It’s not just about increasing my consulting gigs; I feel all companies should be looking harder at User Experience during the recession because that’s the one area that can mean some quick wins. Let’s face it, designers and user experience folks are much, much cheaper than hard-core programmers, and are easier to measure results against — really, how can you measure results against a SQL query?

90 Percent Of Everything has a great post about this, about placing some skin into the game, profiting off of the results of UX. There are also some dangers, like not every change has an ROI tied to it that’s obvious or evident (or, how do you measure the touch interface changes with an iPhone?).

Read on…

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As the Cheshire Cat said to Alice in Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there." Your business' marketing plan is your roadmap for success; without one you're just wandering blindly through the forest.

Your marketing plan can be a simple 1- or 2-page document or a detailed 60-page booklet, complete with charts and graphs. Either way, the exercise of creating a formal marketing plan can help you determine exactly what it is that you want your marketing program to accomplish, how you intend to reach these goals and what yardstick you will use to measure the results.

A basic short-form marketing plan should include the following elements:

• Business/financial objectives – What are your business' overall goals? Be as specific as possible.
• Market overview – Description of your market, product and competition.
• Marketing objectives – What are the goals of your marketing program? For example, you may want to increase sales, introduce a product to a new market and/or increase product awareness among a particular group of people.
• Target audience definitions – Who are you marketing to? In addition to all of the people who may want to purchase your product, you may also plan to market to those who can influence their purchasing decision, members of the media, current or past customers and more.
• Key creative, media and promotional strategies and tactics – This is the "guts" of your marketing plan, the details of how you plan to accomplish your objectives.
• Infrastructure issues – Are there any known issues which may impact your ability to reach your goals, such as personnel, supplier or cash flow problems? If so, how do you intend to address them?

Do you have a marketing plan? If not, now's the time to create this critical document.

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This answer is from Laura Melbourne, Director of User Experience at MIVA, Inc. She provided one of the longer answers.

The simple answer is not meeting the expectations of your users and/or potential customers. A users expectations are the threads that make up the fabric of the user experience. Knowing who your customers (current and prospective) is the key to meeting those controllable expectations. Through surveys, user-testing, personas, and ethnographic research we can get a good idea of who our customers is and what they want or expect. (I want it fast. I want it easy. I want to know what I am getting upfront. I don’t know what I want, but I know I want something.)

There are any number of factors that could stop a user from becoming a customer, (not finding what they are looking for, price, and indecisiveness come to mind), but your web site shouldn’t be the deterrent.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Is my site/app useful?
  (An essential user need is met… pay a bill, buy an item, etc…)
• Is it Usable?
  (Easy to use)
• Is it desirable?
  (Emotional needs are met through image, color, branding, etc…)
• Is it findable?
  (Can easily navigate through your site and find what they are looking for)
• Is it accessible?
  (All users are welcome, even those with disabilities)
• Is it credible?
  (Promotes trust and believability)
• Is it valuable?
  (Delivers value, improves customer satisfaction and/or advances the mission)

By utilizing the basic principles of usability and user experience strategy you will at least give yourself a fighting chance and offer your user a better experience.

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Writing as a craft has never paid particularly well except for a rarefied lucky few that can sell their words as dollars — I remember thinking in 1992 that I would never earn a good living as a newspaper type, which means I dodged a really large bullet the size of Manhattan — but lately, it’s been taking a real hit, as shown in this blog by Jeneane Sessum.

I write here, but I don’t claim to be a great writer. I do, however, understand the value.

Occasionally I write a catchy headline, but most of my work is long, verbose, and is sometimes off mark. That’s mostly because I write technical documentation and complex use cases, but I have a secret desire to fulfill my Nathaniel Hawthorne fetish with 798 854 949 word blog novels chock full of grammatical mistakes and typos.

Good writing is important not only to usability, but also to telling the story of social media: the best storytellers on the web like Seth Godin have turned those stories into real value, and they spread like wildfire. It’s about catching the reader’s attention, which is even harder on the web because sometimes all you have is a headline’s time to do so. Three seconds and you’re done. Period.

Not only do you use social media to talk to your customers, you use it so your customers tell your story for you. That only comes with a well crafted message that takes real time and real money.

And the next few statements will illustrate why the friends I have who initially chose writing as their profession now reside in other, much better paying careers.

I’m going to quote liberally from her blog because it’s part of my rant:

The first, a woman who uses elance to outsource writing work to folks in India. I was, she explained, overqualified for the kind of work (and pay) she was offering. I did the math. It was pennies a word. She said I was overqualified. I have to think she’s right.

The next was a social media blogging gig, two posts per day minimum, with pay of $200/month, preceded by a testing period where hundreds of interested applicants would compete to get this primo gig. To the company’s credit, they offered $100 for the testing period.

Next I tried another online micro-job site that posts small jobs requiring a tiny bit (and nothing more) of human intelligence. Sample writing work there? 1000+ word product guides. Pay: $5.00. In 1986 I would have made about $1,000 for that job. In 1999 I would have made $3,000 for that job. Today, some one will do it — maybe not well, but they’ll do it and search optimize it — for five bucks.

In several conversations that I’ve had with the resident writer on this site, Linda Coss, good writing means more money. How do I know this? Lately, I’ve been sending out my resume with a spiffy marketing pitch at the very start, and low and behold, I get hits. Lots of hits. Not all of them turn into closed deals (or some go on for months), but they get my foot in the door at consulting gigs that turn into real dollars.

I’ve worked with clients where we would obsess over three separate messages for over a week, and that included A/B testing of the message to see which had the higher conversion rate. When you are working with a company that is dropping close to $4 million a year in Google ad marketing dollars, even the lowest common denominator ad campaign gets attention.

I’ve also spent time as a product manager where the time we spent rewriting help text and marketing emails translated into a very real drop of overtime (to zero); thus, I’ve spend very real time showing very real value for words that we pulled out of thin air.

Back to Linda. I paid her real money (not a lot, but enough to establish the value of her ability to write great marketing copy), we got the message, and it works. I can track a very real return on investment for the money I spent and the leads I generated with that content.

I’ve found it puzzling that no one questions the return on investment of software developer when 70 percent of all software projects go down in flames, most of them because of feature creep or lack of market insight, but if the rate is too high for a writer, suddenly the intern is given a laptop and told it’s time to go to town.

The web is this vast wasteland of content not worth the blog, er, paper it’s written on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a client that thought cutting the content budget was okay in favor of that “shiny new feature.” Or, just because there’s more people on Yelp (not that I don’t like Yelp, I think it’s a hoot) does it mean that real reviews should go by the wayside. They shouldn’t. The reality is that we need better filters more than ever.

Users don’t care about the shiny new feature.

They do care about brands reflecting a certain quality, and I’m not talking User Generated Content like You Tube or MySpace, because UGC is their target audience’s wants and needs. I’m talking about million dollar deals with Fortune 500 companies where the firms in question ask the marketing intern to write the copy because he happens to have Microsoft Word and barely passed American Literature.

Users want precisely the message of why I should should use this product or complete this offer, what makes them stand out. That message takes time, money, and hits the bottom line.

Now if that message were only clear.

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That is impressive.

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You’ve been running some custom CMS built during the internet prehistoric era (read: 1999). It’s huge, it’s a mess, and the development company that built it is charging you too much money. Someone on your management team has decided what the new platform is, and like or not, it’s moving day.

What’s going to happen?

I’ve been through a few of these, and they’re never easy. People always estimate the amount of work it’s going to be, and for the most part there’s no real thing as a straight migration. At some point or another there’s human intervention.

Here’s a few truths and what to do to move it along.

Just because it’s the system picked to fill all your needs, it will not fit all your needs

Content management systems are picked for all kinds of reasons (and more specifically, the people that help you those content management systems are picked for all kinds of reasons) other than the right reasons. Sometimes it’s price, sometimes it’s for personal preference.

It’s really about biting the bullet — most of the things you do in the beginning will take a lot longer to do than the previous system because the previous system was custom to your needs. No out of the box content management system will completely fit the bill, so you need to figure out how to alter your workflow and business processes to fit the new system.

What to do? Figure out the strengths of the system, and play to them. That might mean doing some work that you don’t think it’s the right way to do it, but that’s okay, learning a new system is going to take time.

There’s no such thing as a straight migration because it deserves a new information architecture from the start

Like it or not, the site’s going to take a lot of reconstruction, because legacy systems like that have outgrown their previous design. It’s like a freeway that’s been around 30 years — when you have to reconstruct it, you’ll have to build new interchanges, lanes will have to be reconfigured, and it should be just wider. Think a virtual version of the Santa Ana Freeway in Los Angeles.

This is a painful process, because that means moving a lot of pages around, and it also means editing a lot of pages.

What to do? Bite the bullet. The users deserve pages where they can find information.

The content will be no where as clean as it needs to be

Almost ten years of content entered into the site by people that have long since moved to greener pastures means that a lot of pages will have old font tags, some won’t be structured correctly, and across the board, every page will a different adventure. Phone numbers will be in 23 different formats, headlines will be in lower case, upper case, title case and all cases.

One of the great things about content management systems is that anyone can edit the content.

And one of the worst things about content management systems is … anyone can edit the content.

What to do? Set up some standards from what the content should be, including giving everyone a copy of the Associated Press Style Guide or Chicago Book of Style, and set a style guide for the hierarchy of content.

There will be a lot of content missing

Just because it’s a migration doesn’t mean it’s really a migration. There will be new pages. There will be missing pages. There’s will be new content structures. And someone has to write all that content.

That’s one of the biggest secrets of doing a migration: after a site inventory of the current system, what you thought was there you didn’t necessarily thing was there, so you   might migrate some of it, but re-write a lot of it.

What to do? Employ a content strategist or copy writer. You aren’t programming a new system, you’re using a tool, so the ratios of the roles will be much more to user experience folks and content specialists. You don’t need a bunch of developers, you need writers.

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No, really, this is a great list. I was talking with a friend of mine, and figured out that I haven’t been in an office environment for more than a few months in the last eight years, and there’s a lot of truths that are convered in the article. It’s about freelancing (and there’s going to be a lot of it soon, as we all get laid off, or like me who already was from a previous full time gig).

It’s over at Freelance Folder, check it out.

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This answer is from Emmanuel Mwangi, a Project & Platform Manager at CUC Services:

Long load times.

I can’t stress how often I’ve seen sites with great design and seemingly great functionality get less than stellar results simply because they didn’t look at the load times as a part of how functional the site was.

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This is a rant, pretty much, but will be a continuing discussion about how the social media platforms are evolving, and the key differences.

This is a pretty new blog, so I don’t get a lot of comments, other than, “hey, I agree with you!” My writing style doesn’t lend itself well to controversy — I usually come off as very matter of fact — so I get readers, but not discussion.

That’s really true for the vast majority of websites.

A very small minority of people control the content on sites like Digg (Social Blade tracks it), and Coding Horror has an article about how less than 1000 people contribute the content on Wikipedia. I ran a message board back in the day, and less than 100 people contributed to a message area that was getting close to two million page views a month. Just under .2 percent of You Tube visitors actually put up videos, and the trend goes on and on.

It’s really about being an active contributors: very few of us are in the world are truly active, and the majority of traffic on MySpace isn’t people posting to their profiles, but users who have joined to have a really basic account there browsing through photo after photo. The user may comment occasionally, but for the most part, it’s really just about seeing what other people have done.

The perception of passive versus active is very important in User Generated Content: for sites like Yelp.com and MySpace, they don’t exist if there isn’t an active community, but the distribution of contribution for all these sites has a definate long tail result in graphs (a few people generate most of the content).

Some of the sites, like Yelp, have turned a lot of views into contributors in a way that other sites haven’t by essentially creating hundreds of Yelps, all locally based. Yelp events happen all over the country, and they have generated a sense of community among it’s users that Facebook has to a certain extent, but MySpace hasn’t except for music and entertainment event.You can go to Yelp events, and meet the people behind the reviews. Locally, there is a certain set of people that contributes much more than the rest of the audience, so they are essentially the super connectors, the people for whom if they didn’t contribute, the community didn’t exist.

With Facebook, you tend to stay within your own social circle, so the same effect happens, even if you don’t meet the other people on a regular basis. There are events, but more often than not, there’s a disconnect between the virtual and the physical world because the status messages are from people in other parts in the country versus someone reviewing the dry cleaner down the street.

There will be more thoughts on this. Please stay tuned.

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I think one of the hardest parts of explaining the User Experience process is how it fits within into the complete software development life cycle, especially in a consulting environment.

Clients want to know how to limit costs, developers want to know when they’re going to get in documentation, and your boss wants to know what you can bill for (remember, wireframes are deliverables). Some of the process is very new for developers that have been working in software for a while. Or, as one CTO said to me, “You know, you guys changed the process on me.” And he had worked in an agency environment. And I had just recently worked with a couple of agencies that know they needed to start paying attention to it, but didn’t know where to start.

This is a document I developed at my previous company to explain the User Experience process not only to clients, but internally within the consultancy, and it helped greatly show that we were following some kind of process (Well, I tried to, but you know how that goes on some projects).

I included where sales came in, to further illustrate the point that User Experience extends even into the sales process because a good Information Architect or Creative Director can sell the concept, and a final review with the developers, to fix issues that came up. A lot of consulting engagements lend themselves to a waterfall process because of fixed costs, so that’s what this is modelled around.

What’s the process you follow at your company?

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I can never say Infragistics right, but they produce top notch controls for the ASP.NET world. Now they have something else that is way cool: Quince, a great little directory of user interface patterns that is built using SilverLight. J. Ambrose Little, a User Experience guy over there, wrote an extensive blog post about the new tool.

You can navigate through different patterns four different ways (I find user tasks especially useful), search them via keyword, and sort through them by letter. Very, very easy to use.

The best part? If you have a design pattern you want to submit, you can do it through the site, and the Infragistics team will review it and post it. It’s got all the requisite social networking tools with it!

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If you are interested, email me at jobs@usabilitycounts.com.

Top interactive agency is seeking a seasoned   Sr Content Strategist/CS Lead for a three month project of the over 5,000 page site. Environment is highly collaborative and friendly, and extremely fast-paced and tactical in this stage.

Requirements

• Competitive site analysis and benchmarking in content breadth, organization and presentation.
• Creating development plans for web content;   recommending content types and organization based on user needs and marketing goals, identifying content gaps
• Presenting content strategy deliverables to clients
• Selecting and evaluating content; maintaining site content inventory.
• Defining research requirements for web strategy.
• Developing content attributes and classification schemes (content models)
• Understanding of relational databases is desirable.
• Content development and editorial calendar planning experience is desirable
• Supervisory/mentoring experience desirable

Experience

• Content Strategy Experience:   5 years
• Interactive marketing experience: 5 years

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This answer is provided by Wahne Tubman, a User Experience Designer out of New York City.

The one that has the most weight in my mind is a poorly designed landing page: a page without one clear objective is a waste and limits conversions.   Each page in the site has to have at least one single clear objective. The objective should be whatever task is necessary to facilitate a sale or an inquiry.

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