Eat Your EDU Dog Food

From a digital prospective it seems that lots of digital adaptation within universities stops at a check mark.

"Online registration system? Check"

"Course catalog available online? Check"

This list goes on a while and then someone says, "Whew, glad that's done"

Eight years later the exact system remains. It is cared for and curated by the Office of Perpetual Status Quo and the Chief Already Satisfied Officer.

Sound familiar? 10 years ago some of these systems were cutting edge and extremely complex to install. Today? None of it is responsive. Systems are separate that should be integrated. Wordpress has more native function.

Senior university officers should be required to enroll in their own university every year. They should be required to go through admissions, select housing, apply for financial aid, schedule their orientation and advising appointments, make course selections and order books.

One should do all of this on a desktop, one on a tablet and one on a phone - a 3G phone. Why? Not to embarrass or challenge their internal systems, but to see what their customers experience.

Ever watch "Undercover Boss"? The CEO goes undercover as an employee to see how the company really works. Every episode the boss is shocked, stunned and amazed at how poorly some boardroom decisions work in practice. Change is mandated because it is required.

As for the fallout, Pres. Harry Truman was asked nicknamed "give 'em hell, Harry". To this he famously said, "I don't give them hell, I just tell them the truth and they think it's hell." This doesn't have to be IT vs Admissions vs Community Relations. This is simply time marches on. Things change. Customers become more sophisticated.

If you are a university administrator, on behalf of your customers, I implore you, eat your dog food.

Vacation Time

Beach. Drinks. Fun. Yes, you are jealous.

Then came Wendy, a person we met and spent time with. Fun, casual conversation and then it happened, "Pat, what do you do for a living?".

"I help build websites and other digital things".

Honesty is so stupid. I should have said I was a stuntman, I always wanted to be a stuntman.

Turns out, she is working with web people on her website.

"They're so stupid, they haven't done anything that I like..."

She looks at me like I have answers.

Long pause. Staring. I gave in.

"What, they're not listening to you? Not follwing directions? What's your goal?"

"Oh, I told them they're the experts, just make something that I like and everything they show me is just not me... doesn't 'look' like me or my business."

"So you told them what you didn't like?"

"No, I just told them to do something else"

Sounds familiar, right? Clients can be like this. Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of what her business is, where it is or who she hired to work on this project. But I know what they're doing wrong.

They are letting her get away with moving the goal posts. There hasn't been a conversation about goals so how do you (design team) have anything to inform your work? You don't.

They've let her get away with "I just don't like how it looks" without blocking the door and grilling her, not about the color or placement, but about the function. We can argue all day about preference in design, but if there is a goal and we create components that support that goal, we're in a defensible position.

If the conversation is allowed to stay on "I said blue, but I meant a different blue", what hope is there? Sure, maybe its a quick buck, but I'm second generation independent contractor and I promise you one thing: Bad projects leave a stink on you. And (okay, two things), the second project is always the one you want. That's where the money is.

So the world seems destined for one more mediocre website. The sun will come up tomorrow. But if you work for a client that tries to "just let you be creative..." either duct-tape 'em to the chair and grill them for concrete goals, or walk away.

Life's too short to just chase dollars.

It all matters

Interesting day at work. Sitting quietly, well, listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan, so I was entirely quiet. An email comes in with the the red-exclamation-point-of-doom.

"Why do we have an app for ___, but not for ___?"

Why?

Why.

Because we never thought about our universe.

Because we didn't build the one, so we can't be responsible for not building the other.

But what about all the other ____'s that exist, but don't have an _____ to compliment them? What about the guests who come to us via _____ but all our work is built for _____ instead.

Hmm. And what about the hand-off between the homepage and _______. What do the user's expect to see when they get to that page?

Well this sucks. We spend all this time building great _____s and they don't work because [ someone else, ANYONE ELSE ] didn't complete the thought. What would the customer expect? What would they need once they click that link? Will my site generate enough positive business results to maintain my employment?

All good questions.

Here's the upshot of today, boys and girls. It is not an inconvenience to work on two sites that make up one customer experience.

It is not intrusive or "a power grab" to talk to other groups about where they pick up the customer experience. It is not "their job" to be concerned with the customer's experience. The customer does not perceive "we" or "they" - to the user, it's just us.

So look at your blind alley's and dead-ends. Admit that your link should take them to an interior page rather than a landing page. Confess that your menu system is repetitive and pare it down. Did you know that when faced with too many choices (especially when user is unsure what they are seeking), the most common choice is to exit. True. Ask Susan Weinshenk. It's in her book, "Neuro Web".

Large organizations have large digital footprints. It's easy to put up walls and defend your castle and ignore everything outside your castle walls. It's easy, but it is very, very stupid. No customer in the world has ever said, "the _____ section was great, but when I clicked in to the _____'s area it all went to crap."

They just say "that site stinks".

Fix it.

Well, I could be wrong. Maybe.

I have one "go to" example of the worst site user interface ever. I've shared it, shown it, laughed at it and cursed it's existence. I've used words and phrases like "worst thing ever", "insulting", "abomination" and others to describe it.

It is to UI what Larry the Cable Guys is to Opera.

I'm no tease. There's a screenshot coming. So, it has no introduction, no orientation for the reader, nothing. Just circles and lines and boxes and abbreviations. Get the dramamine. It's just link after link to pdf's of text.

Click it. I dare you. You couldn't stop yourself, could you? The ultimate attraction at the world wide freak show web. Did I lie? Did it disappoint? Did you look? Look again. It gets worse, like one of those mosaics in the newspaper, the longer you stare the more it morphs and new images appear.

So recently I was with a group of engineering students. They were talking about horrible websites. I said, "I have the worst site in the world and it's from YOUR university!"

I felt like Perry Mason about to turn the accuser into the accused. Deer in the headlights.

The site loaded, I spun my laptop dramatically around, I saw their eyes trying to follow it. They leaned in with great expectation. They collectively fixed their gaze upon the monster.

"Oh", the only sound. Quick glances shot back and forth between them. A palpable sense of discomfort took the room over.

"That's my favorite site here. It is so clear and easy to understand."

"... no, look at it. See? It's horrible." I said, stating the obvious.

"No, I love that site".

Maybe the sky isn't blue.

Another student glanced at me, making eye contact for a fraction of a second, "Yeah, I like it too. It's how we're taught."

The moon is made of cheese. The earth is flat. Prius driver's aren't pretentious. Obamacare is the answer.

I just don't know anything.

"what the hell..." is all I could mumble. "how... I mean... it's got the... "

Momentarily I panicked. I have to stop using this as an example of the worst of the worst. It's not the worst. It's the best. Dizzy. Can't breathe.

But then, like someone removing kryptonite from the room, my powers began to return. A fresh breeze seemed to restore my senses. I could see again! Hallelujah, I could see!

These are engineering students. They have been taught to be engineers. They have studied and learned to speak engineering. They have spent hours, years, untold thousands of dollars to learn this visual form of engineering communication.

This page does suck! It is horrible! It is wrong in every way and for every reason because this page is not designed or intended for engineering students. It's designed for prospective students and their parents!

We cannot assume, and there is no reason to believe, that these prospective students, or their families, have any engineering training. They don't possess an understanding of schematics. They aren't versed in any of the hundreds of abbreviations and acronyms thrown about on this site the way a monkey throws his own crap!

Hooray, it's wrong! I'm right.

Whatever you build, whatever you create, make sure it is built and created FOR the intended audience. Not what the intended audience will be or what they will know, but what they are and what they know when they are on your site.

Do that and you can teach them whatever you want.

Don't do that and you'll never have the chance to teach them anything.

Active Shooter. Worst Day Ever.

I have no idea how to start this except to say my mind is a jumble. First, the human side. The victim is my son's age. The shooter just a couple years older. I have a parental compassion for both families. I can't begin to imagine the long journey from their homes yesterday to the institutions that require their immediate attention today - a funeral home and a courthouse. Prayers to all, their loss' are incalculable.

Answers or solace or understanding are just vapors, quickly glimpsed in the mind's eye then gone just as quickly. No one has an answer. And that is the very real hell of it. 

I'm going to talk shop now. Not callous or dismissive of the human factor, but I can actually see paths and actions that are important. Every public safety officer and administrator I've heard speak praised communication as one thing that went right. 

Where the shooting occurred is in a very student-heavy section on one boundary of campus. Panic would have driven thousands of people into pinch-points and "blind alleys" that could have been dangerous in their own right. So what went right? Social media. 

Facebook - hey, it's where moms and dads are now - did about 175,000 total reach under an hour. Only two official posts in that time. Mostly expressions of support, prayers, well-wishes. Very few inappropriate or odd posts. What were the outliers? Someone wanted to know the nationality of the victim - I believe this was a foreign national seeking reassurance that their friend or countryman was safe.

A few people commented on bad links on the homepage. The homepage is where I want to talk with you now. There were issues where none should have been. We talked about a plan, we went through the steps of our plan. There were mis-steps.

First, make your emergency web (your "active shooter" scenario) a one-click from anywhere solution. Don't pin it to having someone in a certain spot in a certain building. We kind of did this and it slowed us down. You should have an emergency page so simple and available that it can be customized and called from a mobile device. Dirt simple, no design. This is a facts-save-lives scenario. To hell with bells and whistles.

Second, your server is going to get pounded in a way it never has. Ever. The damn things start rocking back and forth, smoke spewing from the fans, there is so much traffic. The hand-off between your daily production server and your emergency message server needs to be rehearsed and tested again and again. 

The alert went into the regular "News" cue.
Should have become the entire homepage.

For reasons I don't yet understand (not a server or bandwidth guy), we put the emergency update on our homepage but it was many, many minutes (20? 30? more?) until it was loading as the homepage - which is what we needed to have happen. Immediately.

The information was on the homepage before the emergency page loaded, but it was buried in the bottom of the page under the "news" ticker (right). Active shooters and other disasters do not go in the text rows on the bottom of a homepage. 

People from my group, the server team and public safety will meet in the coming days and assess performance. This will be the most significant thing my group has to address. And we will do better. And we want you to do better. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

Analytics show over one-million pageviews for the 24 hour period. The event didn't occur until after 12 hours had already passed. These were mom's and dad's trying to figure out what was happening. News media trying to get the right information. Students and staff trying to ensure they are doing the things that the public safety officials want them to do. These people need immediate information. 

The homepage became the newsfeed

Dribs and drabs is fine. But it needs to be accessible. Schedule a meeting with your server staff today and talk this out. It's going to be worse than you think. Prepare for it. No excuses now.

I haven't even begun to scope the twitter traffic. On #purdue, it was moving faster than I recall seeing traffic fly when Steve Jobs passed away. Probably not that sustained, but it was simply a blurry column in continuous motion on tweetdeck. It was mostly user-generated, some public safety and a few "official" university tweets.

The twitter waters were running deep and fast. As the day went on and the pace changed twitter became a great platform for the news conference coverage, the coordination of a vigil and a place to talk about support services available on campus.

Third, have your graphics ready. Our facebook page at the beginning of the day had a bright "Winter Wonderland" banner. Nice, but not appropriate. Since you don't know what the event or tragedy will be  until it happens, you need to have generic, university-branded drab banners ready to go. Not a big thing, but all part of responding appropriately.

What else can I tell you? Hmm. You will be more distracted than you think. You will consider friends around campus and wonder about their safety. You will be voyeuristic, trying to find pics, or quotes that help orient you. I'm about 4 blocks from yesterday's shooting. I had friends in the building next to it sending me pics so I could comprehend the scale of the police response.

You will contact your family. Family and friends will contact you. My phone, email, twitter and FB were all busy all day. These people are important. Most of them understood when I said, "So glad you called, I am fine. It is very busy here right now but I appreciate your call and I'm looking forward to talking with you very soon. Bye".

Your office mates will want to talk. Babble in some cases. There will be political, moral and legislative debates. I saw people getting red-faced yesterday in, what should have been, quiet conversations to simply share views and emotions.

Our job now is to navigate back to normal. We will dance nervously when we take the vigil banner off Facebook and go to our next seasonal banner. What do we put on the homepage and how long does it last? It's a conversation. It will be listening and talking via our social media. It will be listening to advising and student affairs and administration.

Work is the easy part. Understanding what has happened, considering the human condition that lead a student to such a state of desperation that murder was the only avenue he saw- 

i have no idea.

42. My new favorite number.

So this is me happy. My team has scored a really big win. We delivered a 42% increase in a key customer demographic. Forty-fricken-two-percent. It feels good no matter how many times I say it. 42%.

So why is this project different? Why did it yield great results? The client was smart enough to let the team do great things. The color, the design, the grammar - none of these things hit the mark with the client. But these things all connected with the audience.

Smart client. Had to argue with "higher ups". Had to argue against the norms and in favor of success.

The copy writer interviewed audience demographics. The photographer took time to get to know the audience models featured. The designer dug deep into their mindset. Content strategist took away clutter. Project managers documented practices and ideas.

We worked as a team. The site launched, decent numbers, but we met right away and went through the numbers live in google analytics. We did a pre-mortem (thanks Guy Kawasaki) and found small things that, if ignored, would be the fails. And we all worked together to resolve and re-test.

Contrast this to clients who don't like this color, or that line or - we've all had someone ask us to make the logo bigger.

My job now is to exploit this win (along with a couple other recent projects). If I don't pull and present meaningful metrics then it is my fault the next time a client shouts me down. If our group doesn't take the time to meet and talk about high's and low's in retrospect - and then tie those experiences to data, then we are the blind squirrel that found a nut.

See, winning doesn't happen when you get lucky. Winning (and I mean on the client's behalf, because if they don't succeed, neither do we) happens before the project. It is knowing and understanding what works and what doesn't.

Winning is practicing pitching in your car on the way home. It's conversations with peers. It's finding geniuses (thanks Halvorson and McGrane for always answering) who are big enough to share knowledge. It's listening to clients complain about their project that fell short - listen to that more intently than any praise you receive. Mistakes are the easiest way to learn because they are always nearby.

In short, today was good. Tomorrow shows promise, but only if we examine, obsess and discuss each component of every success and every failure. And everyone should read Weinshenk's "Neuro Web", it's fun and informative.