Are your written materials easy to read? Sometimes people get so caught up in creating a certain image – or squeezing a lot of words into a limited space – that they completely lose sight of readability. Unless yours is a completely visual message, it's important that people be able to read your words. Make sure your finished piece is formatted for maximum readability.

Make it Easy to Scan

People don't want to wade through what appears to be a short novel. If the mere site of your written piece overwhelms the reader, you can bet he or she will quickly move on to something else.

• Recommendation: Put your headings and subheads in bold type, use bullet points, left justify your text (don't center everything) and break things down into short, easy-to-manage paragraphs.

Avoid Giving Readers a Headache

Have you noticed that an increasing number of websites are composed of tiny little white letters set against a black background? Ugh! Instant eyestrain.

• Recommendation: For maximum readability of any written piece (not just websites) stick with dark type on a light background, and don't use anything smaller than a 10-point font.

Think about Your Font Formats

Sometimes it works to use special formatting to call attention to particular words, but if you're not careful you'll end up making those important words difficult to read.

• Recommendation: Go easy on your use of ALL CAPS, italics, underlines, Initial Caps, and other special formats. These all work well on headlines and brief items, but should generally be avoided on longer passages.

Remember, if your letter, website, brochure, or other written piece isn't formatted for maximum readability, there's a good chance it won't get read at all.

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When people are deciding whether or not they should do business with you, there's a good chance they're also evaluating your competitors' offerings. Have you given them a good reason to pick you?

The All-Important Unique Selling Proposition

Your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP, is what clearly answers the question, "Why should I do business with you instead of your competitors?" Often translated into a tagline, the USP should be the basis for all of your company's marketing efforts. You've got to let people know why your products or services are the best choice.

Developing Your USP

How do you determine your USP? Start by finding important benefits that are unique to your product or service. Try looking at. . .

• A Product Feature – This can be anything about your product, service, or service delivery. For example, Folgers coffee is Mountain Grown. I think most coffee is mountain grown, but they make it sound unique and special.
• An Emotional Appeal – Perhaps your USP can be based on an appeal to the prospect's emotions, such as love, humor, or fear.
• A Possible Association – This is the celebrity endorsement approach. Your product is wonderful because so-and-so says it's wonderful.

Once you have a good list of possibilities, pick one that is unique (i.e. not being touted by your competitors), believable, and a big advantage. Remember, this should be something that can be used to motivate people to make a purchase!

Using Your USP

The final step is to boil it all down to one clear and concise sentence and then integrate it into all of your marketing materials. Remember, if you can't figure out what sets you apart from your competition, your prospective clients aren't likely to see any reason to do business with you either.

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While I’m fighting writer’s block, this is a post from a friend of mine, Stephanie Bergman. She runs a blog that gets the occasional post. Stephanie has a few people in her twitter feed, and we have occasional conversations about social media. Something about meeting her at MySpace, and she’s working at an intriguing startup in SOMA.

Great post.

A couple of weeks ago, I started ranting a little over Twitter about followers and how people see them as friends. The rant began because someone I followed had posted a few messages about only wanting "quality followers" and asking everyone else to please stop following her. So I stopped following her.

To me, that's a crazy obnoxious egotistical statement. I mean, come on, who do you think you are? Do you really think Matt Lauer tells the Today Show audience that he only wants "quality viewers?"

Either this person didn't understand what followers really were, or was being a snot. Either way, I didn't care to see a whole slew of messages about it. I follow enough people that I have a fairly low tolerance before I unfollow people. It doesn't keep my follow count down like I wish it would, since I keep finding new people to follow, but I do try.

Anyway! Back to followers.

If someone has a public Twitter page, their data is available – to anyone – a number of ways. You can visit the website, you can subscribe to their RSS feed, or you can follow them. Their tweets also appear in the public feed (although there's a setting to turn that off), and are available through search.

What all of this means, is that you really don't know who's reading what you say. The only way to control this is by making your twitter feed private. Once you're private, you have approval over every person who can read.

I think most of the whining about "don't follow me" is over spammers more than real people, but that really makes no sense to me. Spammers rarely talk to you. I've gotten a number of @ messages from spammers, but they're not from people following me. In fact, I think the spammers unsubscribe once I don't follow back. It also seems like the same people who complain about spammers are those who try to get tons of followers. Spammers artificially inflate follower numbers – shouldn't they like that? If some person hawking viagra really wants to subscribe to my feed…have at it, I'm not interested anyway.

Most of the follow/unfollow behavior is automated. Mention one thing and suddenly a flood of people are following you. It's not like an actual dude who sells viagra is sitting at his computer staring at your tweets. But really, if you're uncomfortable with that idea, you should not have a public twitter feed.

I used the TV comparison above, but Twitter – to me – is best comparable to a blog. Some people read a blog by going to the webpage, others subscribe through RSS readers. Some blogs even end up syndicated to other places, on other blogs, to Facebook, all across the Internet. I don't know everyone who reads what I write, and there's no way I ever could. And that's ok.

I've talked before about how the tone of my blog changed when I went public, there's no denying that it did, significantly. It had to, for exactly the reasons stated here. I don't know who's reading what I'm writing. I'm the same with Twitter. No question that there are things I will not say on there.

But even I've said some things on there I shouldn't have. For example, I discovered a guy I follow (and who follows me) on twitter lives above me in my building. He seems to be cool and I'm not concerned, but it is spooky. I should never have said enough so he could figure out where I lived.

Facebook, on the other hand, grew as large as it did specifically because it was locked down to your friends. You did only have "quality" readers (if you're really going to be as obnoxious as to describe people as "quality"), since nobody could see what you wrote unless they were your friend. That, of course, is changing now, with Facebook making status messages more open. More and more people will now see what you say on Facebook, and you're going to have less control over that.

So the Internet's trending…again. We were all open, then we went all private, now we're all opening up again. It's easier to go from open to closed than from closed to open. People will be much more likely to make mistakes. Hell, I did, and I thought I was smarter than that.

I'm not sure how this is going to play out, but it will be fun to watch.

You can follow her here on Twitter.

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He was the 1,500th Twitter follower. His blog is cool too.

Who will be the 2,000?

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View more presentations from Patrick Neeman.

I’m taking a break from doing events for a while, however here’s the Powerpoint from the event. We recorded a video of the presentation, and you’ll be seeing the presentation soon online either on YouTube or some other site.

If you run a company, and want project management consulting on how to integrate UX and Agile, send me a line at pat@usabilitycounts.com.

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How important is usability? Even the New York Times talks about it, reviewing a new router, network storage device and digital picture frame (yes, you read that right, digital picture frame):

D-Link's PR person suggested that the elusive instructions might be on the company's Web site. (They weren't.) In the end, it took a D-Link product manager a day to figure out how to work these features himself and supply me with the instructions. He says that he'll have them posted on D-Link's Web site by the time the 685 goes on sale. (Caution: They entail mucking around in the router's advanced HTML-based configuration pages. Technophobes need not apply.)

Seriously — if the product manager can’t figure it out, you have a problem.

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Over at IXDA, I came upon the following post:

Hello,

Someone I work for has a strange enhancement request which I do not agree with, but this person is the boss. I think in my gut, this is wrong.

Website: a user management system for secure student data. Clients are a little paranoid about passwords and user names getting out.

Behavior: when you select a user and want to reset his or her password, the resulting screen shows the user name, but then blanks out the password which you can only see by printing the page.

Blanking out the password seems silly since you can still see it if you print it out. Do people agree this is poor functionality? If so, is there any evidence to support my feeling that this is a bad idea?

I think the writer is smart to be asking for ways to back up his gut feelings about this particular client request. I would agree that the printing of passwords is not best practice, but I’m curious as to why this specific approach is being requested.

I’ve worked with clients who have made suggestions for solutions which didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but upon a deeper dive of their company culture and/or process, I was able to understand why that particular approach made sense to the client. As a consultant, I’m often brought in to solve or address a problem that the client can’t address completely on their own.

So while an outsider’s point of view can be valuable, it’s also important for consultants to listen carefully to requests and understand the underlying reasons for some of those requests. It’s pretty easy to walk into a situation and cite “best practices are xyz,” but sometimes best practices do not make sense for a particular organization. In fact, sometimes the “crazy” approach is the right one, for the right situation and the right company.

But then again, sometimes “crazy” really is just “crazy!”

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It happens to all of us. We're busily writing a letter or email and suddenly we doubt if a word we just typed is the right one for the situation. Personally, I always have a hard time keeping "it's" and "its" straight. Maybe you struggle with "your" and "you're" or "advice" and "advise."

In fact, there are a number of words that commonly confuse lots of people. To help you out, here's a guide to some of the ones that I see most frequently in the editing work that I do.

Its & It's

Its means of or belonging to it.

It's is the contraction of "it is."

It's just amazing the way the dog can sense when its owner is about to come home.

Their & They're

Their means of or relating to them.

They're is the contraction of "they are."

They're flying to Chicago to visit their cousins.

Whose & Who's

Whose means of or relating to whom.

Who's is the contraction of "who is" or "who has."

Whose turn is it to pick up the guest who's arriving on the 2:00 train?

Your & You're

Your means of or relating to you or yourself.

You're is the contraction of "you are."

You're doing a fabulous job sticking to your diet.

Advice & Advise

Advice is a noun that means guidance or counsel.

Advise is a verb that means to counsel or give advice to.

My advice to you is that you advise your staff to answer the telephone promptly.

Complement & Compliment

Complement (as a noun) means something that completes; complement (as a verb) means to complete.

Compliment (as a noun) means praise or a favorable remark; compliment (as a verb) means to praise.

"I would like to compliment the chef," said Ralph, "for the way the flavors of this dish complement each other so perfectly."

Insure, Ensure & Assure

While all 3 of these words relate to guaranteeing that something is true or that something will happen, there are subtle differences in their usages:

Assure means to say, write or confirm the guarantee.

Ensure means to do something to make certain that something happens.

Insure means to guarantee something with insurance or other financial instruments.

"Let me assure you that there's no need to worry," he said. "While your firewall will ensure that hackers don't get into your system, this new policy will insure you against loss in case your system goes down."

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This is an event I’ll be speaking where we’ll talk about integrating User Experience with Agile methodologies. This is a reschedule of the canceled event.

Here’s some of the information:

Scrum provides us with a great framework for building our Scrum team, implementing the core agile practices and getting the inspect and adapt process started. But Scrum doesn’t provide much for the specific disciplines like programming, testing and  User Experience. That’s where our coaches Patrick Neeman and Michael Vincent come in.

Join us as we explore how User Experience Design integrates with the Scrum process. We’ll see first hand how each type of activity fits into the Scrum cycles, and how our User Experience researchers, designers and artists integrate into a Scrum team.

The address is:

Blankspaces
5405 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

The event will start at 7:00 p.m.

And Michael Vincent’s bio:

Mike Vincent is a solutions architect based in Orange County, California. He supports clients with application lifecycle management as a senior consultant with Accentient, and provides software architecture and development services focusing on Microsoft .NET technology as principle architect withMVA Software. He has been in the software business for over 20 years in addition to engineering and marketing management positions.   Actively involved in the user group community since the early 90’s, Mike is Vice President of INETA Noram. He founded both the SoCal .Net Architecture group which is now also IASA’s SoCal Chapter and the Orange County C# Developers group, now OC .NET. Mike is a frequent presenter at user groups, regional events, and code camps. He is a Visual Studio Team System MVP. Currently, he is working with the Scrum Alliance on a forthcoming program. mvasoftware.com

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