Frank Chimero in Stand Clear of the Closing Doors:

Noticing is important, but what’s more important is sharing what one observes to define the edges of the experiences we share. This overlap bonds us, and the best part of paying attention is that it reminds us that we are occupying the same space at the same time as others. We are a part of the world, even in those in-between spaces.

I’ve read many books and articles about writing and why we write, but this is probably the statement that comes closest to my own feelings about writing. I want to share the things I notice in an attempt to find some of those shared experiences and the overlap that bonds us.

C.S. Lewis once said, “We read to know we are not alone.” I guess I write to know we are not alone - especially in an industry like ours that can sometimes feel very isolated.

Ok, that came out way heavier than I planned. In my defense, it’s a rainy Sunday afternoon. Anyway, here’s a video of a dancing cat to balance things out a bit.

Frank Chimero on why designers should learn to code:

Design decisions are not only affected by the characteristics of the content being designed, but also the qualities of the format. The best way to understand the characteristics of the web is to speak its language.

Good design and good markup provide structure to content. Good markup is a fundamental part of good design: beautiful on the inside, beautiful on the outside. HTML and CSS give another venue to provide structure to content in the native language of the web, and learning these guides decisions by surfacing the affordances of the medium. Design decisions are affected by both the content and the format, like how a sculptor would make different decisions if she were working with clay rather than marble.

Spot on. The whole post is worth a read, and Frank gives some good suggestions for resources to help designers get started on coding.

[caption id=“attachment_1181” align=“alignright” width=“240” caption=“Thinking about writing at Melissa’s Food Shop, Cape Town.”][/caption]

How good I am at my job as a software Product Manager depends on my ability to do two things: Understand the needs that real people have when they go online (whether they can articulate it or not), and building products that satisfy those needs as well as meet business goals. It occurred to me this morning that in many ways writing is about doing the exact opposite. To a large extent, writing is about being selfish.

Virtually any book or article you read about writing gives the same advice: Write what you know and what you’re passionate about. Write what’s in you, not what you think people want to read. Just last week James Shelley reminded us that people cannot help but notice an individual with passion. In another post he says:

Although passion may at times appear dangerous, the planet does not need less human passion right now, it needs more passion than ever before ”” passion that refuses to be immunized by the lulling caress of consumption and the crippling inundation of knowledge.

But it is this apparent struggle between Design and Writing (with a big D and W) that makes it so damn difficult to write sometimes. As user experience designers we’re trained to get out of our own shoes and into those of others. It’s about their needs, not our likes and dislikes. “You are not the user,” we often say.

But I have a feeling that the best writers (and designers, for that matter) are those who are able to balance this apparent conflict between user needs and internal passion effortlessly. Writers and designers who truly astound us with their work are those whose understanding of what people need are so ingrained in their beings, so much part of them, that they’re able to express their passion in a way that meets those needs “without fuss or bother,” as the NN Group definition of User Experience states.

It is for this reason that I think if you’re in software, you should write. Anil Dash got me thinking about this when he said:

Some ideas are just bigger than 140 characters. In fact, most good ideas are. More importantly, our ideas often need to gain traction and meaning over time. Blog posts often age into something more substantial than they are at their conception, through the weight of time and perspective and response.

If nothing else, the practice of writing down your thoughts (yes, about the things you are passionate about) will teach you how to create words in a way that resonates with those who read it. And just go ahead and try to convince me that won’t make you a better designer.

The biggest problem is, of course, that we all hate our own work, especially in the beginning. As Ira Glass so eloquently puts it:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

He goes on to give this advice:

And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

If you’re noticing a change in this blog over the past few weeks, you’d be right. I’ve redesigned to put the focus on the content, and I hope to write just a bit more - even if that means fewer long-form posts. I have to test this theory that writing better words will help blur the lines between what I’m good at and what people need from software. We’ll see how it goes.

And you - yes, YOU. Go write something, ok?

Last week I delivered a new talk at a Cape Town SPIN meeting (the Software Process Improvement Network). While I was preparing for it I thought of a working title for my next talk:

A talk about preparing a presentation for a talk about preparing a presentation for a talk.

You see, I have a love/hate relationship with new talks. I love delivering a new talk, and I love getting feedback on what worked and what didn’t. I love making it better. And I hate pretty much every moment leading up to delivering it.

But this is, of course, the problem with the creative process.  It’s blood, sweat, and tears, most of the way. Rands recently wrote a post entitled A Hard Thing is Done by Figuring Out How to Start. He writes:

Those who do not understand creativity think it has a well-defined and measurable on/off switch, when in reality it’s a walking dial with many labels. One label reads “Morose and apathetic” and another reads “Unexpectedly totally cranking it out”. This dial sports shy, mischievous feet - yes, feet - that allow it to simply walk away the moment you aren’t paying attention, and each time it walks away, it finds a new place to hide.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life wondering where that damned dial is hiding.

He goes on to explain how random moments of discovery and seemingly useless tangents are all part of the preparation process, and that we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves when we’re struggling to get started. He closes with this:

W’re addicted to quick fixes, top ten lists, and four-hour work weeks, but the truth is - if it wasn’t hard, everyone would be doing it and a hard thing is never done by reading a list or a book or an article about doing it. A hard thing is done by figuring out how to start.

You’ve been spending a lot of time thinking the result is what matters. You have a bright and shiny goal in mind that is distracting you with its awesomeness. It is this allure of awesomeness that is the continued reason why you keep searching around your house looking for that mischievous walking dial.

My guarantee is that what is going to make this bright and shiny thing awesome isn’t finishing. It’s all the little, unexpected details you discover trying to start. It’s all the small pieces of unexplainable execution that will not only make it yours, but also continue to teach you how you get things done. And when you’re done, you’ll discover finishing, while cathartic, is just a good reason to go start something else.

I’ve absolutely found that to be true. My basic process for preparing a new talk is as follows:

• First, I spend weeks researching and saving articles to Delicious.
• Then I live in FreeMind for a few days, building the outline of the talk.
• I then proceed to tell myself I’m ready to roll, so I  spend another week or more getting all those thoughts onto slides.
• This is followed by several nights of bad sleep as I start seeing the holes in my thinking, and struggle to find the right words/pictures/length/style/order.
• And then, suddenly and without fail, about two nights before the talk, I hit Flow. That “mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.” Things suddenly fit, I spend 10 minutes re-ordering slides and it suddenly all makes sense. From that point on, the process is an absolute joy.

Why is Flow so hard to find? Or is it meant to be hard to find, because the creative process requires struggle as its fuel?

Whatever the reason, Rands helped me relax a little bit and panic less during the beginning phases of the creative process. Because all those starts, stops, and anxiety eventually come together to collide in the ultimate high that happens when things just… flow.

I recently read two book excerpts, both about art and the creative process, that I think are extremely relevant to web design, so I wanted to share it here. The first is from the book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, and it tells the story of a ceramics teacher on his first day of instruction:

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. All those on the right would be graded solely on their works’ quality.

His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group; 50 pound of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A. At grading time, the works with the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.

The second is from Absolute Truths, where a character in Susan Howatch’s novel talks about the struggles she encounters as a sculpter:

But no matter how much the mess and distortion make you want to despair, you can’t abandon the work cause you’re chained to the bloody thing, it’s absolutely woven into your soul and you know you can never rest until you’ve brought truth out of all the distortion and beauty out of all the mess - but it’s agony, agony, agony - while simultaneously being the most wonderful and rewarding experience in the world - and that’s the creative process so few people understand.

It involves an indestructible sort of infidelity, an insane sort of hope, an indescribable sort of… well, it’s love isn’t it? There’s no other word for it… and don’t throw Mozart at me… I know he claimed his creative process was no more than a form of automatic writing, but the truth was he sweated and slaved and died young giving birth to all that music. He poured himself out and suffered.

That’s the way it is. That’s creation. You can’t create without waste and mess and sheer undiluted slog. You can’t create without pain. It’s all part of the process, it’s in the nature of things.

So in the end every major disaster, every tiny error, every wrong turning, every fragment of discarded clay, all the blood, sweat, and tears - everything has meaning. I give it meaning. I reuse, reshape, recast all that goes wrong so that in the end nothing is wasted and nothing is without significance and nothing ceases to be precious to me.

These stories are some of the best descriptions of the creative process that I’ve ever read. The next time you’re mid-design and feel like you’re stuck in the “sheer undiluted slog” that is sometimes the reality of what we do, think of this.

You’re not just theorizing about perfection - you’re doing.

Think about how you can reuse, reshape, and recast all the failed efforts.

Give it meaning by letting it lead you to the next, better solution.

Remember Plaxo? I do too, but up to now I remembered them like I remember MySpace: “That site that used to be popular for something-or-other.” But recently a bunch of people I used to work with moved to Plaxo, and they’re colleagues I respect, so I thought I’d check it out again. You know, one day. But to his credit, Preston’s incessant tweeting about how awesome Plaxo is finally got me off my procrastinating butt to sign up for the thing.

And I am impressed.

I only signed up this morning so this isn’t really a review of the service, but I did want to make a couple of points about the sign-up process and some very effective use of microcopy. UX designer Joshua Porter has written extensively about the value of good microcopy, and so have the folks at Polon. To quote from Joshua’s post:

Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size”¦judge it on its effectiveness.

Below is the first screen in the Plaxo registration flow. I’ve circled the microcopy on the form:

The copy on Date of Birth and Gender are particularly interesting, for two reasons:

1. They’re extraneous fields that you usually don’t see on sign-up forms that are optimized for maximum conversion. More fields usually equal higher drop-off, so this has the potential to be dangerous.
2. In particular, these are fields that people feel a little uneasy about from a privacy perspective. People are especially skeptical about providing Date of Birth.

Plaxo does quite a few things right with this microcopy:

1. Short messages to explain why the fields are required.
2. Plainspoken language that is easy to understand - no legal jargon.
3. The explanation is phrased as a user benefit. They want your date of birth not for some sinister reason, but so that your friends can wish you Happy Birthday. That’s good copy.

I’d love to see some data on the conversion rate of this form with and without the microcopy. Maybe Plaxo can do the user experience community a favor and run an A/B test for us? :)

I also wanted to briefly mention the second screen in the sign-up flow:

We’ve all seen these confirmation screens that tell us we need to confirm our email address. But I haven’t seen an image of what the email looks like on the confirmation screen before. In an age where users are terrified of fraud, this is another small detail that probably has a pretty significant impact on users’ comfort with the Plaxo service. Well done, guys.

But hey, it’s not all good. I spent about 10 minutes trying to set things up and I got pretty overwhelmed with all the information being thrown at me, so I took a break to write this post instead. I hope I’m the only one with that reaction…

Content strategy is starting to get its much-deserved time in the spotlight as part of the user experience design family.  As basic examples of confusing/bizarre content like this one and this one show, getting serious about content is way overdue.  But I’m a little worried that we haven’t seen much talk on how to measure the effectiveness of web content.  It is unfortunate that in some companies it is still a struggle to sell the benefits of UX design, but it is the reality, so we have to deal with it.

Selling content strategy to clients and stakeholders is, of course, not the only reason why measuring its effectiveness is important. It is also essential as part of the whole design process:

• How do we select the best content if we have a variety of different alternatives, each with its own group of supporters who want to get it on the site right away?
• Since the voice of a web site can be such an abstract, arbitrary decision sometimes, how can we apply methodologically robust research methods to help make these decisions?
• How do we know that the content we wrote made a difference on the site?

So that is what this post is about — a proposal for how to measure the effectiveness of web content.

What makes content effective?

First, I would define “effectiveness” in this context as the optimization of the following three concepts:

• Do users understand what you are trying to tell them and what action they should take to be successful in their task?
• Are you invoking the desired emotions with your content?
• Does the proposed content result in higher conversion rates than other alternatives?

It’s so important to combine the user perception data (the first two concepts) with business metrics (the third concept).  From my experience the only way for user experience designers to affect change is if we can show the positive impact these changes have on engagement/revenue metrics.

Measuring content effectiveness

My proposal is to map each of the three concepts to a research methodology that is specifically designed to get the needed information:

Each of the three methodologies can be used to measure the effectiveness of different versions of the same content before it goes live, as well as measure what difference it makes once it is live.  This is also a really nice way to progressively reduce the number of alternatives down to the best solution.

I’ve written about usability testing and A/B testing before so I’m not going to go into more detail on that, but I do want to spend a little time on Desirability testing since it’s a method I really like, and I think it’s not used enough to measure design/content effectiveness.

Desirability testing

In desirability testing, a survey is sent to a large number of users where they are asked to rate one of the proposed design/content alternatives using a semantic differential scale.  The survey is done as a between-subjects experiment, meaning each user sees only one of the proposed designs, so that they are not influenced but the other design alternatives.  The analysis then clearly shows differences in the emotional desirability of the proposed  alternatives.

So, for example, you could show one group a design and ask them how they feel about it:

And then show a different group another image and ask them the same question:

When you then compare the averages of the different groups, you’re able to make an accurate relative comparison between the two designs.

Putting it all together

In summary then, to apply all of this to measuring the effectiveness of content:

• Usability testing. Start with several different version of the content (~10), along with the current version (if it exists).  Ask users in a lab setting what they understand the content to mean, and any other thoughts they have on the way it sounds.  This should help narrow down the alternatives to 4-6 possibilities.
• Desirability testing.  Use the Desirability method in a large sample online survey as a between-subjects experimental design.  In the survey, ask users to rate the content on different brand and design attributes.  This way you can determine what emotional response the content elicits from users.  You’d also be able to ask users which version of the content they’d prefer, and why.  This method has the added benefit of large numbers to give you confidence in the statistical significance of the results.
• A/B testing.  Once you’ve narrowed the alternatives down to two or three, live A/B testing can help you determine which of the alternatives perform better from a revenue or engagement perspective, by looking at differences that can be attributed purely to content changes.  This obviously works easiest when the content is directly related to a revenue-generating task, like the call to action on a checkout page, for example.  But it’s not just about revenue — there are great ways to measure metrics of engagement with the page, which is just as powerful.

Now, I can see a few issues that make this a pretty difficult task, and it’s the reason why the above three methods should not be used in isolation.  In combination, they help tell the whole story.

• It is difficult to know what users really read on a page.  In the first two methods you pretty much have to show people what to read — that doesn’t happen when they visit your site organically with no one looking over their shoulder.  This is why A/B testing is so important as it gives you a sense of how behavior will change based on content.
• It is difficult to isolate the effect of content changes from the other influencing factors on a page.  This is the really difficult part.  How do you know that conversion/engagement improved because of the content and not of some other factor on the page, like visual design changes?  That is why it is important to keep the rest of the page exactly the same, and also why usability and desirability testing is important to bring out the perceptual data from users.
• [Update] This method doesn’t scale well. When you are doing a major redesign or re-write, you can’t do this for every single change (as Eric Reis points out in the comments of this post).  The method is mostly suited for microcopy and incremental improvements once the base content has been written.

And the biggest problem is of course that this is an idealistic approach.  Finding the resources/time/money to do this for every content change is obviously not feasible.  But for high-value landing pages, in-line help, etc. this approach could be well worth the investment.

This is also by no means the only way to measure content effectiveness, but I think it’s a good approach that balances methodological rigor with the dangers of not overdoing it.  I’d be curious if anyone has any thoughts or ideas on how to improve on this proposal.

PS. Last week I discussed this topic at the first Cape Town Content Strategy meetup.  I uploaded the slides here, and you should join the Cape Town group here.