads can we get for our sellers? There is a world of a difference between the two.

It’s easy to measure inputs. It’s harder to manage outcomes.

I’m sure you’ve heard the management mantra: If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.

Just because you can easily measure something does not mean you should manage it. Sometimes we choose to manage things simply because they are easy to measure. It’s easy to measure the number of visits or page views, but that is rarely an effective management model. In many situations it can be a disastrous management model as it encourages bad practice.

The original web team was obsessed with getting sellers. It didn’t matter how poor quality they were. It was all about maximum volume in minimum time. They managed what was easy to measure and easy to do. It doesn’t take a lot of talent to fill a website with garbage.

It’s much harder to measure leads. There are different types of leads. You have to work with your sellers a lot more. There’s often education and training involved. While any junior person can add a seller to a website, it takes a professional to reject a potential seller, explain to them why they were rejected and what they need to do to be accepted.

The buyers who came to this website were there for a reason: to find a quality seller. The fact that they contact a buyer is good for both parties. Of course, you can take this type of metric further. You can begin to measure how many leads turned into sales. And then how many of the buyers were actually satisfied with what they bought.

Measuring outcomes is hard, but does that mean we shouldn’t do it? Measuring inputs is easy, so does that mean we should do it? Are we saying to ourselves: “I don’t have time to do it right, but I do have time to do it wrong?”

Most customers need another page of your content like they need another piece of spam in their in inbox.

“The content people are killing the website,” a web manager told me sadly. Twelve months previously the company had reviewed its website. There were lots of good things happening but there was too much clutter, too much stuff. It was getting harder and harder for the customer to find what really mattered.

The website had links and promotions and content for events that had finished years ago, but was still left up there. “Our website never poops,” one web manager lamented. “We just publish, publish, publish, but nothing ever gets removed.”

Everyone agreed that they needed to make the website simpler. And then Monday arrived and the writers sent their stuff in as usual expecting it to be published. And when it wasn’t they stamped their feet and got their way and everything went back to the bad old normal.

Would you pay a sales rep based on how much he talked? We’ll that’s how most organizations pay content professionals. By the word. Churn it out. It’s so Pre-Web, so print thinking, so counterproductive and negative. It damages everything, and most of all it damages the reputation of content professionals.

We have to measure the outcome on the Web, not the input. What did your content help your customers do? If you can’t answer that question you should seek another career. Because long term there is very little future for the put-it-upper, churn-it-outer, content producer.

Another web manger sent me an email yesterday complaining that a content company was telling her that she must have fresh content because that’s one of the best ‘strategies’ for keeping customers coming back to her website. For starters, keeping customers coming back to your website is not a strategy. At best it’s a tactic and in most situations it’s a terrible one.

For a huge number of organizations keeping customers coming back to your website makes absolutely no sense at all. What’s in it for the customer? It’s all part of the Cult of Volume mentality. We should be focused on satisfied customers not repeat visitors. We should be focused on task completion, not page views or time spent on the page.

I have often been asked why I include my entire newsletter in the email I send out. ‘Because many of my readers want to read it that way’ is my reply. But aren’t you losing page views, I’m asked? I have absolutely no interest in page views. I’m seeking influence and one way to get that is making it as convenient as possible for people to read.

Whether because of journalism or literature most content professionals are very poorly prepared for a career in the Web. They want to write, write, write when what they should be doing is remove, remove, remove. The Cult of Volume will not last forever. Its members will ultimately be exposed as time wasters. Wasting your customers time is the biggest sin you can commit on the Web.