Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 17

Grateful X 2

NONE of us knows what today will bring. And for many of us, these are fearful times. So I wanted to take a breath, pause a moment, and share two small gifts I received this morning at the start of my workday:

You know, for kids

First, Rob Ford wrote to my daughter and me to tell us that Macaw Books will be at Frankfurt Book Fair next week to promote The Little Trailblazers, a children’s book of illustrated stories to which we contributed.

It’s been more than two years since a younger Ava and I co-wrote a rhyming story for this collection of tales written by “Internet pioneers” and illuminated by brilliant illustrators from around the world—50 contributors from over 25 countries, 50/50 female/male ratio.

When the book’s original publisher withdrew their support due to its lack of mass commercial potential, Rob could easily have given up. Instead, for over two years, he fought to find the right publisher and charity organization to align with the project.

Today word came that The Little Trailblazers will be in aid of Unicef’s work for children. I can’t think of a better fit. Rob’s vision and perseverance have been something to behold, and I am grateful to have had the chance to collaborate with my kid on what will be her first published story.

Art & copy

Next, Dougal MacPherson presented a trio of narratively related illustrations for an important upcoming A List Apart series directed by Aaron Gustafson. I’m thrilled that Aaron conceived the series, found the authors, chose ALA to publish it, and is shepherding the entire project. I can’t wait for you to read it.

And, although I should be used to it by now, I’m still gratefully astonished by Dougal’s ability to take complex, technical topics, find their common truth, and create a unifying visual narrative tying them together for A List Apart’s readers. Oh, and he draws great, too.

Breathe

There is much that can go wrong in our lives, most of it beyond our control. Sometimes how the afternoon sunlight looks as it warms the tops of trees is what you get that day to remind you that life is a gift. Or, hey, don’t knock a good sandwich.

But sometimes—especially if your line of work can at least partly be described as “creative”—sometimes you are reminded how just how incredibly lucky you are to know and work with passionate, talented people. And that is fuel, not only for continued effort, but for gratitude.

 

Also published on Medium.

Illustration: Justin Dauer

 

 

The post Grateful X 2 appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

My Glamorous Life: Riding North

Woke 5:00 AM New York. Fed cats, crossed town to Penn Station.

Uber software was misbehaving, so instead of Penn Station New York, it booked me in Penn Station Dallas, Texas—a three-day ride costing tens of thousands of dollars. The driver and I had a good laugh over it.

Amtrak Acela First Class Lounge, a dingy little smut box in a catpiss corner of Penn Station, was dark. It does not open till 7:00, and, by God, the attendant sat there in the dark, with her door locked, until 7:00 AM on the dot.


Acela Express has two classes: Business and First. First comes with meals, early seating, and (experimentally, on some trips) selectable assigned seating. For some reason, First cost only $5 more than Business on this trip, so I sprang for it, and was rewarded with a Greek omelet, endlessly flowing beverages, and a nearly empty train car staffed by two highly professional waiters. One was tall and lean; the other, short and round. I mention this only because it was highly cinematic.

The man seated across from me had a kind smile and a deep need for coffee. From his mildness, I inferred he was an alcoholic on a business trip.

I spent the rest of the ride with Guillermo del Toro. What did we do before the iPad? Oh, that’s right—read books.

Cab from Boston South Station to waterfront hotel: $9. The driver let me hoist my impossibly heavy bag into the trunk myself, and tug it back out again on arrival at the hotel. “Okay,” he said, scowling, as I gently lowered the hood of his trunk. I don’t think he approved of my beard. Or maybe he blamed me for the African Diaspora. My people didn’t do it. We were hiding in barrels.

My hotel room was ready when I arrived, and even included a clean little kitchen area, which I sprinkled with little bags of nuts and dried fruit I’d brought with me.

My friends and team mates Marci & Toby, without whom the conference and our company would not function, have been in the hotel for days setting up next week’s event, so I spent a lovely hour catching up with them. Marci, who’d just undergone her sixth surgery on the same shoulder, had her arm in a sling, so I asked permission before carefully hugging her.

Rehearsed my presentation. Took a nap. I seem to have entered a phase of life where naps are a daily thing. Bingo’s next, I suppose.

Left hotel on foot to go meet a guy for dinner. I don’t really know the guy, but we’re both designers, and meeting other people who do what we do is part of what we do.

Last time I was in Boston’s Seaport area was shortly after 9/11, when there was nothing here but the World Trade Center. I’m in Boston every year but I don’t know this terrain. Between Foursquare, Apple Maps, Google Maps, and operator error, I somehow spent 20 minutes walking in circles before I finally broke down and asked a cop how to get to the place where I was meeting the guy.

Called the guy to tell him I was running late and got his voicemail.

Got to the place. The dark-eyed hostess awakened thoughts I can’t write about in our present cultural moment as I followed her in search of the guy I was supposed to meet. The hostess asked me what the guy looked like and I told her I didn’t know. So she interrupted a septuagenarian couple’s dinner to ask if the husband, digging into his lobster, was the guy I was supposed to meet. “No, the man I’m meeting is a guy by himself in his thirties,” I offered, pleasing neither the hostess nor the lobster fan. We returned to the hosting stand, where the other hostess looked at a screen and said my guy had never shown up.

So I walked out in the light rain, left another voicemail for the guy, and worked my way back to the hotel.

Called my daughter to wish her goodnight—she laughed when I told her I hadn’t expected Boston to be cold. Cracked open a room service hummus and a bag of dried banana chips. Business travel, baby. It’s the life.

Also published in Medium

The post My Glamorous Life: Riding North appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

On Rejection

Recently I had the privilege of reading a book proposal which the author shared in hopes of being published. It was a beautifully written treatise, well structured, nicely paced, logically argued, and thoroughly researched. The author had clearly poured time, thought, and years of lived experience into the text. The topic had relevance for our professional UX design audience, and the reading experience of the proposal alone was entertaining.

We turned it down.

I publish books, and it turns out the main job of a publisher is deciding which books not to publish. Accordingly, we give strong consideration to quite a large number of book submissions—and reject more than a few of them.

A few of these books are clearly targeted at A Book Apart’s readers. Some suffer from structural or conceptual problems. Others are too niche to interest more than a handful of readers.

But many submissions we receive are from qualified authors who are familiar with our catalog and mission. Many of these writers are subject matter experts, and stylists with distinctive voices and particular points of view. They know how to design narratives that engage the heart and persuade the mind. They write books that deserve to be read. When we decline to pursue even some of these proposals, it is not because there’s necessarily anything wrong with them. It’s because they don’t fit into our particular series of brief books for people who design, build, and write web and digital content. It’s because they’re good—but not for us.

Love means having to say you’re sorry

Over the years we have turned down more than a few gorgeously articulated proposals. In one case we even had to say no to a beautifully written, fully finished book. Some of these works found other publishers, others got self-published. Several books we rejected have gone on to be quite successful. And their authors’ success thrills us.

Here’s a secret. In most cases, we’ve turned down the successful ones knowing in advance that they would be successful. Do this long enough and you get pretty good at knowing when a submitted manuscript has genuine breakout potential.

So why did we turn down books we knew would sell? Because, again—they weren’t quite right for us.

The loneliness of the long-distance publisher

At least four books we’ve rejected in the past few years were written by friends and colleagues of mine. It hurt to say no to these people. I dread conflict and am even more fearful of inflicting pain. I love my friends. If one of them comes to us with a solid book idea, I want more than anything to be able to say yes. But these beautiful, elegant, useful books didn’t fit into our schema. They weren’t right for our audience. And for a small trade press like us, that’s what matters most.

Respecting those constraints is what makes us who we are; over time, it’s what builds the brand our audience comes to trust. For a publishing house brand, rejection over time equals design. It’s as important to our brand as the content we choose to help shape and publish. You can rejection as whitespace.

We’re not trying to be the most popular publisher in design and tech. We don’t even sell through Amazon because, although it might broaden our reach, it would impair our ability to pay our authors fairly. A Book Apart is a particular canon for a particular audience. It’s both a brand and a curriculum.

Ensuring that we only publish material that fits both criteria—while also ensuring that every book we publish has a unique authorial voice that comes through, and that every book we publish is both thought-provoking and useful—is our job. It’s also the job of other deliberately small design and UX publishers whose books you may know and love. (Waves to friendly competitors.)

As a good designer, developer, or editor, you work like hell so your customers/users/readers don’t have to. Publishing books is the same.

Keep those cards and letters coming in

Don’t fear the Reaper. Authors, keep those proposals coming in. We strive to say yes to books that belong in our curriculum.

And if you’ve sent us a proposal that ultimately wasn’t for us, don’t be afraid to try again if you write something new—and most importantly, believe in yourself and keep writing.

The post On Rejection appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

The Cult of the Complex

“IN AN INDUSTRY that extols innovation over customer satisfaction, and prefers algorithm to human judgement (forgetting that every algorithm has human bias in its DNA), perhaps it should not surprise us that toolchains have replaced know-how.”

Our addiction to complicated toolchains and overbuilt frameworks is out of control. Web-making has lately become something of a dick-measuring competition. It needn’t stay that way.

If we wish to get back to the business of quietly improving people’s lives one thoughtful interaction at a time, we must rid ourselves of the cult of the complex. For more about why and how, see my new article, “The Cult of the Complex,” in A List Apart, for people who make websites.

 

 

 

Illustration by Kevin Cornell

The post The Cult of the Complex appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

For your pleasure

For your listening pleasure, I have prepared a 15-minute playlist composed of ten short songs.

Before I share the URL, here are the requirements:

You must have Spotify. (Sorry.)

To enjoy, in Spotify Settings: Advanced, you must turn on Crossfade: 12 seconds. Half the trip is listening to how each track yearns for and blends into the next. Without Crossfade, you won’t experience that. And with Crossfade set to any duration other than 12 seconds, you won’t experience it correctly. The timing matters.

For maximum pleasure, set the playlist to infinite Repeat, so that the very last track of the playlist begins crossfading into the first track. Listen forever, with volume as loud as you can handle it.

Got all that? Good. Now you can enjoy the playlist.

My design constraints in creating this playlist for you were as follows:

Each track must come from a different era—from 1969 to today.
Each must be of a different style, such that no one would think of putting it on the same playlist with any other track on the list.
No track could be longer than 2:30 or shorter than 1:00.
The 10 tracks chosen had to clock in at 15 minutes and the whole thing had to work as a narrative.

Enjoy.

Note: Some tracks contain adult language. If that bothers you, you may not enjoy this playlist.

The post For your pleasure appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

On practice

Over the decades I’ve used computers, my drawing skill has all but vanished—along with my ability to do calligraphy or even write legibly. Which is why I’ve started forcing myself to sketch again every day. Practice is the best form of hope.

Also published on Medium.

The post On practice appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

Cossack

“Are you here with your child?”

It’s a Sunday and my daughter is visiting her mom. I’d spent the morning lugging my daughter’s old clothes and toys to a donation bin, where they’ll be given to some of New York’s neediest kids. Now I was on a photo walk, shooting places in my neighborhood along the East River.

At Saint Vartan Park, where I had gone to shoot the pink cherry blossoms, a large man walked up to me somewhat aggressively.

Saint Vartan is a pocket park near my home. It has a playground area where local families take their kids. I took Ava there for hours every day until she was six or so. We practically lived there.

The cherry trees overhang the a public space adjoining the playground area, and it was there I’d stopped to take photos when the big man put himself in my face.

“Are you here with your child?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“You have to leave,” the man said.

He wasn’t a cop, he just a big white man wearing tee shirt, shorts, and sneakers.

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” I said. “My daughter practically grew up in this park.”

“You said you didn’t have a daughter.”

“I said she isn’t here today. She’s thirteen. I’m a dad, like you. This is a public park. I’ve stopped in to take pictures of the cherry blossoms.”

“You can’t be here without your child,” he said again.

“Really. Is there a sign? I’ve come to this park for years, this is my neighborhood, there’s no rule about who can come to the park.”

“If you don’t have a child here, you have to leave,” he said.

He leaned down closer, emphasizing the difference in our heights.

I could see he was becoming angry. So was I. I had an irrational impulse to punch him in the face.

We were walking, now. He had moved closer to me and was escorting me out of the park. Like he was a cop and I was a criminal. No, not that. Like he was a decent, God-fearing parent, and I was some kind of pervert who got off taking pictures of kids.

Only I wasn’t photographing kids. I was photographing the cherry trees at the edge of the park. It’s the only place in the neighborhood where there are pink cherry blossoms.

He was much bigger than me, but we were both agitated, both ready to fight, both suppressing our anger to avoid fighting—avoid making things worse.

We had move in sync toward the exit, but now I walked past him, showing him that I did not need an escort.

“I’m going to photograph this tree,” I said. And stood with my back to him and took the shot. To prove a point, I guess.

And then I left.

Later, at home again, I saw things from his point of view. He didn’t know me. He saw a guy with a camera not far from where his kid was probably playing, and felt protective. I might have felt the same.

Maybe he wasn’t feeling anything, at first; maybe his partner was anxious and he was acting on their behalf. Maybe he and his partner had been annoying each other, and here was his opportunity to act the hero.

Maybe, as a longtime resident, on a sunny Sunday, I should have known not to enter my neighborhood park with a big honking camera around my neck.

I think of that park as my park. My daughter’s park. It’s as much a part of our family as our favorite neighborhood restaurant. I forgot that my daughter has long outgrown the place, that I don’t know the parents of young kids in my neighborhood as I did when my kid was young. I forgot to imagine how an anxious parent might view a stranger with a camera and no kid.

But when my kid was young and that was her park, if a stranger with a camera had triggered my parental anxiety, I would have walked gently up to the middle-aged photographer at the edge of the park and said hi. I would have asked questions, not assumed ill intent. Not taken the other man in hand, like he was a lesser being, an annoyance to be handled.

My interaction with the big man took all of two minutes. And happened hours ago. I have done many things since then, most of them positive, some even joyous.

But I still want to punch that big fuck right in his big fucking face.

Also published on Medium.

The post Cossack appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

We need design that is faster and design that is slower.

During a recent conversation with  David Sleight, Design Director at ProPublica, I found myself realizing and saying “we need design that is faster and design that is slower.”

Who are we and what is this thing called design?

When I say  “we,” I mean our whole industry, when I say “our whole industry,” I mean design, and when I say “design,” I mean: web design and development; digital product design; digital user experience design; digital user interface design; digital interaction design; “mobile” design (which is the same thing as web design and development); graphic design as part of UX, UI, interactive, digital, and web design; publishing and editorial design; and other  design practices specifically empowered by the internet and digital technology and built largely around reading and interacting with words on screens.

A mouthful, isn’t it? Some people mean all the above when they say “UX.” I generally mean all the above when I say “design” and call myself a designer.

I exclude from the category, for this specific discussion, tactile, conversational, and passive design powered by the internet of things. Not because those practices are uninteresting or unimportant—on the contrary, they are fascinating, exciting, and fraught with critical ethical questions—but because they are not specifically screen- and reading-driven. And it’s our screen- and reading-driven design that needs a reset.

Our whole industry, as I’ve just defined it, needs design that is faster for people who are trying to get things done, for they are our customers and should not be burdened by our institutional surrenders. We need design that is slower for people who are trying to comprehend, for they are our only chance of saving the world.

This porridge is too fast

Our news and information sites have succeeded so well, they are failing. We’ve designed them to be quickly scannable—at a glance, I take in the headline, the key visual, and the lead paragraph. But today’s news is anything but simple. The truth cannot be reduced to visual sound bytes. That’s how we got in this mess in the first place.

As a society, we’ve replaced thinking with slogans, listening with wall-building. Our best news publications are doing a better and better job of reporting beyond headlines—getting down to the details that really matter. But we designers have so trained readers to scan and move on—Pacmans scarfing dopamine hits—that they no longer have the instinct to sit back and take their time with what they’re reading.

Our news designs must work to slow down the reader, engage her more deeply, encourage her to lean back and absorb. The good news is, we’ve long had the tools to do it: typography and whitespace.

Larger type — type that actually encourages the reader to sit back in her chair — plus radically uncluttered interfaces and (when budget permits and the story merits it) art direction are the way to do it. Derek Powazek’s late lamented {fray} (1996 — remnant here) and Lance Arthur’s Glassdog were the first sites to do real art direction on the web. Jason Santa Maria’s personal site was a later, brilliant exponent of art direction on the web. (See “Previous/Embarrassing Editions.”)

You can see these techniques working in the recent designs of The Washington Post (but not its homepage), The New York Times (but not its homepage), ProPublica, Slate, Smashing Magazine, and Vox — with inspiration from predecessors including the Readability application, Medium, and A List Apart.

To a great extent, the ability of news publications to pursue slow design depends on their ability to finance themselves without overly relying on race-to-the-bottom advertising. Not all periodicals can free themselves of this dependency.

On the flip side of the news experience, which must be savored and digested slowly, comes the challenge of our corporate and organizational sites, which must become faster—not just technically, but (even more importantly) in terms of their content’s comprehensibility.

In the beginning, there was shovelware

As the once-vital blogosphere recedes from the equation, and as traditional periodical publications struggle to retain solvency and relevancy (and wrestle with readability), the web becomes the turf of stores like Amazon, powerful networks like Facebook, and traditional corporate brochureware. It’s this brochureware that most needs fixing—most needs to be designed to be faster.

In the 1990s, disgruntled computer buyers coined the word “shovelware” to refer to the second-rate games, fonts, and software that came pre-bundled with many PCs. It wasn’t stuff you had to have, carefully curated by software wizards who cared for you—it was garbage presented as value. Early web designers, including your present author, soon used “shovelware” to refer to the reams of corporate copy that got thoughtlessly dumped into the first corporate sites. The corporate overlords thought of the stuff as content. The readers didn’t think of it at all.

Getting easier to publish and harder to communicate

So we spent years preaching that the web was not print, finding ways to design words on screens so they could be scanned and used. We learned to inventory our old content and develop the will and the sales ability to toss the dross. Only content stringently designed to satisfy both customer and business needs would be permitted onto our excellent corporate websites. At least, that was how we did it when it came time for a major redesign (and only when astute stakeholders permitted it).

But most of the time, and constantly between redesigns, junk still got shoveled into our websites. We even made it easier for the shovelers. We developed CMS systems and gave everyone in the organization the power to use them. It was easier for us to let people publish the stuff their little group cared about than to stop and ask what mattered to the customer. And it was also easier for the organization, as it enabled warring fiefdoms to avoid difficult meetings.

It was easier. But not better.

And the CMS systems multiplied, and the web-savvy middle managers were fruitful, and the corporate site was filled with documents nobody but those who posted them ever read. And the corporate site sucked. It sucked harder than it had even in the earliest shovelware days of the 1990s. It sucked deeper and wider and more frequently and with better algorithms. For all our talk of user journeys and mental models, most corporate sites are mostly pretty garbage.

Shhh! Don’t tell the client. They still owe us a payment.

Beyond pretty garbage

Gerry McGovern’s “Top Tasks” method showed how to prioritize the information the customer seeks over the darlings of Management. Ethan Marcotte’s responsive web design and Luke Wroblewski’s mobile-first strategies pointed the way to restoring the focus on what’s most essential. There’s no room for pretty garbage on the small screen. Now, before it’s too late, we must fulfill the promise those visionaries and others have shared with us. If we want to save our brochure sites, we must make them not just faster, but relevant faster.

Designing with the content performance quotient (CPQ) in mind is how we will take the next step. We’ll ruthlessly prune the inessential, cut our sitemaps down to size, slash our bloated pathways, removing page after unloved page, until there’s nothing left but near-neural pathways from the user to the information she seeks.

In short, we will sculpt the design, presentation, and amount of content in our brochure sites with the same scalpel we take to the shopping carts in our e-commerce sites.

Evaluating speed or relevancy for your site’s content

How can we tell which sites should be faster, and which should be slower? It’s easy. If the content is delivered for the good of the general public, the presentation must facilitate slow, careful reading. If it’s designed to promote our business or help a customer get an answer to her question, it must be designed for speed of relevancy.

I’ll continue to explore both these themes in future articles here. My thanks to ProPublica’s David Sleight for the remarkable conversation that helped give birth to this piece. David is a web designer, creative director, and  leader at the intersection of publishing and digital technology. ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces “investigative journalism with moral force.” Our conversation will be broadcast next week in Episode № 171 of The Big Web Show. I’ll come back here and post a direct link to the episode when it does.

Read more

Beyond Engagement: the Content Performance Quotient

Large Type: One Web Designer Puts Content First in a Big Way

Authoritative, Readable, Branded: Report From Poynter Design Challenge, Part 2

To Save Real News

Redesigning in Public Again

The Year in Design

 

Also published at medium.

studio.zeldman  is open for business. Follow me  @zeldman .

The post We need design that is faster and design that is slower. appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

Beyond Engagement: the content performance quotient

Recently, Josh Clark, Gerry McGovern and I have been questioning our industry’s pursuit of “engagement.” Engagement is what all our clients want all the time. It’s the № 1 goal cited in kickoff meetings, the data point that determines if a project succeeded or sucked wind. When our clients muse over their Analytics, they’re almost always eyeing engagement, charting its tiny variances with the jittery, obsessive focus of overanxious parents taking a sick child’s temperature.

Engagement is our cri de coeur. Our products, websites, and applications live and die by it. But should they?

For many of our products, websites, and applications, duration of page visit, number of our pages clicked through, and similar signs of engagement as it is traditionally understood may actually be marks of failure. If a customer spends 30 minutes on her insurance company’s site, was she engaged … or frustrated by bad information architecture?

For these products, websites, and applications, we need a new metric, a  new and different № 1 goal. Think of it as speed of usefulness; and call it content performance quotient—or CPQ if acronyms make you feel all business-y and tingly inside.

The content performance quotient is an index of how quickly you get the right answer to the individual customer, allowing her to act on it or depart and get on with her day. It is a measurement of your value to the customer. For many apps, sites, and products, the content performance quotient offers a new goal to iterate against, a new way to deliver value, and a new way to evaluate success.

For many sites, engagement is still a valid goal

To be fair as well as explicit, spending extra seconds on a web page, and browsing from one page to another and another, remains a desirable thing on deep content sites like A List Apart and The Washington Post — sites that encourage slow, thoughtful reading.

A List Apart isn’t a place to grab code and get back to your web development project; it’s a place to ponder new and better ways of designing, developing, and strategizing web content. And pondering means slowly digesting what you have read. The Washington Post isn’t a purveyor of ten-second talking points and memorable but shallow headlines—it’s a place for detailed news and news analysis. That kind of reading takes time, so it makes sense if the owners and managers of those publications peruse their Analytics seeking signs of engagement. For everyone else, there’s the CPQ. Or will be, once someone reading this figures out how to measure it.

There’s also a new design paradigm that goes hand-in-hand with this new goal: shrinking your architecture and relentlessly slashing your content. It’s an approach we’ve begun practicing in my design studio.

But first things first. What exactly is the CPQ?

The content performance quotient (CPQ) is the time it takes your customer to get the information she sought, and here, less is more—or better. From the organization’s point of view, CPQ can be the time it takes to for a specific customer to find, receive, and absorb your most important content.

Come to where the messaging is

 

Consider the Marlboro Man (kids, check the Wikipedia entry), a silent visual spokesman for Marlboro cigarettes, created by the Leo Burnett agency for an era when Americans expressed their optimism by driving two-ton be-finned convertibles along the new highways that bypassed the old cities and the old urban way of life.

It was a time when Americans looked back on their historical westward expansion un-ironically and without shame. Cowboys were heroes on TV. Cowboys were freedom, the car and the highway were freedom, smoking the right cigarette was freedom.

On TV back then, when commercials had a full 60 seconds to convey their messaging, and nearly all were heavy on dialog and narration, Marlboro TV commercials were practically wordless. They showed a cowboy riding a horse. You saw him in closeup. You saw him in long shot. There were slow dissolves. There was music. There were no words at all, until the very end, when a suitably gravel-voiced announcer advised you to “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.”

But it was in billboards along the highway and at urban entrance points where the campaign really lived. There was a beautiful shot of the cowboy doing cowboy stuff in the distance. There were four words: “Come to Marlboro Country.” One of them barely counts as a word, and you didn’t have to read any of them to get the message.

The billboards had one or two seconds to tell you everything, and they worked. At a glance, and from repeated glances over time, you knew that Marlboro was the filtered tobacco cigarette of the independent man who loved liberty. It was not the smoke of the neurotic urban dwelling subway rider (even if, in reality, that was the customer). Marlboro was for the libertarian in chaps. For the macho individualist with no crushing mortgage to pay off, no wife and kids to infringe on his horse-loving freedom. You got it all, without even knowing you got it. That’s performance.

Targeting convertibles on the information superhighway

In hindsight, it sounds ridiculous, but the super-fast storytelling worked: when I was growing up, Marlboro was what every child in my middle school smoked.

Remove the cancer and the other ethical problems from this story and hold fast to the idea of conveying information as close to instantaneously as possible. The geniuses behind the Marlboro Man achieved it by reducing their messaging to only what was needed—only what could be conveyed to a person passing a billboard at 60 MPH.

Your customer is not speeding past your messaging in a 1954 convertible, but she is speeding past it, and if you don’t optimize, she will miss it. For her to get your message, you have to work as hard as those evil ad wizards did. You must focus relentlessly on messaging (as well as design and site performance—but we’ll get into all that soon enough). Just as Leo Burnett cut their TV messaging to ten words, and their billboard to four, you must be willing to think twice about every word, every page. Mobile First taught us to focus above all else on the content the customer actually seeks. A better CPQ is what you get when you do that—particularly when you combine it with good design and optimal technical performance. 

Most business websites contain dozens of pages that were made to satisfy some long-ago stakeholder. They are pages that nobody visits. Pages that do nothing to help the customer or advance the business’s agenda. Putting all that junk online may have made for smooth meetings ten years ago, but it isn’t helping your business or your customer. Our sites, apps, and products must do both.

Content performance quotient: the secret sauce

Lately in my design practice I’ve been persuading clients to create sites that might superficially appear less effective if you’re going by engagement metrics alone, but which are actually far more successful because they are more instantly persuasive. At my urging, our clients have allowed us to relentlessly cut copy and chop sections nobody looks at, replacing them with a few pages that are there to do a job. We are lucky to have smart clients who are willing to jettison hundreds of hours worth of old work in favor of a streamlined experience that delivers value. Not every client has the courage to do so. But more will as this idea catches on. 

(By the way, don’t look for these projects on our studio’s website just yet; they are still in development.)

Serving only the content the customers actually need; streamlining and testing and fine-tuning the interaction to get the right customer to the right content precisely when they want it; wrapping the experience in an engagingly readable but also quickly scannable user interface; and doing everything in our power to ensure that the underlying web experience is as performant as possible—this, I believe, is the secret to increasing CPQ.

CPQ: the story so far

 

The idea of delivering much less (but much better) first occurred to me while I was looking over a fellow designer’s shoulder. My friend Fred Gates of Fred Gates Design is working on a project for a client in the nonprofit education space. The client’s initial budget was not large, so, to be fair, they suggested Fred only update their homepage. But Fred being Fred, if he was only going to design a single page, he was determined to deliver tremendous value on it.

By focusing relentlessly on the objectives of the entire site, he was able to bring all the principal interactions and messages into a single performant homepage, essentially reducing a big site to a lean, fast, and more effective one.

Far from getting less, his client (and their customers) got much more than they expected.

Inspired by what my friend had achieved, I then proposed exactly the same approach to a client of ours. Not because their budget was a problem, but because streamlining was clearly the right approach … and a redesign is the perfect opportunity to rethink. When you repaint your living room, it gives you a chance to rethink your couch and divan. You’re most likely to consider changing your diet when you’ve begun a new exercise program. Clients are people, and people are most receptive to one form of change when they are already engaged in another.

Positioning CPQ as an aspect of technical performance is another way to overcome stakeholder skepticism. Lara Hogan has more on persuading peers and stakeholders to care about technical performance optimization.

We are a few weeks away from launching what we and the client are calling Phase I, a lean, performant, relentlessly message-focused web experience. But if we’ve done this right, we won’t have much to do in Phase II—because the “mini-site” we’re delivering in Phase I will do more for the company and its customers than a big site ever did.

I’ll be back with updates when we launch, and (more importantly) when we have data to share. Follow @DesignCPQ to stay on top of CPQ thinking.

 

Also published at Medium.

studio.zeldman is open for business. Follow me @zeldman .

The post Beyond Engagement: the content performance quotient appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

A beginning consultant brings skills, an experienced consultant brings value.

A beginning consultant brings skills, an experienced consultant brings value.

Early in a good career, you establish that you write the best code on your team, have the deftest touch in UI design, produce more good work more quickly than others.

You’re the person who resolves disputes about which typeface was used on an old poster. Or who knows more frameworks, has used more tools. Or who can fix the server when everyone else around you is panicking. Or all the above.

God is in the details. You sweat them.

You are incredibly skilled and you work to stay that way. You read design books and blog posts when your friends are out drinking or home watching TV. You keep a list of things to fix on your company’s website, and you make the changes whether anyone instructs you to or not.

Often, you make a site more accessible, or more performant, or easier to understand not only without being asked, but without being thanked or acknowledged. You do good in secret. You quietly make things better. You inspire good colleagues to learn more and work harder. Lazy or less talented colleagues secretly hate you. You’re the tops. You got mad skillz.

But the organization doesn’t treat you like the incredibly motivated, supremely talented, highly intelligent, deeply passionate professional you are.

The organization rewards something different. The organization looks for leadership, not among the most skilled, but among the most strategic.

The tragedy of great designers and developers

The tragedy of great designers and developers is when they get promoted to positions of leadership where they can no longer design or develop. And the other tragedy is when they don’t.

You can stay an ace coder, a design whiz, a brilliant copywriter well into your 40s and remain a valuable, employable team member. You will not go hungry. You will not be without work.

(By your 50s, finding jobs becomes tougher no matter how brilliant and experienced you may be, due to capitalism’s preference for hiring younger people and paying them less, but the multidimensional, interlocking problems of agism and economic injustice exceed the scope of this little commentary. Typically the solution to prematurely aging out of the market, even though you have much to contribute, is to go off on your own—hence the plethora of consultants in their late 40s. But here again, merely having skills will not be enough.)

To survive as an independent consultant at any age, and to remain meaningfully employable in digital design, you must bring something different to the table. You must bring value.

You must be able to demonstrate, in every interaction with management, how your thinking will help the organization recruit new members, appeal to a new demographic, better assist its customers, increase its earnings.

Consulting in a nutshell

As a professional with skills, you are a rock star to other designers and coders.

As a professional who brings value, you are a star to decision makers.

Both paths are valid—and, truthfully, a great designer, writer, or coder adds incredible value to everything she touches. But the value she adds may not be one management deeply understands. Just as developers understand development, managers understand management.

If you can speak that language—if you can translate the precocious gifts of your early, skills-based career into a seasoned argot of commerce—you can keep working, keep feeding yourself and your family, keep contributing meaningfully to society and your profession.

###

Also published at Medium.

studio.zeldman  is open for business. Follow me  @zeldman .

The post A beginning consultant brings skills, an experienced consultant brings value. appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.