Giraffe Forum

It is a familiar theme: fixation on short term results or results that compete with fellow collegues or departments. The question is: how to bring the customer in a mood that is more open to the presence of the elephant? E.g. when departments all urge for more links and banners, how to convince them that is in in the common interest to keep focus on the common goal?

So, i agree with the analysis that it happens and that this behaviour is damaging to the interests of the company on the long term. And how can i advice them to focus on the long term?

Excellent post, so good that I blogged about it: http://www.thinkingdifferently.eu

Professional communicators start out with positive intentions and the starting point is often the problem. Websites are seen by many as places you put things. If we furnished our houses the same way then we’d never get through the front door!

Taking intranets as examples…

There are so many good examples of task-based internet sites it’s amazing how more large organizations have not embraced these principles for their intranets. However, as long as well-meaning training organizations keep offering courses on how to populate these web spaces with content the more the comms community will not get it.

Employees may not often buy their own products from their own websites. Or, it seems that way because even companies who have superb internet sites have not replicated this for their intranets. Why wouldn’t you want the same service levels for your internal customers? I’m amazed at how many CEOs and senior staff can tolerate lousy intranet sites in today’s day and age.

Perhaps, as a transition, all intranets should have a big button saying ‘Library’ where all the traditional content can be found, or not? And the actual intranet can enable users to focus on getting the most important things done?

Looking forward to your next installment, as usual!

from Gerry to Gerry

This is a great article. Prioritizing the things that a page should be trying to achieve is possibly the most important step when creating or managing an experience in my opinion. A colleague and I recently spoke at the IA Summit about a technique we’ve developed to do this, the slidecast is here:
http://mauvyrusset.com/2010/03/12/experience-strategy-dealing-with-a-ux-mid-life-crisis/

- Richard

In a large organisation, every part of that organisation thinks they’re important. Because to the people who work in that part, it is. And quite possible they have specific customers for whom it is also the most important part of the organisation.

Everybody wants their bit of space on the home page because their view is (understandably) focused on themselves.

But a good website must be brutally democratic. The biggest, most proninent space goes to the stuff that most site visitors want most of the time. A good web manager needs to be firm (or needs a boss who is firm) - you’ve got to be able to say no. You’ve got to be able to say “Sorry, no, you can’t go on the home page because if you do, then this other department will want to go there. And this one. And these. Then where does it stop?”

Good navigation will mitigate this to some extent. And good, short URLs for constituent parts so that if they are important enough to be quasi-autonomous, customers can find them. And some sort of topical box on the home page can give everyone a space there now and again, when they have something epecific to advertise.

But the nub of it is, as ever, is that the website has got to be based around what customers think is important, not what the company/organisation thinks is important.

Mr. McGovern points out an essential topic. In my opinion, the main obstacle in clients thinking is always to treat Web Services mainly from technological point of views. Instead of working on towards simplified (really emphasizing those supertasks in the service) content clients want to fill up their Web Services with all those “cool & sexy” functionalities.

Acting in this way leads to problems as McGovern mentioned particularly on the homepage. This really drives me as Web Communications Specialist nuts if “the underlying problems have not been addressed” first.

So, is the statistical approach only way to prove that it’s totally inefficient way not to focus on functionalities if the content is not in a good condition?

-Antti