FatDux

Stepan at the WebTop 100 conference

On 25th of Novemeber I have visited the conference WebTop100 and here is some notes and interesting quotes I have heard:

First presentation was given by Jiri Suchy, the man who stands behind the redesign of O2 web pages. Link

• His team tends to speak to the stakeholders and collect expectations not requirements, because expectations do not necessarily have to be implemented.
• When redesigning in the corporation one good solution is sometimes forced on behalf of another good solution.
• Give the job to good and motivated people. Give them the authority and trust that they will do a good job.
• Programmers should not design UX but need to know the reasons behind particular decisions.
• It is not possible to satisfy 100% of the users, stakeholders and your ego.

Second presentation was by Petr Štědrý from Dobrý Web. Him and his team has redesigned a web of Sencor in just 14 days.

• Petr believes, that the problems in design needs to be communicated visually and that everybody can draw sufficiently to be able to participate on the "discussion".
• They have started the project by the design workshop, where all the stakeholders did 3 round of drawing of their vision.

Next in line was Daniel Frouz, the owner of InetPrint, company providing not just promo materials and prints. He spoke about the redesign of their extensive portal/eshop, where they have reached some remarkable improvements in conversion rate.

• Recomendation: leave enough time for the usability testing. Which should come as soon as possible in the design phase. During the implementation it is too late.
• They started the project by setting the main goals and did a brainstorming using the mind maps.
• When cooperating with external agencies, it is important to communicate extensively.
• Various visual designs have to be done by multiple visual designers.
• They decide to provide the prices on the web, but they plan on blocking suspicious request from their competition.

I did not make much notes from the presentation of Jiří Chromát from Seznam.cz. Not that it was not interesting, but because I do not know much about czech Pay Per Click and their system sClick.

The next presentation was given by Petra Brodílková from Google. The only woman on the agenda (as she has presented herself). She has revealed some nice features for the online marketers, to be used in the very near future.

• Remarketing - you will be able to identify the visitors of your web pages, for whom your specified adds will be display when they browse the web. How cool is that!
• She has introduced a google optimizer. A tool which automatically creates the online marketing campaigns and while it runs the campaigns, it learns itself and optimizes along the way.
• She has mentioned an application Our Mobile Planet, which shows statistics of mobile usages. For some it might be a well known thing, but for me it was a cool new application.
• Then she has advertised the AdMob. A system for online advertisement on mobile phones. In the Czech Republic it has 1.7M users and over 100M impressions.
• Petra also spoke of the TrueView, a system which allows you to post video ads before the Youtube videos. I personally find those ads annoying and skip them, but important thing is, that the advertiser only pays, if the viewer sees the whole clip!

The next presenter came late, so after 5 minutes of waiting I left for a coffee and got sucked into the discussion with Jiří Suchý and Ondřej Kratochvíl about what it is like to be a UX designer in the big corporation.

The next presentation was by Ondřej Kratochvíl, about the critical state of the UX in the Czech Republic. From my point of view this was the best speech - bold and critical.

• From Ondrej's perspective thee is 3 main problems when it come to czech web pages: Trying to be different no matter what, Putting everything into the menu, Not explaining clearly what is the company about.
• It is important to deal with UX as a whole, not just the usability testing.
• It is important to deal with UX across the all channels, not just web.
• It is important to communicate with external agencies.
• UX can not be measured, and therefore it attract lots of incapable people.
• The most important marker is the "customer satisfaction" (even more important then sales)
• Constant patching is often so expensive, that it is better and more effective to do a complete re-design.

For the next presentation of Martin Kalda from Mather, my attention has been weakening, so even when the presentations were interesting I just could not keep my full concentration:

• Designers use the filler texts "loren ipsum", which they later replace. However they also use the filler images from the databases, which the don't! And so we have the webs full of annoying young professionals shaking hands.
• We do the webs for the companies, not for the CEOs.
• By default, companies should have the brand manual and use it!

Michal Špaček from Skype has complaint about the security of the webs. One of the sites he found so offensive, that he decided to punish the owners by hacking it (live). Unlike everyone else, I did not find this so amusing. I was thinking about the owners of the page who will have to spent their money to fix this and everyone else who has to spend our money to protect agains hackers like Michal.

At the end Jan Havel from Actum had an interesting presentation, not just visually, about our fears and phobias when it comes to designing webs.

• What stops us from doing things properly is the fear.
• Clients do not improve the agency by micromanaging it. Give them the trust and authority.
• Agencies fight the micromanagement using the method of ugly green stain. They place something horrible on the design, for the client to complain about it, winning this battle and not complaining about anything else.
• Every self-respecting agency is counting the time and charges for extra work.
• If we make a bad decision, but quickly, it can be fixed. However, if we hesitate with the decision nothing is done and nothing can be fixed.
• It is important to see where the money is.

Vestas - "We don't need no stinkin' social media"

Investors have totally lost confidence in the leadership of the Danish windmill giant, Vestas. Earlier this week, on October 31, 2011, their stock plummeted almost 25% - the most recent, most dramatic swing in a roller-coaster ride that started in 2008.

This most recent disaster was triggered by a discreet announcement late Sunday evening that a German turbine factory, owned by Vestas, couldn’t deliver on time, which was going to severely reduce earnings for the year.

I’ve been monitoring Vestas for over a year, not as an investor, but because I am fascinated by how poorly this company handles social media. Let me be blunt: Vestas just doesn’t get it - and it has cost them millions.

A story about “Black Tuesday”
On the morning of October 26, 2010, I read the headline on the Danish business newspaper, Børsen, that Vestas was going to fire 3000 employees. At 9:45, someone told me that Vestas’ CEO, Ditlev Engel was holding a press conference at 10:00. Around 10:15, another colleague told me that a Danish windmill company was declaring bankruptcy and that there would be a statement at 11:00.

About 10:20, as Engel rambled on to the press corps (streamed live on the internet), the first remarks started to appear on Twitter: “So when is he going to tell us the company has gone bust?” Actually, another, smaller windmill company, Skycon, had gone into receivership. Although this news had been announced earlier that morning, the particulars were overshadowed by the happenings at Vestas. No interesting statements were made at 11:00.

However, looking at Vestas’ stock price that morning, there was a curious, minute-by-minute correlation between the tweets and the stock. About 10:20, when the stock was falling, but not yet in free-fall, the first social media messages appeared. And during the next 15 minutes, Vestas lost almost DKK 20 million in stock capitalization. After 11:00, when it was clear from the news updates that Skycon, not Vestas, had gone broke, Vestas stock rallied briefly. But only briefly; the company lost a bundle that day - the company’s communication punctuated by occasional tweets providing a link to the online video of Engel’s press conference.

Coincidentally, a senior VP at Vestas told me later that day that the company had a community manager responsible for their social media. But what does this person actually do? For the next 26 hours, there wasn’t a single tweet - during which time Vestas lost over 10% of its total market capitalization.

Late in the evening of October 27, 2010, Vestas finally posted a tweet. Too little, too late.

Could social media help?
If you had looked at social-media activity related to Vestas on October 26-27, 2010, it was clear that people - including Bloomberg - were looking for some kind of useful communication. But there was none.

On October 27, 2010, Vestas had roughly 450 followers. A couple of days ago, Vestas stock again plummeted, this time by almost 25%. They now have 3,600 followers on Twitter. But did Vestas tweet? No. A repeat performance from a year ago.


Finally, a tweet - at 9:20 AM on Tuesday November 1, 2011. Throughout the dismal Monday, Vestas remained silent.

So here’s my message, dear Vestas: people WANT to talk with you. The dramatic rise in your number of Twitter followers shows this. So why aren’t you engaging with them? Do you have a social-media strategy or are you just making this up as you go along? If so, consider taking a different approach. The most recent debacle reduced the value of your stock by 24.3%. The costs to prepare a professional social-media strategy and the salary for an effective community manager are far less. You do the math.

FatDUX Prague sponsoring EuroIA in Prague

ENG:
I am proud to announce the opening of FatDUX Prague. Our offices are located just minutes from the famed Wenceslas Square in the heart of the Czech capital. Over the past few years, our sister company, ExperienceU, has grown to become one of the most respected usability testing facilities in Central Europe. Now, working hand-in-hand with FatDUX Prague, we are able to provide a full range of UX services – from strategy and design to usability and search optimisation.

To help celebrate our new company and build our local user-experience community, FatDUX Prague is subsidising 20 registrations for residents of the Czech Republic to the upcoming EuroIA conference. The conference is possibly the most important event of its kind in Europe. We are honoured that this year, it will be held right here in Prague on September 22-24.

Rather than the normal registration fee of EUR 430, with our discount code, you will only pay EUR 150. We will take care of the rest. For details and your personal code information, please write to me directly: stepan (at) fatdux.com

CZE:
Rádi bychom oznámili oficiální otevření pražské pobočky dánské designové agentury FatDUX. Naše kanceláře se nachází na okraji historického centra Prahy. Díky spolupráci s agenturou ExperienceU, respektovanou zejména v oblasti testování použitelnosti, dodáváme celé spektrum služeb v oblasti UX, přes strategii a design po audit použitelnosti a SEO.

Abychom oslavili oficiální vznik nové pobočky a zároveň podpořili místní UX komunitu, FatDUX Praha sponzoruje registraci 20 zájemců z České republiky o nadcházející konferenci EuroIA. Tato konference, která se řadí mezi nejvýznamnější svého druhu v Evropě, se bude konat v Praze 22 – 24. září.

Místo plné ceny 430 Euro zaplatíte pouze 150 Euro a FatDUX doplatí zbytek. Případní zájemci, neváhejte mne prosím kontaktovat na: stepan (at) fatdux.com

The story of the BB-bird

I don’t know when the BB-bird came into my life, but it was early – a bright, yellow canary with an incredibly friendly demeanour. His name, pronounced “bee-bee”, was related directly to my ability to say things around the age of 10 months. It entered my vocabulary about the same time as “mama”, “dada”, “bye-bye”, “night-night”, and “ford”.

BB-bird had a cage, but using the cage was at the bird’s discretion, not ours; the door was always open. BB sat on my crib, let me poke him with sticks, and even flew around outside during the summer months. But BB always returned and was an integral part of our family.

One day we returned from a short winter holiday and BB was suddenly very stand-offish. He wouldn’t sing, wouldn’t play with me, and was generally apathetic (I was about three at the time, but recognized apathy nonetheless). When spring came, I opened a window and the BB-bird flew away, never to be seen again.

A few years later, my mother confessed that the original BB-bird had died that winter weekend and she had discreetly replaced him with another bird without telling me. She said it was the only time she ever lied to me – and I believe her.

She learned a lesson and I learned a lesson – several, in fact. And now, 55 years later, the BB-bird still affects my decision-making process. Allow me to share some thoughts with you.

Lessons learned from the BB-bird

First, you can sugar-coat the truth, but you can never hide it. Truth always comes out. In my case, I was confused and upset that my friend the BB-bird no longer liked me. This was far more painful than learning the concept of death. I was genuinely relieved when my mom confessed the truth behind the BB-bird’s sudden personality change.

Today, when clients leave us unexpectedly or old friends “go off the radar” in a calculated manner, I want to know why. I want an explanation – and hopefully I shouldn’t have to ask.

This leads to my second epiphany…

There is a difference between “difficult” and “unpleasant” decisions. In truth, there are relatively few “difficult” decisions here in life – mostly, we procrastinate to avoid making the “unpleasant” decisions – or look for ways to avoid confrontation entirely (e.g. replacing a dead canary to avoid upsetting the baby).

Thanks to the BB-bird, I rarely hesitate when making unpleasant decisions. It’s not that I’m cold-hearted, I just don’t see the upside in prolonging pain. I also rip off band-aids really fast. And I always explain the reasons behind my decisions and subsequent actions.

Do you have a BB-bird in your life? You probably do. So, take a moment and see what lessons you learned.

Undercover Boss – service design bitch-slapping for clueless CEOs

Are CEOs out of touch with reality? I’d say a lot of you are. Although you CEOs don’t have to go to extremes to improve things, most of you do need to do something, so listen up. If you don’t want the long backstory, skip ahead to the last subhead. 

About the title of this blogpost

Undercover Boss is the title of an American reality series. The premise is simple: an out-of-touch CEO puts on a disguise, takes a low-level job within his organization, and hears the truth about the company problems. After a week of play-acting, he goes back to his office and makes everything right again.

(By the way, I write “he” as I have yet to see a female CEO profiled. But I digress…)

There’s a great review of this episode by Ken Tucker at ew.com here:
http://watching-tv.ew.com/2010/02/14/undercover-boss-hooters-episode-2/

Quick recap of the “Hooters” episode

For those of you who haven’t seen the episode or read Ken’s synopsis, the “star” of this particular show was CEO Coby Brooks of Hooters.

Hooters is a chain of restaurants featuring beer and chicken wings served by buxom young women in tight t-shirts and hot-pants. FYI: “Hooters” is a slang expression for breasts. In the United States, the cute Hooters owl-logo only misleads those who are certifiably clueless (you can see it on Coby’s shirt in the photo below).

Coby Brooks (at left - duh) with two typical Hooters employees.

During the show, Coby learned (among other things), that although men love Hooters, most women feel the concept is degrading. I would have thought this was kind of a WTF “no-brainer” observation, but it certainly surprised our friend Coby as he talked on camera to random folks on the streets of Dallas, TX. (Good we got him out of his posh office and cosy private jet).

Hey, the concept is demeaning. But let’s face it, Hooters knows tits, ass, and beer is a winning combination for roughly half the population. In the meantime, Coby is now promising to rethink the company’s image. “We’re gonna tell folks about all them Hooter gals who are now doctors and lawyers and rock stars and…”

Uh…and this proves what, Coby? Did you know that feminist Gloria Steinem was once a Playboy bunny?

Lesson #1
Coby’s advisors look more like his drinking buddies than business executives.

Dear CEO, don’t hire your buddies. Don’t hire ass-lickers. Hire folks who aren’t scared of you. Sycophants and spies will never tell you the truth. And don’t take personal offence when someone disagrees with you.

Lesson #2
Coby probably would have been a better CEO if his father hadn’t just plunked him down into his current position without either warning or training. Coby seems to have had a very strained relationship with his dad and it’s clearly been tough to fill daddy’s very large shoes.

Are you a CEO looking to turn over the reins of your business to the next generation? Think twice before giving the job to a family member. This has been the downfall of many a family-owned company. Put your idiot offspring in charge of a charitable fund or something else that’s fairly harmless, but keep him away from the executive suite.

Lesson #3
Poor Coby inherits a billion-dollar business and finds out to his incredible surprise that the folks making chicken-wing sauces at his dad’s old factory in Atlanta loved his dad, but hate the current owners (er…that’s you, Coby). Why? Because Dad walked the floor and knew all his employees by name. Coby is an “absentee landlord”. The employees feel abandoned and uncared for. Which was a theme throughout this show – also when Coby visited his restaurants. Good TV. Naïve management.

Dear CEO, go “walkabout” – an Australian expression for going into the wilderness. Get your ass out of your chair and walk the floor, greet the guests, answer the phones. Honestly, you don’t need a reality TV show to get you moving.

Lesson #4
Clients come to FatDUX precisely because we can uncover problems for them without bias – which is what all agencies should provide. The amazing thing is, the work is not always particularly difficult – although it often appears impossible to those inside the organization. That’s because it’s not enough to solve a specific problem; you have to deal with the generic cause of the problem. In service-design language, this means fixing the problem both ways. We can see patterns that are often invisible from inside an organization – the more siloed the departments and functions, the more invisible the patterns are to senior management.

Dear CEO, ask questions. Ask tough questions. Demand answers. Don’t accept “it depends” as an answer from highly paid consultants. Hell, everything “depends” so there’s no need to dwell on the obvious.

Lesson #5
Dear CEO, you don’t want to be on Undercover Boss. If you’re good, you’ll never be on Undercover Boss. You’re supposed to know what’s going on in your organization. That’s why you get the big bucks.

Folks, it’s easy to get folks to tell you the truth. Just ask. If you’re honest, open, and fair, people will tell you things. But you do need to go out and talk to people. Talk to your customers (alas, far too many companies don’t ask because they are scared of what they may find out). If you want to align your business goals with user needs, you’d better understand what these needs are. The magic word is “listen”.

Coby didn’t learn a thing he couldn’t have learned in much simpler ways.

Dopamine and the mind – why good designs go wrong

Over the years, I have noticed a strange pattern: when executives (site owners) are asked to comment on design layouts, they often say there is too much text and demand larger pictures/graphics – whether these are relevant or not. These executives are disappointed and frustrated with the design proposals they see. On the other hand, if you listen to users (during usability testing, for example), they complain that these same pictures/graphics are getting in their way. Like the executives, they also exhibit frustration, but in a diametrically different way – “Why are you making me scroll past this crap to get to the information I really need?” 

My question was simple: was there a scientific reason for these dramatically different reactions to essentially the same designs? And I think the answer is “yes”.I’ve included a few salient footnotes for those of you who are scientifically inclined.

Thesis in brief (1)

Why do two groups of people seem to consistently disagree regarding the “attractiveness” of a website design? Could it be that there was a physiological reason for these reactions? In short, was our brain playing tricks on us or misleading us? Were our development and presentation techniques actually encouraging inappropriate client reactions?

Early research

I have known about the functions of neurophysiological “reward chemicals” since my pre-med studies at Washington University in St. Louis 1972-1976. In late 2007, having spotted the curious reaction pattern described above, I started to do some more serious research, focusing on the limbic system (2) and the nature of reward chemicals (3).

I made the assumption that if the pattern I had identified was universal, voluntary intake of recreational reward chemicals (e.g. nicotine, caffine, cocaine, etc.) was probably not at the heart of these reactions. So I looked for chemical rewards produced by the body itself. Soon, my inquiry zeroed in on dopamine, a chemical messenger similar to adrenaline. (4)

Dopamine – friend or foe?

Dopaminergic neurons appear to code environmental stimuli rather than specific movements. (5) This, in layman’s terms, means that pretty pictures stimulate dopamine release, which perhaps explains why executives favour graphics over blocks of text in dummy design layouts.

Although this reaction seems obvious (pictures are more attractive than text), it was reassuring to know that there was a scientific reason for this.

Task-solving activities

The second part of my question dealt with why test subjects so often reacted badly to eye-candy (i.e. gratuitous pictures/graphics).

There are various viewpoints as to the role of dopamine and the task-completion process. For example, Pennartz et al. (6) asked in 2009:

“Given the parallel organization of corticostriatal circuits, the question arises how coherent behavior, requiring integration of sensorimotor, cognitive, and motivational information, is achieved.”

Perhaps part of the answer to this critical question can be found in Taizo Nakazato’s research, published back in 2005 (7):

“During the task performance, dopamine concentration started to increase just after the cue, peaked near the time of the lever press, and returned to basal levels 1–2 s after the lever press.”

By way of background, this study deals with rats pressing a lever to receive a food reward. In internet terms, I equate this behavior with humans pushing a button/clicking a link to receive an informational reward. In other words, task accomplishment produces a reward – in this case chemical.

Actually, though, it appears that the anticipation of task-completion triggers dopamine release (8). And it could be that executives about to see a proposed design for the first time may be anticipating the presence of pretty pictures.

Yet the essence of the problem seems to be that if something delays/hinders task completion, dopamine release actually causes post-action frustration. Dr. J.G. Fleischer describes this phenomenon quite succinctly: (9, 10)

“If the [subject] does not receive the reward when it expects to receive it, then there is a depression of dopamine release, which is consistent with the negative preduction error that would occur in that situation.”

In other words, if something gets in the way of task completion, dopamine doesn’t get where it’s needed (“depression of dopamine release”). I suggest that perhaps the pretty pictures and eye-candy that were anticipated and appreciated during the presentation phase, are actually getting in the way of test subjects who expect a more relevant response to their query (i.e. clicking on a promising link). If we make people scroll to get to the stuff they want (and expect to receive), they experience dopamine depression.

That said, a more recent study by Wanat et al. (11), suggests that further research is needed:

“[The] enhancement of reward-evoked dopamine signaling was also observed in sessions in which the response requirement was fixed but the delay to reward delivery increased, yoked to corresponding trials in PR sessions. These findings suggest that delay, and not effort, was principally responsible for the increased reward-evoked dopamine release in PR sessions. Together, these data demonstrate that NAcc dopamine release to rewards and their predictors are dissociable and differentially regulated by the delays conferred under escalating costs.”

In other words, the tougher it is to achieve a result, the greater the dopamine reward. This somewhat contradicts my thesis – and yet these findings also indicate that the response is situational. Hence, I feel certain that Wanat & Co. are actually looking at a different side of the problem, unrelated to task-based frustration, but that related to task-completion in a triumphal ”I just made it to the summit of Mt. Everest” kind of manner.

Drawing on my network

In late 2009, my online research led me to my grade-school best-friend, Jon Kassel. (12) Jon is now Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. Jon’s speciality is addiction. Naturally, the effect of drugs on emotions represents a key part of his own research.

Jon and I chatted informally about the problem with which I was wrestling. And without putting too many words in Jon’s mouth, it seems my thesis holds water – certainly from a cognitive point of view, and more and more from a clinical-psychology point of view, too. I hope that Jon and I can work on this in more detail sometime.

Please note: my conversations with Jon served merely as litmus tests and should not be construed as formal endorsement of my theories on the part of Dr. Kassel or the University of Illinois.

Community research

Of course, it could be that the pattern I thought I had detected was merely a fata morgana, Maybe my community wasn’t seeing the same things I was. So in January 2010, I published a simple survey on SurveyMonkey, which I broadcast to the interactive-design community via social media and list serves. (13) All of my questions could be answered with a simple yes/no. Here they are, along with the results of the 144 people who responded within the first week:

1. Have you ever been at a client meeting where you or your company have presented detailed page mockups for a proposed website (a “comp” complete with graphics and “greeked” text)?

Note: This may or may not represent the culmination of a longer discovery/strategic/IA process, but exactly where this presentation occurs in the overall process is not particularly important in terms of this survey.

Yes: 97.9%
No: 2.1%

2. If you have been to a website design presentation meeting as described above, have you ever heard the client say, “Very pretty, but there’s too much text. We need more/better/prettier graphics.” (this is when clients start talking about including pictures of their pet cat.)

I see this mostly when senior officials have not participated in an earlier discovery/IA/wireframing process.

Yes: 70.5%
No: 29.5%

3. Having been present at the original design presentation, have you later observed (probably through a one-way mirror during a usability session) that respondents say “Don’t make me scroll through the damned eye-candy to get to the substance. Get rid of the picture of that dumb cat!”

Yes: 58%
No: 42%

4. So in short, do you see any correlation between requests for more eye-candy during the layout approvals, and irritation with the same eye-candy during task-based usability testing?

Yes: 59.9%
No: 41.1%

About 62% of the respondents were from North America, 30% were from Europe, 8% were from the rest of the world.

Even though this is a primitive survey, the statistical results are significant; the pattern I hypothesised is recognized by others by a factor approaching 2 to 1.

Today, “dopamine” seems to have become “flavor of the month”

I first mentioned this research en passant in blogpost I published in January, 2009. (14) I talked about it again briefly at the IA Summit in Phoenix, AZ in April, 2010. Today, the subject seems to be finally taking hold – most recently at the IxDA’s conference, Interactions 11, in Boulder, CO last week (February 2011). Here, Charles Hannon, presented the subject formally (e.g. as the main subject of a talk) for the first time in our community. (15) Although the subject has also been broached tangentially at EuroIA 2010 and elsewhere, I look forward to speaking with Prof. Hannon at some point; alas, I was not able to attend the Boulder conference.

A second empirical observation

When I first suspected that comprehensive design mock-ups might be creating problems, we tweaked the development/presentation process in my own company, FatDUX. Subsequently, we spent much more effort in guiding senior management through our decision-making process prior to showing actual color design mockups. Although we had always involved our clients in the earlier stages of the development process, we had never previously insisted on top-management participation.

My empirical observation is that if C-level administrators are made part of the comprehensive design process, there is less chance they will insist on bigger pictures or cuter kittens on the website. In situations where we have not been able to obtain face-time with senior officials, our designs are more often open to challenge. Only expensive rounds of usability testing have enabled us to reinstate the graphic-design best-practices we normally espouse.

Some background

Both of my parents were scientists and the value of the scientific method and controlled studies was something I learned in parallel with my ABCs. As a pre-med student at Washington University in St. Louis, I continued my scientific studies, although I did wind up in a so-called “unrelated field” (encouraged by my father, who helped me send my first e-mail back in 1982 (no typo) to his secretary at the University of Miami). I have since been involved in the creation and/or critique of over 1500 websites and online apps.

So in closing, I encourage you to do your own research to prove or disprove my contention. And if you’d like to share your own empirical observations and/or research, I hope you’ll leave a comment here or write me directly at er@fatdux.com.

Here, I use “thesis” in the literal Greek fashion: as an “intellectual proposition” (θέσις), not a “dissertation” (dissertātiō).

http://rossmed.drbuschman.com/notes/semestertwo/limbic.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence

http://www.utexas.edu/research/asrec/dopamine.html

http://biopsychiatry.com/dopaminerev.htm

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/29/41/12831

http://resources.metapress.com/pdf-preview.axd?code=j1392rk26327525j&size=largest

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/dopamine-neurotransmitter.html

http://nsi.academia.edu/JasonFleischer/Papers/26012/Dopamine_Signaling_and_the_Distal_Reward_Problem

http://books.google.dk/books?id=BA8kvh7jgFEC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=when+an+individual+expects+a+reward,+dopaminergic+neurons+are+fired&source=bl&ots=JMINA_81vP&sig=9fC8tPBQ6hGBzweK0B9y0Og3rIg&hl=da&ei=9_tYTeDyEozoOaTzsJIF&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/36/12020

http://www.uic.edu/depts/psch/kassel-1.html

Twitter, plus the SIGIA list maintained by the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and the discussion list of the Interaction Design Association. The survey was published on 10 January 2010.

http://www.fatdux.com/Blog/2009/01/10/a-definition-of-user-experience

http://www.ixda.org/interaction/ppllightning.html#CharlesHannon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Strangelove

Content strategy for dummies

Have you heard about “content strategy”? If you work in website development, the chances are you have. But what is it exactly?

What is content?
In the online world, “content” means stuff you put on a screen – words, pictures, videos, animations, sounds. Of course, there is also offline content. For example, when Tommy Hilfiger stations cute little pippins in tight dresses around your local department store to hand out white paper strips that stink of some expensive smell he’s created, well, that’s content, too. The sexual allure is content. The fragrant strips of paper are content. The Tommy Hilfiger logo is content. In my world view, “content” affects all five of our senses.

But for the most part, “content” means words and pictures on a website or application. OK?

What is “strategy”?
In the military, there is talk of “strategy” and “tactics”. Mostly, strategy relates to goals whereas tactics relate to the methods needed to achieve these goals.

Strategy (as expressed by the Lieutenant): “We need to take that hill, men.”

Tactics (as expressed by the Sergeant): Fat guys behind rocks. Skinny guys behind trees.”

What is “content strategy”?
“Content strategy” means giving visitors – to a website or department store – whatever “content” they need to make a decision or carry out a task. The strategy part lies in how we present this content to influence these decisions and tasks. If we’re doing a sitemap for a website, we call this “information architecture”. If we station a girl in a department store, we call it “service design”. But it’s all closely related.

Here’s an article that shows how many content strategists view themselves:
http://knol.google.com/k/content-strategy#

Please note: I take exception to a couple of the things said in this article. I include it mainly to provide equal time to the hard-core proponents. I’m not out to declare war on anybody – but I do have a low tolerance for bullshit.

Birth of a buzzword
How did the web survive for so many years before “content strategy” came along? Surprisingly well - because “content strategy” has always been part of the picture. It just got a new name and has since become a buzzword. I’ve had it on my business card for years simply because my clients didn’t understand the term “information architecture”. Incidentally, when I googled “content strategist” back in 2004 (when I first put the title on my card), there wasn’t a single hit.

My story isn’t unique. Many folks came to information architecture from a writing background. Think of “content strategists” as librarians who read and write. Since we understood the content and were often providing it, too, we were the ones who got to create the sitemap.

Just for the record, my very basic description of information architecture is this:

- We gather stuff into convenient categories
- We call stuff by names people will recognize
- We put stuff where people can easily find it.

Remember, this is IA on a high, strategic level. Naturally, when you get down to the tactical nitty-gritty of information architecture, you’d better understand taxonomy development and the other cool stuff they teach at library school. This is also why there are no easily defined borders between the worlds of IA and CS. And if you ask me, who really cares as long as the job gets done properly – and in a way that provides measurable benefits.

Content becomes valuable by virtue of context
Here’s a piece of content:

“Strandøre 15. A ten minute walk north from Svanemøllen Station”.

For 99.99% of the readers of this blogpost, this snippet of content is irrelevant and therefore worthless. But if you were taking public transportation to the FatDUX office in Copenhagen, the content becomes useful and therefore acquires value. If content is king, then context represents the kingdom.

Information architects need to understand content. Content strategists need to understand context. In terms of traditional sitemaps, the boxes have no value without the interconnecting arrows. And the arrows have no meaning if there are no boxes to which to point. And that’s why there is so much gray area in the definition – and why the pedants will spend years fighting over definitions in the years to come.

Form cannot exist without content
There’s a video on YouTube that has achieved cult status. It is of the Russian singer, Eduard Kihl, featured in a 1966 video where he “sings” his hit song, “I Am Glad I'm Finally Going Home”. Actually, in the repressive Soviet Union of 1966, the lyricist apparently was unable to write a suitable poem that would meet with Party approval. So Kihl simply trololo’ed his way through the melody and today we giggle at the results.

My point in mentioning the "Trololo Video" here is that form without content becomes absurd. And now that I've provided some historical context for the video, perhaps you'll see that it is actually more tragic than comic.

The most attractive website cannot survive without meaningful and useful content – content that is arranged in a meaningful and useful way. And somebody needs to do the work - no matter what their official title.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z4m4lnjxkY&NR=1