At the start of 2010 I setup this blog to start a discussion on topics I have a passion for and to learn more about blogging, writing and the web in general. I feel it’s appropriate to look back on 2010 and ask “what have I learnt?”.

It’s a long post so feel free to jump to the bits you’re interested in:

1. The WordPress ecosystem
2. Writing process
3. Discussion & comments
4. Analytics
5. Discovering new Mac tools which help tell the story
6. Conclusion

1. The WordPress ecosystem

Since I decided to host my own blog, by necessity, I’ve had to learn about the WordPress ecosystem. When setting up the blog I wasn’t really aware of the alternatives to WordPress. The blogging platform was so widely used & discussed by friends and colleagues that I didn’t stop to think about my options.

I knew there was hype about WordPress but I also knew that WordPress was more than just software. The community surrounding WordPress, in my opinion, was and still is the biggest asset to the entire platform. Why?

• WordPress is “extensible”. Developers get excited about this word. The only thing developers love more than getting functionality for free is building something cool on top of something cooler. The truth is, just because something is “extensible” does not mean it’s useful to the end user. The developers need to be utilising the extensibility – building software that’s useful and well supported. WordPress has a massive & active developer community and this is huge news for the end user. I can easily add cool functionality to my blog through WordPress plug-ins & widgets or I could completely change the look & feel of my blog by using themes. All this is about 3 clicks or so away within my admin dashbaord.
• WordPress is “learnable”. There is nothing more frustrating than using software that does not have a facility to learn more about that software. Perhaps you want to learn about advanced usage, perhaps you want to look under the hood and attack the details, perhaps you just want to hear about what’s hot or what the pros do. With WordPress you have access to all the above. Blogs, podcasts and books provide a huge resource. There is so much knowledge to tap into.

There is barely a learning curve to WordPress if all you want to do is setup a basic blog. I though wanted to get “good” at WordPress and I knew that would require work. I’ve viewed that work more as an opportunity to learn something exciting, something that could help friends or perhaps even earn money.

In just 1 year I’d describe my WordPress knowledge as “intermediate”. I’ve been able to help friends on their WordPress projects and, in my day job, I’m in the process of launching my first WordPress site (which will be using the very cool Carrington Build). There is no way I would have had the confidence to pitch for that work if it had not been for this blog.

A couple of resources have really helped me learn:

• The WordPress community podcast – great resource to work out what’s hot in WordPress land. I like listening to the “pro point of view” and I love the theme and plugin reviews.
• WP Candy – get your daily WordPress news
• Digging into WordPress book – I read this book just recently and its great for the beginner and intermediate WordPress user. The book takes a comprehensive look at everything from developing themes to WordPress security
• Yoast – the host of the WordPress community podcast and top SEO specialist. Joost de Valk’s blog is full of tips, tricks and thought provoking articles

2. Writing process

The process of creating good content is hard. The process of creating good, original content is even harder. Like most bloggers I started out thinking I wanted to write like somebody else. In my case I enjoyed the long form, thought provoking & highly actionable style of Avinash Kaushik. I quickly realised that producing that style of content was a massive effort. An effort which would require a substantial amount of time. I could only give up this much time every 2 weeks, hence my posting frequency. I aim for a post every 2 weeks but as you can tell from my “monthly posts sidebar” my consistency has been poor.

My writing process goes something like this:

1. Lightbulb moment! This is when I think of a good idea for a post. Ideas generally come from discussions at work, discussions at events I attend, through reading other articles online or by listening to different podcasts. I keep track of post ideas using WordPress drafts or by using Evernote.
2. Write a rough plan. This usually incorporates an introduction, a list of points I want to make or a line of argument, a conclusion and a list of links I know I will use. This usually takes between 60 and 90 minutes.
3. Write the post in full using MarsEdit. Review & edit, review & edit, review & edit. I try to be brutal when editing. If the content is not focused or feels waffly I try my best to kill it. This process usually takes at least 4 hours. It can take up to 6 six hours. The Chicago Restaurant Guide was a monster effort!
4. Check the code generated by MarsEdit using TextWrangler. I used to be a developer. I cannot abide bad markup. MarsEdit usually does a great job but I do like to check!
5. Upload to WordPress & check look and feel. Tweak if necessary.
6. Publish to live and get feedback from friends.

When it comes to my writing style I still think there is plenty of room for improvement. I truly wish I had been taught more English grammar at school (or perhaps I should have paid more attention). I’ve been reading The Elements of Style (slowly) and I hope this improves things.

My writing process needs loads of work too. I think some areas for improvement are:

• Ideation – the process of creating ideas. I can always read more, attend more events and read more stuff outside of my focus in the pursuit of research & the creative spark
• Using images in my posts. Images help break up content and maintain visual interest
• Optimising my posts for RSS feeds. Plenty of geeks & common folk love RSS readers like Google Reader or NetNewsWire. I think its important to make sure my content looks good wherever my readers consume it
• Cross linking to other posts I’ve already written. Good for readers, good for SEO
• Make my subheadings links so it’s easier for others to link back to content of interest
• Experiment with different forms of content. I’m particularly excited about using video on the blog
• Discipline, focus, consistency! I’m sometimes horrible at maintaining focus and I’m worse at sticking to my 2 week schedule. Must do better!

It may look like I’m hard on myself but the thing to remember here is that 1 year ago I didn’t have a writing process. I didn’t know about or use half the tools I’ve just mentioned. I didn’t have aspirations for becoming a better writer. I had no reason to go outside of my comfort zone for the sake of research. Blogging has opened my eyes to a hugely creative experience. While it takes effort the reward is exceptional. Writing challenges my own views and forces me to make my argument clearer.

There is nothing better than reading an old post that I’ve written and then thinking “wow – did I write that? Its pretty good!”.

3. Discussion & comments

I’ve not been able to foster much discussion on this blog. 13 posts & 17 comments are not great numbers! I really like hearing an alternative point of view and reviewing reader feedback so it’s a shame there is not more comments. That said, I’m not surprised. Here are some things I think I need to do better in order to generate more discussion:

• Improve the customer experience
  • Speed & availability. I don’t think my host did a great job last year. I’ve taken action this year and changed hosts. My new host has 24 by 7 support and I got a great deal on a much snappier hosting package
  • Enable “subscribe to comments”. This will let readers receive a notification when comments have been added to a post. I think this will help foster more discussion
  • Post more consistently!
• Increase “reach” (the number of people who know about the blog)
  • Comment more on blogs owned by others
  • Hang out in forums and contribute to discussions (likely to be time intensive so might be difficult)
  • Post more links to the blog through Facebook, Twitter and get friends to link to my blog from their sites

If you have more ideas, please share in the comments below!

4. Analytics

I’m super interested in analytics. I love reading about the topic and I often advise on analytics within my job. For this blog however my approach to analytics has been pretty poor. My excuse? Time. I just don’t have time to review the numbers and work out the actionable insights. In this area then, I think I’ve improved the least.

It is comforting to know that when I do get time to play with analytics I have a case study I can mess with. I hope the day comes where I can have a really good play with analytics and regularly derive insights because I find the topic fascinating and I have plenty to learn.

5. Discovering new Mac tools which help tell the story

I’ve come across several problems while authoring this blog and these problems are often solved with great software. I define great software as software with the following attributes:

• solves my problem
• is easy to learn
• has a good user interface
• affordable! All the software I use is under $100 and usually under $50

Its great when you find a tool which does exactly what you want it to do. Here are the tools I’ve been using for this blog and a few more tools which I have installed and will be utilised on the blog in the future.

• WordPress desktop editor: MarsEdit. Ridiculously simple & awesome
• Keeping track of notes: Evernote. Good for tracking notes, ideas, research (using web clippings)
• RSS reader (for research): NetNewsWire. I also use Google Reader for Android
• FTP program: Transmit. Does everything well – FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3
• Text editor for checking code: TextWrangler. I just bought TextMate too. Loads of good reviews. I’ll experiment and report back.
• Image editor: Acorn. All the good bits of Photoshop without the learning curve!
• Wireframe tool: Balsamiq. Awesome for sketching ideas. I hope to post a few sketches this year
• Video screen capture tool: Screenflow. I hope to include some screen capture video in the future. I think it will be useful for walking through ideas
• Local test environment: MAMP. If I’m doing anything which I think could crash the blog I try it out locally first. Particularly awesome if you’re moving between hosts and want to be sure the transition goes smoothly!

Using all these apps for the purpose of the blog has been a great learning experience. I’ve become a more competent Mac user and I’ve developed my skills beyond the corporate mix i.e., expensive Adobe products like Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

Conclusion

A year’s worth of blogging has been a tremendous learning experience. I’ve developed my existing skills and created interests I never knew I had. Simply learning WordPress has given me another sellable skill.

I’m better at my job because of this blog and I feel I have more credibility as a web professional. It’s a bit like the saying “never trust a skinny chef”. Can you really trust someone offering advice on your digital strategy if they don’t have a good site themselves?

Email is as awesome as it is frustrating. Everyone knows email is an amazing tool until you get too much of it.

I offer 5 tips for managing email and recommend a couple of great tools to help Microsoft Outlook users. This is the process I use every day and I’ve managed to get my once bloated inbox down to a manageable daily amount of 30 or less.

Cutting to the punch line then, here are my 5 tips for email management:

1. Group your email as “conversations”
2. Don’t use your inbox as a to-do list
3. File email quickly and easily with SimplyFile
4. Check email infrequently
5. When you do check your email – check it properly

Tip 1 – group your email as conversations

If you use Gmail this will be a familiar solution to you. For everyone else… picture the scene. You send an email to 5 people asking for feedback, you get a reply from 3 over a period of time. 1 friend might get back to you in the same day, another a week later and so on. Your 3 replies though are dotted throughout your email as your respondents did not “reply all”. To answer all the feedback you have to spend time searching & retrieving your email in order to maintain the thread of the conversation.

This overhead can be eliminated by using a conversation view. In Outlook this is easy to achieve by creating a “custom view”. Within your inbox, or any folder full of email, go to View – Current View – Customize Current View. You’ll get the following screen:

Click on “Group By” and select “Conversation” and “Ascending”. You’ll end up with this:

Click on “Sort” and select “Received” and “Descending”. You’ll end up with this:

If this all works your email should look something like this:

Tip 2 – don’t use your inbox as a to-do list

A common objection to a well managed inbox is:

“I don’t want to forget anything I have to do. My inbox reminds me of the things I have to do.”

If this argument sounds familiar it’s likely you have an inbox overload problem! Email is not designed to be a to-do list. You need to use the right tool for the job. A good to-do list has the following properties:

• Easy to prioritise
• Easy to categorise
• Easy to assign a completion date

“Standard email” does none of these things well. If you cannot prioritise your inbox, when it’s masquerading as your to-do list, how can you be expected to prioritise your work? Lots of people I know get bogged down in email because they believe the last email they received is the most important. This is a slow, painful way of getting no important work done.

I suggest you use a good to-do list which has the above properties. Outlook has a good solution built right in. It’s called “tasks” and it can be viewed along side your email inbox.

Next time you get an email, work out if it’s important and needs a reply or action from you. If it does then add a task to your to-do list and file the email (getting it out of your inbox). Prioritise your to-do list accordingly.

Tip 3 – use SimplyFile to become an email ninja!

SimplyFile is an Outlook plugin and it has been a life-changing tool for me. You can use SimplyFile for many things but there are 3 things in particular that I love.

“File message”

I like filing my email in folders. It helps me keep my inbox clear but it also helps me retrieve my email at a later date. SimplyFile does an awesome job of filing email quickly. Not only does it have a cool “predictive search” feature – making it super easy to figure out where you usually put your email – it also “learns” where you put your email. If it guesses right, filing your email is a one-click job. Sweet!

The screen shot below shows the SimplyFile toolbar in an open email. In this case SimplyFile thinks this email belongs to my “Knowledge base” folder. If I click that button the email will be filed in this folder. Take note of the other buttons. They are mentioned later!

“Quick find”

Once you’ve filed email, you need a good way of getting back to those folders. SimplyFile does an awesome job here too. You can pull up a list of your folders and just start typing. The search feature finds that keyword within your folder hierarchy and gets you to your email quickly.

“Task it”

This is like the icing on the cake! If you’re making use of tasks/to-do list within Outlook there is no better way of creating tasks from email messages than the “task it” feature of SimplyFile. It goes like this:

• Read an email, decide it’s worthy of your to-do list
• Click “Task it”
• A task is created in your to-do list, description all filled in, and email embedded into the to-do item!

Is that awesome or is that awesome?

Tip 4 – check email infrequently

Easiest advice to give but perhaps the hardest medicine to take. The urge to check email, if it’s already a habit to check every 5 minutes, is so strong. I’m a believer in working in 60-90 minute slots, without interruption. I recommend checking your email between these slots.

Tip 5 - when you do check your email – check it properly

Instead of dipping in and out of email get your head into your email and do the job right. Delete emails that are not relevant to your workflow, read all email thoroughly, create to-do items, reassess your priorities, make any replies you have to. DONE! The point here is that if you make a real task of managing your email rather than making fleeting and nervous glances every 5 minutes you can get so much more work done and feel in control of your email.

Commitment to improve

I hope these tips are useful and help you get more “real work” done. I’m always looking to improve my own workflow so please leave your own tips in the comments.

Happy email management thoughts projected to everyone!

Related links

• Inbox zero by Merlin Mann
• Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst
• The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working

mint.com has over 4 million users. This popular online tool, which helps you manage your money across banks, has gone from startup to Intuit owned in 3 years. Clearly they are doing something right! I think the mint.com user interface is one of the things Mint is doing right. Let’s take a little time to review.

While mint.com is clearly sexier than your average banking related site there is one element of the UI that I think is wickedly clever. It’s the humble “alerts space”. Check out alerts on the mint site (update 26th Dec 2010 – they used to have a demo but it seems to have been axed).

In the day job, I’ve been working on how to sell products & services within a transactional website. It’s not an easy problem because there are trade-offs at play. One must balance the following:

• On the one hand you have to respect your users and what they have come to your site to do e.g., check balances, review transactions, get stuff done,
• On the other hand you need to make money from those same lovely people.

It’s the age-old web-business-model-problem. How do you make ads unobtrusive but at the same time give them enough prominence that they stand a chance of being clicked? Or to put a “glass half full” spin on it – how do you let your users know about all the great stuff you & your ad partners offer while making the whole process enjoyable?

The alerts space solution

The alerts space is a great solution to the problem. Alerts in Mint are presented in the dashboard page, the first page you see after logging in, and are given plenty of prominence i.e., first thing in the second column, well above the page fold.

Alerts are a great tool for indicating key events in your finances. Mint users can configure alerts so that they are notified of different events – anything from low balances to ATM fees. Alerts can arrive as a text message or in your email but they will definitely show up in your web-based dashboard. The key point with alerts is – they have clear user value. User’s want to keep an eye on their alerts because it makes their lives easier and can help them get their tasks done quicker. Alerts are a valuable feature.

There is more to alerts though. They are not just friendly notifications of financial events, they are also the home of super-powerful contextual sales messages.

Contextual, relevant, helpful

Here is an example of the alerts space being used for sales:



Notice in this example I’m getting a little more than a notification of something that’s happened within my bank accounts. There are alerts which are clearly trying to sell something… cue really cheesed-off customers… right? Well, maybe not. The alerts are still referring to my money and they are referring to events in my financial life, albeit indirectly. To put it another way these are sales messages but they are:

1. Contextual e.g., the alerts make sense in the context of a tool that cares about my money
2. Relevant to me e.g., I would like to know if I can save money on my current car insurance payment
3. Helpful to me e.g., they help me sort out my financial life. I can easily dismiss the alert if it is not relevant
4. Stable e.g., the sales messages don’t move around the interface. I know where to expect them and I can interact accordingly.

That’s the magic then, the marketing special sauce. A feature which adds value to your customers but at the same time gives me a clear space to continue a conversation about the additional value of your service. You, the site owner, wins and your users win. Hooray!

Disecting is fun!

It’s easy to take things for granted. It’s easy to accept the design of something without really looking at why you like it or why it was built that way. Part of the job of interface designers (IAs or graphical designers) is to understand the science of a particular design they like so that they can reproduce the desired effect in another design. If you’re in charge of recruiting interface designers try asking them about their favourite website. Ask them why they think that site is successful and how the UI contributes to this success.

Related links:

• The design of everyday things by Don Norman
• Good experience – Customer experience and the importance of seeing
• UIE – Playing Hard to Get: Using Scarcity to Influence Behavior
• Making Web Advertisements Work by Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman
• Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

More examples?

Mint contains many examples of clever contextual marketing but I cannot help wonder about other examples outside of Mint. The only one that springs to mind is Google and it’s contextual ads. I search, they give me results, some of those results are paid for but that’s fine providing they are contextual, relevant and helpful. What other examples are there that meet these 3 criteria? Add a comment if you can think of any!

The diversity of information on the web is only matched by the diversity of people using it. For me, that’s what makes the digital user experience profession so fascinating – trying to understand all users of the web and how they engage with it so that you can provide a top quality experience & produce a satisfied consumer.

One audience which is often forgotten by our profession are those users who live life with some form of disability. How do we make the web usable for these users? That’s the question which feeds my passion for web accessibility.

New to web accessibility?

“What is web accessibility?” I hear you cry. If you’re new to web accessibility I highly recommend WebAIM’s excellent introduction to the topic and the Web Accessibility Initiative’s “what is web accessibility?” guide. Once you get the principle of accessibility – read on. I want to address some common issues I’ve often faced when I’m quizzed on web accessibility. A list of common questions & issues and what I consider to be a good response based on my research over the years.

10 things you need to know

My list covers a range of familiarity with web accessibility and a range of skill sets. Hopefully they’ll be a little something for all readers.

1. I don’t want to break the law. What guidelines do I need to follow in order for my site to be accessible?

Sounds like an obvious question. The answer is a little complex as there is a difference between international guidelines that you should follow and legal requirements that you need to follow.

First, let’s look at the guidelines. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have a Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The WAI develops guidelines widely regarded as the international standard for Web accessibility. The guidelines which address web content are suitably named the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines have 3 levels of compliance: level A, level AA and level AAA.

The WAI suggests that all websites must comply with level A success criteria. If you’re site does not meet this minimum standard then it’s likely that your site is completely impossible for disabled users to use. The WAI suggests that web sites should comply with level AA success criteria so to ensure most disabled users enjoy a good experience. In the professional circles I belong to level AA is seen as a good standard of accessibility.

I mention the guidelines first as some laws use these guidelines as a basis for judging accessibility. The law that applies to your site will depend on where you’re doing business. In the UK web accessibility is covered by the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). In the USA web accessibility for Federal Agencies is covered in Section 508. Other businesses in the US will have to consider State law too. Target.com being one famous example where State laws were discussed.

In the case of UK law and in general, where strict accessibility law is in place, the best way to understand whether you meet appropriate legal criteria is to test your site with disabled users. In the UK charities exist which will help test your site. AbilityNet, for example, is one I have worked with. In the USA non-profits like WebAIM provide a similar service. For most businesses this level of commitment might be too much and in this case I would strongly recommend that you hire a web agency who understands how to design and develop accessible websites (like the agency I work for) and put level AA accessibility in your requirements. If your responsible for designing and building your site yourself I would suggest that you get familiar with WCAG and build a site that meets level AA success criteria.

Remember WAI guidelines don’t guarantee that your site is accessible. Ultimately testing is the best method because your end goal should be making your site easy to use for disabled users and not simply meeting guidelines.

Related links:

• Disabled access to websites under UK law
• Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) & web accessibility
• WebAIM Section 508 Checklist
• Dept. of Justice considers Web for ADA

2. Can I get a piece of software to test my site against accessibility criteria?

There are tools which can give you some indication of how accessible your site is. Automatic tools are great at helping with a preliminary review of your site and helping manual evaluators identify possible problems. The guidelines produced by the WAI need more than an automated check to ensure you do a proper evaluation as there are guidelines which automatic tools simply cannot test. The tool which I use the most in my preliminary tests is WedAIM’s WAVE toolbar for Firefox. Loads of other tools exist and I strongly suggest you read the WAI’s guide on selecting tools before you go too tool crazy.

3. Is accessibility all about making my site work for blind users?

In a word – no. Blind users are just one segment of the disabled community. There can be a lot of emphasis given to making sites work with screen readers but accessibility means more than just “good in screen readers”. Users may live with different types of disability such as visual (blindness, low vision, colour-blindness), hearing (deaf), motor (inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control), cognitive (learning disabilities, distractibility, inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information). WebAIM do a great job explaining different considerations for these different communities.

4. Does accessibility mean that I cannot use JavaScript on my site?

No. It’s considered best practice to make your site content and functionality available to users with and without JavaScript. It’s a fallacy that disabled users don’t use software which makes use of JavaScript. Modern screen readers, for example, do a great job interacting with well written web sites that include JavaScript.

The WAI have been working on some great guidelines, called the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, which:

“defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies”

These guidelines are a great basis for making complex web applications which make use of the latest JavaScript techniques more accessible. There are lots of cool companies doing great things with ARIA already. Yahoo does have some nice, well documented, examples.

5. Can I use site overlays and still be accessible?

Site overlays, like Lightbox, are difficult to make accessible but not impossible. The overlay, user interface component, can be useful for numerous reasons and they can be used in many circumstances. So many in fact that it would be really hard for me to right up guidelines in just this post. Perhaps an idea for another day!

Things to consider when trying to make an overlay accessible would be:

• will users expect an overlay? Can you distinguish links & buttons in a site which will open an overlay? For example – can you use visible text or text hidden with CSS or title text or icons to help users understand that an overlay is about to be launched?
• is the overlay code positioned well within the HTML? Should the HTML for the overlay be next to the link or button that launched it?
• where does focus go when the overlay is opened?
• how do you close the overlay?
• is the overlay and it’s contents keyboard accessible?
• where does focus go when the overlay is closed?

6. Does my site have to have a liquid layout to be accessible?

A liquid or fluid layout refers to a site which changes it’s layout based on the width of a user’s browser. The logic goes that liquid layouts are a good thing because it makes full use of the user’s screen real estate – no matter how big or how small. There are lots of sites out there that have liquid layouts – useit.com, Amazon to name a couple of popular sites.

Rather literal interpretations of the conformance guidelines suggest that you need to test a site using numerous screen resolutions “to verify that horizontal scrolling is not required”. Some people interpret this to mean that every site must use a liquid layout. In my opinion this point of view is complete rubbish. None of the WCAG guidelines suggest horizontal scrolling make a site inaccessible and this is despite a direct mention of liquid layouts in the “techniques” section of the WCAG guidelines. This technique is documented as a method to help users read a web site when they want to resize text. Loads of alternative techniques are also suggested – techniques which do not require liquid layouts.

If that’s not proof enough consider this – the page where the conformance guideline is written will eventually lead to horizontal scrolling if you resize the window to a small enough size. My interpretation of this experiment suggests that the WAI were not suggesting “horizontal scrolling is bad for every screen width”.

My advice to you would be to use a fixed width site. Make a decision on page width based on the users who are coming to your site. If the vast majority, I’m thinking greater than 90%, use a particular resolution or greater then you should optimise for that number. For example 98% of visitors to this site use a screen resolution of 1024×768 or greater. About 18% are at exactly 1024×768 and that is why this site is optimised for that size. I don’t really fancy optimising for 1280×800 (the next size up) if I’m likely to annoy 1 in 5 of my readers!

I would also suggest making a mobile optimised version of your site. While iPhones and other smart phones do a really good job of resizing web sites and the text within them usability studies suggest that your users will get more done if your site is optimised for the smaller screen. If you use WordPress – this is super easy to do with mobile themes!

7. Do I have to add text resizing controls to my site to make it accessible?

Text resizing controls, as seen on AbilityNet’s site in the top right hand corner, is a technique for meeting the resize text guidelines within WCAG 2. It is one way of meeting the success criteria. Plenty of other methods exist. It is not necessary to have text resize controls to make your site accessible. If you don’t believe me – try to find the resize controls on the WAI site. Good luck!

8.  The guidelines are not written in “plain-English”. Are there any cheat sheets available?

There are no short cuts to creating an accessible web site. If you’re committed to creating accessible content then someone in your team needs to know the guidelines inside and out… public service announcement over.

Sometimes it is handy to have a quick reference providing you know it’s just that and not a substitute for the full guidelines. I use a couple from WebAIM:

• WebAIM Section 508 Checklist
• WebAIM’s WCAG 2.0 Checklist

9. What are the business benefits of accessibility? Is accessibility worth the effort?

I love this question. If you don’t subscribe to the point of view “do accessibility because it’s the right thing to do” what else can you get out of an accessible web site? Here are a couple of great benefits I always talk about:

1. You get access to more customers! If you’re site is accessible more people can access your site and help improve whatever conversion rate you hold dear. If your site is more accessible than your competitors, all other things being equal, you will have a better shot of reaching your goals because lots of different types of user will be able to access your site.
2. Search engines love accessible sites. A friend told me once that he was at an SEO workshop and the instructor said “the DDA was the best thing that could have happened in the SEO industry”. What did he mean? Well… accessibility is about making web content accessible to your users. WCAG guidelines help make your site better by making it easier for software to interpret the content on your site. Guess what? The robots used by search engines to crawl the web is software too. Software which is trying to make sense of your content. Investing in accessibility will mean you’re making a massive investment in SEO too.

10. Who do I need in my team to get an accessible site?

I’d suggest that accessibility is a team game. Here’s why:

• Project sponsors & Project Managers: need to be bought into accessibility. They need to empower the team to get the job done right
• Information Architects & Graphical Designers: need to design a site which can be made into an accessible solution. It is possible to design a site which is very hard or impossible to make accessible
• Developers: need to write solid, standards compliant code which can be easily interpreted by screen readers and other forms of assistive technology
• Testers: need to make sure everybody did their job!

Breaks in any piece of the chain will lead to a bad solution.

Final thoughts

I love businesses that are obsessed by the quality of their customer experience. I find this kind of attitude inspiring. These kind of companies ooze a sense of “don’t worry we will take care of you. You cannot go wrong with our product or service”. Isn’t that the greatness projection of any brand? If you’re serious about quality on the web and delivering the potential of the web to all it’s users I’d suggest you need to take accessibility very seriously indeed.

Over to you

Feedback is always welcome!

• what has your experience been like with web accessibility?
• do you work for a company that takes accessibility seriously?
• what other common questions arise when web accessibility is being discussed?
• have you worked on any projects which utilise ARIA? How have they gone?
• what do you think of the questions & issues above? Can you relate to them?

Remember those books that are sold at Christmas? Those books that attempt to deliver life’s wisest phrases while it’s readers are firmly seated on the toilet? I remember one which we used to have at home and there was one nugget that has stuck with me. It went something along the lines of:

“Don’t attempt to learn the tricks of the trade. Learn the trade first, the tricks will come later.”

I went to my first Digital Marketing Q&A session this week, hosted through the meetup network (you should come if you live in Chicago), and this phrase popped into my head after the session.

Ben? Yeah? It depends!

Let me set the scene – the session had a panel of 4 experts covering SEO, Digital Strategy, Site Design & Development. The audience, in my opinion, was dominated by small business owners who are just starting out in the web. The questions from the audience were good and the panel did a good job answering some tricky questions.

I say “tricky” because I think most of the questions could have been legitimately answered “it depends”. Hardly a crowd pleasing answer.

• Q. “how much does a web site cost?” A. It depends
• Q. “how long should I spend on a web site every week?” A. It depends
• Q. “what do you recommend I read and how often should I read it?” A. It depends
• Q. “can I get my site on to the first page of Google?” A. It depends

Needless to say my nonexistent-career as a panelist is likely to remain nonexistent providing I come up with such insightful and humorous responses. I digress!

An “it depends” answer is often followed by the phrase “you need to think about…”. This is usually when the chaff in the audience glazes over. The answer goes on “you need to think about X, Y, Z really hard thing that takes…”. Cue intake of breath, prepare to gasp. “…Z really hard thing that takes time & really hard work”. Goodness gracious me!

The 2 types of easy

Apologies for being facetious but I’m getting to my point. I think some people getting started on the web fail to distinguish something important. It’s easy to get started on the web, something economists call “low barriers to entry”, but it’s hard to master your objectives once you’re there.

1. Q. Is it easy to get started on the web? A. Yes, the web enjoys low barriers to entry
2. Q. Is it easy to get good at all the things needed to have an awesome web business? A. No, the skills involved take hard work

Getting started & getting good are 2 objectives which are worlds apart, polar opposites in the land of the Internet.

How do you learn the trade?

What do you do if you want to become an expert? First of all you need to appreciate that experts are not made overnight (sounds easy but perhaps this is the bitterest pill to swallow). Experts are crafted through education, through project experience and through a commitment to learning.

Have I scared anybody yet? I hope not. Here is the deal: getting started in the web is easy and you should do it because it is only through doing that you’re going to learn. Remember that before you get going you should work out what your requirements are. What are you trying to do? How are you going to measure success? Work out those business objectives and attack them like hell.

Here is my distilled advice. A 3 step plan, once you’ve got your objectives sorted.

1. Test – get started & experiment. Play around with the tools. Don’t play mindlessly though. All games have goals and this web game should be no different. Work out how the different tools can help you win your game.
2. Learn – who are the big authorities in the space you’re trying to master? Luke had to find Yoda to become a Jedi. Same deal here. I like books so I try to work out who writes a good book, I then read the author’s blog and anything that the author is reading. Perhaps start with the Wiley Hour a Day series of books, anything at O’Reilly books, perhaps go to your favourite topic on alltop.com or just look at blog recommendations through Google Reader. Got some cash for training? Check out Market Motive.
3. Grow – build on what you’ve learnt and go back through steps 1 and 2. Take time to appreciate how much you know and how much you don’t. Never lose tension.

If the above sounds like too much work then perhaps you should think about another career or, if you’re not keen on becoming an expert, work out who to hire and make sure they know your business objectives. You don’t need to be an expert in the web to be an entrepreneur.

Final thoughts

I was on a conference call years ago and the most senior, highest paid person on the call said:

“I appreciate all your hard work guys. Digital. It looks easy but plays hard.”

Perhaps she was the most enlightened person on the call too because at the time this comment didn’t make sense to me but in hindsight she hit the nail on the head.

P.S.

Almost no one at the Q&A session asked about the process of creating great content, great user interfaces or great customer experience. I guess my job is safe for another day! Remember folks – you can lead a horse to water but can you make it drink?

Feedback

Feedback is always welcome, goodness knows I need some!

• Did you come to the Q&A? Did you enjoy it?
• Do you think people get confused between ease of entry to the web and ease of success?
• Do you think web design and digital marketing is too commoditized, driving the notion that the web is easy to master?

No post this time but a new page has been added to the site. I’ve written up my favourite Chicago restaurants. Take a detour from the main blog and check out the restaurant suggestions and let me know what you think. Feedback is definitely welcome!

• Do you agree with the restaurant suggestions?
• Which ones did I miss?

Tenuous link to the blog – people are always willing to test & learn when it comes to restaurants!

Thanks for the idea Jenny!

Do you ever hear relatively random words over and over again and then think “Woh! Where did that come from? Why do people care about this all of a sudden?”. Here are 3 words I have been hearing a lot recently in and around the user experience field and within my own job.

Partnership

2 main contributing sources for “partnership”:

Source 1 – AT&T and Apple. Apple prides itself on control of the user experience. Apple has made a business of controlling the hardware, the operating system and the software of the devices they launch. With this kind of control you can live or die by your own decisions and make progress on feedback given directly to you.

Enter the iPhone. Apple has the same control (maybe more with the curation of the App Store) but cannot launch the iPhone without a carrier. A partner. In the US that’s AT&T. AT&T is clearly swamped by iPhone demand. Depending on where you live you’ll get huge differences in AT&T service. Couple this with some well timed, perhaps cynical, pricing changes and it’s enough to put people like me off of the iPhone. I love the tech but couldn’t cope with the dropped calls.

Thoughts:

• I wonder how much this lack of control hurts/annoys Apple?
• I wonder if they will ever get so annoyed that they will break off the exclusive deal with AT&T and open up the market in the USA?
• Perhaps Apple will even have a go at trying to create their own network carrier?

Then again, if Apple keep selling 1.7 million devices in 3 days (not all linked to AT&T though as these sales are across multiple countries) you might not blame them for thinking “what’s all the fuss about?”.

Source 2 – pitching. Part of my job is to pitch. Pitch to prospects, to clients and to people I’m trying to recruit. One of the unique selling points (USPs) I believe in and always talk about is the concept of “partnership”. I often get challenged on it.

• “Why is partnership important?”
• “Isn’t everyone a good partner?”
• “How are you guys different to the next guy who is going to take me to the Cubs game and pretend to be friends?”

I tend to respond with “there are 2 types of partners”. I call them solid & hollow partnerships. Solid partnerships are those where the relationship is mutually beneficial and each party can come to the table with feedback and discuss options. These partnerships can survive, perhaps thrive, when the feedback is good & bad. I think this is summed up best by a quote I read in Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start.

“In giving advice, seek to help, not please, your friend.” Solon

This type of partnership seems a lot more beneficial to me but takes a lot of work. You have to get good at giving out and receiving good & bad news. Remember some people, as Tom Cruise & Jack Nicholson suggest, “cannot handle the truth”.

Take aways from partnership

• Partnership gives you reach beyond your natural grasp
• Partnership is hard work
• Good partners get more out of the relationship. Discussions are 2 way, built on respect and feedback

Consistency

I love to listen to podcasts and over the last couple of weeks the concept of “consistency” has come up frequently. User interface designers, including myself, think of consistency as part of a heuristic evaluation. Jakob Nielsen tells us about “Consistency and standards” and we interface designers try to make sure people don’t have to think about what happens if they click on a given button or link. The exact same heuristic can be applied to delivery of content and this was a “light bulb moment” for me.

An audience trusts sources of information that deliver consistently. An audience has expectations for this content, is excited by the next episode and is disappointed if the next edition is skipped. Just think about your favourite newspaper, radio show, TV program, blog. Think about phoning your parents at the weekend. This experience or media is delivered consistently and it’s part of why you like it and it’s an important part of a relationship with the experience.

Take aways from consistency

• The consistent delivery of content is a user experience principle
• When creating content it’s important to deliver consistently
• I need to deliver this blog consistently if I want to build an audience who trusts in me – I’m trying for 1 post every 2 weeks!

Curation

2 places where this word “curation” keeps cropping up:

Source 1 – buzzword-de-jour for Content Strategy folks. Pick your article:

1. The Content Strategist as Digital Curator on A list apart
2. On Curation and Curators: Skills vs. Roles at User Interface Engineering
3. Curation nation at Brain Traffic

I don’t think I’m clever enough to work through the semantics of “curation” or “curator”. I don’t think I care much about the nuances of definition. I subscribe to the Brain Traffic point of view:

“We don’t care what you call it. If it’s needed, just do the work. And I think this activity of content curation is much needed.”

Source 2 – App stores on the TWIG podcast. It seems that a gating factor in Google’s app store proposition is the curation of apps. Separating the good from the bad, or more seriously, the safe from the unsafe. One idea discussed on TWIG was the idea of letting 3rd parties solve the problem on behalf of Google. If Google opens up the Android Marketplace API then developers can come along and build a better app store than Google. What a great idea! I wonder if this principle could be applied to more than just app stores? Perhaps someone will do something cool with The Guardian API?

Take aways from curation

• Too much information is always a big problem for users
• Folks involved in the user experience field need to make sure they understand the “information overload” problem and help users get to the good stuff
• Content providers can look to open their platforms & methods of content delivery to provide opportunities for others to curate content in new and interesting ways

Over to you

Feedback welcome!

• what do these words mean to you?
• have you heard these words come up more frequently recently?
• what words have been coming up in your world?

P.S. Hello Technorati. I do own this blog and here is my code thingy 7DW256UJZWTE

Fans of Star Wars and the infamous Jedi Mind Trick understand the allure of persuasion. What would the world look like if everyone uttered the magical word “yes” whenever I made a request? If only! Ironing, laundry and cleaning my bedroom would be chores banished to memories of the “the bad old days”.

Persuasion, it turns out, is not a power limited to Luke Skywalker & friends. There is some science to the seemingly dark-art of Influence. Understanding the principles of persuasion can have a dramatic impact on the way we choose to design web sites and understanding these principles becomes another item for good user interface designers to consider.

I’ve been lucky enough to read some good books on these principles:

• Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

…and how some of this can apply to fruitful online relationships:

• Trust Agents

With the knowledge gathered from these books I was intrigued when the IxDA of Chicago setup the Brains, Behavior & Design workshop. The Brains, Behavior & Design team are a group of IIT Institute of Design students appling findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics to the design process.

Workshop format

I really enjoyed the workshop, here is how the 2 hour session was broken up:

1. Intro on the topic of influence and how fields such as Cognitive Psychology & Behavioral Economics can have an impact on web design
2. A room of about 50 people were split into groups
3. We were given a persona for a particular type of user on Facebook
4. We were given the scenario that each team worked for Facebook and we had to come up with ideas to help stop users, of the type described in the persona, leaving Facebook
5. We were given “strategy cards” developed by the smart Brains, Behavior & Design team
6. Each team then had to brain storm ideas, using the cards to seed the ideas, for the given problem

The value of this workshop was excellent. While the principles of persuasion, according to Dr. Robert Cialdini, might be relatively simple to understand I would suggest that the application of these principles is more difficult. What the Brains, Behavior & Design team have managed to do is take the principles of persuasion and come up with a handy toolkit which helps us all apply these principles to web design. Hooray!

Instead of talking about the laws of reciprocation, scarcity, authority, commitment and consistency, consensus, liking and their impact on our problem I can pick up a little card with statements like “Highlight colorful and personal stories”. From the strategy card I can review the meaning of this point, review examples and come up with ideas to solve my problem.

Fruits of labour – Facebook listen up!

I want to share some of the ideas the group came up with – some are fun, some are obvious. The point is – it’s good to share and it would be fun to see if Facebook ever implements any of these in the future (seeing into the future was another Jedi skill!). Our persona was “early adopter, early leaver” but some of the ideas encompass a broader audience.

• Alpha betas – the idea here being to let early adopters test new improvements to the Facebook service. Have these people be a special kind of focus group driving the direction of the service. These users become more engaged in the service and Facebook gets quality feedback.
• Badges for the cool crowd – can a gaming element be introduced to Facebook? Provide badges of honor to groups of Facebook users. Early adopters could get “On-Facebook since 2004″ or “5 year user” badges. The idea here being users of Facebook stay engaged with the service to earn or keep hold of such badges
• The breakup box – awesome idea. The analogy here is when you break up with a boyfriend/girlfriend you have to go through all the pictures, CDs, trinkets etc. gathered over the course of that relationship. Everyone knows this process. Everyone knows this is heart breaking. Could the same thing be applied to Facebook? If you want to “breakup” with Facebook you have to go through a process which is littered with “remember when?” type scenarios. For example “remember that great photo of you and 10 friends enjoying the summer on North Beach?” cue photo and associated comments. This process makes it harder to leave because users remember the value associated to Facebook.
• Facebook discounts – Facebook could make the value of the service greater by offering discounts to users of Facebook Connect. In this Facebook-meets-Groupon idea a user could log into a site with Facebook Connect and receive a discount on products & services just because they have used their Facebook log in.
• Facebook themes - one Facebook for work and one for home. Different features & different value can be derived from Facebook in different situations.
• Facebook for senior citizens – a variant on the above “theme idea”. The idea here is that there could be a super-simple version of Facebook with features specifically designed for senior citizens. One feature discussed was the ability to have a paper newsletter with group updates delivered, sent through the traditional post office system, to seniors at the end of each month.
• Farmville culling – another idea, to be filed under “slightly crazy”, to assign greater value to Facebook and subsequent losses to the user. Here the user would have to perform large scale virtual euthanasia of the animals they have cultivated in Farmville before they can delete their account! Note: I think this idea was dreamed up by everyone who is sick of the Farmville updates in Facebook news feeds!

Persuasive design – cutting through the hype

“Persuasive design” is fast becoming the buzzword-de-jour in user-interface-meets-analytics circles and this makes sense. If you’re building any kind of web site the likelihood is you want someone to do something on your site. You want to meet your goals and you want your consumers to be compelled to help you out to that end. Subscribe to your blog feed, buy more products & services, sign up to your newsletter, listen to your podcast, refer your products. Web designers need to design sites in such a way as to leverage the cues which people look for when making a decision. The principles of persuasion and the great books mentioned are a good grounding and I would suggest that the Brains, Behavior & Design team have now added a great tool to the persuasive design toolbox.

Take action & add to your process

You could use the Brains, Behavior & Design toolkit to:

• Introduce the concept of persuasive design to your wider team or client in a fun, collaborative way
• Brainstorm & help with idea generation and exploratory sketching
• Validate designs you’ve already done – can you make tweaks to something you are already happy with?

I’m so thankful that the IxDA keeps on coming up with great workshops and I’m really excited for the smart folks behind Brains, Behavior & Design. I wish them luck!

Over to you!

As always I love to hear feedback. Here are some thoughts on where the conversation could go:

• Have you heard the term “persuasive design” crop up more often recently?
• Have you read any of the books mentioned? Did you like them? Do you think the principles are applicable to web design?
• What process do you go through when you are reading good principles in a book and then want to start using them in your day-to-day process?
• Have you been to a Brains, Behavior & Design workshop? What did you think?
• How do you think Facebook could keep its early adopters?
• Do you think any of the Facebook ideas are good?
• Do you see yourself using any of the process described in your next site design?

Related links

• Inside Influence Report – great blog by Robert B. Cialdini, Noah J. Goldstein & others

Do you ever have a tough time describing user experience and what UX consultants try to do? I’ve been trying to spread the good word for over 5 years and it still trips me up some times. It’s not a case of whether I understand, it’s a case of getting my audience to understand. Stories, analogies, metaphor and simile all help. Here is one I stumbled on while talking to my hair dresser.

How are haircuts and user experience alike?

Here is the conversation I had with the awesome hairdresser, who’s skills are sadly lost on a balding man like myself, at Steven Papageorge Salon.

Hairdresser: “I had a tough week last week because I had all my difficult clients in”

Me: “Why is that?”

Hairdresser: “They are difficult in that they make me cut their hair in a way that is not flattering. It’s hard work when you have to do that.”

Me: “I totally understand!”

Hairdressers work with thousands of different types of people with different types of hair, they are trained to work out what looks good and what does not look good. They have probably made loads of mistakes in the past and learnt from them. I’m going to that hairdresser because I think they are good or my friends think they are good. Why then do we all walk into a hairdressers, sit down and answer the question, coming from the hairdresser, “how would you like your hair?”? Shouldn’t it be me asking “what can you do with my hair?”?

My point is that “the experts should know best” but sometimes the wishes of the client can get in the way of the best ideas.

When designing websites the UX consultancy world can get like hairdressing. I’d suggest that, like good hairdressers, a good user experience professional will be able to create a good experience even if you, the client, cannot picture it yourself. Sometimes I get asked to make an interface or experience that I know sucks or to put it another way I’m being asked to cut may favourite client a pristine mullet.

Banishing the mullet!

What can you do? How can clients and agencies banish the mullet?

Client side

If you’re getting push back from your agency maybe have a go at doing the following:

• Take a step back and ask yourself “am I qualified to cut my own hair?”
• Start to phrase your feedback as problems and not solutions (point added to post on 6th June 2010)
• Read this excellent article by Seth Godin – how to be a great client

Agency side

• Take a deep breath & remember who pays the bills. The worst possible thing to do is to be disrespectful or arrogant. If you lose your temper you’ve lost your argument or, worse, your client
• Keep a log of key decisions, document both (client & agency) points of view. If the solution you don’t like really does bomb you want to make sure you have an audit trail of sorts
• Keep a log of the ideas that got shot down, call it your “innovation log”, whip it out if you get a shot at A/B testing or iteration 2 of the same project
• Promote A/B testing within a lab study – let your users decide which solution is best
• If it’s technical constraints that are sending you down a dark path – try to understand the constraints you’re operating within? Is there a hack around the constraints that are forcing you to build out a bad experience?
• If all else fails – picture your client with a sweet ass mullet, mohawk, bowl cut or <insert bad hair cut here>. A smile on your face may help you keep perspective

Your stories & ideas

Over to you:

• do you think the hairdresser analogy is a good one?
• what stories, metaphors, analogies do you use to help clients understand your services & good ideas?
• what other industries are analogous to user experience consultancy?
• what techniques do you use to get the best ideas implemented?
• when should an agency back off? When does the client really know best?

Happy story telling & best haircut wishes to all of you.

Netbanker is a site that I rely on. It provides great coverage for all things digital within the financial sector. A few weeks ago they posted an interesting article about how, in their opinion, USAA Makes Mobile Banking Better than Online Banking. A quote that stuck out within that article got me thinking. Here is the quote:

“The key to making mobile a profitable channel is to make the user experience BETTER than online.”

The thing that stood out to me was the notion of the same service being “better” depending on the channel of delivery. This idea is certainly not new. Today we have 5 ways, at least, you can engage with your bank:

1. Bricks & mortar branches
2. Snail mail (you remember that, right? the thing the hole in your door is good for)
3. ATMs
4. Call centre
5. Internet banking (via the desktop/laptop web browser)
6. BONUS features if you’re with a progressive bank – SMS/text banking, kiosks, native mobile apps, optimised web apps, access via 3rd parties like Mint, Wasabe or Yodlee

The right tool for the right job – its about context

When it comes down to it, no matter what channel, I get the same service – banking. I will get different levels of service depending on the channel of delivery. Some channels are massively more convenient than others – it all depends on the context within which I’m trying to get something done. To simplify, it depends on:

• what I’m trying to do e.g. check balances, make a transfer, get a mortgage
• what I’ve got available to do it with e.g. basic phone, smart phone, a method of transport (to drive/walk/train to a local branch), a computer, an internet connection, an ATM card etc.
• how I like doing it e.g. if I’m tech savvy & I trust the bank’s online service my first port of call is going to be Internet banking

Depending on this context one channel is going to be more convenient than another to get certain tasks done. Some tasks are just plain hard to do well in one channel and so I need to turn to a different channel to get the job done. Let’s look at a couple of examples, keeping a mobile experience in mind:

1. Task – checking balances. Massively simple to do. Easiest for me, as a tech savvy customer, to do this on my mobile phone. The value of checking my balance, within the shop, just before I indulge in retail therapy would be high. The task is well suited to the channel.
2. Task – buying my first house. I just cannot see myself, a self confessed geek, screaming “Hey, darling, let’s buy a house. I’ve got an app for that”. I’m sure this is not because I lack imagination. I just don’t believe the channel is cut out for the process of buying a home. The value of completing this task on the go is low and, in all likelihood, completely impractical. I probably need access to all sorts of paperwork to buy a mortgage. Paper work which is at home, near my desktop and my big screen where my better half can watch me go through the motions (and do some back seat driving). All this without my fingers and thumbs getting in the way.

My first amendment to the Netbanker quote is:

“The key to making mobile a profitable channel is to make the user experience, for certain tasks suitable to the mobile channel, BETTER than online.”

Ways to make money with mobile internet banking (MIB)

The other point that got me thinking was the idea of mobile profitability. Obviously, if you’re writing a business case for a mobile app or mobile optimised web app you need to make sure you know what the ROI is. How are you going to turn a profit? Here is a list of ways I could think of:

1. Ad supported content. This for me is out for mobile internet banking (MIB). The trade off does not make sense from a usability perspective. Screen real estate is at an absolute premium on a mobile device and plastering ads all over the small screen sacrifices real estate I’d otherwise use to get a job done. Mind you Apple and Google certainly think there is something to be said for it
2. Have your customers purchase your app and generate revenue from app sales. This seems like an unnecessary barrier to entry given that the bank stands to make more money from users engaging with them. I guess The Guardian got away with it but they didn’t have a way to make money once the users got engaged. This is not the case with MIB
3. Don’t build an app, get someone else to do it while licensing your API. This approach seems short sighted too. While I do believe developers would queue up to get their hands on a banking API (think Mint, Wasabe, Yodlee) its unlikely that developers would do so just to focus on your brand. It is more likely that the aggregators would support an experience like “hey, your current bank account with Bank of America sucks and we can recommend a new one which is way better and its with Citi bank”. The other drawback here is it only takes 1 bank to give away their API access and suddenly your at a competitive disadvantage in the eyes of the developers
4. Make your functionality more accessible & charge for some types of transactions e.g. international transfers, rush payments.  If you charge for the same things you charge for in the online banking service the experience is the same between channels. Customers are unlikely to be surprised by this status-quo. The point here is that if you make your functionality more accessible, by having that functionality available from the mobile phone, you increase the likelihood of people using it. I think this is where Netbanker were coming from
5. Up-sell or cross-sell from within MIB. Here is a huge opportunity if its done right. The bank tells you about a product which they feel is better for you or is complimentary to another product you have and you accept their offer. This experience does not have to suck. There could be an offers component to the app, there could be contextual, non obtrusive messaging within a flow e.g. if I’m looking at a loan balance it might be nice to know about the pre-approval I qualify for.
6. Build out a cross-channel experience. Let your customers start an application online, do some of it on the phone with a call centre agent and then finish it off on MIB. Again – more access, more money
7. Invent a new method of mobile payment and take a cut on each transaction. Sound mad? Alas dear reader – PayPal & Square did not take their medicine
8. Make happy customers by letting them enjoy awesome customer service. “Delight users”. The term is over used but the essence makes so much sense. If you’re a business doesn’t it make sense to keep your customers happy? Providing customers with greater access  to your functionality should not be seen as a new frontier upon which to plaster generic banner ads. It should be seen as an opportunity to engage your customers, making them happy because you, Mr Bank, get where your customers are coming from and what they need right now. Call it a retention strategy if you want – to me it’s just awesome customer experience. I know of people who change banks because their new bank has a better online banking service. How long before we say “I hate my bank. I can’t even check my balance/pay a bill/review my stock on my phone”? To put it another way – how long before your retention strategy becomes an acquisition strategy?

My second amendment to the Netbanker quote is:

“The key to making mobile a profitable channel is to make the user experience, for certain tasks suitable to the mobile channel, BETTER than online AND by choosing the business case which makes sense for you and your users.“

Final thoughts

Who knows what year will be the fabled “year of the mobile”. Do econsultancy know? Do The Guardian? What is clear is that smart phones are increasing in their number and mobile data packages are becoming pervasive within this space. To put it another way – it’s got to the point where if you’re a “young professional” in Chicago you look pretty silly pulling out your clam shell Verizon rubbish e.g. me.

“Mobile web” adoption & access is as fabulous as it is interesting from a user experience point of view. More phones, more operating systems, more browsers, more app stores – while the choice may be confusing for the consumer the variety of solutions produced to solve interesting user interface problems make mobile the most interesting digital space today (IMHO). This fascinating divergence will be matched only by the inevitable convergence so we may as well enjoy it while it lasts!

I’d suggest that drawing closer to or reaching that mobile tipping point has it’s drawbacks – while everyone and their dog wants to offer functionality to their consumers they also want to work out how to make money within this new space. The salivation of anticipation is audible in big business e.g. Apple and Google. While this mobile land grab takes place all businesses need to learn from previous usability mistakes, striving to understand the channel they’re dealing with, what the channel is good for and how their business can add value for their customers within this space.

In short – banking is coming to a mobile phone near  you and if you’re a smart bank there has never been a better time to work with user experience professionals.

Over to you

• Do you use mobile internet banking today? On what phone/bank combo?
• What bank does mobile internet banking well today? Web or native app?
• Do you trust the idea of mobile internet banking? Do think it’s secure?
• What banking tasks are well suited to mobile internet banking?
• Would you buy banking products from your mobile phone?
• Can you see a day when we buy mortgages from our mobile phones?
• Can you think of other ways to make money, as a bank, from mobile?
• Have you seen any sponsored apps where the banks are the primary sponsors?

Related articles

• Jakob Nielsen – Mobile Usability
• Jakob Nielsen – iPhone Apps Need Low Starting Hurdles
• Netbanker – Mobile Firsts: PayPal Launches Bump to Pay
• Netbanker – USAA Hits 1 Million Mobile Users; Grabs Great Press Coverage with Remote Deposit Feature
• eMarketer - Internet Is Top Banking Method, Mobile still niche preference