Giraffe Forum

We don’t scan a webpage. Instead, we scan a particular block or section of it.

I was working with a company who, based on research, had discovered a top intranet task. It was interesting that the web team initially had no idea what this task was about, even though there was huge demand for it in the workforce. But this is not uncommon; web teams tend to be very isolated from their customers.

But the really interesting thing was what happened when we tried to prioritize the task on the homepage. We placed the task prominently in the center column. We then did a round of testing expecting employees to immediately identify the task.

Of the 15 people that were asked to carry out the task, only one noticed it in the center column. The rest either scanned the left column or went to the search box. This was a bit of a shock but on reflection was no real surprise.

Over the years, I have found that people don’t really scan an entire webpage. Rather, they break the page up into various sections or blocks and then scan within these areas.

The left column is where people expect to find the core navigation for the area they are searching for. So, for example, if they are searching for a product, and they are on the products homepage, they expect to find the main products listed in the left column.

If the company has a large range of products, then it may be that the products are listed across the page. In this situation, the traditional left and center columns should merge. The list of products should be clearly visible as a single block.

The center column is a very important space, but as we see from my initial example, if someone expects to find something in the left column, they may literally not “see” it in the center. The right column tends to be particularly weak in this respect. I have found that many people don’t scan that block at all, unless perhaps as a last resort.

What is important here is to understand the expectations of your customers. Where do they expect to find things on the page? The only way to truly answer this question is through testing. However, there are general guidelines:

• Place the local navigation in the left column
• Put the logo in the top left
• In the navigation that runs across the top of the page (global navigation) place a link to Home as the first link, and also include a Contact link.
• If you are dealing with a top task, it should be startable on the homepage, and there may be multiple links to it on the page.

None of the above guidelines are absolutes. Whatever works for your customers is what you should do. However, what is definitely true is that your customers have distinct and dominant patterns of behavior.

One company we dealt with expected that for Product XY customers would click on Link A. Out of the 30 people tested only 2 clicked on Link A. But 12 people clicked on link D. In understanding your customers the first rule always is: you are not your customer.

On the Web, nothing is more damaging to your organization’s reputation and brand than out of date content.

On Monday September 8, 2008, a story about a UAL bankruptcy began circulating on the Web. (UAL is the parent company of United Airlines.) Within hours of the story’s being released, UAL’s shares had dropped by 76 percent.

The story was 6 years old.

For some reason, the story had been added to the “Most Viewed” link section on the homepage of a Florida newspaper. From there, Google News picked it up, and the rest, as they say, is hysteria.

It’s easy to put content up on a public website or intranet. In fact, the content management software industry has made distributed publishing a key selling point. Basically, the more published, the merrier.

This is a totally unprofessional approach to website management. But the unmanaged distributed publishing model is attractive to organizations that do not value content. Such organizations want to find the cheapest and fastest possible way to deal with content. The cheapest way is to buy some software, give people basic training in how to use it, and then let them at it.

The easiest decision of all is to publish everything you have. Take all that print stuff and just PDF it. Take anything that’s digital and put it up on that great big website. It’s a “have gigabytes must fill” mentality. If you publish everything, nobody can blame you for leaving something out. It’s just that nobody can find anything.

It’s very hard to review and remove. Not alone does it take time, it also takes skill and authority. Anybody who can use a computer can quickly learn to publish a piece of content on a website. It takes real skill to review.

Organizations are in urgent need of professional review processes for their intranets and public websites. Out of date content is growing year by year, and there are many more UAL-type stories waiting to happen. It’s time for management to get serious and professionally manage their websites.

One of the first tasks is to stop free-for-all distributed publishing. It doesn’t work. We need some sort of basic editorial control that decides what gets published and what doesn’t.

Anything that does get published must have an identifiable owner. That owner must commit to regularly (every six months at least) checking their published content. It is absolutely no excuse for them to say they don’t have time. Don’t let them publish if they don’t have time to review and remove.

Some out of date content should be immediately deleted, some needs to be retained for legal or research reasons. This content should be placed in an archive. Archived content should be very difficult to get to. In particular, it should not appear in normal search results.

What the UAL story teaches us is that archives have the potential to do tremendous harm, whereas their value is often questionable. What it also teaches us is that professional content management requires real people and real skill.

At the bottom of the Google News homepage is a statement: “The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program”. I’m sure that gave great comfort to UAL investors as they watched their investments lose 76 percent of their value.

The Internet thrives in information-rich societies. Traditional communications and marketing thrive in information-poor ones.

The job of marketing and advertising was much easier in the Twentieth Century. It could inform people of genuinely novel things like cars and soap powder, microwaves and computers.

People lived rudimentary lives back then and these new products and services made things easier and more pleasant. People were information poor and the advertisement was often a source of interesting information. The marketer was saying to the consumer: “Did you know …”

But as the century progressed, genuine newness began to fade. People began to know a lot more. For increasing numbers of people, advertising became an irritant that was constantly tugging at the sleeve of their attention.

The Internet succeeds because it helps us make better decisions. We go to the Web to get more details. We go to the Web on a mission. When was the last time you went to Google and said, “I wonder what should I search for today?” You go to the Web wanting to buy a lawnmower. The chances of your attention being caught by some clever ad for a vacation in Greece is very, very small.

This is a real problem for marketers, because marketers have been trained to say, “Hey, look over here. This is really interesting.” Advertising is specifically designed to interrupt something you are doing.

Imagine you are sitting in an airport reading a book as you wait for your flight to be called. A stranger pulls your sleeve and smiles at you. “I’ve just found out about this amazing new product,” he says to you smiling enthusiastically. “And I’d really like to tell you about it.” What would you think of that sort of person?

On the Internet, spam emails and websites tell us they will change our lives. They tell us that they want to give us millions for nothing. All they need is our bank account details. There are obviously enough foolish people out there to make some of these spammers rich, but the Web is not the land of the fool. Quite the opposite.

The Web is the land of the skeptic, the cynic, the impatient, time-starved, information-overloaded consumer who is on a mission. The mission is to solve a problem, answer a question, get a good deal. The Web is the land of the comparison shopper, the person who wants to read reviews to see if the product is actually any good.

Trying to grab the attention and tug the sleeve of this information-rich consumer is much more likely to irritate than to interest them. Presenting them, on your homepage, with the big, smiling face of some actor who has never used your product, is a good way of getting them to sneer at you.

Marketing must change. Marketing used to say: “Don’t go down that road, go down this road. My destination is much more interesting.” On the Web, we choose our destination and will not change it. Marketing must now say: “I can help you get to your destination faster and easier.”

The complexity tax is demanded by those who want to create dependency.

I was reading recently about a country that had “pervasive corruption and bureaucracy”, and how this made it very complicated to do business. It reminded me about the book, The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando De Soto, in which he showed that the poorer the country, the more complicated the bureaucracy.

It also reminded me of an article I read about the decline of the British Empire. Seemingly, as the number of colonies continued to drop, the number of bureaucrats involved in colony administration rapidly increased. Strange? Not really.

While discussing a piece of software with one of its managers, he readily agreed with me that it had succumbed to too many features. However, he pointed out that each feature represented at least one job, and sometimes a team of people. Deleting a feature was thus tantamount to getting rid of someone. The programmers had become powerful and were seeking to increase features, not reduce them.

In another company it became clear that the increasing complexity of the IT infrastructure created a proportional dependency of the organization on the IT department. I do not believe that the IT department was deliberately seeking to create complexity, but neither do I believe that it was highly motivated to reduce it.

Most organizations are producing far too much content. Too many emails, too many PowerPoints, too many reports, too many webpages. All this content creation activity keeps a lot of people busy. Also, much content is far more complicated than it needs to be. Of course, there is a reason for this complexity.

If, for example, legal documents were genuinely easy to read and understand, then we wouldn’t need as much advice from lawyers would we? Many who create content have an incentive to make it complicated because it creates a dependency on them.

Most of those who take bribes in poor and corrupt countries don’t become very rich. The tax that corruption and complexity places on a country drains practically everyone’s resources.

The complexity tax on an intranet affects the productivity and efficiency of the organization. It may benefit a particular person or department in the short-term, but creating unusable applications and unfindable, unreadable content will cost everyone in the long run.

The consequences of the complexity tax on a public website are even more severe and immediate. In money-rich, time-poor economies, there is no greater sin than to waste people’s time. You thus tax their time and their attention at your peril. They will give you a couple of seconds and then they will hit the Back button.

Even government websites that have a monopoly must pay heed here. If the website is too complicated, then citizens will pick up the phone or drive to the government office. Thus, a complicated website means that services will be more costly for everybody.

There are forces at play within all organizations that seek to create complexity and dependency. These forces can be entrenched, but must be uprooted if we are to truly embrace all the promises that the Internet offers.

Web 2.0 is part of the shift away from the dominance of the elite to the innovation of the collective.

Social media is just that-social. Blogging, wikis, rating and voting systems are based on the idea that there is value outside the traditional channels of power.

Web 2.0 and social media mean that for teachers a declining part of their job involves telling. An increasing part is listening to the class and facilitating them in having conversations. Teachers should help moderate these conversations and draw new learnings from them. They need to say less of: ‘let’s open up a book.’ and more of: ‘let’s open up a conversation.’.

The traditional manager is taught to command and control. Web 2.0 challenges that model. I have worked in many European countries. In Scandinavia, management tends to be very collaborative, but the further south you go the more the manager becomes a controller.

In some countries I have heard employees speak of their manager as “Sir.” There is not much chance of Web 2.0 succeeding in such deferent cultures. It is, of course, hard to give up control. Even harder when your position brings with it such formal respect.

Companies are not democracies, of course. And social media will deliver little value if it becomes some giant water cooler conversation because not all the best ideas are discovered at the water cooler. Huge quantities of absolute rubbish are talked there too. So, social media and Web 2.0 are not a replacement for management decision making, but rather a support to make better, more-informed decisions.

The naïve tool-centric view of Web 2.0 still exists. ‘Just give them the blog and the wiki software and get out of the way’ has very limited logic. But it is classic IT-thinking. As if the tool was the be all and end all, and the only purpose of life was to discover the right one. As if it was the type of quill that Shakespeare chose that made him the writer that he was.

I have seen the sad results of intranets where anyone could set up a wiki or a blog. Sure, there were good ideas, but the intranet quickly filled with massive quantities of irrelevant and out-of-date junk. And I have seen countless failed attempts by government websites to ‘interact’ with the public by launching discussions areas that quickly became ghost towns.

So Web 2.0 and social media still need management. They rarely mature on their own. Discussions need to be moderated and channelled. Processes that allow the cream to rise to the top must be put in place. The bad ideas need to be weeded out.

But the managers are not the only clever people in the room anymore. The room is much bigger and it is speckled with cleverness. To manage in the Web 2.0 world is to converse, to listen, to be honest and upfront, to collaborate, to moderate, and constantly watch out for the trends and patterns that always emerge when many minds mingle and mix in the network.