Giraffe Forum

If a customer cannot complete their top tasks quickly and easily on your website, why would they trust you to help them with other tasks?

You’re in a giant shopping mall. You urgently need to go to the toilet. You go to the Information Desk. There’s a big queue. After waiting for ages your turn comes and you ask directions. You’re told to head down the hallway, take a right, go up an escalator, turn right, walk down to the end of the hall, take another escalator, turn left and walk down to the end of another hall where you will find the toilets.

You hurry towards your destination wondering why they have made it so difficult to find the toilets. When you finally get there you find to your despair that there are no toilets. You have been given bad directions. This sort of experience will color your whole view of the mall. And if you do go back a next time you’re not likely to go to the Information Desk looking for directions to other areas of the mall you’d like to visit.

There are certain basic things your website needs to do really, really well. If it doesn’t then the customer is likely to get a very negative view of the entire website. If you can’t easily book a room on a hotel website, then you don’t think much of the hotel website. For that matter, you don’t think much of the hotel either.

If you can’t quickly find contact details on a website then the brand is undermined. We need to reclaim branding. It has been hijacked by a very narrow visual interpretation, as if the essence of the brand was the logo and the graphics.

The essence of the brand is the experience customers have with a product or service. There is of course a visual component in branding but it has been vastly overemphasized. When we think of Google do we think of a colorful logo or a fast way to find stuff? Web brands, in particular, are functional. The successful ones help us do useful things.

When we arrive at a website for the first time we are impatient and highly skeptical. If we try to complete basic but important tasks on that website, and we fail, our whole impression of the website is undermined.

Every website has a small set of top tasks (usually no more than three, definitely no more than five). After getting off a plane I remember going down an escalator to the trains section of the airport. At the bottom of the escalator were three signs: Trains, Tickets, Toilets.

What are your Trains, Tickets, and Toilets? How easy is it to complete your top tasks? Branding is about how well you help people succeed. It is about how much time you can save them. It is about how easy and convenient you can make their life.

On your website there are top tasks that customers expect you to do extremely well. If you don’t perfect those tasks, you lose your customers’ trust. A brand that is not trusted is not much of a brand.

Traditional managers often lack the skills required to understand if an intranet is successful or not.

I was once talking to a manager about how the intranet could save staff time and make things easier, when he shook his head dismissively. “It’s not the job of management to make life easier for staff,” he told me. “And the only time I’m interested in is firing time. If you say you can save me one man year, I want to know which man I can fire. Otherwise, I’m not interested.”

Some time later, I was telling another manager that if we made a particular task easier we could save 5 minutes every time that task was completed, and that many thousands of staff members needed to complete that task every month. He shrugged. “5 minutes saved? They could be out smoking a cigarette.”

Indeed they could be. But it is management’s job to manage time effectively. Properly managed, those 5 minutes could help make another sale or help a customer solve a problem. But because of a poorly designed intranet this time was being lost every time a staff member needed to complete this task.

Organizations are simply not structured to allow for time management when that time runs across the organization. Managers manage within the framework of departments or units. They also tend to be obsessed with head count rather than efficiency.

Let’s say that Organization A has 30,000 employees. Let’s say each employee does a particular task on average 50 times a year. Let’s say it takes 10 minutes longer than it should because it’s badly managed. This is costing the organization 15 million minutes a year in lost productivity. That’s 250,000 hours. Or 33,333 days. Or 150 person years. It’s significant.

By improving this task you can save the entire organization 150 person years; but that doesn’t necessarily mean firing anybody. What it does mean is making the entire workforce more efficient, more productive.

Most managers will not be very impressed. They want to know which 150 people they can fire. Otherwise it’s not real savings, not real efficiency. But you can’t fire everybody. Surely it is still logical and practical to make sure that those employees who are still left with the organization can do their jobs more efficiently. Shouldn’t management also have a role there?

The origin of management, in the late Nineteenth Century, was about making the tasks factory workers carried out on a day-to-day basis more efficient. However, when management pioneer Frederick Taylor said that he could make the job of shovelling coal faster and easier, he was initially met with skepticism.

The intranet is the factory of the information worker. And it’s not in a very good state at the moment. No organization would allow its physical factories to be managed with the level of messiness, carelessness, confusion, waste content, and general untidiness that occurs daily on most intranets.

There is a much better way; focus on time and efficiency.

Of all the things that make the Web different from print, linking is the most important.

Are we tool-making animals or are we animals made by tools? It’s an old question. How much did the quill shape our minds and worlds? We invented the printing press which then invented a new society, a new way of thinking.

“Scribal culture could not sustain the patenting of inventions or the copyrighting of literary compositions,” Elizabeth Eisenstein writes in her book, The Printing Revolution In Early Modern Europe. “It worked against the concept of intellectual property rights. It did not lend itself to preserving traces of personal idiosyncrasies, to the public airing of private thoughts, or to any of the forms of private publicity that have shaped consciousness of self during the past five centuries.”

And what of the Web? We invented the Web. How is the Web re-inventing us? What makes the Web different from print?

We need to carefully answer this last question because otherwise we are in danger of approaching the Web with our print-thinking and print-techniques. We are in danger of saying: ‘This is what quality writing is,’ when really what we are saying is: ‘This is what quality print writing is.’

Here are some of the ways the Web is different from print:
The Web is about links
The Web is about tasks
The Web is about finding
The Web is about permanence
The Web is a process
The Web is about the customer

The Web is about links. Print is about units of content. A 500-word article, a book, a magazine, a report. Print writing is often a solitary task. The Web is about linking. We’re linking one piece of content to another. We’re linking the consumer of the content with its producer.

The Web is a functional, task-oriented place. We come to the Web to do, and we already have the context when we get to the website. Print lends itself to length and because print is physically going out to the reader, it tends to have lots of contextual language. The Web is bare, hermetic, pared-down-an ugly but useful place.

The Web is about the customer trying to find the content, rather than the content trying to find the customer. The Web turns much of advertising and marketing on its head. You must know the words your customers use when they search. Otherwise you are lost.

The Web is about permanence. Over time, most print content degrades, dissolves, disappears. Try finding that brochure you published in print in 2003. But if you put it up on your website, it’s still there. This is the great blind spot of web teams. Review and remove.

The Web is a process. Print is an event. You get it all together and then you publish. And then it’s over. Job done. On the Web it’s job begun. The print and IT culture of launch and leave is a ruinous strategy on the Web. Great websites involve continuous improvement of your top tasks.

The Web is about the customer. It is not about the control of elites. It is about the wisdom of crowds, the collective intelligence. At the center of the Web is the customer, not the organization. It is about the things the customer wants to do, not the things the organization wants to do to the customer.

The shift away from blind faith and unquestioned brand loyalty is good for both customers and organizations.

“Inch by inch, voter by voter, Barack Obama and John McCain labored for more than a year to lock down supporters and woo defectors,” an Associated Press story stated in November 2008. “It turns out, though, that the nation’s voters were a lot more fickle than commonly expected, and far more prone to switch allegiances.”

“Conventional political wisdom says it can be pretty much taken for granted that most voters lean sharply left or right and commit to one candidate early on,” the story continued, “and the real campaign fight is over a small slice of undecided voters in the middle.”

Some years ago I was standing in Galway’s Eyre Square. It was a hot summer’s day (a minor Irish miracle). Three old men sat together on a bench. “Things aren’t like they used to be,” I overheard one saying. His friends’ heads nodded sanguinely, lips pursing in agreement.
“I don’t know what’s got into these young ones,” he continued, warming to the favorite subject of old people and Irish intellectuals. “Sure the country’s ruined, ruined.” He paused, wiped his hand across his forehead, drew it down his left check, then under his chin and back up his left cheek. His eyes squinted at two ruinous teenagers as they shuffled by. “Sure they don’t even vote for the party their parents vote for!” he spat with finality. The ultimate insult.

The more sophisticated a society becomes, the more it questions, and the less its citizens can be taken for granted. The thriving economy is the one built on transparency and a desire to make decisions based on reason and logic rather than depending simply on emotion and gut instinct.

We are, of course, much more emotional than we are rational. Our emotions are hugely powerful and allow us to navigate through life. They are as important to decision-making as a sail is to a ship. But when we give our emotions too much rein they can lead us into deep and treacherous waters, as the current financial crisis certainly shows.

Ever so slowly the world is changing. There is a raising of the head of reason. There is a broad murmur of questioning. It’s not coming from the center, or from any one organizational point. Rather, it is coming from the network, where everywhere is the center of somewhere. The Web is a world searching for answers. No longer trusting blindly what the politicians, CEOs, doctors, web gurus, or priests say.

We don’t want pictures of ‘important’ people on a homepage. It doesn’t impress us at all (quite the opposite in fact). We want to be spared those embarrassing press releases and the smiling faces of actors pretending to be customers. Or that marketing and branding meaningless drivel about solving tomorrow’s problems today. And we find it so tiring to read an organization’s name in practically every sentence. We’re on its website, after all. We know its name.

The people who go to the Web are much too smart to be seduced by dumb retro marketing and PR tricks. Treat those who visit your website as intelligent strangers. Give them the facts. Get to the point. And, you know, in an age of truth-searching, telling them the truth could be the most radical marketing and PR strategy of all.

AP poll: Few Obama, McCain backers were unwavering

There is probably no worse strategy for an intranet or public website than content migration. It is doomed to failure from the very start.

Joe the manager picks up a jug. Inside that jug is milk that is curdled, sour and foul smelling. As Joe shakes the jug the solids and water separate and slosh about and the smell rises further, choking the air. Joe has a problem.

How is Joe going to solve this problem? Here is the traditional web management solution. Joe decides he needs a new jug. Joe gets a team together to decide what sort of jug is needed. They specify a really cool, all-dancing, all-singing, high-tech portal jug and they go out and spend a lot of money on it.

Then what happens? Another team is assembled to take the old jug and migrate its contents into the new portal jug. Once all the putrefied milk has been drained into the new portal jug there’s high-fives and lattes all-round. Job well done, Joe! Project complete.

If you’ve been involved in the Web for a while then the above story will be all-too-familiar to you. It is nothing less than shocking how little attention and genuine strategic focus most managers give to their websites. Even in 2008, I’m still coming across stone-age strategies that revolve around buying cool new technology.

From a management perspective, content has little or no value. It does not even deserve to be managed. Whether it is good or bad is irrelevant. Just shovel it onto the website. If it was written for print, so what? Just shovel it onto the website. The old website didn’t work? Buy new technology and hire a fancy graphics agency. The content? Just migrate/shovel it over from the old website.

You get the website you deserve. Quality content is at the heart of all great websites. This sounds like a self-evident, no-brainer statement. However, as we approach 2009, it still needs repeating.

Taking your old intranet content and migrating it into a new software system is doomed to failure. If your website isn’t working then ask this question: why isn’t the website working? Is it because of the technology? Is it because of the graphics and the layout? Or is it because of the content? Nine-times-out-of-ten it will be the content.

Content migration-and its first cousin, website “redesign”-are all about pouring sour old milk into new portal jugs. At some stage, we have to address the core web management challenges. Why do we have such bad content?

1. We allow the organization to publish puff, fluff and vanity, instead of focusing on the needs of our customers/staff.
2. We don’t hire web content professionals. Instead we find the most junior person in the department and give them the job of managing the website.
3. We don’t see the Web as a unique medium-we just take print content and print thinking and shovel it onto the Web.
4. We don’t review and quality control. We have practically no processes to take old content off our website.