Building or redesigning an important website can be like buying a starter home. You think it’s the solution to all your problems, but sooner or later you discover that it has problems of its own. The upkeep is a lot of work. One thing is certain if you are building a family: There will come a time when you outgrow your starter home, and you’ll notice that it seems like the house was built for someone else. A close examination of the house reveals that, in some instances, you just weren’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

For instance, the contractors used composite hardboard siding instead of wood, vinyl or cement, and it seems to not withstand the rigors of the environment like the other things might. Since hardboard is slightly cheaper than the alternatives, that part was built for the builder’s bean-counter… not for you.

When you encounter your first plumbing issue, the master plumber who comes in to fix it laments that when the builder installed the pipes, they didn’t seal them. That part was built for the construction workers, so they could get to their break quicker. It wasn’t built for you.

Who is your website built to serve?

It doesn’t always have to be this way, but in many cases, websites are built through a series of processes, negotiations and compromises – much like a house. However, it is primarily built to solve problems. Therefore, the design team must agree on which problems they are trying to solve, and in what order.

There are several ways to approach the problems you identify.

Recently I had the pleasure of attending the 2^nd Annual Big Design Conference in Dallas (#bigD10). Our keynote speaker was Jared Spool (@jmspool), founding principal and CEO of User Interface Engineering. His presentation, “The Anatomy of a Design Decision,” included an excellent perspective on user-centered design.

What is “User-Centered Design?”

The traditional definition of user-centered design can be explained this way (from Wikipedia):

“User-centered design can be characterized as a … problem-solving process that not only requires designers to analyze and foresee how users are likely to use an interface, but also to test the validity of their assumptions…”

“The chief difference from other interface design philosophies is that user-centered design tries to optimize the user interface around how people can, want, or need to work, rather than forcing the users to change how they work to accommodate the software developers’ approach.”

User-centered design can be broken into 4 categories.

1. Self-Design – The designer is the user. This is not traditionally considered user-centered design, but it can be effective when the designer is designing for himself or when other users are exactly like the designer.
2. Genius Design – When the designer intimately knows the user and the space for which he’s designing and can apply the patterns he’s learned without researching everything from scratch.
3. Activity-Focused Design – When the designer is focused on what the user does and verifies through research and testing. This is the benchmark for traditional user-centered design.
4. Experience-Focused Design – Through extensive research and deliberate execution, persuades the intended audience to perform a desired action and elicits appropriate emotion that makes the experience memorable. True experience design transcends the medium and is the hardest to plan.

User-centered design is, at its core, a philosophy, not a rule. It stands in opposition to three other types of design.

1. Unintentional Design – If this occurs, one of two things is true: Either the designer is absolutely clueless or has tried to stretch an architecture designed for one thing to serve purposes for which it was never intended to serve.
2. Technology-Centered Design – This occurs when you’re more concerned about “features” on the platforms you already own or have access to than you are how the user could interface with those platforms – and why they would even want to.
3. Ego-Centered Design – This is a variation of “Genius-Design” masquerading as “Self-Design.” The difference is that with Self-Design, the designer (whether he be an actual designer or simply a stakeholder who is hijacking the process through the exertion of power, intimidation or influence) actually is the primary user of the design in question. With Ego-Centered design, the designer simply presumes that everyone thinks like him — denying evidence to the contrary.

Getting to Good

There’s an old adage that production managers seem to like to use when estimating a project or allocating resources. It goes something like this: “Quick, Inexpensive and Quality. Pick two of the three.”

(Image credit: Adam Polansky)

Strictly speaking, this isn’t even true. Sometimes you can have only one. There are always limitations with any project. There are always going to be trade-offs, and discovering what isn’t negotiable is part of the process of getting to good design.

That really boils down the design process to its essence. Good design is primarily about solving a multitude of problems: for the user, the marketing group, the IT group, the finance group and the design group.

The value of a design can be broken down to its parts — such as usability, usefulness, desirability, etc., but if it doesn’t solve at least one key problem that synchronizes what your users want and what you provide, it is doomed to fail.

Instrumental to solving these problems is making sure you honestly identify what the real problems are — asking the tough questions up front to make sure you don’t go down the wrong rabbit hole. This requires confronting the uncomfortable truth that you may be using one design method when you mistakenly believe you’re using another.

For Further Reading

10 Usability Heuristics

The Elements of User Experience (PDF)

User Interface Engineering

1. All audiences are not equal.

A general consumer goods retailer has a number of different audiences, just within the customer base. But besides customers, they must also talk to the community, the press, employees, potential employees, investors and often regulators.

These audiences have wildly divergent needs, but they have one thing in common: they expect your website to be designed to sell general consumer goods, regardless of what need brought them to your website.

Secondary audiences for Target.com do not suffer on account of Target’s decision to cater to its primary audiences. Target was ranked 19th largest online retailer in 2008 with 2007 sales of over $1 billion. Investors and prospective employees don’t mind.

This doesn’t mean your design team can neglect other audiences, it just means they are free to focus their energies on solving the primary business problem while providing access to secondary content in areas that do not disappoint those audiences. Everybody wins.

2. The more it is about, the less it will be understood.

For large organizations, there is often a temptation to try to fit a little bit of everything for everybody on one page. This can work to a degree, and there are a number of companies that have found success with this model (e.g., Yahoo!). Others such as Intel have taken a different approach by segregating the audience outright.

Intel immediately segments the audience without sacrificing its core value proposition that communicates its expertise in the category.

All of these companies understand that too much of anything is a bad thing. Because even though they might want to sell a hundred things, virtually no one will want to buy a hundred things. They just need a clear path to their things.

Some companies, such as Amazon, work through personalization, though this doesn’t appear to help it be “about less.” This goes to show you that what’s right for Amazon might not be (and probably isn’t) right for you.

3. If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

This is typified by the monstrous, undead home pages I described back in October. I blame this common flaw on corporate silos. Everyone seems to believe whatever their responsibility entails deserves top billing, or else no one wants to say “no” to their friends and colleagues.

Does that mean you have to choose a SINGLE element to focus on? Not necessarily. But it is always a good practice to utilize conventions in interface design to emphasize high priority tasks.

Apple’s Obsessive-Compulsive Simplicity

I often hear people exclaiming admiration for Apple.com. Their website is “clean” and “simple” and “easy to navigate.” This is true to a point. It’s not true for my typical usage of their website — if I had to get there through the navigation, anyway — but (among other things) Apple has embraced the 3 above principles very well.

1. They know (in my typical usage) I am not their primary audience. This frees them up to focus on those who are.
2. They stay true thematically to a singular core message.
3. They prioritize each page so its purpose is eminently clear – whether you are the audience for that purpose or not.

This is not true of all of Apple’s products – even the popular ones.  But here’s one thing to remember: What works for Apple may not (and probably wouldn’t) work for others in the sense they really want it to. There are very few organizations that can, pound for pound, generate such conversation and, in the midst of it, maintain their message discipline. Much of the communication heavy lifting occurs elsewhere (through PR, marketing, organic word of mouth, etc.), and Apple recognizes that.

Apple leaves no room to doubt what they want you to know about. Apple undoubtedly realizes that not everyone who comes to their website is going to buy an iPad. Not everyone who comes to this page will even want an iPad. That’s okay. It’s not who they’re talking to with this message.

Any organization needs to similarly recognize the space in which they work, the environment in which they live, and the sandbox in which they play. Doing this will give them the wherewithal to make the difficult decisions necessary to prioritize correctly and to conform to principles that allow them to communicate the right message to the right people at the right time.

Eyetracking is the mechanism we use to observe and measure what people actually look at on a page. For individual users, they show what the order in which various elements caught their attention and how long they looked at a specific area.

Figure 1: This example from the Universtity of Minnesota shows in what order and for how long a single user looked at different objects on this page.

Typically they also produce heat maps that demonstrate what everyone in the test looked at while they were on the page.

Figure 2: This example shows the areas where a group of users fixated their gaze most often (shown in red).

What people look at and consequently do is directly tied to what they came to the page to do in the first place. However, people don’t keep seeking until they are 100% certain they found the right answer. They typically stop at the first reasonably plausible one.

In general, the better your design is able to both 1) draw peoples’ attention to the area of the page that will enable them to complete their task and 2) enable them to recognize it as the solution to their problem, the better the page will perform at helping them accomplish their goals and make them happy customers.

So how do you know for certain that that they’re looking where you want them to look so that you can improve your design?

You could ask them what they look at. User interviews, focus groups and properly constructed surveys will help discover what people think. But for more reasons than can be discussed here, they are inadequate measures of behavior.

Site analytics measure behavior, but they don’t explain why that behavior occurred.

Professional usability lab studies explains the “why” question to a great degree – and I recommend at least a quick, inexpensive informal study (often several) for most projects – but it still requires interpretation. Eyetracking can help the design team understand, contextualize, visualize and interpret these problems.

How to Get Started
There are 3 general approaches to getting started with eye-tracking studies. Which one you choose depends on your goals, expertise, capacity, deadlines, margin for error and budget.

1. Outsource
   Outsourcing is the ideal option for organizations looking to manage the performance of a high-value project that eyetracking can measurably help improve, if your team does not have equipment, time or expertise to conduct them.
2. Bring it In-House
   Organizations that regularly build and refine websites should consider whether training and hiring in-house experts makes sense. The equipment and software can be obtained at a fixed cost (systems sell for over $20k), and in many cases incremental costs can be relatively low.
3. Simulate
   If it could be shown that the human eye is typically drawn to certain objects with defined characteristics in specific contexts, accurately predicting what people would look at on a page is a matter of putting the right algorithm in a screen interpretation engine. Eyetracking simulation engine AttentionWizard is said to be able to do just that for static images. Its creators claim 75% correlation with actual eyetracking studies. This is partially because it cannot interpret the context of a specific task, but with prices for testing each image far lower than traditional studies, accuracy at that level may be worthwhile.

Limitations
Eyetracking doesn’t measure peripheral vision. Just because someone’s eyes did not fixate on an area, it doesn’t mean they didn’t see it or weren’t affected by it. Nor do they read minds. Just because it appears as though someone looked at something, it doesn’t mean they comprehended it.

Figure 3: This example from useit.com shows that users looking for the current U.S. population looked and fixated directly at the number that answered their question. However, as Jakob Nielsen reports, only 14% of users successfully identified it for what it was. A closer look shows that users fixated on only the left part of the number, implying that they did not really comprehend what they had seen.

To answer questions you have about a Web product (be it a site, application, or some hybrid of both), make sure that the test actually measures what it is you need to study. Just as you would not use a stopwatch to measure the temperature in Hawaii, nor should you ask analytics, surveys and usability lab studies to measure what areas of a page draw peoples’ gaze.

No single research method measures everything, but in many circumstances eyetracking can be a good supplemental tool in your design arsenal.

Related Links
Eyetracking: Is it Worth It?
First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye

1. Create a Mobile Version of Your Website
We’ve been talking about mobile for a while, yet a surprisingly small number of brands have created mobile versions of their websites. With the iPhone pushing up mobile Internet usage dramatically, and new phones following the lead, 2010 will be a critical year to get your mobile website up and running. Here are a few things to consider:

Who’s trying to access you via mobile now?
Check out your website traffic statistics. You’ll be able to see the current number of visitors accessing your site via iPhone, Android and Blackberry. This is a good way to figure out which devices and platforms you should optimize towards.

What would a mobile visitor want?
Simply reformatting your website into a mobile-friendly version isn’t the right approach. Ask yourself what kinds of features and content would visitors find most useful if they were on the go?

2. Launch Your Facebook Page
Facebook Pages are free to set up in their most basic form, and even without customization allow your brand to provide a community for your most loyal fans. If you haven’t already set up a Facebook Page, 2010 is the year to start. You can always start free, and customize based on what your fans want. Here are a couple things to keep in mind:

Secure a Facebook URL
You must have 100 fans before you can secure a branded URL for your page, but it’s an important step towards driving traffic directly to your fan community from other media.

Cross-Promote Through Other Digital Channels
Use your existing digital channels to drive traffic first. Put a prominent link on your website and send an email to your customer database letting them know you’ve set up a Facebook Page.

Before You Promote…
Be mindful of how you conduct promotions. Remember Facebook just updated their promotion guidelines, and some of the “do-it-yourself” approaches others have adopted aren’t allowed.

3. Start Monitoring Buzz Around Your Brand
There are some simple ways to begin buzz monitoring without breaking the bank. If you find there’s a good amount of conversation around your brand, then 2010 might be the year to take the next step and build out a more robust buzz monitoring strategy.

Utilize Free Tools
There are many great free tools that can help you easily begin to monitor brand buzz. If you haven’t already, set up Google Alerts for your brand terms.

Twitter Buzz Tools
One of the best free sources to monitor brand buzz is Twitter. It can be as simple as setting up alerts for your brand name through a third-party app like Tweetdeck, or more thorough analysis through the use of a tool like Trendistic.

These three simple resolutions will help keep your brand relevant throughout the year, and on top of the new digital resolutions that are sure to come from whatever technology has in store for us this year.

Home pages have historically been a hotbed of contentious debate.  Because of this, they are what Steve Krug called “The First Casualty of War.”

Why are they so controversial?

Because everyone wants a piece of the action. Because organizations typically work in silos, different departments feel slighted if their discipline isn’t “adequately” represented on the home page. One would think by all the name-calling and weepy eyes that the home page is kind of a big deal.

And they’re right. The home page is – kind of – a big deal. But not for the reasons people tend to get worked up about. After all, typically, only 40% of traffic to a website comes through the home page.

But as a consequence of their inability to set boundaries and priorities, they compromise the very purpose of the page. Every piece of real estate is up for grabs. The result of all the haggling may actually, as Krug suggests, kill the home page. But unlike a typical dead thing, it doesn’t go away. Like a zombie, it is reanimated into an unrecognizable abomination of its formal self.

You have 1/20^th of a Second. Go.

The average time a new visitor (who comes to a site through the home page) spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-35 seconds on the page. User research tells us that people form lasting impressions of the quality of a website within 50 milliseconds.

That’s 1/20^th of a second. It isn’t nearly enough time to process, well, pretty much anything except, apparently, a lasting impression.

There is one thing that can be processed in that amount of time: The presence or absence of clutter – the very thing that all the haggling over home page real estate tends to produce.

Like zombies, they also slowly suck the brains out of the user – making the home page manifestly harder to comprehend.

The purpose of a home page

To prevent this tendency, organizations and everyone who has a say in how the website is designed must realize what a home page is intended to do. A home page for a typical B2B or B2C site needs to do two things very well:

1. Convey the big picture
2. Speed people along their way.

Example 1: Hulu does an excellent job providing access to relevant video entertainment while minimizing noise.

This can be challenging for larger organizations that must communicate distinct messages to and accommodate the discrete tasks of many audiences – especially if they don’t have internal buyoff on priorities, or if they do not understand the purpose of the home page in the first place.

Example 2: Although improved from it’s previous version (on right), BravoTV still suffers from a significant lack of focus created by a failure to establish a clear hierarchy.

These organizations ought not rely on the home page to have a message and support each and every task for each and every one of their audiences. That produces clutter, which is enough to form a lasting negative impression within 1/20^th of a second.

(As an aside — contrary to popular belief, clutter isn’t the result of simply having “a lot of stuff.” Instead, clutter is  the consequence of failing to establish a clear priority and hierarchy. It is created, not by a multitude of objects or content, but by confusion.)

To serve all the audiences – even the important ones for whom the website was not primarily built – companies must ensure enough time and skill is applied to a comprehensive, consistent, and intuitive navigation – most of all from the perspective of all of the intended primary audiences.

Without a commitment to a process that recognizes that, they’re just tilting at the windmills – or worse – fighting a battle against a horde of undead without as much as a zombie survival guide.

Related Links:

Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability
Don’t Make Me Think
How to Kill a Zombie

Q: What is Google Wave?
A: How email would look if it was invented today… and much more

This was the simple challenge the Google Wave team started out with: What does email look like in the 21st century? The answer was Google Wave, where communication is collaborative, brings in the real-time aspect of instant messaging and the distribution of communication that social media has made ubiquitous. If you prefer the no-nonsense explanation of what the Google Wave is, watch this video.

Q: Why is Google Wave Important?
A: It competes with important platforms like Facebook and Twitter

The jury is still out on whether or not Google Wave truly poses a threat to Facebook and Twitter, but consider that many segments of the online population have already replaced email communication with instant messaging or social networks like Facebook. Google Wave is offering many of the same real-time communication tools. What remains to be seen is if Google can achieve the same scale as these popular platforms. They haven’t been able to do it with some of their other tools.

Q: What Are the Opportunities for my Brand on Google Wave?
A: Gadgets, Robots and Embeds

The folks at Mashable have one of the best Google Wave guides I’ve seen. Beyond the core functionality of Google Wave, the guide outlines three distinct categories of Google Wave features worth paying attention to:

Gadgets: These are fully-functional applications that are shared by a Wave. Most iGoogle and OpenSocial applications will work in Google Wave. An example of a Gadget would be a group poll application or games.

Robots: Robots are essentially an extra “person” in a Wave, but they’re not a person, they’re an automated “robot.” Think similar to the instant messaging bots you might be familiar with.

Embeds: The easiest way to understand embeds is that this is how you take a Wave out into a third-party website. Similar to the way you “embed” a YouTube video on any website.

Q: What Should I be Doing Now?
A: Follow the conversation, request an invitation and get your developers involved

There will be no shortage of conversation about Google Wave and possibilities over the coming weeks and months. It will be important to stay current on these conversations, as we’re likely to see some very smart folks dreaming up some very smart ideas on what Google Wave will eventually be. In the meantime, submit your invitation request, as Google tends to roll these out, well, in “waves.” Most importantly, have your developers or your agency’s developers investigating the Google Wave APIs.

I’m sure we’ll be posting about this subject again in the near future… I can’t help but think that even if Google Wave doesn’t replace email for the 21st century, it will certainly throw down a challenge for our communication tools to evolve, and for us to evolve with them.

Contrary to our dearest wishes, people generally don’t come to our websites just to “click around” and see what’s there. They’re on a mission to find or do something – either specifically or vaguely defined. Information scent is that which sets expectations for their ability to find or do it.

It is a brand’s promise to them that they can find or do what the object or labels represent.

The good news is that, for savvy and diligent brands, this is a great opportunity to set high expectations and exceed them – thus, building a strong brand reputation.

The bad news is that, without proper planning, it’s unlikely to happen on its own. Brands, Web designers, and experience planners need to know the principles that will enable them to build strong brands by generating a strong information scent and delivering on the expectations they set.

What is information scent?

(Nerd alert: Instruction of theory follows)

To help interaction designers understand how to make information more findable, back in 1993, some researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center developed a theory called “information foraging,” which suggests that there are important similarities between how animals gather food and how humans collect information online.

The concept of “information scent” came out of this theory, which provided some useful principles to follow when building online experiences.

Abstraction: The stink bomb of information scent

Everything is alike at the appropriate level of abstraction.

For instance, dogs and cats are distinct animals. However, dogs and cats are both “pets.” Dogs, cats, and horses are “domesticated animals.” Dogs, cats, horses, and mice are “animals.” Dogs, cats, horses, mice, and pitchforks are “things you might find on a ranch.”

The more abstract the category, the more difficult it is to predict exactly what the label means. Hence, in (sadly) typical website parlance, “resources” and “tools” may be too abstract to be useful. By themselves, they provide no information scent. “Resources,” as a label, may just as easily be about water, coal, and oil as it is about links, support documents, or helpful people.

As the Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick tell us, “Abstraction is the kiss of death in any situation where you need to stand out.” And in a space that is abundant with information (like the Web), you need to stand out.

Don’t be obsessed with click-counts

Once upon a time, savvy Web designers believed that websites should adhere to something they called the “Three-Click Rule,” which, as the name suggests, stated that every piece of content on a site should be no more than three clicks away.

The problem, however, isn’t the number of clicks. It’s the degree of certainty users have that they can find the information they need – that they can accurately predict what will happen when they click something.

It’s very rarely a good idea to add unnecessary clicks.* But often adding an intermediate step in a given process can actually make things more findable.

Otherwise everyone would just take their site map and turn it into their home page.

* Surprisingly enough, this white paper from Human Factors International suggests adding extra clicks can sometimes better support the goal of the site and fulfill the desires of the users.

Turn your web pages into billboards

“The goal should be for each page to be self-evident, so that just by looking at it the average user will know what it is and how to use it.” – Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think

Following Krug’s advice sometimes means turning three painfully laborious clicks into four quick and mindless ones. Within reasonable constraints, if the information scent is strong enough that users are supremely confident they will find the information they need by clicking on something, as long as the site delivers regularly, they won’t even remember how many clicks it took them to get there.

They get frustrated only when they struggle – either deciding what or where to click, or finding out that what they clicked didn’t give them what they expected.

You could provide instructions, but while in foraging mode, people don’t want to stick around and read instructions, so your interface must convey what you would otherwise use words to communicate.

People want to get to the meat of what brought them to your site in the first place. So they won’t read at first. They’ll scan. They’ll scan by looking for cues that indicate to them where they must go (or what they must read to find out).

Krug wrote of a framework that takes advantage of the typical scanning behavior of users: If people simply scan pages like they scan billboards (until they find what they came for), when necessary and possible, treat the pages like billboards.

Besides creating clear, consistent labels, here are Krug’s guidelines for doing just that:

1. Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page

Caption: As “ugly” as his site design is, Jakob Nielsen’s articles at useit.com are ridiculously easy to scan and read because he makes use of good visual hierarchy.

2. Take advantage of conventions

Caption: Many of the video interface elements we see and recognize everywhere on the Web today are conventions because YouTube became popular. Many of them were recognizable because they were recycled from video players that were manufactured for decades prior to YouTube’s manifestation.

3. Break pages up into clearly defined areas

Caption: USA Today’s website has a lot going on — even on content pages like this one — but the various areas are clearly defined for what they are. Navigation is navigation, headlines are headlines, body text is body text and so forth. Separation between areas aids in navigation and consumption.

4. Make it obvious what’s clickable

Caption: Buttons can come in all shapes and sizes. You can perform a few tests with others to determine if a button appears clickable. But if you do nothing else, look a few inches in front of any given design element (such as a button). If you can still tell that the object is clickable, then it probably will appear clickable to others.

5. Minimize noise

Caption: In spite of providing access to thousands of programs, Hulu.com does an outstanding job of keeping things simple on their homepage.

Live it, love it, give it a pleasant aroma

The main goal of following these principles is to ensure people who come to a site looking for information can find it.

Abstract labels or design features can get in the way of this goal. They are said to have a weak information scent.

Clear labels with good visual hierarchy, familiar or recognizable design elements that aren’t too cluttered typically provide a strong information scent.

It isn’t always possible, given the constraints of any particular circumstance, to achieve 100% clarity in appearance or labels.

However, knowing the principles of information scent and their potential benefit, with proper planning and testing, can give you a greater degree of certainty that your online presence will successfully support your brand promise.

Remember to plan for this important aspect of communication.

Related
Top 10 UX Myths (Hat tip to David Armano)

“A social widget that Page owners can add to their websites to allow users to fan and view the accompanying Facebook Page stream. With the Fan Box, brands can bring content from their Facebook Page into their website and help convert website visitors into Facebook fans. Users can view the most recent posts from the Page, see a list of other fans (including their friends), and, most importantly, become a fan without leaving the site. Additionally, if a user visits the site and isn’t logged in to Facebook, the user can log in and become a fan directly inline as well.”

Here’s a look at the Facebook Fan Box that the clothing retailer Threadless is using on its homepage.

As you can see, the Facebook Fan Box allows you to showcase a few of the latest published updates you’ve made to your fan page, as well as a clear call to action for visitors to your site to become fans of your page. It also appears that some implementations will include overall fan counts. Learn more at the Facebook Developer Blog.

According to Facebook, it’s as simple as adding 4 lines of Javascript to your site. So if you’ve created a Facebook Page, this is an easy way to promote it and build your fans. The Facebook Fan Box is made possible by Facebook Connect, which is changing the way this popular social network interfaces with the rest of the web, and provides a powerful glimpse into the future of the web, where social networking isn’t a fad, it’s a pervasive part of everything we do.

With the line between off- and online media becoming more and more blurred, there are a lot of questions about how to truly incorporate the two, specifically when it comes to planning and buying media. Based on our integration experience, I’ve developed a list of the top five guidelines that will help a media team garner major kudos from a client for developing a great, integrated media plan.

Loop everyone in from the ground level.
Whether the client is new and you are starting from scratch with research and strategy, or the relationship is mature and you’re working from the success of previous campaigns, having the offline and online teams together from the get-go is invaluable in developing a comprehensive, integrated, and efficient media plan. One of the first steps in this direction is to brainstorm together and to talk to the client about their expectations, so there aren’t any surprises down the road. Another key step is to compare data after pulling research from your respective resources to expand everyone’s background knowledge on the industry, the target and the competitors relating to a particular client. Most tools have different methodologies, and comparing reports helps get everyone on the same page. For example, we align the competitive data from AdRelevance with what we pull from TNS to ensure an appropriate understanding of the overall media mix.

Assess the media objective(s) and strategy to determine the appropriate media mix.
It’s not as simple as “online always gets 7% of the overall budget,” or “let’s plan television first since it’s the most expensive and then divvy up the remaining dollars to the other media.” Clients are unique in their needs and what constitutes a successful campaign. Building from the first point, once research is conducted and conversations with the client have begun, it’s important to confirm the objective(s) and align the media accordingly. For example, Advance Auto Parts is a very direct-response, retail-oriented client, so media that have quick response rates like direct mail, search, and radio get more of the budget. M. D. Anderson, while their end objective is to increase the number of patients, has more of a branding component and therefore magazines, television, and cinema spots help generate awareness.

Integrate properties where applicable.
There are many offline properties across broadcast and print that have viable online counterparts, and it’s constructive to work together to have an integrated campaign across all media. Planning together helps not only extend the reach and align with consistent messaging, but approaching that property with needs across multiple media gives the agency stronger negotiation power, which results in efficiencies for the client. Because the online and offline media planners literally work together – we share not only offices but sit side by side – this makes it easy to work together for the client’s benefit.

Understand the other media and how they fit in.
Everyone has his or her area of expertise, and working together to create a media plan can be greatly benefited by the collaboration of talent. What makes the plan even stronger is to understand the other media that are in the recommendation.  Knowing why the television rating points are at a certain level or why the direct mail pieces should be mailed on a Thursday for a particular client can help a planner make more educated decisions with his or her own medium.

There are a number of ways to become educated on other media. Click Here has participated in training sessions to understand the basics and day-to-day responsibilities that the offline planners have and how they use their research tools. The offline planners have participated in a shadowing program for eight weeks, working for the online planners and understanding the more granular processes and day-to-day activities that occur.

Give face time to all planners.
This might be the hardest to carry out in practice since there are logistical issues with having multiple people in one room or on the phone, not to mention the increase in billable hours. However, it’s important to have the person who planned a specific portion of the media plan the opportunity to speak to that section, so any questions can get answered as accurately and completely as possible. I can’t necessarily speak in detail to a recommended TRP level, but I can certainly wax on for a good half hour on the strategy behind including a microsite in a media plan.

Here are some general principles your team must follow if they’re going to improve their chances for success.

1. Provide orientation clues

In most public-facing websites, your users don’t think about your organization in the same way you do. They have diverse reasons for coming to your site. You need to be able to immediately answer several of their questions:

Am I at the right site?
Your website should be able to clearly explain to anyone likely to find his way to your site that he has arrived at the right (or wrong) place. There are two ways to accomplish this effectively.

1. Put a company logo prominently in the header, preferably on the upper left hand side of your screen. Make it so that clicking this logo will take the users to your home page.
2. Include in your header a short website-specific tagline that explains your business. This isn’t an elevator speech and, unless you’re a well-known brand, your audience is fairly well established and static, or it happens to also be descriptive of your company’s purpose, it’s not your company’s motto, either.

Bad Tagline - netmarket.com. "Save Time. Save Money. Save Your Sanity." Okay. Ummm, what do you do, exactly?

Good Tagline - refdesk.com. "Fact Checker for the Internet." That's pretty straightforward. Now, can you deliver?

No Tagline Needed - Yeah. We already know you, eBay.

(Credit for examples goes to Steve Krug)

Am I on the right page?
Not only should your website assure your users that that they’ve arrived at the right site, it should also let them know where in the site they’ve landed. There are a number of ways to accomplish this.

Where should I go next?
Just as important as knowing where they are, your customers are going to want to know where they should go next. For this, you must make your navigation easy to identify and easy to understand.

2. Display system status

The website should always let users know what’s going on. This will help users understand that your website (and by extension, your company) is both helpful and responsive, because it never lets these questions go unanswered:

Can and does the website recognize me?
This is especially important if you offer some sort of benefit for registration and logging in. Prominently showing universally and reminding the user at key places within their experience that the site can recognize and meet their needs can help drive leads.

Though not as prominently displayed as it could be, this message on USA Today lets me know that I'm not signed in and one of the benefits (weather on-the spot) I can get by becoming a member.

Did what I just do make any difference?
Have you ever clicked something and nothing happened? Try to avoid it. Even as broadband adoption expands, it’s still important to keep your website lean by reducing latency periods. When someone clicks something and expects to get something in return, your website should not delay in providing it.

How long will this process take?
Sometimes your website must make some calculations, and latency periods are unavoidable. In these instances, if you know about them ahead of time, provide some feedback to acknowledge that the user has done something, and let him know that the system will deliver momentarily.

Gmail lets you know that what you asked for will be delivered momentarily.

Don’t rely on long-form copy to explain that the process can take between 25-30 seconds, buried somewhere in the paragraph and a half it takes to explain that they should click the button to get to the next screen.

3. Create a recognizable interface

For websites intended for mass audiences, recognition is better than recall. In other words, people who see something should immediately recognize how interacting with it will affect the system. By virtue of the way it looks, they should be able to answer several questions about it:

Can I click on this?
Put simply, buttons should look like buttons and links should look like links. If it’s clickable, it should appear clickable. Conversely, if it’s not clickable, it should not appear clickable.

Example 1: Click Here (Good!)
Example 2: Click Here (Bad)

What will happen when I click on this?
Will it take the user to a new page? Will it submit the credit and billing information he just entered, or will he have an opportunity to confirm his order information before submitting it? Clear, concise instructions and an intuitive interface, designed from an accurate understanding of the audience, can help make it easy for people to predict the website’s behavior given any intended interaction.

Example 1: Next button
Example 2: Proceed to confirmation button

Should I click on this?
Knowing what is clickable and what isn’t solves only part of the problem. The other part of it is communicating whether clicking on something will benefit the user. One tactic that is often overlooked is communicating to the user whether clicking on two different links will take him to the same place, or whether he’s already been to a page where another link would take him. To solve this, use consistent terminology and ensure your links appear different when someone has already visited a page.

4. Plan defensively for errors

You’ve done well, but maybe your users are in a rush, they weren’t paying close attention, and they either clicked on something they shouldn’t have, or the servers are going through convulsions at any given moment. How can you help them recover?

Help users quickly answer a few questions.

Why am I here?
Was it a server error, a bad link, or was it something he did wrong? Use concise, plain language, and format it in a way that is easy to quickly identify and scan.

What should I do next?
Imagine searching for Elvis songs in a music distribution application. What if you weren’t paying attention and you submitted “Elviss” or “Elbis?” If you search for “The King,” will the system return music options from the the or B.B. King? What if you’ve ordered Elvis music before, should the application recognize your preferences and deliver more meaningful results?

Example: Google Did you mean…

Search isn’t the only place where people can experience difficulties. Good prior planning can make sure users have some meaningful choices when they’ve encountered an error.

Will I be able to avoid this problem in the future?
Understanding why something went wrong is critical to understanding how to avoid it in the future. Whatever the reason is, communicate it. Even small, growing companies with server issues can avoid audience abandonment by assuring their users that they’re taking steps to fix the problem.

5. Test, test, test

Guidelines are useful up to a point, but every project is different. It’s a constant struggle to straddle the fence between being unique and innovative and providing something of value that people can actually use.

Since you’re dealing with goals that seem to be at odds (being both innovative and conventional), why not take positions that seem to be at odds with each other?

Be a skeptical optimist.

Don’t be afraid to try something new, but test your ideas. Test your prototypes while in development. After all, your website’s success is measured by how well it supports your business, and to support your business, visitors must have a positive experience on your site.

People find websites useful, enjoyable, and valuable for different reasons. But chances are that very few will speak highly of a company when they get lost on their website.

You’ll never be able to save everyone from getting lost, but if you follow these simple rules, you’ll save a lot more than you lose.

Other resources:
Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics
Don’t Make Me Think
Ambient Findability
The Design of Everyday Things
Defensive Design for the Web