Steven Nash

I just spotted that Future of Web Design has been cancelled and the company responsible seems to have filed for bankruptcy. Sad but I’m not surprised.

I went there a few times and I’d considered going this year but was put off by high ticket prices. Add that to the cost of a London hotel for a few days and the fact that there are now plenty of smaller local conferences and unless you’re working for a big company you’d struggle to persuade your boss that it justified the expense.

The first few years were great and a real credit to the organisers at the time (the event was sold off a few years ago). I’d leave with at least one or two ideas that I could put into practice and generate a return on my employers investment. But something changed. The last couple of times I’d left with no new ideas to justify the cost. The speaker list became dominated by freelancers intent on building their personal brand. That’s to be expected, but the problem was the lack of quality. I didn’t see why a particular speaker was worthy of a place on the lineup when I’d looked at their work.

I grew tired of seeing presentations by UX ‘experts’ who behaved like evangelical preachers. Affecting exaggerated joy and glee when describing a nice example of interface design. And then raining down fire and brimstone on some poor bastard who designed a lift button he didn’t like in Prague.

The final straw for me was the workshop. I’d enjoyed the previous ones by Molly Holzschlag, and I remember a really good one by Aarron Walter from Mailchimp. But the last one I went to? It was run by two guys who talked a really good game but if you checked out their website you’d really scratch your head as to why on earth they were sitting up there as self-appointed experts. They relied on a gift of the gab and gimmicks to disguise a lack of anything new to say. They’d dole out sweets, and hand out random objects to ‘inspire’ people during the group work. The workshop was written the day before (it showed), but this wasn’t because they were lazy and were taking us for mugs. It was apparently because they ‘wanted the material to be as fresh as possible’– how’s that for spin?

And then the group work started. A collection of random objects were handed round to the different groups – I can’t remember exactly why, I think there was some nonsense about how they were supposed to be inspiring in some way. I just remember a young web designer in our group eagerly tapping away at a typewriter with a look of awe and glee on his face. He’d never used one before.

At that point I buggered off to the pub.

I needed a new alarm clock as the old one was a bloody ugly thing, and this fact was accentuated by being some close to my shiny Imac.  So I surfed around and found this Lexon alarm clock on madeindesign.co.uk and it arrived today.

No surprises for guessing that I wanted something that looked vaguely in-keeping with my Imac and it looks rather nice indeed.  Brushed aluminium – yum!

I woke up this morning with ‘Where I Find My Heaven‘ by the Gigolo Aunts stuck in my head, but alas didn’t have the song on my Ipod.

I quickly googled the lyrics on my lovely HTC Hero & found that the first line summed up the morning rather well – ‘Hey Monday mornin’ is only for the brave’.  Certainly bloody is, my car was hidden below lots of ice and scraping ice off my car at 7 on a pitch black, cold morning is a rude awakening from a lovely Christmas and New Years slumber.

A line in the second verse caught my eye as well: ‘And the sacred moments of sillyness are Where I find my heaven’ – reminded me of the delights of working with Vicky & @Looplah at Attraction World a few years ago.  ‘Sacred moments of sillyness’ indeed!

As soon as I got home I picked up the Gigolo Aunts album.

Email marketing is lauded as the most cost-effective online marketing channel but I’ve spent the last year working with an e-commerce site which has struggled to make email campaigns work. While PPC and natural search are delivering fantastic results (in the past 4 months the average cost per sale has halved), email marketing hasn’t been exploited properly.

The main problem is that the product area I’ve been working with (home learning courses) isn’t one which lends itself to being an impulse buy, and previous websites I’ve worked with such as AttractionTix have a variety of products at different price levels – all of which lend themselves easily to generate exciting and emotive email marketing. Product-oriented and special offer e-flyers weren’t working for us, so this week we’ve been able to try something new and have achieved some good results by selling our first add-on product – a low cost service which we thought would do very well with our existing customer base.

I set up a series of emails which were sent to different segments of our email list and the statistics have proved encouraging. 75% of the sales generated by the emails sent out this week were from existing customers, with the remaining 25% from users who had contacted the site but hadn’t bought anything.

Now the obvious answer would seem to be that ‘of course existing customers will convert better!’ – and yes assuming you have satisfied your customer, it should be fairly straightforward to maintain a good relationship with the customer. But one of the things it could suggest is that the type of language used in the email for a non-customer may need to be different compared to an existing customer. Does it need to re-enforce the USP’s of the site? Does it need to work a little bit harder to establish that trust with a non-customer? I’m not entirely sure what that difference may be but it’s certainly one I look forward to experimenting with by running some split tests on the non-customer segment using Lyris EmailList.

I’m currently planning out a comprehensive triggered-based email strategy that will take time to plan, write and a fair bit of programming to set up, but once established it should be both highly targeted and geared towards some of the ‘persuasion architecture’ ideas mentioned in Call-To-Action by Bryan Eisenberg.

Speaking of which, I am beginning to feel like my spare room has been invaded by Bryan Eisenberg, having added several of his books (including the excellent ‘Persuasive Online Copy’ which I had to track down on ebay – why is this out of print?), I’ve also picked up a book recommended by Lyris on Email Marketing with an Eisenberg-penned foreword, he must be a busy chap.

I’ll follow this blog post up at a later date and hopefully I should have some interesting statistics to share.

This week, I visited Pendeford Community Learning Centre at the suggestion from Val Smith. Val works with the Beacon Centre for the Blind in Sedgley and I spoke to him so that I could translate the theoretical and practical side of constructing accessible web sites into something more tangible; something more personal; in short – until last week I had never watched a visually impaired person use a computer.

On my journey to Pendeford I had the good fortune to meet someone who knew how to get there and found that he was involved in the class. In Val’s class it was nothing short of inspiring to see people of a range of ages learning new skills; learning how to use a computer without things that many people take for granted.

Where would most of us be without a mouse? More importantly, could you operate a computer if you turned the monitor off? Val can type at a much quicker rate than myself, his hands skating over the keyboard using shortcuts I wasn’t aware of, using the assistive technology – screen reading software JAWS to its maximum.

JAWS is very powerful, but it does have a steep learning curve with so many options and keyboard shortcuts, but when you can see someone able to use a computer better than many users without disabilities it is incredibly frustrating to know that many websites which have not been designed to assist such users, even things like putting in a link to a search facility instead of a search field can cause confusion.

I’ve just been working out what I need to do for the year ahead and most of my free time will be devoted to my Usability research at Staffordshire University, I’m currently planning which papers to write and setting deadlines.

This should be a good way of obtaining a wider view of e-commerce usability and web 2.0, as on a coding level – whilst you obtain invaluable technical knowledge and proficiency, you can lose focus on the overall picture of what makes a website work.

In day-to-day development work, individual tasks are completed, each design element is implemented but just like a football club filled with star players does not always result in a title winning team; sometimes a website can equal much less than the sum of its parts.

Sites often get the basics wrong! But because they are unattractive, unexciting jobs, which will probably go unnoticed and will not result in whoops of excitement from a Sales and Marketing team or a Director, too often not enough time is spent on things such as:

• Defining a clear navigational hierarchy and site structure
• Improving the site search algorithm to return more accurate results,
• Ensuring that the site is accessible to disabled users.

You might have a customer discussion forum, you might have customer reviews of your products, you may add flashy Web 2.0 widgets that you hope add a ‘coolness’ factor to the site. But I am suddenly reminded of a question that drummer Andy Edwards asks on a fairly regular basis… ‘Is it good?’

It is a simple question and the answer is largely a subjective one. You can produce something very simple, but it can be ‘good.’ An example I can think of off-hand is the song ‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin, great song, but the drum pattern is on the whole very very simple, but when listening to the overall song, it sounds good!

Each individual developer can get so wrapped up in finishing their individual task that nobody is taking that step back and looking at the site and asking: ‘But is it good?’

Unlike music or film, judging whether a site is ‘good’ is much less subjective and you could define your own criteria based upon what you are hoping to achieve with your site. Task-based usability testing with participants representative of your users go a long way towards measuring whether your site is ‘good.’