Alas, poor clients

How many people could say that they were happy with their implementation? Even those case studies I saw were tinged with regret at missing features or how long the process took. The conference was littered with people who’d wasted budget and wanted to share their hindsight. And these were the enlightened ones.

The industry protests too much, methinks

But while those of us in the industry can easily put errors down to naïvety, I think it’s time we took a long hard look at ourselves. How can we tell users that CMS is like complex machinery which should involve substantial training and even change management? That’s an appalling attitude to user requirements.

Don’t try to make people change… do something that can’t already be done. (Euan Semple)

When every survey shows usability as the top area of dissatisfaction with CMS, what’s preventing vendors from making a friendlier system? As Seth Gottlieb points out, they’re all as bad as each other.

Slings (and boxes) and arrows

Creating and maintaining content should be simple enough for devolved editorial teams to perform with little training. The tricky thing is creating high quality content to suit an audience’s needs. Yet few CMS will ease editors through this process or evaluate their content against style guides. We’re beginning to see a few technologies in this area, but these are just sold as add-ons to an already bloated feature set.

The play’s the thing

It seems the industry has been blind to the truth. Features are specified but never used. Vendors add functionality so that they can score highly in analyst reports and avoid being excluded from shortlists, but all they’re doing is making it more difficult for users to create a compelling web presence.
To be or not to be
WCM was once a breakthrough in enabling less technical users to publish web content relatively quickly. But has it really progressed in the last few years? I don’t think so. We just have more modules piled onto re-skinned interfaces. Can’t we have friendlier tools for delivering a content strategy? Otherwise WCM will see some other application usurp its role and seduces its client base, which would be a tragedy for the industry.

More on #fixwcm

• Jon Marks, including links to other post on the theme.
• #fixwcm tweets

More on #jboye09

• J. Boye participants
• My conference presentation — succeed fast

Let’s start by setting aside the technological issues, because these are largely irrelevant. Metadata may be stored in a database separate from a file, or in a distinct table, or marked up differently, but this isn’t the determining thing that makes it different from other data or content held in a system. It can even be an inherent part of a document. What makes metadata different is how it’s used.

Metadata is used for classification. It’s used to relate one piece of content to another and to help people and systems find relevant information. If it’s not serving that purpose then it’s not metadata.

This may lead you to the conclusion that I’m saying everything is metadata. But it’s not. Some content that is marked up as metadata isn’t really metadata at all, or is at best poor metadata. Take a look at the UK’s National DNA Database, for example. This database records ethnicity and skin colour as a way to search for people, but one person’s view of their ethnicity may not be shared by another’s. This disparity has effectively rendered this metadata set useless. The records on ethnicity and skin colour are potentially useful as content, but unreliable as metadata.

So if you’re looking to define metadata types and corresponding taxonomies for your content, you have to consider how those doing the classification will apply the metadata and how other people are going to use that classification. If it’s not useful, it’s not metadata. If it is useful, you’ll be on your way to managing your content.

Get your website out of the scullery!

Promoting your web presence isn’t about just finding some kind of SEO godmother so you can trend on Twitter or make a splash on Google. You need to have content that’s stimulating, up-to-date and relevant to your target audience. If you simply tart up your presentation and wave it under people’s noses, your website will be about as popular as the ugly sisters.

So how do you get to the ball?

1. Make your content presentable.
Cleanse, freshen, and exfoliate! Remove anything that’s unsightly or redundant, accentuate your positive features by promoting them in your navigation and ensure that your design is focussed on your users’ needs.

2. Get out and network.
Once you have a website you think people will want to visit, you’ll need some kind of vehicle for getting your website in front of them. The channels that you use will depend on your target audience, but clearly SEO, social networking profiles and non-web media are all legitimate ways of getting yourself noticed. Unlike Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage, however, there needs to be honesty in the way you promote yourself. Habitat shot themselves in the foot recently by tagging their sales tweets with keywords about the Iranian election. Similarly if people are drawn to your website because it has popular but irrelevant keyword matches, they’re not going to hang around for long.

3. Keep that glass slipper.
Once you’ve got people to visit your site and experience your well-presented content, you need something to keep them coming back. RSS feeds are an obvious way of doing this, but you need to keep publishing good content if you want the party to carry on past midnight.

There’s not much point in having a website that’s an ugly sister – in your face but unattractive – or that’s beautiful but unknown. Every little website can grow up to be a princess if you can just show off its inner beauty.

Some further reading:

• Lon Safko – The Five ‘P’s of Social Media
• Patrick Lynch – Visual Decision Making
• Rick Sloboda – Internet Users Place More Weight on Web Design

As a brief aside, did you know that Cinderella’s name comes from having her behind covered in cinders because she used to sit in the chimney to keep warm? And that her slippers were made from squirrel fur: vair in French, converted to verre (glass) by Charles Perrault to make the story more magical. Honest, guv’nor.

But how should you go about this design process? There are a bewildering array of techniques that fall under the general heading of usability.

At the most basic level, you can employ an expert. Someone with extensive experience of designing customer-focussed websites is going to be of a lot more value than a non-specialist. This is a quick way to get up and running.

To give the specialist some structure, you should provide heuristics about what you want your site to achieve. The expert can then analyse your site against these heuristics and tell you if it’s likely to meet your objectives.

This is still pretty subjective stuff, so the next step would be to develop persona: constructed character profiles which represent the kind of visitors you have on your site. You can then test your site’s objectives against these user profiles.

A more tangible way of doing this is to test the objectives against real people: recruit people from your user base and test their interaction with your site in a lab, or using a multivariate testing tool. There are many agencies which conduct this user testing, but it’s often difficult to get enough users to be truly representative sample.

Probably the most solid basis for user-centred design is to consider your website traffic analytics: click-throughs, bounce rates and page hot spots. This requires considerable investment in technology and analysis. These techniques all bring value, but with diminishing returns based on the effort and cost you need to commit.

Which one is right for you? The table below provides a very cursory guide.

All the techniques will provide you with some return on investment, but it’s only the more complex or commercially-driven content that’s likely to benefit from serious user testing or analytics.

Some further reading on usability and persona development:

• Amy Hillman – Pioneering a User Experience (UX) Process
• Steve Psomas – The Five Competencies of User Experience Design
• Daniel Ritzenthaler – Taking the Guesswork Out of Design
• Angela Quail – Beyond Fake Personas
• Andrea Wiggins – Building a Data-Backed Persona
• Jake Hird – Ten inexpensive tips to improve user experience

Of course there’s an element here of Vignette promoting its own product set — a case of gazing at navels rather than crystal balls? — but I hope Guy won’t mind if that I contradict some of his predictions. I do agree with quite a few!

1. Enterprise 2.0 takes off

The use of web 2.0-style tools (micro-blogging, RSS, tagging, etc.) as part of daily communication within a business should be a no-brainer, but many organisational cultures are way behind the curve. Early adopters are reaping the rewards of improved knowledge sharing, but the ethos of control, hierarchy and compliance hamper efforts to implement Enterprise 2.0. How do you convince people who send email attachments to half a dozen people for approval that there’s a better way of communicating if they can’t see beyond their clogged up inboxes?

One compelling case for web 2.0 tools is their use in project management: posting on project status with comments for feedback, using shared calendars and discussion boards for meetings, building networks of friends across departmental and organisational boundaries. But if you’re used to out-of-the-box services, be prepared! Implementing these kind of tools within the firewall is often considerably more complex: LDAP integration is just the first hurdle you’re likely to face.

2. Life in the cloud

So many cloud-based applications offer real benefits at seemingly ever-falling costs that the cloud appears to be the saviour of the web, particularly when recession hangs over IT budgets. But security questions remain: how sure can you be that information you want to keep in your organisation remains there? Businesses will have to become a lot more savvy about encryption methods before they start to really take advantage of what the cloud has to offer.

Nevertheless, those applications that are external to the firewall — including email — are ripe for cloud computing and I expect we’ll see many organisations taking “a punt” on these services just from a cost perspective.
3. Web 2.0 in the financial services sector

This is a banking compliance officer’s worst nightmare: anyone posting all kinds of comments to a bank’s public website. However, financial services have been the trail-blazers for web 2.0 on internal applications and I think we’ll see them pushing these applications to the public too.

The question is: what is the killer app? Social comparison sites for mortgages, savings and the like similar to Trip Advisor in the holiday industry are bound to become more prominent. But retaill banking is going to have to think long and hard about applications that they can find for online social media to gain market penetration.

4. Personalisation and the rise of ‘My Web’

Personalisation has not been the trend for web content and I see no evidence that it will become one. Personalisation has proven many times to be both costly and ineffective. The trend has been and will continue to be “our web” rather than “mine”.

Even the oft-cited Amazon example isn’t enclosing the individual in their own world: it’s making recommendations based on what other people bought who bought the same product and there’s a heavy use of communal rating functionality. I expect we’ll see more in the way of sites suggesting links other people followed (even Google is moving this way) rather than offering visitors options to configure the kind of content they want to see.

5. The future of online media is video

This is a marketeer’s dream. Unfortunately, the market is willing but not yet ready. There are significant challenges in engaging users with video based on current browsing habits. If you’re online at work, watching video is still viewed as at best anti-social and at worst as skiving. Watching at home still isn’t the experience that it should be, sat a few inches away from a small monitor displaying an even smaller video. Video on mobile devices is improving significantly however, so if mobile bandwidth prices start to fall, expect to see a rise in video clips for handheld devices. What’s more, these devices are likely to be far less effective at blocking out this content than most PC browsers.

6. The integrated brand experience

There’s is a slightly chicken and egg situation going on with multi-channel delivery. Sites won’t develop for small audience shares and those audiences won’t visit sites that don’t cater for them. I expect that we’ll see a few niche players here — probably around news and software sites for mobile devices — before we see any real obvious example (in Europe, at least) of business catering for multiple channels.

7. Social media – what next?

Social media has been about individual sites allowing lots of people to comment and contribute. The next step (we’re already seeing on many sites including BBC news) is for the site themselves to be social and provide links to resources they don’t control. I think this is a really good thing. For too long, organisations have focussed on enclosing themselves in their own “enterprise” models rather than seeing themselves as part of the web. Now they’ll begin sharing content and resources with each other more freely in order to become the “hub” that visitors come to on a regular basis. It’s best to be the daily starting point for browsing rather than the infrequent end point.
8. Semantic Web

Has the semantic web lost all meaning? It’s pushed so heavily by vendors, but how many compelling examples are there of it? Some of the technology is exciting, but let’s see a compelling business proposition for it.

Tidying up your content, organising it better and making it more search-friendly are still more effective ways of improving your website or intranet than the implementation of a semantic engine.

If the crystal ball isn’t right, what is?

I’m not disagreeing out of hand with Guy (apart from on personalisation and possibly the semantic web), but if I disbelieve his predictions, what do my own tarot cards propose?

1. There will be more opportunities to reach new audiences across multiple channels, but a correspondingly increased need to justify the costs of these new channels.

2. Intranet projects will struggle for attention. Challenges and costs associated with application integration in comparison to a cloud-based model will cause many internal implementations to be delayed. The focus will turn instead to communication beyond the firewall for market penetration and retention.

3. Websites will become social, sharing content not just from their own resources but from off-brand and off-message sites too, through the increased use of RSS.

Let’s review next year and see whether tarot is more effective than a crystal ball.

1. Identify key user types (personas)
2. Identify key tasks they need to undertake (user journeys)
3. Develop navigation to enable journeys (site maps)
4. Develop user interface that will enable users to complete journeys (wire-frames)

Main advantages of doing things this way:

• You’re not trying to fit in existing content unless it’s actually useful to your users.
• You can identify content that’s missing easily.

There are more useful IA definitions at iaonesheeters.com

To be able to tell people that FAQ content is available on your site.

Who do FAQs help?

Only the person who needs to claim that the content is on the site.

Why don’t FAQs help visitors to your site?

Because visitors to your site don’t care whether their question has been asked by anyone else or not. All they want to do is accomplish a task.

But my FAQs are representative of what all visitors are asking, so don’t they bring value?

Think of it another way. Your site is providing a user manual for your services. By providing FAQs you’re offering them that user manual without a contents page. Is that helpful?

But isn’t it helpful to provide what most people want first?

Of course, but if I don’t want the most obvious answers, I’ll give up and go to another provider: either through a competitor website or I’ll pick up the telephone and harass your call centre. That probably defeats the purpose of your website.

Why is browsing FAQs a flawed argument?

Let’s say you’re describing your arrangements for dealing with business partners. If I want to become a partner, I should follow links to Partners > Becoming our partner. Why would I trawl through a long list of questions in order to find the right one. I want a simple and obvious path to the information I need.

Why can’t visitors just search the FAQs?

They’ll probably do this if you offer no other way to the information. But the success of their searches will depend on how well and how consistently you classify the questions and on having a really good search engine that will pull out relevant information.

Isn’t it easy to manage FAQs?

It might be easy to add an FAQ, but it’s extremely difficult to manage them. You’ll need to check that similar content doesn’t already exist, just framed with a different question. You’ll need to check that you’re removing questions that are obsolete, or simply not being asked any more. And you’ll need to ensure that questions are presented in the right order according to your site visitors’ behaviour.

So is there anything good about FAQs?

Not in their standard format of unsorted lists of questions and short answers.

So what should I do?

Review what people are contacting you about over other channels. This information should probably be on your website. Does it exist already? If it exists, is it being adequately promoted? Undertake some usability studies challenging people to find the information. What do you learn about your site navigation from this? If the content is prominent, is it well-written? Are people finding the content and misunderstanding it?

Isn’t this post just stating the obvious?

Yes, but it’s amazing how many people think their website needs FAQs but they never ask themselves why.

The BBC can struggle to innovate on its website however. Since it has such a large audience and generally well-organised structure, it has become a sort of de facto standard for presentation of content-rich sites. Changing this standard makes visitors nervous. Perhaps more significantly, the corporation’s funding is significantly targeted on producing TV and radio rather than web, despite many of the corporation’s multi-platform aspirations. Innovation in the browser faces stringent public critique.

Nevertheless, there are experiments in improving web delivery. Recently, particularly for viewers in the UK, the site has seen an increase in the use of embedded video delivered via its iPlayer. There’s an obvious attempt to make the website more multimedia, but it does beg the question, will people watch video in a browser at work? People scan the news, particularly on the web. They’re a great deal less likely to sit and watch a video.

Then you have the issue of external links. The web is, after all, about a worldwide information network, so your own information becomes richer as you link to content beyond your site. The problem is that you don’t own that content, which means that it can say things that you disagree with or that might make you look less than impartial (important in the case of the BBC).

Consequently, the BBC has a disclaimer for any external links. But it does beg the question, why have they introduced inline links to Wikipedia?

Clearly Wikipedia is very Web 2.0 for the BBC marketing team, at the heart of the social web. But that brings real problems for a sites whose content is supposed to be reliable. Wikipedia is inherently unreliable, even though it is peer-reviewed in extremis. The BBC has no way of checking that the biographies supplied on the site are accurate, but it treats this as additional reference information and by doing so undermines the its own journalism.

I’m a fan of the BBC News website and I recognise that the corporation struggles to fulfil both its official remit and target new markets, but the quality of your content can be measured not just by what it says and how it is written, but by where it positions itself in the web. If you reference external sites whose authority is questionable, you undermine the value of your own content.

Visitors to BBC news are looking for accurate content. By hopping on the Wikipedia bandwagon, the BBC is undermining its users’ objectives.

Wikis, forums and other collaboration technologies provide the tools for organisations to get the most out of their staff. For public websites, ratings features, comments and social bookmarking enable authors to see which aspects of their content attract positive interest.

If your website ignores its public’s needs, or your systems deny their users the opportunity to add their feedback, they’ll just go somewhere else. If you’re lucky. Mencius also advocated the just overthrow of despots and one of my favourite Chinese stories, Outlaws of the Marsh, also known as the Water Margin very much follows this code.

So the message is clear. You can learn from your audiences and stakeholders, inside or outside your organisation. Provide them with the tools that will enable them to enhance your systems, and you will flourish with them.

In the web content management world, it is the public website that commands our exclusive attention. The only relevant question is: Is the site meeting its objectives and delivering required information and services to its visitors?

Adequate governance needs to be put in place to ensure that it is impossible to break what makes the website successful. If you allow people too much flexibility, they’ll make self-interested decisions rather than good decisions.

When a sage governs a state, he does not rely on the people to do good out of their own will. Instead, he sees to it that they are not allowed to do what is not good. If he relies on people to do good out of their own will, within the borders of the state not even ten persons can be counted on.

So, if you’ve accepted that your templates are well-designed, why would you enable people to move content around? Just give them a web-based form to enter content. It’s less glamorous for the content editor, but much more likely to produce the right effect. Similarly, provide people with enforced structures in which to classify content. This will ensure consistency and a better end-user experience. Otherwise, people will simply drop content into new website sections that they think might be more relevant, rather than those that everyone is used to getting the information from. If you decide your food is spicy, don’t give people an option to make it Mexican or Chinese or Indian. It’s spicy.

Clearly, this command-and-control approach may be difficult for some organisations to implement. But remember what Han Fei tells us: “An enlightened ruler holds up facts and discards all that is without practical value.” If your design and approach can be proven, no one in your team should be allowed to break your website by undermining these principles.

More on China and WCM to follow.