Pattern Finder

Run an Accessible Web Site or Pay the $6 Million Penalty

A cautionary tale for companies that neglect the look, feel, and functionality of their web site. On August 28, the retailer Target agreed to pay $6 million in damages for running a web site inaccessible to the blind. 

"Contact Us" and Google Maps Squeezed onto a Business Card

I had a briefing with Michael Moppert and Santi Pierini of Day Software this week -- and besides it being a good briefing -- I received a business card from their PR rep that has two Web sites built right into it. Pretty amazing stuff.

But before I get into that, a rumination on the changing nature of business cards.  Today, business cards are a short-term information transmittal mechanism: they contain the contact information that you type into Microsoft Outlook.

However, in the past, they meant more: you stuffed them in your Rolodex. Ah, those were the days.  You zinged your Rolodex around with a satisfying flick of the wrist, put the brakes on at the appropriate time, and looked up the card that you needed. You kept the cards because they made up your contact database -- and heaven help you if someone walked off with your Rolodex.

Today, business cards are ephemeral. In my case, a business card is lucky if it lasts a day before I enter its data into Outlook and toss it into the recycle bin. That is, assuming I can read the small type (my eyes are going as I get older) and decipher what the legends T, F, M, E, and W mean (telephone, fax, mobile, e-mail, and Web site, respectively).

But when Katie Eakins of Lewis PR handed me her business card, I suddenly realized I couldn't do the normal card heave ho. Besides the usual contact info, it has a picture of her on the front. Secondly, it has a map and directions on the back, telling me how to get to the Lewis PR office in San Diego. Now those two out-of-the-ordinary additions are useful. My memory won't fade as to what Katie looks like, and if I'm in the San Diego area and need to get to the Lewis offices -- for a briefing, perhaps -- now I'm set.

Geez, a picture and a map -- wait a minute, that's like putting the (1) Contact Us page (including photographs) from the Lewis Web site and (2) Google Maps onto the business card.  Four pounds lighter than my laptop, fits in my shirt pocket, I don't have to go to either www.lewispr.com or maps.google.com, and I don't have to navigate to Katie's picture or a San Diego map.  Now that's time-saving, space-saving high tech. (Or maybe it's just an intelligent person's rethinking of what should be on a business card.)

Before you know it, someone will come up with the idea of putting a mini-bio on the back of the business card, and save me Web site reading time as well....

Webcontent.gov: A Hidden Resource

While there is a cottage industry in books and seminars on how best to design to your Web site, there's a government site that offers a lot of good advice for free: Webcontent.gov.

The home page contains the following sections:

1. Requirements & Best Practices
2. Usability & Design
3. Improving Your Website
4. Using Technology
5. Managing Content
6. Management & Governance
7. Resources & Tools
8. Getting Started

Besides these general subjects, it contains nuggets such as "Content Management Systems Used by Government Agencies" a tutorial on RSS. Check it out; I think you'll find it well worth your time.

We Just Sell Content Management, We Don't Practice It: Part 2

Since my January 10th post of the same title was such a hit (at least according to my Web logs), I thought I'd revisit this subject. To summarize: on January 10th, 50% of the content management companies I track hadn't updated their copyright notices to say "2006," even though the ability to update content at a specific date and time is a common feature of such packages. As of early January, the guilty parties were: ATG, BEA, CrownPeak, Day Software, Ektron, Interwoven, iUpload, Mediasurface, Open Text, and Stellent.

Since we're almost entering the second quarter of the year, let's see how we're doing. The answer is better -- but four are still stuck in 2005.

Blundering Through the UI

One of the results of taking a new job is you get to stumble through the corporate applications that longterm employees know backwards and forwards.  It's a bit embarassing, but it's also instructive: you get to participate in a realtime human factors study (universe of one) and find out where the system gets confusing, before you've learned its idiosyncracies.

I'll give two examples.  Last week, we had what's called an "Analysis review" of my forthcoming report. (The Analysis portion of a Burton Group report is where you editorialize about the market, trends, what to look for, etc. It precedes the Details section, which contains the supporting facts).  An Analysis review is where your colleagues go over the main points of the Analysis section with you on an hour and a half conference call, to make sure you don't have holes in your argument.

"Hmm, have you thought of this?" "I think you should talk about it this way." "One way to make that point would be to talk about this..."  You get the idea.

Windows Vista: Easier to Read

I've been futzing around with a mock-up of the Microsoft Windows Vista interface and I'm not sure I'm a big fan.  It's smoother and perhaps a bit more Apple-ish, which is a plus, but the see-through glass can get a bit much.  It's nice when you have one window open, but if you have six stacked on top of one another it just gets confusing.  Of course, since my eyes are going, maybe it's just me.

However, a really nifty piece of Microsoft Vista is the new TrueType font that the OS uses -- something called Segoe UI.  It's definitely an improvement compared to Verdana and Tahoma.  So on Windows XP I've gone in and changed the font style for things like menus and icons to use Segoe UI rather than Tahoma.  The Segoe UI typeface, in concert with Microsoft's ClearType technology (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypeInfo.mspx), makes my screen a lot easier to read.  So why wait for Vista?  Install the Segoe UI font and enjoy one of the benefits of Windows Vista before it ships.

We Just Sell Content Management, We Don't Practice It

The new year has arrived yet a whole bunch of Web sites still think it's 2005.  Let me explain.  As an analyst, I often pay attention to details, such as copyright notices on Web sites.  If a a company updates the year promptly, it signifies to me that they're careful about the small things.

So, more than a week into 2006, how are we doing?  Well, a lot of companies are still sticking with 2005 -- including a lot of Web content management companies.  You'd think at least they'd get this one right.  After all, a common feature is the ability to set triggers for Web page changes -- for example, ensuring that the press release doesn't go up before the company has briefed the analysts.

So even though they sell the feature of automated content updating, ten out of twenty Web content management companies that I track aren't using the feature -- that is, they still have 2005 copyright notices on their own Web sites.  The laggards are ATG, BEA, CrownPeak, Day Software, Ektron, Interwoven, iUpload, Mediasurface, Open Text, and Stellent.   

Shopping by Color, Time, and Location

The O'Reilly Radar blog this morning had an interesting post about Etsy.com.  It's a Web site that sells handmade goods (somewhat similar to Eziba.com, I suppose, which had a meltdown and then got bought by Overstock.com).

However, rather than just doing the normal online storefront thing (search by category, size, etc.), they've embraced the freedom of the interactive Web and come up with some fascinating ways to search the site.  For example:

• By color:  Pick one of the color dots, and it displays products in that color.
• By time:  The clock at the top of the screen runs backwards, showing which products were listed when.
• By location:  Where the sellers are from, based on a U.S. map.

Once I start looking through the site, my mind went wild with other navigation options.  For example, what about temperature?  Let's say it's 20 F out -- I'd want to see sweaters and overcoats rather than swimsuits.  I also thought about materials -- silk, wood, cotton -- but they've already done that one.

I like such sites, because they break the mental habits of buying from brick and mortar retail stores:  blouses are here, skirts are there.  Who knows?  If a store manager sees the Etsy site, maybe he or she will experiment with putting all the pink clothing together.

Site Timeliness Does Matter

I received an interesting comment back regarding my recent report, Best Practices: Online Crisis Management: 30 Top Colleges/Universities Respond to Katrina.  Morty Schapiro, the President of Williams [disclosure: I attended Williams], argued against my ding in the report against Amherst:

Two weeks after Katrina, Grinnell College and Harvey Mudd College still hadn’t acknowledged Katrina on their homepages; Amherst College did so, but rather slowly, finally putting up a press release (and eventually a Katrina page) on the afternoon of September 5th, a week after the disaster and three days after its peers.

Morty noted in an e-mail: "Amherst wasn't slow at all -- they were working extremely hard with Xavier from the very beginning."  I'm sure they were (Xavier is a college in the south that Amherst was working with to receive students from).  However, the important thing is, Amherst didn't tell anyone.  Companies -- and in this case colleges -- forget, especially in a crisis, that unless it's on the Web site, no one outside of the institution knows what's going on.

To alumni and prospective students, it just looked like Amherst was twiddling its thumbs after Katrina, especially in contrast to colleges such as Williams and others who had Katrina statements up by the Thursday or Friday before Labor Day.

So while reporters and analysts talk about the latest whizbang feature, sometimes the best value that companies can get is not to buy the latest gadget, but rather make sure that they're using what they have in a timely manner.  A simple rule, but enterprises violate it time and time again.

The Gap: Bringing Information to the User

After reading the article this morning in The New York Times about The Gap's take-down-the-Web-site experiment, I thought I'd give it a shot -- and finally got in after several tries.  (There appears to be some sort of random throttling mechanism.  At first I got a "you're one of a select few" to see this site popup; then I couldn't get in the next two times; then I got in again without the popup.)

While the Times article describes the behavior of the Web site correctly, "the mouse-overs and pop-up windows eliminated the need to bounce the shopper off her browsing path each time she needed information," it doesn't quite impart the visceral reaction that you get as a user -- that the site is bringing the information to you.  It's an interesting feeling, and quite distinctive.

While shutting the site down for several weeks to rearchitect the site may seem a bit drastic, it's clear it has some compensations -- after all, it rated an article in The New York Times, and here I am blogging about it.  Online retailers rejigger their Web sites all the time and no one talks about it.

This revamp features Gap.com-designed software, rather than commercially-available software, which The Times raised its eyebrows at.  In fact, it quotes Carrie Johnson, a Forrester analyst, who said, "All the companies that have home-grown systems are doing everything they can to ditch them."  While I think that's a correct observation in general, it doesn't apply to leading edge online companies.  Amazon.com runs almost exclusively on home grown software, and no one's raising their eyebrows on that one.

For companies with a vision and a willingness to invest, I think well-designed in-house software gives them a lead which they can't get any other way.  I remember having a conversation with Bill Bass several years back, when he ran LandsEnd.com.  He pointed out that Lands' End often had to build its own software because vendor software wasn't cutting edge enough for their tastes.  That said, Bill also would do a rolling phase out of in-house software -- when commercial software came along that duplicated something Lands' End had built several years ago, the company would yank out the homegrown stuff to decrease its maintenance burden.

In the end, I'm not sure how much more revenue this site revamp will bring The Gap.  For example, I'm more of an L.L. Bean, Lands End kinda guy.  The Gap's increased usability isn't going to make me buy clothes from www.gap.com.  Nevertheless, I think Gap customers will become more loyal.  And if Gap customers buy more items and more frequently due to the redesign, that's still not a bad gain.

ClickTracks' BidHero -- and Less Is More

I just put up my Briefing Notes (clients only; summary that everyone can read is here) for ClickTracks' new bid management software.  As I note in the Conclusions,   

Once again, ClickTracks displays the design philosophy that has distinguished it since its founding: creating a tool that makes it easy to manage the essentials of a complex problem. This is not as simple as it sounds: it means avoiding over-simplification, as well as deciding what’s crucial and what’s extraneous. It’s akin to being a superb editor -- an anomaly in the software world, which is inclined to think that running on and on with features is a good thing.

While this has been John Marshall's (the CEO's) mantra since day one, other software companies are finally starting to catch on.  In the past, fat client software got feature fat because companies (1) rarely performed human factors testing to understand if and why users got confused and (2) there was no automated feedback mechanism.  Marketing wanted more features; the developers saluted and piled them on.

However, the Web has changed that.  It's a worldwide human factors laboratory every day.  By watching user behavior via Web analytics, companies are starting to realize there's a value to making pertinent content and controls available to users -- and value in jettisoning the extraneous stuff, which only confuses users and slows them down.  Because of the Web -- and runaway hits such as the iPod -- the high tech world is finally realizing that intelligent design is a differentiator.

In a busy world overflowing with things to read and things to do, simplification and streamlining -- without dumbing down -- is a feature users yearn for.  With so many things to do, a tool that makes the job easier and less stressful is refreshing.  Happily, companies are finally figuring out what the architect Mies van der Rohe pointed out 50 years ago -- that "less is more."

The New Look on Amazon.com

Several weeks ago Amazon.com revamped its navigation, and I like it.  Rather than tab Hell at the top, there's Amazon.com, [Your Name]'s Store, See All 31 Categories -- and that's it.

Amazon used to offer a small set of tabs and then "everything else."  I always found that aggravating because the tabs I used (I'm a DVDs, Books, and Electronics person) were sometimes hidden.  So the company appeared to make my life easier but didn't.  At least with the 31 hidden tabs its clear that I get to chose, rather than be penalized for going to an upopular tab.

Besides the new tab behavior, the page is generally less cluttered.  And when you type a query into the search box, your typing appears in BIG LETTERS.  As a person aged 50+ whose sight is failing, I like that feature.

Once again, the above changes show they're always thinking at Amazon.  Now if only most other Web sites would do the same.