We made mistakes

In 2007, my DJ brother Gabriel asked me to build him a website. I didn’t know at the time, but it would turn out to be the best thing I ever did.

It took ages to build. I had to learn HTML, CSS and Expression Engine. Five years later Gabriel’s a full time DJ and I’m a user experience designer.

But the best thing about building your own site is the mistakes. Our biggest ones taught me unforgettable lessons about information architecture.

Names are not just about clarity

Global navigation is a great way to reinforce messages

Our first mistake was naming. He plays music that people LOVE to dance to. Not shoe gazing indie – raucous, irreverent Jamaican dancehall crossed with UK club music. What do you call the section about their shows? 

Don’t call it Events (like we did). It’s clear, but it’s dull.

Events doesn’t sound like fun party music. Events doesn’t even sound like music. Events sounds like corporate functions in conference centres with delegates drinking terrible coffee and talking about ‘getting visibility’.

What should it be called? Parties. Raves. Jams. Gigs. Dances. Shows. Anything that communicates some excitement alongside the clarity. Your global navigation is on every page so what you choose to include, and the words you use, are a huge opportunity to tell your story. Use them wisely.

Not all content is created equal

Put your most valuable content on the homepage

Our second mistake was a classic. We structured the site to match our mental model by splitting the Music section into original productions, mash-ups, remixes, refixes, mixes, live shows and radio shows. Clear. Logical. Wrong.

Why? People only care about two categories. Good music. Bad music.

Only publish the good stuff. Don’t hide it in subsections. Put the very best on your homepage so people can get at it within two seconds of arriving.

Truthfully, very few organisations have enough high quality content to justify complicated hierarchies. Much better to publish a stellar subset and leave your users wanting more. Or you risk overwhelming them with choice.

Humans beat computers (sometimes)

Some content is best left to humans to edit by hand

Our third mistake – and this one is an all time favourite pastime of mine – was getting carried away with the content model. We designed our events to have titles, venues, locations, prices, addresses, concessions, web links, booking offices, artists and plenty more. We were exceptionally proud of our design.

This pride was misplaced.

Within two minutes of entering the first event we realised we didn’t have all the right information. We made some fields optional, which broke the visual design by leaving gaps where content was previously. We hacked the code with if/else statements for millions of data combinations. And it still never worked properly.

In the end, three years later, the solution was stupidly simple.

For rapidly changing content where you can’t predict the shape of the data, just have a page that a human can edit by hand. We’re good at that.

Huge mistakes can bring huge benefits

We saved the biggest mistake until last – last year Google killed the site for being infected with malware. We hadn’t updated Expression Engine for four years and deserved what we got, so we started over. (Losing a thousand pages overnight was easier and far more effective than a content audit!).

But this isn’t about Gabriel’s site anyway. It’s not even about information architecture. It’s really about how I learned to learn from my own mistakes.

Owning up to my bad decisions was horrible at first. It made me feel like I had given bad advice and often felt easier to argue back. The turning point was a conversation where Gabriel pointed out how much it took to maintain the site and I was practically shouting in denial. He, the client, was right.

Over time, I got better at admitting mistakes and started to relish finding flaws in my own thinking. Welcoming criticism is the hardest thing I’ve ever learned to do – and I’m still working on it – but nothing has improved my work quicker.

Let me know what you think on @myddelton. Thanks to Gabriel for putting up with me, @MagsHanley for encouraging us to share IA war stories and @Mike_FTW and @slowtext for their great podcast, Let’s Make Mistakes.

Escaping the vacuum

Before 2007, I lived in a vacuum. The internet was overwhelming me.

I bookmarked interesting websites and completely forget to check them again. I read life-changing articles that disappeared into the ether. I constantly felt like something important was evaporating behind the currently-open tab.

Google Reader changed everything for me in 2007. It remade the internet at a human scale by connecting me to real life designers and developers. In six months I learned HTML/CSS, discovered Don’t Make Me Think, found Avinash Kaushik and got a job running the websites for a government agency.

Three years later the iPhone, Twitter, Reeder and Instapaper did the same thing. Just in time, because 2011 was another crazy year.

It’s play or get played

Even with the right tools it’s never easy to stay ahead of the game. Twitter, Instapaper, Google+, Reeder, Flickr, even email – they’re all out to crush you.

All over the internet, people are panicking and making big statements about unplugging. As if that’s a solution! Far better to think intelligently about your own strategies for consuming and sharing infomation. If you want to start somewhere, try listening to Kip Voytek’s amazing insights on Radio Johnny.

My advice? Police your sources. Ruthlessly unfollow, unsubscribe and unread anything you find boring. Constantly tune your setup. Remember to start from scratch in a new area every now and then.

And your desire for completeness? It’s harmful. Let it go. 

There are hidden shortcuts. Each day I link to two things that I think are amazing on Twitter, so follow @myddelton and let me know what you think.

Radiolab and other podcasts

Podcasts have the power to transform mundane tasks into enjoyable activities. Why? Because unlike books, tv, videos or websites, you can do other things at the same time as listening to them. 

Exercising, cooking, cleaning, shopping, commuting or just lying awake with jet lag are all a million times better with a good podcast between your ears. But like most things online, sorting the great from the merely good is hard. 

Want a head start? Try listening to these, my all time favourite podcasts. 

Radiolab

Few things in this world are as good as Radiolab. Seriously. It believes ‘your ears are a portal to another world’. And it’s right.

You get sucked in by the sound. After the acoustic purity of BBC Radio 4 or the earsplitting compression of commercial radio, the sonics in Radiolab are mind-bending. Original music drifts in and out. Voices are stitched together. Scratches, gurgles and vortexes appear – and silence becomes a weapon.

But the secret of Radiolab is the storytelling. It takes the deepest, weirdest, scariest subjects – death, artificial intelligence, morality, animal rights, tumours – and tells beautiful, emotional, unforgettable tales about them.

Radiolab is the DJ Shadow, the Aphex Twin, the Miles Davis, of radio.

In Our Time

In Our Time has three British academics discussing a single topic over 50 minutes. Sounds dull, but it works thanks to the wide range of topics like:

• Philosophy - David Hume, Malthusiasnism, Free Will
• Science - the Moon, the Neutrino, the Age of the Universe
• Religion - Shintoism, John Wyclif and the Lollards, Islamic Law
• History - the Siege of Tenochtitlan, Custer’s Last Stand, the Iron Age
• Artistic works - Delacroix’s Liberty, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Bhagavad Gita

Melvin Bragg’s a great host too. He never gets out of his depth when cajoling, prompting, hurrying and even correcting the academics into covering the topic. And although he can be brusque, he usually extracts a compelling story.

Which, knowing academics, is a special skill.

Seminars About Long Term Thinking

There are multiple Stewart Brands. They show up in documentaries about Ayn Rand, ecological science, NASA, cybernetics and the Whole Earth Catalog. One even came up with 'information wants to be free’. But my favourite Stewart Brand is the one who introduces the Seminars About Long Term Thinking. 

You might learn that some organisms are thousands of years old, that you can pick up any language in three months, that governments should use historians to predict the future, or that the South is falling prey to deviant globalisation.

Yes, the ideas are often a little crazy and yes, Kevin Kelly asks ridiculously long questions at the end. But conventional wisdom is rarely this thought-provoking.

The Straight Dope

Finally, when you’re not up for dealing with the big questions, you might prefer five minute answers to the little questions. Enter The Straight Dope:

• What would it be like walking around on a cube-shaped planet?
• Did firemen once use nets to rescue people from burning buildings?
• Are bananas about to become extinct?
• Whatever happened to that plan to grow square trees?
• Could I take down a T Rex with my Beretta 9mm pistol?

Funny stuff. Perfect for walking to the bus stop and learning something new.

Let me know which podcasts you love on @myddelton. Thanks to @sjors and @gabrielheatwave for the original recommendations.

The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier

For years I’ve been hostile to branding. It felt like smoke-and-mirrors, a relic from the golden age of advertising with no place in our brave new online world.

The Brand Gap changed my mind overnight. It bridges the gap between strategy (logic) and creativity (magic) and is structured around five activities – differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate, cultivate.

But the twist comes with Marty Neumeier’s (re)definition of branding:

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about
a product, service or company”
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap 

This focus on feeling makes it a call-to-arms for user experience designers.

Convince people to focus

User experience people are fond of saying that if you design for everybody, you design for no one. This question of focus is one of our key battlegrounds and, let’s face it, one where we often lose.

The Brand Gap tackles focus head on. Marty admits that focusing means giving up on potential customers. But if this lets you dominate a small category instead of trailing the leaders in a big one it’s worth it:

History has shown that it pays handsomely to be number one in your category – first, because of higher margins, and second, because the risk of commoditization is almost nonexistent.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap 

More money with less risk of fighting to the bottom on price? Sounds like a convincing business strategy to me.

Make new friends

The parallels with UX design go beyond focus and differentiation though:

• for brand research, qualitative techniques like 1:1 interviews, ethnographic research and field tests are preferred to focus groups and quantitative studies.
• branding uses prototypes – in the form of creative briefs and mockups – to quickly test and refine the gut feelings necessary for success.
• a clear visual hierarchy – or ‘natural reading order’ as it’s called here – is important in everything from packaging design to websites.
• brand people need to be natural facilitators, as creating a charismatic brand needs thousands of people to work together over a long period.

These shared techniques should make branding and user experience people natural allies – a refreshing change from the idea that marketing is the enemy.

Discover a new history

User experience designers know plenty about the history of design but rarely talk about the story of branding and advertising. Which is a shame, because advertisers were talking about designing experiences back in the 1950s.

The Brand Gap positions itself within this wider tradition. Marty Neumeier even provides a list of “rewarding and true” books at the back, saying:

The ideas in The Brand Gap are like a group of islands whose foundations extend below the surface of the page: 
What you see are only the peaks.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap 

If Positioning and Selling the Invisible are typical, learning about the history of branding will be extremely rewarding for user experience people.

Why you should read it

The Brand Gap is a perfect introduction to branding. Marty Neumeier combines ideas you already love into a story you won’t forget. Read it.

Let me know what you think about this review on @myddelton.

The hidden business of user experience design

User research often throws up problems beyond the scope of designing websites and applications. Awkward things like corporate focus, content freshness, customer service relationships and database quality problems.

All affect the user’s experience, yet addressing the business processes responsible is rarely seen as part of user experience design. Which is a shame because failing to address business issues can undo all our design work.

Redesign the organisation

My first exposure to user research was the CABE redesign in 2008. The big (unsurprising) finding was that people wanted to find content by themes like housing, health or sustainability.

It didn’t take long to design the information architecture, but three years later we still had problems with creating the content. Sections like sustainability, which had a dedicated internal team, had great content. Areas which required cross-team collaboration, like health or housing, were poor.

The lesson? It’s not enough to redesign your website - sometimes you have to redesign your organisation. CABE should have created new teams, or refined their editorial processes, to populate our shiny new information architecture.

Forget the front end (sometimes)

Another site that I worked on had serious usability issues. Frustrated at my failure to convince people of their importance, I did some user research to show the need for change.

But none of the research findings related to my usability concerns.

Instead, the real user issues touched on multiple areas of the business. Addressing them involved difficult conversations, serious data analysis, renegotiation of contracts and even culture change.

The lesson? User research throws up some issues that can’t be addressed with wireframes and prototypes. (Also, don’t do research to prove yourself right!).

Fight for better processes

You might wonder whether these issues matter to user experience designers. They sound suspiciously like things other people should be sorting out.

Maybe. But many managers aren’t digital natives, let alone advocates of user-centred design. They won’t make good strategic or operational decisions without good advice and, weird as it seems, our research is often the first time they find out what users really think. So, for now at least, it falls on us to fight for the better business processes our designs deserve.

And if we don’t? The beautiful websites and applications we design won’t work for users. No matter how good they are on paper.

Let me know what you think on @myddelton.

Concatenate rules

Normal people don’t usually thank you for teaching them Excel tricks. Unless that trick is the Concatenate function. Then they love you forever.

Concatenate joins together text from multiple cells. Let’s say you have two cells containing “Hidden” (A1) and “Gems” (B1). Here’s how to combine them:

=CONCATENATE(A1,B1)
results in “HiddenGems”

But Concatenate is a long unusual word which makes it hard to remember. So it’s good you can use an ampersand instead, just like you use plus and minus:

=A1&B1
results in “HiddenGems” as well

You can add your own characters into the formula too. Insert a friendly space (or any character string) by putting it in quotation marks:

=A1&“ ”&B1
results in “Hidden Gems”, which is much prettier

It’s difficult to explain how useful Concatenate is. I use it to build greetings from title/firstname/lastname (mailouts), construct working URLs from unique identifiers (content audits), add HTML tags to list content (CMS uploads) and export quotes to Wordle to make pretty word clouds (data visualisation).

If you liked this you should read about PureText. Let me know what you think on @myddelton and follow @wizardofexcel to supercharge your Excel skills.

Why can't I shop by meal?

Online grocery shopping in the UK is underwhelming. It’s the same old process (write a list and locate the items) with a few tweaks (favourites and search).

It doesn’t take much to imagine big improvements:

• Find a recipe online and click a link to get the ingredients
• Jump from wine review to buying a bottle (or case) in one click
• Buy a chef’s cookbook with QR codes throughout to fill your basket
• Email all the necessary supplies to that friend who loved your last meal
• Open a government PDF linked to ingredients for a week of healthy eating
• And my personal favourite - enter number of party guests, pick your party food and then watch the website spit out a mathematically-precise party hamper.

All you need is a robust system so that anyone – food blogger, publishing house, civil service mandarin, software developer – can populate a shopping basket with items via a simple weblink. The internet will do the rest.

Everyone benefits

The first supermarket to introduce a great API will reap the benefits. (An API lets websites talk to each other – in this case, any website would be able to create and fill up a basket on the supermarket’s website, ready to order).

Normal people benefit because transcribing and hunting down ingredients for recipes becomes a thing of the past. You can find a recipe on your favourite site and order the ingredients direct from the supermarket.

People using the API get income, like book reviewers do from Amazon. Food bloggers might make enough to buy white truffles. Larger sites could reduce their display advertising (yay!). Government could even get kickbacks from supermarkets through encouraging people to eat more healthily!

Supermarkets benefit most. An API drives customers from new sources, not just existing store visitors. Profitable third party apps give you great design without investment risk (think Twitter and Tweetdeck). Hundreds of niche uses open up, so the mass-market supermarket becomes a powerhouse of differentiation.

Groceries are not books…

Of course it’s not as simple as creating an Amazon for food. Grocery products are fast moving consumer goods and they come with their own challenges:

• The sheer volume of products make it hard to build good affiliate bundles.
• Products are launched and discontinued at a bewildering rate. The same product, same quantity, same manufacturer, can change from month to month.
• There are stock issues. A popular recipe exhausts a rare-but-perishable delicacy. Items like Brussels sprouts are seasonal. Stock levels are so volatile that delays between basket generation and ordering cause problems for users.

…but the hard part’s been done already

Although these are big problems, we’re talking about giants. Tesco is the fourth largest retailer in the world. And whereas Amazon has spent a decade building their stock infrastructure, the Big Four supermarkets already have it in place.

The challenges are about design, not infrastructure. A great microformat for ingredients so the API could make appropriate substitutions (make it open and the world will thank you). A beautiful front-end to help normal people put together baskets for their own links. Interaction design that deals elegantly with stock issues. Service design with real humans doing real quality checks.

The future will have a better connection between the internet and our groceries. The only question is, who’s going to get there first?

OK, I know Tesco has an API, but I’ve can’t find any examples of the uses I want to see. Let me know what I’ve missed on @myddelton. And thanks to Leisa Reichelt’s workshop in January for the inspiration…

Coasthopper service design

The Coasthopper bus in North Norfolk is a fantastic service. It proves you don’t have to be a huge corporation to do great service design. 

If you’re tired of hearing the same old service design case studies, here’s an example of a simple public service delighting its users by meeting their needs.

Frequent, cheap, on time

In Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith advises that the first step in service marketing is to “get better reality”. For a bus service like Coasthopper this means you need to be frequent, cheap and on time.

It turns out Coasthopper already has great reality.

Buses run at least twice an hour throughout the day, which is exceptional for a rural timetable. A 90 minute journey along the Norfolk coast costs less than a 10 minute hop into Bristol’s city centre. And in catching eight buses over three days, every one arrived within three minutes of its scheduled time.

Word gets around

You can’t get near North Norfolk without hearing about Coasthopper.

A huge part is the name. “Coasthopper” communicates the whole service in three syllables – it runs along the coast and you can hop on or off at any point. Word of mouth matters in service marketing, so helping users form an accurate mental model of the service in a single word is a killer tactic.

The buses look distinctive too. You only need to see the cheerful yellow and blue colour scheme once to realise what’s on offer.

But it’s more than that. We first heard about Coasthopper in the Guardian. Our King’s Lynn hotel had timetables on reception and in our room. The tourist guide had a timetable in the back. Someone at Coasthopper is doing fantastic work with the national press, local businesses and the regional tourist board to get the word out at every possible touchpoint.

Communication matters

My favourite thing about Coasthopper is the clear, friendly communication.

Timetable design is a tricky business. Coasthopper’s is clearly laid on a large square, with Monday-Saturday on one side and Sunday on the flip. It lists every time, for every bus, at every stop, but the text is large enough for the many pensioners using the service. The (difficult) decision to stick to a single linear route helps, an example of how constraining your service can reap rewards.

The writing is even better. Just compare the empty marketing drivel for First’s Bristol fares with the friendly and informative text for Coasthopper. You can’t fake it – the writer was thinking about who reads it and what they want to know.

Even the drivers are great communicators. One calls out personal introductions to “Sunny Hunny” (Hunstanton) and “Chelsea By The Sea” (Burnham Market) as you pass through. Others make polite, friendly and well-received interventions when people have music too loud or eat on the bus.

Everybody loves special treatment

But what makes Coasthopper exceptional is they clearly know their users and cater to their needs. Some examples in their own words:

• “If you are walking in a large group and you want to use Coasthopper, then please let us know at least seven days in advance, so we can do our best to make sure you’re not left behind!” (incredible service for walkers)
• “Wheelchair users have priority over all other passengers in using the dedicated space” (unambiguous inclusion of people with disabilities)
• “Dogs are welcome on board Coasthopper, and we do not charge for them” (explicit acceptance for people with pets)
• “Coasthopper Rovers come in 1, 3 and 7 day versions, so you can hop on, hop off as much as you wish” (perfect for holidaymakers without a car like me)
• “If you have any further questions, please email us or call us on 01553 776980” (real contact details at the top, not the bottom, of their FAQ page)

Coasthopper wins awards and carries over half a million passengers every year. Their service does more than take people from A to B – it gives you a reason to return to North Norfolk. Did you think a bus service could do that?

Let me know what you think about this on @myddelton. You can find out more about Coasthopper on their excellent website or, preferably, by going to the North Norfolk coast yourself. It’s beautiful…

The hidden powers of SurveyMonkey

Twice I’ve joined companies to find professional researchers laughing at my use of SurveyMonkey for user research. They assumed it was inadequate compared to their costly enterprise software.

But most surveys don’t need advanced features. When they saw how easy it was to do surveys with SurveyMonkey, the researchers never looked back.

In their honour, here’s my guide to the lesser-known features of SurveyMonkey.

Super simple data sharing

The whole point of a survey is getting responses. But enterprise tools put so many barriers between writing the survey and getting the responses that it’s easy to forget why you were asking the questions in the first place.

This just isn’t good enough.

So my top reason to use SurveyMonkey is it only takes 30 seconds to create a password-protected URL for your survey results. Now anyone can access the data without being able to modify the responses or mess up the survey itself. 

And what does quick and timely access to user data equal? UX converts.

One survey, multiple collectors

SurveyMonkey lets you create a single survey with many different URLs (‘collectors’). You might put one on your website, another in a mass email to registered users and a third on your Twitter account. 

All collectors gather responses to one place, but the trick is you can view data in aggregate or segment it by collector. This lets you easily see differences between your audiences at the same time as gathering overall data.

And that’s just the start. Segmentation lets you test your hunches (do people respond differently when incentivised?) and compare feedback over time (one set of feedback questions with a different collector for each time you speak).

Conditional logic that my mum understands

You don’t have to create many user surveys before you find that you want to ask different follow-up questions depending on previous answers. 

The classic example is the satisfaction survey – ask one thing to users that failed to complete their task (‘what prevented you doing this?’) and something else to users that were successful (‘what do you most value about our site?’).

Although this sounds simple, in practice it’s dangerously close to programming. And, ouch, debugging. But SurveyMonkey has an interface for branching surveys so straightforward that my mum can (and does) use it.

The creepy part

Finally, you can pass information into the survey via a personalised URL. 

Using something like Campaign Monitor you send personalised emails to all of your registered users, each with a survey link that contains their email address as part of the survey URL. When users complete the survey their response is logged alongside their email address. Without them doing anything.

Now you can contact users about issues raised without ever asking for an email address. Fewer fields to complete, and no input errors either. Win-win.

Just don’t claim this is an ‘anonymous’ survey…

It doesn’t do everything (but in a good way)

Of course, many great features are missing from SurveyMonkey. (Although the refusal to bloat it with features just makes me love it more).

You can’t drag and drop when designing your survey. Or allow respondents to upload their own files. Or completely retheme your survey with CSS. If you want to do those things then check out Wufoo.

You can’t get an RSS feed of responses. Or do computation and scripting. Or use strings from previous answers in subsequent questions. If this sounds fun, you should look at SurveyGizmo. 

But SurveyMonkey has been ever-present in my arsenal for the last five years, and no other tool can make that claim. It’s solid, easy, powerful, friendly, usable and cheap. If you do user surveys, you should definitely try it.

I’m not affiliated with SurveyMonkey – I just love using it. Let me know what you think on @myddelton – particularly if you know something useful I’ve missed.

Update: SurveyMonkey introduced the ability to use strings from previous answers in subsequent questions in February 2011.

My name is a geolocation

My name is Will Myddelton, but you won’t find any other Myddeltons in my family except my brother. Why? Because my mum and dad made a stand against centuries of tradition when they named us.

They felt that, women and men being equal, it wasn’t right to name me after a distant ancestor on my dad’s side. So they decided not to call me Haynes after my dad. They could have named me Welch after my mum, but this rights one wrong with another. (And my mum’s name came from her dad originally too).

Double-barrelled surnames bring their own problems. Welch-Haynes or Haynes-Welch? What happens when two people with double-barrelled surnames have their own childen? Four surnames is ridiculous, which takes you back to the problem of choosing which name is more important.

So they sidestepped the whole issue and named me after the location where I was born and grew up. I became Will Myddelton from Myddelton Square.

Frequently answered questions

We all know you can choose whatever first name you like for your child. But the surname convention is so deeply ingrained that you’re probably wondering if you’re allowed to change it.

You can call your child whatever you like, surname included.

You might ask whether having a different name from my parents makes me feel less close to them. Plenty of others have. But I feel close to my mum and dad because, well, they’re my mum and dad.

The most difficult question you can ask me is what I’ll call my own children. When I was younger I liked the idea of starting a Myddelton dynasty. Now I’m less sure. Some friends of mine changed their names when they had kids so that their whole little family started afresh with a new surname. I like that.

A New River runs through it

But the thing I love most about my name is it connects me to where I’m from.

Myddelton Square is named after Hugh Myddelton, who built the New River to bring clean water to London in the early 1600s. The New River flows from Amwell Springs near Hertford into Clerkenwell. And I’ve never lived far away.

I grew up where it terminates at the New River Head, shared a house close to its course through Clissold Park, lived near to it in Finsbury Park and now my flat in Haringey is less than 200 metres away from its sluggish flow.

Instead of making me feel alienated, my name connects me to my city.

I love a well-designed taxonomy

There are people who think that what my parents did was pointless, even stupid. The political-correctness-gone-mad brigade mostly.

I think it was an extraordinary and beautiful thing to do.

My mum and dad made a political statement about our society while hurting no one, least of all me. And my information architect side is proud that not only did they recognise how important names are, they sat down together and worked out a system that solved the design problem they faced. Perfectly.

I’ve been answering questions about this my whole life, so if there’s anything else you want to know feel free to ask me on @myddelton.