The guru of web usability

"He's also the man that some web designers love to hate. In particular, they love to heap abuse on his website - UseIt.com."

Here's a Guardian interview with the guru himself, Jakob Nielsen.

But first, a digression.

I like lists. So much that I have lists upon lists. Lists for everything. Lists of life goals, lists of tasks...really long lists of tasks. Then, people send me lists via email (usually more tasks). Those lists get added to my other lists. Then I have Outlook making lists for me everytime I flag something. So I have paper and Outlook lists. Then I go home and I have sheaves and sheaves of paper detailing tasks, things to do around the house, chore schedules, future goals, places to visit, websites to revisit, books to read, films to rent, errands to run, food shopping lists....etc.

Then I found this web application....

In one of my fits of internet browsing, I came across 37signals, an ingenious little company that makes ingenious little applications. I now have my own ta da list (which is a compilation of to do lists). I tried to share a list with both my brother (with whom I must collaborate on a number of house projects) and another one with a client. To my dismay, neither appear to have looked at the lists. Prior to finding Ta Da, I used "now do this", which is a very simple program that allows you to put in your tasks for the day and click the "done" button when you're done, until you uni-task your way through. However, after a couple of days I found that now-do-this was too simple. In fact, if you accidentally close your browser you lose your whole list and you're left thinking, now don't do that, stupid program. So, not functional enough.

I am waiting to see what the pick up is on the Ta Da to do lists before I introduce my client to Highrise or Basecamp. However, both of these web apps could be just what our small, minimally staffed, frequently travelling dance company needs.

Which brings us back to the issue of web usability. What does that mean, anyway? Well, from what I understand from 37signals and Jakob Nielsen (see his retro-looking site), it refers to web interfaces: web design, not graphic design.

Some interfaces work, some don't. We all know this intuitively. Like many semi-sophisticated web users, I do have some basic programming skills, I started a blog in 2000, I use dictionary.com, I get a lot of my news online, google is my best friend....I am loyal to good sites and don't both with bad ones.

From the point of view of the 'user', websites provide a service.
How well they provide that service is a question of their 'usability'.

A real time, enfolding as I write this, example of web usability:
My dear colleague Douglas, despite wearing two watches on his left wrist like a character in Alice in Wonderland, has somehow mistaken the departure time for his daughter's bus trip up to camp. This, he now claims, is the fault of the website. He could not find the departure time of the bus, and when he did find it, it was buried in many other numbers and dates so he mixed it up with some other time.

I just went to the website to find the relevant page and link it for our reference but...I couldn't find it. Disastrous!

Now, Camp Big Canoe is a very small organization that services a limited number of people. But any time you go to a website and get fed up that you can't find what you want, anytime a website drives you crazy by hiding the most important information behind layers of click, anytime they frustrate you as you try to: find a schedule; book a ticket; do a search; find a phone number; donate money; send an email-- they are crippling the functionality of the internet, wasting our time and their own money in the process.

I have gone to a website before, felt confused or irritated, and left right away. I no longer go to those websites (ie. nowdothis.com).

Anyhow, those issues are top of mind because since working for NetGain I have been responsible for generating content for one website and designing two others from scratch. Any sites you love lately or have been forced to use?

Why best practices for business are useless for the arts

In the area of non-profit cultural enterprise, we are accustomed to having government and commercial institutions talking down to us. Through our boards of directors and funding relationships we are fed a continuous stream of "best practices," usually about five years after they've lost favour in the sector that spawned them. From industries that failed to anticipate rising fuel prices and from governments that can't run a gun registry, we get scandalously bad practices from scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells who oblige us to adopt them uncritically just to get along.

Examples? The Harvard planning model and the SWOT analysis are techniques that only work for organizations that have sufficient resources to do really solid research, analysis, and who can employ the relevant conclusions with enough process integrity to produce a result that offers better than average prospects of success. Those preconditions disqualify about 90% of the non-profits arts organizations that have been employing those methods to satisfy the business people on their boards, as well as the public and private sector funders on whom they depend.

Another great example is a study done by a well-meaning management consulting firm that tried to draw lessons from the airline industry for the performing arts. Their results were published and widely quoted for a brief time in the late '80's or early '90's. They noted, as Julia did in reference to Godin's article, that both industries offer time-bound products, so they both faced the same supply-demand, pricing, and inventory management dilemmas.

There, in my mind, the similarity ended and I recall little of interest in the study's findings. But how could the world's most credentialed multinational consulting firm fail to observe the fundamental differences between these enterprises? Even a lay analyst would conclude that these differences spoil all but the narrowest and least valuable analogies between them.

One industry is well capitalized, with a highly trained, unionized workforce and a high degree of price elasticity in most market segments. The other was never capitalized, always operates out of cash flow, has a transient workforce in all but the largest companies, and can charge only enough for its tickets to recapture a fraction of its operating and production costs. Can you guess which the airline industry is and which is the theatre industry in Canada?

One is faced with intense competition with others in its industry group, however customers have no real alternative to purchasing from one or another of that group. The other industry competes not only with others in the same category; it competes with all other leisure activities for the spare time and disposable income of its customers. Again, can you tell which one is which?

For anyone who wishes to maintain that there is a profound resemblance between the airline industry and the commercial theatre industry (as opposed to nonprofits), I have two responses, either one of which should decide the matter. First, most of the performing arts activities in Canada is nonprofit, not commercial, and even the commercial activity depends on the broad base of subsidized nonprofit activity beneath it for its audience and talent development. Second, airlines and theatres are not even time-bound in the same way, which was the primary point of comparison, after all. Anyone who has arrived a few minutes after the curtain has gone up at the theatre, or a few minutes after boarding has ended at the airport, can tell you that it is infinitely easier to be shown to your seat at the theatre than it is to sprint with your baggage down the runway, grasping for the landing gear. They are fundamentally different enterprises that operate in completely different circumstances, all of which affect the ways in which they market their products and manage their inventories.

People in business and government are always trying to share their wisdom with the arts, even though their own performance often puts that wisdom in doubt, and even though the techniques they offer may be unsuited to the practical realities of the arts enterprise.

Photo credit: Corex

Why Seth Godin's approach to marketing is wrong for the arts

Godin's right about something. A departure from the marketing mantras of the past half century is overdue. Knowledge workers in creative industries never really had their hearts in a formulaic approach to selling commodified products. There simply wasn't a better marketing vocabulary available to them, despite the fact that many were improvising and customizing approaches of their own.

Not that the four P's weren't adaptable, nor that Godin's five elements don't require a lot of work to actuate in real life, but there was nevertheless a need to think about marketing in a way that connected people in relationships that produced experience-based transactions. And of course the business of the arts is the sale of experiences more than of products or services in the conventional sense.

All well and good, except that Godin indulges himself in some of the same priestly platitudes that allowed the four P's to dominate marketing thought in inappropriate places. This really annoys me, because Godin had an opportunity to usher readers into a new relationship between the business clergy and the cultural laity. But in some ways, his approach is utterly conventional.

Let me get the numbers game out of the way first. Numbers have become part of prescriptive pronouncements for as long as there have been priests, or politicians, self-help gurus, and consultants. There was some validity to the notion that it helped the laity remember all the key points of the scheme being offered to them. Cicero argued that three was the quantity of talking points most easily assimilated in classical rhetoric, hence the lulling rhythms of phrases such as, "blood, sweat, and tears," pepper political speeches still today.

The outright numbering of points raises that limit by putting everyone on notice about how many there are, whether or not there is any thematic or logical coherence to them. It puts the onus on the student to find a way to remember it all, as if there will be a quiz later.

In fact, the numbering of points has become essential to the marketing of these schemes, and often becomes more important than the actual points being numbered. For example we rarely hear mention of AA's recovery program without the "12-step," label. Nor do the 'P's of marketing get mentioned without first stating that there are four of them. And Godin, while sounding as if he's departed from this pattern, gives us five elements. Not four, because that would be too few, and not six, because that would be too many. The Godin prescription is for precisely five because five is the right number of elements for right thinking people when it comes to marketing.

It's not the numbers I object to, it's the way his message is transmitted and received to those who are most in need of hearing it. I agree that his five element scheme is an improvement on the old four element scheme. What I object to is the hackneyed reliance on numbers to create the impression of a coherent whole, to make some disparate ideas and an idiosyncratic perspective seem more systematic and therefore credible.

Godin's five elements accommodate the arts in a way that the four P's and other commercially oriented marketing schemes could not. In fact, one of its virtues is that it delivers a little less than it promises as a prescription for change. Its value cannot be realized until a company is deep into the process of figuring out how each of the elements pertains to them and what they might do to exploit the opportunities it reveals to them. The four P's was more of a checklist that offered structure to the process of creating marketing plans and executing them. The five elements is less confining in terms of structure and process, and therefore more demanding of its users.

I just wish Godin had gone beyond saying that the last borrowed marketing model was inadequate or obsolete, not just because of what it recommended, but also because it borrowed from one economic sector, industry, or enterprise, and tried to transpose it's "wisdom" onto another. Rightly or wrongly, his bold language suggests that he is offering his prescription in the same way.

Godin's approach doesn't work because it's right for all times and all forms of enterprise; it works precisely because it demands adaptation to the specifics of the enterprise to have any value at all. It just seems obvious that, in the same way that product, price, place, and promotion fail to capture all that needs to be considered when marketing certain categories of products at this point in our history, his five elements will meet the same fate in certain categories in the future.

Rather than suffer the same dismissal as the four P's, how much better it would be for him to soften the language of his prescription, acknowledge the category limits of his scheme, and encourage adaptations that are enterprise-specific. Had he done so, his work would be a true departure from the customary treatment of this subject in the realm of cultural enterprise, and I could take fuller satisfaction from the intelligence of his prescription.

But who am I to complain. He is Seth Godin and he has five elements in his conception of marketing. He has laid waste to the four element scheme, so I can only succeed him by promoting six. Like nuclear proliferation or the latest advances in disposable razors, the highest number substantiates the value of the proposition. Even as I accept his recommendation, I recognize that it is limited in its applicability and durability. I suppose you would say that it, like all business theory and practice, is time-bound. But until someone says it, we in the arts will always be susceptible to the misapplication of inappropropriate or obsolete models that we will try to employ long after the end of their useful lives.

Real innovators in this field will invite their readers to modify or reject their recommendations according to the exigencies of their enterprise, rather than rejecting one scheme in favour of another as if a paradigm had shifted, when in fact there was never really a unified paradigm at work in the sectors from which these schemes are imported.


Photo credit: from The Independent Aunties of Ms. Evalyn Parry
Post by Doug.

Marketing the arts

Seth Godin's blog about throwing out the old 4 Ps has been picked up in a variety of placed.

Doug and I discussed his points in relation to the strategy we are preparing for our non-profit dance organization client. Artists dislike when you refer to their "product" but it does need to be "sold" to an audience. And the audience for contemporary dance is very small.

So I thought I would review the 4 Ps here (via wikipedia's entry on Marketing Mix) and see how it is or isn't related to the cultural "products" being peddled by non-profit art organizations, in particular dance, and also see how Mr. Godin's take might be more relevant.

Product - An object or a service that is mass produced or manufactured on a large scale with a specific volume of units. A typical example of a mass produced service is the hotel industry. A less obvious but ubiquitous mass produced service is a computer operating system. Typical examples of a mass produced objects are the motor car and the disposable razor.

Is a cultural product a commodity? A dance product is a time-bound event-- as soon as it is performed it has ended. You retain no image and no tangible object of the dance event; unlike live music (whose nature is to exist then not exist), few people reproduce for sale/distribution studio versions of the live dance event that could then be watched (and sold) over and over again. It is true however that recordings are often distributed for free to presenters in order to sell the work or company.

Price – The price is the amount a customer pays for the product. It is determined by a number of factors including market share, competition, material costs, product identity and the customer's perceived value of the product. The business may increase or decrease the price of product if other stores have the same product.

No dancer has the same product so uniqueness is not an issue. On the other hand, very few people appear to want the product at all. Ultimately the 'fee' paid by the presenter is a sad amalgam of grants to both the presenter and the dance company, with neither side breaking even, and little contribution from the general public.

Place – Place represents the location where a product can be purchased. It is often referred to as the distribution channel. It can include any physical store as well as virtual stores on the Internet.

This, I suppose, would be the venues where you can see live dance. There is a "distribution channel" so to speak. It would include most theatres and performance spaces augmented by the occasional corporate conference or official ceremony.

Promotion – Promotion has four distinct elements - advertising, public relations, word of mouth and point of sale. Advertising covers any communication that is paid for, from television and cinema commercials, radio and Internet adverts through print media and billboards. Public relations are where the communication is not directly paid for and includes press releases, sponsorship deals, exhibitions, conferences, seminars or trade fairs and events. Word of mouth is any apparently informal communication about the product by ordinary individuals, satisfied customers or people specifically engaged to create word of mouth momentum.

Promotion appears to be the most important in this scheme of things and yet the most consistently neglected due to lack of funds.

Seth Godin boldly claims:

Never mind the "P"s. Marketing has five elements:

Data
Stories
Products (services)
Interactions
Connection

DATA is observational. What do people actually do?

Cultural organizations should be asking: do people consume our product? If so, for what reason? When? Who are they? Surveys are constantly going out but the quality of the data in this sector is dismal.

STORIES define everything you say and do. The product has a myth, the service has a legend...

Is the 'myth' the brand? (At least one component of it)...We are actively incorporating this point into strategic directions. Small organizations can make themselves seem bigger and more powerful with good automated systems and a good website, IMHO. And then...

PRODUCTS (and services) are physical manifestations of the story. If your story is that you are cutting edge and faster/newer/better, then your products better be.

So if you SAY you are doing the best work out there, then do it.
But that of course is subjective when it comes to culture.
The work with the biggest buzz is rarely of the highest quality.
On the other hand, most of this high quality work is invisible to 99% of the population. So...

INTERACTIONS are the hero of marketing, because there are so many and most of them are cheap.

This needs more explanation in my opinion.

CONNECTION is the highest level of enlightenment, the end goal. Connection between you and the customer, surely, but mostly connection between customers. Great marketers create bands of brothers, tribes of people who wish each other well and want to belong. Get the first four steps right and you may get a shot at this one.

Some questions marketers must ask: Does this interaction lead to connections? Do our products support our story? Is the story pulling in numbers that demonstrate that it's working?

What is the quality of the connection? In so many cases it is poor, frazzled, disorganized. And the onus upon this aspect of marketing is even greater because the dance event is LIVE; it must occur between human beings; in time; in space. In that way it's the only aspect of the company that matters: what does it produce live?

Any thoughts?

Photo credit: Laurent Zeigler