All stakeholders

If only I’d realised, 100 years ago in a former existence, when I was handed HCI 101 to study (HCI=Human Computer Interface), that it could be so interesting.

I went to the final Brunch Bytes session for this season, to hear John Hardy, from HighWire at Lancaster University, talking about interactive surfaces. Yes: being able to use tables, walls, floors…any handy surface, to interact with computers, rather than the typical screen/mouse/keyboard trio of today. And maybe not just 2D flat surfaces, but the surfaces of 3D things in the future.

I know, a long, long way from the corporate website of today. But here’s the thing…

What if?

One of the central themes of his presentation was about how the tools we use dictate not only process, but also group dynamics, and even the output.

He and his colleague Chris Bull set up an interactive desk for collaborative software development. Using this desk, each could see what the other was working on, and share code, since the project was represented/displayed on the table they were working on. For instance, they could ‘pull’ a piece of code from their colleague by literally reaching out and dragging the visual representation of that code across the table into their own workspace, also demarcated on the table. The other would be peripherally aware of this while continuing to work on their own code elements – and could instantly engage in discussion across the desk if necessary.

Setting up experimental tasks using different styles of working to test this collaborative tool, they found that:

• visual representation of actions, architecture and project status improved communication between the group
• people wrote better quality code, faster
• people changed how they worked in order to use the collaborative features of the tool.

The point is that being able to perceive what others were doing as they were doing it—and understanding how that might affect your own work—made a significant difference to the quality of output.

It doesn’t matter that this project revolved around programming. It would work just as well for high-level design, or for determining information architecture… maybe even content development. Perhaps for any piece of work that involves individuals on a small team, developing modular items that are interdependent and need to fit together as an internally consistent and coherent whole.

Corporate website development, anyone?

The really interesting question is whether the processes and development cycles that such things go through could be enhanced by changing the tools we use. And, of course, whether the output would be better with a different tool. Are we hindered by the 2D mindset imposed by the tools we’ve used to date; or have they been so successful because they are best fit for our mental processing?

The related question of how corporate communication might be changed in a move away from 2D screen-based/paper-based communication templates is even more interesting – and a topic for another day.

I know it was a marketing email from a stranger, but when I received 3 emails last week with a subject line of ‘Bet you’ve never seen a law firm website like this!’ I couldn’t resist clicking through. After all, looking at corporate websites is what I do.

And at the other end of the link was an interesting site. Quite a long way from my usual website diet, but worth noting for the following reasons:

• the background image and welcome message change depending on the time of day.

  Not unusual across the web, but it is an unexpected touch for a law firm, and is very nicely done, with good quality images and understated time-framing.

  “We want to help you this morning” implies I would receive a speedy response – and most of their visitors are no doubt in a hurry.

• the content is written in layman’s style (not law-speak) and many of the links are visitor- and problem-focused.

  For example: ‘you’ve been arrested’ or ‘a client of yours is in financial difficulty’.

  This makes it easy for the visitor to find the information they need. Writing content from the visitors point of view – not the internal point of view – is important. Visitors arrive with a problem they want to solve, and neither know nor care what you call the solution.

• the content is informative and helpful.

  They’ve done a good job of case-studies across the site, and the explanations—for example, of what happens when you’ve been arrested—are clear and likely to be useful. (I wouldn’t know!)

• the images are well-chosen: mostly the site depends on the background image for visual appeal, which seems to be a trend at the moment. Where there are images, these are pleasant stock images—I like the umbrella theme.
• the structure, and therefore the navigation, is unusual.

  The home page clearly marks the different directions for visitors—personal customer or business customer—and the ‘corporate’ pages are available across the site (for the most part). Once the visitor has made a choice, there are further choices to identify the specific problem that the visitor has, at which point they are introduced to the appropriate members of the team. The process goes:

  • personal or business?
  • if personal, there are 16 choices – let’s choose, say, ‘defending you’
  • if ‘defending you’, there are 7 choices – one of which is ‘you have been arrested for an offence’
  • if we choose that one, then we arrive at a landing page with:
    • information about what happens in the police station
    • case studies of people they’ve helped
    • a ‘meet the team’ section with good biographies
    • information on paying for their services
    • and more.

  So the case studies and team profiles are tied to the visitor interest, rather than being grouped together, as we might typically see.

  And – to go back to the content point again – they are written in an appealing and understandable manner:

  • Case study: “Our client was arrested for the first time in his life following a tirade of abuse and threats which he received from a group of lads during a night out at his local snooker club with his friends.”
  • Biography: “He has acted for many clients and companies of previous good character charged with offences for the first time and with much to lose.”

  The unusual structure does make it slightly harder to navigate, and there’s little cross-site navigation. But then, most visitors aren’t interested in that: they just want a solution to their specific problem.

It’s not perfect, and there are a few snags: a couple of formatting issues and minor typos, some grammatical infelicities, and some difficulties in navigating, depending on which device you’re using to view the site. But overall, an interesting site to review.

Did the marketing work?

I don’t think that law firm websites are necessarily the pit of turbid grandiloquence that stereotyping would suggest. No doubt there are some stodgy ones out there, but a quick scan reveals other decent law firm sites. So the email was perhaps playing up the stereotype.

And I’m not sure why I received the email – still less 3 copies of it – but I’ll certainly remember that the firm exists. So to that extent, I’d say that the email lure did what was hoped – and maybe more, since here’s the link to the Darbys website, so you can review it yourself…

It’s a brand new year: no doubt you have exciting new ideas for developing your corporate site in 2012. But have you taken care of calendar duties for the change of the year?

I spent yesterday reviewing various corporate websites, and was slightly surprised that they hadn’t all updated the copyright year in the footer. Many have, of course – but have you?

Some of the outdated dates I saw may have been due to caching; and today is still a holiday here in the UK – many people don’t go back to work until tomorrow, Tuesday 3 January. But the date can be automatically generated.

If it’s not automatically updated based on the system date on your site, ask your developers if they could sort this out for you – one less thing to think about next year!

Other things to consider:

• adding in future dates for the new calendar year in your events calendar, and moving 2011 dates to the ‘historic’ section of the calendar, if you keep historic dates
• making sure that you have a new tab—headed 2012, of course—for your news releases, RNS and any other time-specific sections, and that older material is moved out of the ‘current’ tab. Check your reports, presentations and webcasts pages too…
• some of your content, inevitably, will refer to 2011 as the current year. It’s worth developing a spreadsheet with the URLs of pages that need to be updated on a calendar basis, so that you can find them quickly in the future. If you don’t have one yet, then likely pages to check quickly are landing pages across the site, and your strategy pages, including your CSR strategy page if that’s separate.
• check the history/timeline page too. That might need to be updated…
• do you have any text in the rotators on your landing pages or home page, that refers to 2011 as ‘this year’?
• and while you’re having a tidy-up, are there job postings on-site that should be cleared out?

If you’re running a corporate blog, you may want to check that your archive page is working well, and think about your editorial calendar for 2012, making a note of any special company events that are coming up that could be or should be covered in the blog.

And here’s something that has caught me out in the past: if your blog software automatically creates new subdirectories for uploads, ensure that you have access to any new 2012 subdirectories. If your systems administrators keep tight control of access rights, you may find that they haven’t yet given you permission to update those subdirectories. It’s quickly sorted out, of course, but I expect you want to get a flying start on 2012.

What have I missed? Are there any New Year jobs that need doing on your corporate website that I haven’t mentioned here?

This weekend I was invited to run a workshop for medical students about building quality websites. Yes: medical students.

This was a conference for students running their medical school society committees – so, students from across the UK – and my session was for those with responsibility for their society websites this year.

Because every medical school and every MedSoc is set up slightly differently, each is different, but primarily the purposes of their websites are to:

• inform (about education, about events, about current – medical – news, and about welfare)
• recruit (new medical students; new MedSoc members; volunteers)
• sell (event tickets and other items)
• share (create a community of support for their peers).

We ran through an exercise of examining the home pages of a few MedSoc sites to see which items of good practice could be identified and used by others. We found a fair few reusable ideas for MedSoc sites, and it also became clear that what the students were looking for on these sites included:

• an explanation of who is behind the site and what they do
• a statement of why the visitor should join (the school and/or the society)
• fresh – and useful – content for visitors of different types
• contact details.

Why would you care about this?

Some of these are things that companies should consider with respect to their own sites (not yours: obviously you’ve covered these bases). But there is more to it than that:

• mobile

  These students were bright and highly motivated – unsurprisingly, since these were medics. They were also very clear on what they saw as a quality website; and they almost all used the internet with a mobile device (usually a smartphone). What do you think they make of your site?

• motivation

  I sat in on one of the earlier conference sessions, and heard from a 5th year medical student building revision apps using medical expertise from his peers and from hospital consultants.

  These students are a select group, and further self-selected by finding time out of their intensive course not only to run a student society but also to get to their annual conference. And to find time to build an app as well…

• mass communication

  These students are individually willing to voice their opinions and to speak up for themselves and the people they represent. The official theme of the conference was 2020; the unofficial theme that one attendee thought was developing was the need to band together to achieve more—from pooling the results of the revision apps worldwide, so that individuals could compare their own progress with results from their peers around the world, to the MedSoc webmasters sharing best practice and technical support in earning revenue from their websites.

So: what are you doing to prepare for a future in which individuals are demanding service from you from wherever they happen to be, using whatever device they prefer, with virtually instant access to information and with the backing of their peers around the world?

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Thanks to Birmingham MedSoc for the invitation to participate.