Sophie Dennis

1 month ago

#web design
#content strategy

"
Design the top level of your navigation in isolation. Base it on your top 20 tasks. Then test it with about 20 top task questions. Ask a minimum of 20 people what their first click would be based on the navigation you present them. You can do this manually using the simplest of wireframes.

Aim for a 90 percent first click success rate. Keep tweaking your navigation until you get that success rate…

Most of what you will be doing to improve success rate will involve changing words.
"

[My emphasis]

Gerry McGovern on The vital importance of the first click and how to get it right.

1 month ago

#web design
#mobile

Mobile sites: beware flaky device detection

Morrisons, the UK supermarket chain, have a mobile site. So far, so good. Unfortunately their device detection is somewhat, ahem, flaky.

Here’s what it looks like on my HTC Desire S, a recent Android phone:

Let’s leave aside for a minute that that mock phone surround is pretty cheesy. The offending image, “iphone-surround.gif”, is being applied to the <body> by the stylesheet “notmobildevice.css”. Which suggests it’s intended to be loaded only if you’re not viewing on a mobile phone. Presumably to show, should you stumble across it on a desktop, that this is a mobile-specific site.

Unfortunately my small Twitterverse sample suggests whatever device detection Morrisons are using is only treating iPhones (and iPods) as mobile. On iOS the cheesy phone is mercifully absent. But iOS is only around 18% of the mobile market. So - assuming my guess is right - 82% of mobile users are getting a desktop experience in error. This is, in essence, the flaw in relying exclusively on device detection.

What Morrisons could - should - have done is use CSS media queries to load notmobiledevice.css only at larger screen sizes. Either in conjunction with their device detection or instead of it. Media queries future-proof sites against the introduction of new devices their device detection script is unaware of. Provided the new device supports CSS media queries, which new devices almost certainly will, the site owner does not need to fret about supporting every mobile device individually.

Media queries offer a flexible, reliable, future-proof method to give different styles for different screen sizes. Used well they let your site elegantly fit to any screen size in a way that is device agnostic. As mobile devices proliferate and overtake desktop internet use, as assumptions about screen size become ever more dangerous, every site will need to use them to ensure a good browsing experience for its users. I’m not against either device detection or mobile-specific sites. Both have their place. But you want to use them alongside media queries to enhance the mobile-browsing experience, not instead of them.

(As a weird ps, I’ve realised the mobile detection is even more messed up. It was capable of redirecting me to the mobile site in the first place, but then decided I wasn’t mobile after all.)

1 month ago

#web design
#mobile

Rethinking the Mobile Web by Yiibu →

(View more presentations from Bryan Rieger on Slideshare)

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the Morrisons mobile site, here’s Bryan Rieger’s excellent presentation Rethinking the Mobile Web from 2010.

1 month ago

#web design

Is Google's clean-and-simple aesthetic dull, or classic? Mashable can't decide. →

I’m confused. The new Google Reader is “super stark, open and clean, but is it too dull?” yet the “Clean and Simple Homepage” - which could hardly be more dull - is “still a classic”. Make up your mind Mashable.

Much of this can be ascribed to users’ well documented hatred of change. As Jakob Nielsen wrote in 2009 “Users hate change [but] in the long run, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness”.

1 month ago

#web design

Simple is not a design treatment.

Simple is hard. Simple requires deep investigation, a thorough understanding of every aspect of a project, in line with the needs and expectations of the audience.
Simon Collinson, ‘Taming Complexity’, 24ways 2011

1 month ago (1 note)

#web design

Fluid Grids Are More Complicated Than That: Andy Clarke on 24ways →

When columns and elements within them change width, all too easily a visual hierarchy can be broken and along with it the relationship between element sizes and the outer window or viewport. This can happen quickly if you make just one set of fluid grid calculations and use those percentages across every screen width, from smartphones through tablets and up to large desktops.

The answer? Make several sets of fluid grids calculations, each one at a significant window or device width breakpoint.

I hit this issue on a recent project. The fully fluid layout lost its balance as the elements compressed at smaller screen widths. It became clear that multiple design adaptations were going to be needed, each optimised for a different viewport range. The project budget didn’t allow time to craft those multiple design options. I compromised by setting a min- and max-width within which the base grid worked well, sacrificing full responsiveness. Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to revisit it in the New Year and may try taking the adaptive grid approach Andy Clarke discusses here.

7 months ago

#web design

Coming Soon…

9 months ago (1 note)

#web design

Beware web designers bearing solutions

The Law of the Instrument can be seen in every web discussion forum, on sites such as Forrst and on Twitter. Ask for a CMS, blog or framework recommendation and you’ll see people immediately leap in to declare their hammer the best, without any knowledge of the requirements at hand – sometimes even when the requirements really rule out that tool from the outset
Rachel Andrew | ‘If all you have is a hammer…’

You cannot recommend a solution until you’ve identified the problem. Yet the web is awash with people pushing their favourite one-size-fits-all answers to whatever question is posed, whether a particular CMS, a certain programming language, or the latest social media cure-all. They are focused on a solution: one which works for them, one in which they are competent. Their own personal comfort zone, recommended as much for their own benefit as anyone else’s. But Twitter is not a marketing strategy, nor WordPress the only answer to web publishing.

I’m much more interested in problems, burrowing down into what’s really holding a business or organisation back and seeking out those golden nuggets, the smart ideas which are the real solutions to people’s complex, real-world problems. When someone asks for a recommendation, your first answer should be a question: what are you trying to do, what is the problem you are having, tell me more…

9 months ago

Two wise words on growth, making money, and funding startups

37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson on his distaste for the “swing for the fences”, go bust or have lavish success, approach

I’d rather just have nice, steady, predictable growth. I believe in the beauty of compound interest. We might not be growing 2000%, but if we can just keep our nice, solid growth for a couple of years, that’ll compound to have quite an impact.
David Heinemeier Hansson, ‘The problem with the tech world’s “swing for the fences” approach’ | 37signals

and DHH’s business partner, Jason Fried, on Making Money

There’s a fundamental difference between a bootstrapped business and a funded business. It’s all about which side of the money you’re on. From Day One, a bootstrapped business has no choice but to make money. There’s no cushion in the bank and not much in the pockets. It’s make money or go home. To a bootstrapped business, money is air.

On the other hand, from Day One, a funded business is all about spending money. There’s a pile in the bank, and it’s not there to collect interest. Your investors want you to hire, invest, and buy. There’s less—and in some cases, no—pressure to make money. While that sounds comforting, I think it ultimately hurts…

Anyone can spend money. Making it is the hard part.
Jason Fried, ‘How to Get Good at Making Money’ | Inc.com

9 months ago

#web design

Mike Reed, on judging D&AD 2011 →

‘I wish I’d written this one.’ That’s what you listen for, of course: the ultimate creative’s compliment. That potent mixture of delight and envy – and the undercurrent of anxiety that, presented with the same brief, one wouldn’t have come up with anything like as powerful a solution. (Or perhaps that’s just me.)

10 months ago (2 notes)

#web design

Designers fail 95% of the time

All designers fail 95% of the time. This is true for all creative work. And it is unusual in the professional world. The process by which we create is failure centric.

LukeW | An Event Apart: Why Designers Fail

We were talking just last night about design critique and feedback, and how easily it becomes a fraught experience for both parties. If can be just as difficult for the client to talk about what they don’t like, as it is for the designer to hear it.

If both parties accept that, 95% of the time, any design isn’t going to be “right” yet, and treat that as a perfectly normal and natural state of things, those conversations become a lot easier. Because just cos it isn’t right yet, doesn’t mean it won’t be right when we’re finished. The design process is all about spotting what isn’t right and working out how to fix it; refining, improving, polishing and adjusting until it’s all just so.

10 months ago

#web
#web design

Client services: it’s not you, it’s them

I find it’s really easy to get into the self-blame game sometimes. The thinking goes that if only you were somehow better, bigger, higher profile, working for larger clients, working for better clients etc… etc… the problems you face as a client services business would all be fixed.

So it’s great to read articles like the latest interview with Jim Coudal on the 37 Signals blog, ‘Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Coudal’, on why he gave up first his job as creative director of a major Chicago ad agency, and then the struggle to turn his own company, Coudal Partners, into the kind of high-profile client-services agency that would “bill $20 million and win some Addy Awards”:

“I had to feed the beast. If you start adding people, then you gotta bring in more work and sometimes you gotta bring in work that you’re not particularly fond of in order to make the payroll to pay the more people that you’re hiring to do the work that you’re not particularly fond of.”

I’ve said almost the exact same thing many times, to many people, about our decision to break all the business rules anyone had ever preached at us and stop trying to grow as an agency. Still I would be lying if I said I didn’t have occasional moments of nagging self-doubt that that decision wasn’t based on some personal deficiency somewhere. That if only we had been, in some indefinable way, better, the problems wouldn’t have existed. It’s reassuring to hear someone as successful as Jim Coudal give the ‘been there, tried that’ answer: no.

I had a similar moment watching, of all things, the Channel 4 series “Can Heston Save Little Chef?”. The Little Chef chain of roadside restaurants hired Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal of culinary wizardry fame to overhaul their restaurants and menu. It didn’t matter that he was a high-profile, multiply decorated, widely-recognised master of his field. The clients still wouldn’t listen.

It’s always good to be reminded. It’s not you, it’s them.

1 year ago

#twitter
#web design

Twitter and Short URLs: possibilities for a better way

Jacob Gube aka @sixrevisions graciously illuminated yesterday’s Twitter search mystery:

@sophiedennis Maybe because URL of the article has /content-strategy/ on it and it got retweeted a lot this weekend.

(source: http://twitter.com/#!/sixrevisions/status/28726280802)

I didn’t spot this because the full URL was not visible in the search results. All the tweets use a “short URL” from one of the major URL shorteners instead of the full article link.

So that’s the mystery of the ‘irrelevant’ search results solved. They did match my search term. But only Twitter knew that.

Twitter knew? Now, that is interesting…

The interesting part of this (for a given, geek value of “interesting”) is it shows the Twitter engine tracks the full, expanded URL for shortlinks. And not just from its own native T.co service. Just on this screenshot alone we’ve got TinyURL, Ow.ly, Is.Gd and Bit.ly in addition to T.co links.

This ought to create opportunities for improving both security, and how shortlinks are shown to us, the end-users and readers.

Twitter likes to plug the safety advantages of T.co. With T.co, they tell us, Twitter can easily check the actual destination page for malware, scams and other ‘net nasties and warn you accordingly. If it’s search results are anything to go by these security features should, in theory, extend to malicious content lurking behind shortlinks from any of the major shorteners.

More interesting, though, are the user-interface possibilities. Right now there no way as a Twitter reader to see the full destination URL without clicking on the shortened link. This is a shame. We click on these links largely blind. There are some services - including from the shorteners themselves - which will preview links for you. But it involves moving away from Twitter to another tool. That’s a whole bundle of extra effort most of us won’t bother with.

“New” Twitter already uses the expanded right-hand pane to show additional information about individual tweets: who’s re-tweeted, the context of the conversation and so on. I’d love to see Twitter add full destination URLs here as part of this extra information. This would be a great tool for readers. It would protect us not just from real hard malware, but the whole specturm of undesirable content right the way down to just avoiding wasting clicks on links you’ve already visited.

More about Twitter’s URL shortening (from Twitter.com):

1 year ago

#twitter
#web design
#content strategy

View high resolution

These are the results for a saved search ‘#contentstrategy OR “content strategy”’.

So why am I seeing tweets which contain neither phrase?

The irrelevant tweets are all on the same topic and all link to a blog post from @sixrevisions entitled “SEO for Bing vs Google”.

Testing shows the same tweets appear on any search for “content strategy”. But this is an article on SEO, not content strategy. “Content strategy” barely appears on the page - although the post has been posted in the Six Revision’s website’s “content strategy” category.

Am I seeing Twitter serving sponsored search results? Has Six Revisions paid to have tweets naming their article listed for content strategy searches? Or is Twitter applying some clever “people who searched for {keyword} also looked at…” algorithm, blindly assuming that if I am interested in content strategy I am also interested in SEO? (which I might be, but am perfectly capable of searching for separately).

Either way I feel I’m being spammed. And that’s never a good user experience to deliver.

1 year ago

#web design
#content strategy

Brand Narrative: Every Company is a (Bad) Media Company

Companies have always created media in the form, usually, of advertising as well as corporate literature, brochures and websites. The difference now is that companies, more and more of them, are creating their own media themselves, without specialized help or resources… Instead of hiring smart, experienced specialists to tell their stories, they are relying on pretty much anyone within the organization who knows how to Tweet… Every company is a media company. Unfortunately, when it comes to creating their own media, most are doing a bad job.

I often meet clients who wouldn’t dream of laying-up their annual report in-house, but who are firmly wedded to the DIY principal when it comes to websites and social media. Content creation and publishing falls to in-house personnel who may have little or no editorial or marketing expertise. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Even in the brave new social media age when anyone and everyone can create and publish content online - often for free - it still makes sense to pay for professional help.

(Source: blog.brandnarrative.com)