ChaosScenario

Insights: The Case for Use Cases

Website design to some people is a little like a secret, magic box. You tell someone what you want and then presto-change-o, out pops a website, champagne falls from the heavens, and you win all sorts of awards and are gratified by the applause of your peers and colleagues. It never works that way.

It actually takes a lot of foresight and planning to build a website that meets the strategic needs of an organization. At the risk of oversimplifying, doing this requires understanding:

• what the organization's needs are (and hopefully what they should be),
• what their audience's goals are,
• figuring out where the two meet,
• how to make sure the audience knows about it, and
• how to ensure an easy, mutually satisfying transaction

This week, in my second-ever Click Here blog post, I wrote about one of the methods used to plan a website that accomplishes these goals.

If you're on the agency side, hopefully it will give you some ammunition for explaining to clients the time and effort it will take. If you're on the client side, this may give you a little peek into the magic box.

They say a magician should never reveal his secrets, but happily, as this article will clearly show, there's no magic to what I do. - Cam Beck

Related Blog Posts:

• Only The Fools Brand Lightly
• Can't I Just Get Ads and a Website?

Quality Websites are Worth Planning For

When choosing an agency to design your website, are you getting what you're paying for?

In nearly every instance, public-facing, commercial websites don't exist in a vacuum. They are part of a strategy intended to influence thought and/or behavior of a specific audience. Hopefully the strategy is comprehensive.

The measure of their success, then, is not only whether each hyperlink points to the right place or that it displays in exactly the same way in every single browser and is accessible by 99.9% of the population. These things represent an important aspect of quality, 

Quality is the assurance that any given solution will effectively solve a given problem that accurately reflects a specific business environment.

This is the essential distinction that differentiates Total Quality Management (TQM) from quality control. Quality control is making sure technical details are free from defects. TQM is making sure the problem is solved efficiently. Making the distinction, in part, helps companies tell the difference between specialty production boutiques and full-service, interactive marketing partners.

Production boutiques do what they're asked, and they often do it marvelously. There's no shame in using them. Full-service, interactive marketing agencies, on the other hand, ought to, if they have been given the mandate, make sure that what they're building solves the problem.

This requires, among other things, making sure that the problem has been correctly identified in the first place. Done thoroughly, the process by which this is definitively determined can very easily slaughter one or two sacred cows, but it's a necessary unpleasantness, if the final work is to deliver meaningful results to the client.

Do marketing agencies have all the answers, then? Not at all. God knows -- marketing agencies aren't always right.

Sometimes they're even spectacularly wrong.

But if you hired them to solve a business problem within a specific business context, you should be able to challenge them to identify and justify the assumptions and reasoning that led them to the solutions they're proposing. A good partner will provide that for you.

It isn't free, but doing the job right, even if you spent more in research, is less costly than doing it wrong. - Cam Beck

Your Only Two Options

When making a decision on a project that is going to impact your business, you have only two options:

1. Pay for it.
2. Pay for it.

Cost-cutting spendthrifts may eschew meaningful research in favor of their own dead reckoning for the presumed savings in time and money, but the results they engender will almost certainly reflect the shortcuts they took.

To be clear, not all answers can be derived from any old type of research, and sometimes the cost of performing the right research outweighs the benefits that can be expected from it.

But good, relevant research generally gives us something to test against -- a means to identify and challenge our assumptions.

You might think you're saving money by refusing such research, but it's often the only thing that can provide the basis for both not only creating a solution to a problem, but also identifying the right problem in the first place.

Don't skip it. - Cam Beck

Enemies of Progress: Success and Failure

When things are going well and business is humming along, industries are resistant to change because they don't want to change the model that has been working so well for them. They resist change so much that they will defend the status quo with litigation and legislation (through lobbying efforts) to prevent the market from adapting to changing circumstances and demand. When things are going poorly, often companies in these same industries lack the capital necessary to make the changes they needed to sustain profitability.

A prime example of this is the RIAA, who for years resisted the demand of consumers to download music directly from a distributor for use on their portable devices -- and any other device types they might want to use it. Another example that is far more troublesome is the failure of so many newspapers, whose sunk capital investment and romanticism prevents them from making meaningful change in how they create and distribute the news.

Now the Author's Guild finds itself threatened by the same predicament. Having become accustomed to receiving royalties independently for both physical books and for audio versions of the same book, the Guild is concerned that the new Kindle uses a technology that reads text aloud, using a voice synthesizer.

This technology, they fear, may one day become so good that people will no longer need to buy a separate audio version for their books.

Progress? The horror!

Also, consider the hubris of those who would either deny technological advances or prevent the text from being read aloud by a third-party (this would not be the same as a recording).

To be clear, the Kindle 2, were it to become widely adopted, represents some challenges for authors and how they negotiate royalties. However, it's in their best interests to figure it out quickly -- before their industries fail because of their inability to adapt.

Not all the news is bad. One thing the Kindle may do is, if implemented properly, reduce the barrier for consumption of the authors' work, making it more likely that people will spend the money to purchase it.

If this happens, the natural result is that more people will consume more books.

This is good for everybody.

This will enable their ideas and their fame to more easily gain traction, which actually increases the likelihood that they will make money.

But first they have to get out of the way of progress. For now, the publishing industry doesn't face the same immediate threat that newspapers do. However, if they don't find a way to make this trend work to their advantage, especially if the price for the Kindle falls to the point that it can be more popularly seen as a worthwhile investment, they aren't far behind. - Cam Beck

How Much is $1 Trillion? The Anatomy of a Sticky Illustration

Today on Facebook, a friend posted a link to this article on PageTutor.com that illustrates as well as anything I've ever seen, just how much money $1 trillion is.

I don't want to infringe on the author's work, so please go read it, and then come back here.

Simple. They set out to make a simple point: $1 trillion is a lot of money.

Unexpected. The result is just ... astonishing. Just as important as the result, however, is the build up. By comparison, $1 million, which to most would seem like a lot of money, is just pedestrian. However, had they used $1 as the building block instead of $100, the $1 million may have appeared to have more weight. I was just as surprised by the $1 million illustration as I was with the $1 trillion.

Concrete. By using human-scale objects that people are familiar with (a $100 bill. A human. A pallet), the creators were able to take a concept made abstract by its scale and make it understandable. A lot of that has to do with the progression.

Credible. The efforts the author made to make the illustration concrete also make it credible. Add in the fact that the author used a tool created by a publisher with some authority (Google Sketchup), and the author's conclusion receives additional credence.

Emotional. There is really no overt call to action here. It's really not designed to pull at your heartstrings the way it could have been. However, if the scope leaves you with your mouth agape in astonishment, then this criteria is certainly covered as well.

Story. As I said, it would not have been effective had the author just posted the concluding illustration. It required the build-up to be effective. Start with something almost all of us has seen and probably held at some point: The $100 bill. Show how what most of us consider a fair amount of money is really not all that impressive to look at. Keep building anticipation until the last moment, when the final illustration is revealed.

Most people who have been reading this space for awhile know what a big fan I am of Chip and Dan Heath's book, Made to Stick. If you're not aware or you haven't read the book, let me direct you to my review of the first edition of the book (download the PDF).

If you haven't read it, now is as good a time as any. Buy it now. You'll be glad you did. - Cam Beck

Know When to Say When

I have no desire to jump on the dogpile that has landed on The Arnell Group and Pepsico for their handling of the redesign of the Tropicana packaging. It's always easy to be clever retrospectively. It's more difficult, in the face of a request from the client to "freshen up" a design, to question the assumption that it needs freshening in the first place. I'm going to critique it anyway -- but with the caveat that it's using hindsight wisdom.

In the AdAge podcast explaining the changes, Arnell states a few goals that, on their face, are perfectly reasonable.

First, they wanted to show "the product" in place of the orange. This, I think, underestimated the value of Tropicana's original design. With an orange, the design is iconic. It doesn't need much interpretation. An orange is an orange. And a straw implies drinking. Not only is "the product" implied, so is the idea of freshness: You can't get juice more fresh than directly from the orange.

A glass of yellow-orangish liquid, on the other hand, could be a number of things, and it takes the form of whatever glass it's in, which may or may not (and probably doesn't) represent what each family has in their home.

The second thing that Arnell did was to replace the cap with something that resembled an orange.  If I interpreted his comments correctly, the orange even has a little "give" in it to imply squeezing. In a subtle way, this ergonomically innovation served to remind buyers that the juice comes fresh from oranges.

So why didn't they just stop there?

I can only guess that the reason relates to a lot of problems we seen in a number of different fields:

Why do incoming CMOs need to fire the agency his company has been using for years? Why do they need to change an ad campaign when the old one seems to be working? Why do new managers come in to "shake things up" declaring a new sherrif in town? Why do politicians like allocating funds for building new bridges that they can name after themselves rather than fixing old ones that can't?

They want to leave their marks. They want to make an impact and say that they were responsible for it.

The new cap, while (in my humble opinion) brilliant, it's also very subtle, which means it would be difficult for anyone to take ownership in a design that represents an evolutionary -- not a revolutionary -- change.

Take into account the amount of expertise, time and effort it takes to even consider a complete redesign, it would be difficult for those who invested any of those things in the effort to take a step back, say "you know, it's really not necessary" and settle on a small change.

They would consider their investment "wasted," because the change would not have enough "Pow."

Once we acknowledge the limitations of our cleverness, we can feel comfortable challenging our assumptions. We don't need to prowl around like dogs looking for territory to mark. Some other dog is always going to come to cover up our handiwork, anyway.

If our goal in branding is to develop icons that people recognize and love, we have to set aside our own egos and truly investigate the root cause of the problem that is motivating the instructions to change what is already being done. Otherwise, our efforts may not only be useless, but actually harmful, as  a doctor treating a patient for cancer when his only problem is that he has the common cold.

 - Cam Beck