Nigel Smith was talking about the sometimes painful experience of closing the BBC Archer’s Messageboard, a topic which I blogged about a couple of times during the process. Known affectionately as “Mustardland” to devotees, the closure sparked a great deal of anger and generated national news coverage. It marked nearly the final chapter in a lengthy retreat from hosting communities by the BBC.

Nigel Smith, who is Digital Editor of Radio 4, said that the Archers itself is pretty divisive. The music either puts a smile on your face, or is your cue to switch the channel off abruptly. It has a weekly reach of around 5 million listeners, and the website has around 150,000 unique users a week. Episodes on iPlayer generally get around 70,000 plays. By contrast, the message board had around 10,000 lurkers in an average week, and about 900 regular contributors.

Nigel put the closure in context of the BBC’s community strategy. Eight to ten years ago, he reminded us, the BBC hosted messageboards on just about every topic under the sun. “Including a messageboard on Islam,” he said, adding “and you can imagine how much fun that was to moderate.”

Obeying currybet’s law — the more members of BBC staff or ex-BBC staff in the room the probability of Doctor Who being mentioned approaches one — Nigel cited my favourite sci-fi fantasy show as a classic example. The BBC used to host a Doctor Who forum, that was expensive to maintain and over-run with trolls and poor community behaviour. “That isn’t the BBC’s job”, Nigel said. The BBC’s unique job is to make the best possible Doctor Who — there are plenty of places on the web where fans can then discuss it.

The cost of hosting and moderating messageboards is high compared to other types of content, and has a disproportionate cost per user. There is another problem for media companies like the BBC, Nigel explained, in that there is a real tension between the role of being a mass broadcaster, and having a digitally enabled one-to-one relationship with the audience. Hosting communities on the BBC website created a false expectation that users were part of an official feedback loop. So, Nigel explained, then they felt that their comments weren’t being listened to by the programme makers — “but then we’d never really made that promise.”

This was very much the case when I used to help host the Points Of View section of the BBC’s messageboard in the mid-2000s. The fact that the TV show never followed the agenda of the main topics on the messageboard, quoted users, or responded to any suggestions was a recurring source of anger amongst the users. In truth, I’d never met anyone from the television production team to discuss the boards, and to be honest, at that time, I doubt that any of them ever looked at it.

As Nigel pointed out, one of the problems with closing a community associated with a programme is that by definition you are probably dealing with the show’s most passionately engaged audience. You might only be delivering the message to a small group of über-fans, but it is a difficult message nonetheless. And the figures showed that people using the service weren’t really discussing the show all that much. He showed a screenshot of the front page, revealing that the BBC had hosted something like 1 million conversations about The Archers, and 4 million conversations in the off-topic area known as “The Bull”, after the local Ambridge pub in the soap opera. An additional complication for the BBC is that, as Licence Fee payers, the users feel that they own the service themselves, in a way that doesn’t necessarily apply to other media brands.

The closure was undoubtedly a painful experience for those who loved the board. Nigel spoke about how uncomfortable it was to appear on Radio 4’s Feedback show, where he had to come on and defend the decision immediately after a clip of a cancer sufferer who described the community as one of her few sources of support. No easy task, and not the type of thing you imagine the BBC would spring unexpectedly on many other guests apart from their own staff.

Nigel played out loud at the event a clip I blogged about, where Mustardlander Penny, known as teddyandgypsy on the board, said that corporations would pay “megabucks” for the kind of intelligence about their audience that the BBC Archers messageboard delivered to the BBC. I blogged at the time that if this was true, then brands would be falling over themselves to host the best general interest messageboards on the web, and that isn’t the case. As sincerely held as Penny’s beliefs are, the response in the room to the clip at this event was incredulity. There was even more incredulity in the room when Nigel explained that one Mustardlander on the show ended up saying that if it was a straight choice between axing the messageboard or axing The Archers, the BBC should save the online community, not the programme.

And it was, as Nigel stressed in a positive way, an undoubtedly unique community, which, over the years, had provided a great deal of comfort, support, information and entertainment to the community members. I’ve a lot of sympathy with both Nigel’s position, and that of the people who lost their beloved online community. And I write from a position of experience here. One of the real ironies of working for big media companies and being involved in online communities is that you often find the most recognisable individuals outside the building in the community end up being the public face for unpopular decisions that have been taken elsewhere in the company, and the flak can often be very personal. I’ve had people messaging me at home at anti-social hours, trawling through my net presence to criticise my career and lifestyle decisions, and even death threats on Twitter aimed at my kids over unpopular changes or decisions at the BBC and the Guardian in the past. At the Storythings event Nigel showed some of the things that had been sent to him, and spoke of a cartoon someone made which depicted him throwing himself off the top of a building, echoing a plot-line in the soap.

Nigel had some great advice about handling this situation personally. Firstly, before the plan had been announced, he spent some time auditing his social media presence, tightening up his privacy settings on Facebook and the like, as he expected people to seek him out on the web. He kept his Twitter account public, and found that in general, responding to people who sent an abusive personal message generally elicited a response of “Oh, hang on, I’d lost sight of the fact that there is a real person here.” Quite a few people, he said, deleted their original rude tweet once they’d had a polite personal acknowledgement from him.

Secondly, Nigel helped prepare a really detailed FAQ. In UX-land we often scoff at the FAQ, suggesting it is the last refuge of the scoundrel who hasn’t designed their service properly. In this case, having a set agreed line and paragraph on all the issues is invaluable — not least of which because it gives you URLs to direct angry people to.

Thirdly, in the blog post announcing the closure, he specifically said he would address questions and issues in 4 days time. That meant there wasn’t a mad time-consuming scramble to answer every comment and make the same points over and over again. The four day rule allowed time to group and theme the questions and draw up appropriate responses.

It was really good to hear somebody talk so candidly about the end of a digital service like this. It certainly made me feel that I wasn’t alone in some of my experiences, and to think that perhaps blogging about it will help the next person who ends up caught in the crossfire of the closure of a little-but-passionately used digital service.

Full disclosure: I used to work at the BBC, and worked on some BBC Four projects directly with Nigel Smith in 2003/4. I sometimes work for Mat Locke at Storythings, who organised the event. I was involved in closing the Guardian’s Talkboards community a couple of years ago.

“#guardiancoffee is the future. dwi.” – Alex Hern

“If you run a paper, accept that the news is subsidised by everything else, just as it always has been. Except that now, the rest of the paper is also subsidised by everything else, and “everything else” includes literally anything.”

Excellent essay from Alex, looking at how the internet is going to eat every single business that doesn’t have some sort of tangible physical experience with it. And explaining that the Guardian’s pop-up coffee shop isn’t a million miles aways from the Telegraph Wine Club and other newspaper brand extensions. Read it.

“My small advice on sussing out a web career when you don’t have the obvious/expected background.” – Erin Kissane

“Do what you say you’ll do. Make yourself as indispensable as possible by actively tying up loose ends and helping with others’ work. Help the people you work with be awesome. Don’t wait for things to come to you.”

Erin undersells as “small advice” a simply fantastic article that anyone starting out in a web career ought to read. Key points – rolling up your sleeves, being helpful to people, finding role models, use diversity of approach to your advantage, and don’t stay in sucky jobs longer than you have to. And finding a specialism you work hard to know every possible single thing about. All things I 100% endorse. Read it.

He went on to look at the problem of handling mobile traffic, citing the horrifying statistic that 57% of people bounce off mobile web pages after just 3 seconds. He listed three main approaches to dealing with the mobile web: responsive web design, client-side adaptive behaviour, and server-side adaptive behaviour. Responsive web design isn’t cutting it, he said, saying that major ecommerce sites can try and load on average 87 assets on their homepages, adding up to between 2 and 15Mb trying to get down the pipes to your phone. This is slowing the experience down on small devices, and also potentially racking up huge unnecessary data bills for users.

We need, he said, to find a better way of doing this, and suggested this might be Anticipatory Design. He urged UXers to extract patterns from the way that individuals use their mobiles, take advantage of the fact that phones are “situationally aware”, and predict what the individual user is going to need. It doesn’t take much to begin to recognise how a user is consuming a particular service and tailor the options you display to them around that. “Don’t respond just to the device”, he said, “but anticipate the needs of the user who is using the device.”

Eric had some unkind words to say about SCRUM, suggesting that a fetishisation of process held projects back from the true meaning of agile — of reaction quickly to circumstances and being fleet-footed. He prefers the DWYNTDTGTSD methodology.

Saying something that Stephen P. Anderson would go on to echo later in the day, Eric insisted that “design patterns are not design.” He cited the Vitruvian principles of firmitas, utilitas and venustas — being solid and reliable, being useful, and being beautiful — saying these don’t mean we need more “eye candy” in design, but arguing that “brand personality is what will differentiate two sites with basically the same content.” Eric’s law of the jungle I guess — only the truly Vitruvian will survive.

Comparing the amount of time it took the automobile into mass production and on the mass market with the length of time between the first web page and now, Eric pointed out that whilst innovation may be running faster, we are still in some of the early years of the world wide web and the digital services it supports. He worries that we are being complacent when we should still be acting like design pioneers.

Eric Reiss wrote “Usable Usability: Simple Steps for Making Stuff Better”.

This is one of a series of blog posts about UX Sofia.
“Designing for Micromoments: Tiny Interactions with Big Payoffs” – Stephen P. Anderson
“Communicating in style” – Birgit Geiberger
“Design thinking vs user-centered design” – Ina Ivanova & Dimiter Simov at UX Sofia
“Turning historic adversity into business advantage” – Eric Reiss

Dimiter put together a tongue-in-cheek checklist of the things you need to be doing in order to be doing proper user-centred design: use sticky notes, make sketches with a variety of expensive pens and pencils, have personas with names like Vanessa and Sandy, and use lots and lots and lots of whiteboards. These people, he said, clearly “know what they are doing.” Especially if they have a long meaningless job title.

But he soon got more serious about what mattered — a focus on users. Following the lead of Eric Reiss earlier in the day, Dimiter also coined an acronym especially for the occasion. He grouped things like user-centred design and empathetic design and usability-centred design as all being examples of a DAGUP — Design approach guaranteeing usable products.

Ina Ivanova then took over the presentation to give some examples of product development where a clear focus on solving a problem for a specific sector of the market was evident in the way a business had approached solving a problem. She cited Tesco in Korea developing the ability to do your grocery shopping on your phone whilst waiting for a metro train by scanning item QR codes on posters at stations. She also showed Ideo’s work to reimagine the shape of the toothbrush so that it actually suited the motor control skills of five year olds, rather than simply handing them scaled down versions of adult toothbrushes.

Ina went on to explain a bit about “design thinking” as a process, and how a team working on a project needs to develop the critical facility to start asking if they are trying to solve the right problem, and also to allow themselves space to do “divergent thinking” before honing in on a preferred solution. As Ina put it, if you don’t allow your team to do this, “you risk spending a lot of time designing and building a product that does not solve a real problem.” One of the reasons I vastly prefer sketching to producing acres of computer-generated wireframes is not because I am lazy — although I am — but because that allows me scope to quickly rip through lots of possible solutions before homing in on a couple of options. So often, if you have to put a lot of effort into your deliverables, it limits the number of options you are able to explore.

The pair went on to describe a case study of a project at SAP where they had used “design thinking” as their methodology. Dimiter said there had been a workshop with plenty of sticky-notes, and where they “drank a lot of soda, because whiskey and other hard liquor was not allowed.” They have existing products, so are not starting designs from scratch, which means they can also watch people using the software. A key part of their workshop had been taking observational data and plotting similar user tasks on a white-board, then prioritising them.

Dimiter said one big lesson from this session had been that they had used an external facilitator. This was great, he explained, because if you are trying to do the designing and the logistics of the workshop, you cannot do both well. He also recommended that getting out of the office to be creative was very important, and that every couple of months you should ensure that you have sessions watching people use your software, to keep you familiar with your user’s needs. He finished by imploring the audience to “get a UX mindset”, and not leave it behind with them when they left UX Sofia.

Next…

My last blog post from Sofia will be my write-up of the opening session of the day, from Eric Reiss.

This is one of a series of blog posts about UX Sofia.
“Designing for Micromoments: Tiny Interactions with Big Payoffs” – Stephen P. Anderson
“Communicating in style” – Birgit Geiberger
“Design thinking vs user-centered design” – Ina Ivanova & Dimiter Simov at UX Sofia
“Turning historic adversity into business advantage” – Eric Reiss

People have been trying to categorise human behaviour for centuries, as far back as Galen & Hippocrates and the “four temperaments” in the 400BCEs. The scheme she is most interested is the People styles or social styles developed by David Merrill in the 1960s.

This categorises people into four groups, and Birgit referred to them with some rather less academic and more accessible names: thinkers, relators, socialisers and directors. These categorisations aren’t, she explained, a way to understand what or how people are thinking, but are based on all the public manifestations of personality. The types are plotted on four quadrants of a graph, with the axes being indirect to direct, and open to guarded. The indirect styles approach things at a slower pace, whilst the open styles are more about the exchange of emotional information.

Very briefly, the relator needs to build relationships, the thinker likes to plan things very carefully, the socialiser is full of ideas, and the director is very result driven. Like all of these personality classifications, it doesn’t mean that somebody of “Type A” only ever behaves like a “Type A”, but it is a useful tool for describing their general communication style.

What I found interesting about Birgit’s talk is that it was much more than an explanation of a theory about how humans interact — she included some really practical examples of how you could use it to improve things in the workplace. One of the keys is to be able to identify which types of people are on your team.

Birgit explained that often tensions can arise because of a clash of styles. A typical exchange that can cause friction is between a software developer and a designer. Whilst the designer is trying to explain what needs to be built, the developer will be interrupting with questions like “how will this be achieved” or observations like “this interaction will be difficult and expensive to build.” These are all great questions that the designer will probably come to appreciate after a period of reflection, but what is at play here is that developers tend to be the thinker type, and designers tend to be the socialiser type. So the thinker’s methodical fact-driven approach is clashing with the socialiser being in the flow of ideas tumbling out. At that moment the thinker’s communication style comes across to the socialiser as a negative, blocking behaviour, when it isn’t — it is simply a verbal manifestation of how the thinker plans projects. A great clue that someone might be a ‘director’ type, she said, is if you notice that they have no personal effects whatsoever on their desk in the office.

Birgit said that you can use knowledge of these styles to help resolve conflict. First off, determine what styles are involved in the conflict. Then plan your conversation in advance, paying attention to the types of information and communication that will help put participants at ease. A director, for example, will find questions about what she got up to at the weekend a time-wasting prelude to the real conversation, whereas a relator will find a failure to inquire rude and brusque. Finally, Birgit said, don’t forget to evaluate how the process went after the conversation, in order to learn how you could use these communication styles even more effectively the next time.

Oh, and as an aside, Birgit showed a great slide that mapped several different types of people classification scheme onto each other. My Myers-Briggs personality type — INTP — mapped onto the ancient Greek philosopher’s category of “Melancholic”. Go figure.

You might also be interested in the notes I took of Birgit and Pete Boersma’s joint presentation on a similar theme at EuroIA Rome last year.

Next…

Next up I’ll have a blog post about a talk by Ina Ivanova and Dimiter Simov looking at design thinking.

This is one of a series of blog posts about UX Sofia.
“Designing for Micromoments: Tiny Interactions with Big Payoffs” – Stephen P. Anderson
“Communicating in style” – Birgit Geiberger
“Design thinking vs user-centered design” – Ina Ivanova & Dimiter Simov at UX Sofia
“Turning historic adversity into business advantage” – Eric Reiss

“Designing for Micromoments: Tiny Interactions with Big Payoffs” – Stephen P. Anderson

Stephen was giving us a guided tour around great interactions. He says that too many companies seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking that if they get some user requirements, find some design patterns that meet them, get a few best practices out of a brilliant book like Luke’s, and use a decent CSS & JavaScript framework, then they’ve got good UX. He thinks instead that they’ve only made “commodity UX”, and that we should be striving for great design instead.

One of his tips was to think of these interactions as conversations with the user, not just as buttons and fields and forms. You also need to be aware, he said, that conversations happen over time. A great way of de-cluttering an interface is not asking “is this information needed”, but asking “is this information needed right now?”

He gave a couple of good examples of interfaces that become more usable at the moment you need them, whilst otherwise trying to stay discretely in the background. Hulu’s search box is dark black like the rest of the page background, so as not to distract from the videostream. But when you hover over it, it lights up and the background goes white to make it easier to type.

Hulu’s search interaction

Zenpen’s WYSIWYG elements for bold and italics and the like only appear when text is selected.

Zenpen’s interface gradually discloses features

Stephen explained that when you start to think of interactions as conversations, it makes you think much harder about the words you use on the page. He is not a fan at all of using lorem ipsum in designs or prototypes. Essentially just saying “blah blah blah” in the copy means you’ve abdicated responsibility for directing the interaction.

Treating interactions as conversation means taking more care about how you frame the conversation and influence the responses. Stephen cited a study where, shown a clip of a car crash, subjects who were asked to guess how fast a car “smashed” into the other one consistently estimated higher speeds than those asked how fast the car “hit” the other one. Stephen extends this idea of carefully thinking about questions to how you frame the project as a whole. Saying that “John selects something from a map in order to achieve x” dictates a mapping solution, whereas posing the problem as “John is trying to achieve x” opens up more ideas for solutions.

When designing interactions, Stephen said there is a real tension between making everything obvious to the user at first glance, and in making things discoverable. If he is designing something that will be used as an internal tool, by the same people over a long period of time, he tends to want to err on the side of discoverability, as these people can learn an interface. This isn’t the case with web-facing systems, and he suggested there is a “zone of clarity” you should be aiming for in your designs, where most people can easily use most of the features most of the time.

He had another great tip, which is something that I’m definitely going to try. He uses Keynote as his secret weapon. He one day realised that you can get a very quick first sketch of a UI with not a lot of effort. If you sit your client or stakeholder down, he said, and make them go through the conversation that is the interaction, use Keynote to take the notes. The headline / outline structure of a presentation means that within seconds you can quickly produce what looks like a set of web pages out of just making a human go verbally through the main steps necessary to get the transaction done.

Stephen wrote “Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences (Voices That Matter)”

Next…

During the week I’ll be publishing some more of my notes from UX Sofia, starting with “Communicating in style” by Birgit Geiberger.

This is one of a series of blog posts about UX Sofia.
“Designing for Micromoments: Tiny Interactions with Big Payoffs” – Stephen P. Anderson
“Communicating in style” – Birgit Geiberger
“Design thinking vs user-centered design” – Ina Ivanova & Dimiter Simov at UX Sofia
“Turning historic adversity into business advantage” – Eric Reiss

Here are four sessions that I am really looking forward to in Edinburgh in September…

“The UX of Natural Disasters” – Amy Silvers

The disasters we talk about in cases studies at IA conferences are usually caused by stakeholders, bad project-planning, and errant developers. Amy has a different disaster to inspire her — the massive storm that hit New York last year:

“What is the role of IAs in managing information in a crisis? In this talk, I will use my community’s experience during Superstorm Sandy to share ideas about how we as UX practitioners can contribute to the emerging field of crisis informatics, and I’ll look at what we can do to facilitate a partnership between government, service providers, and customers that will aid in improving the user experience of a natural disaster.”

“The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone: Loss in Hyperspace” – Joe Sokohl

I’ve spent a lot of my career working at big media organisations with big audiences, so I hope Joe’s talk is going to echo a lot of the experience I have.

Or tell me I’ve been doing it all wrong. Either will be fine.

“So many times we design for new users, with only a passing nod at existing ones. But what happens when we redesign a familiar experience, especially one that people have ‘grown up with’? What happens when digital destinations disappear? A strong dissonance affects people who become used to a certain digital place, a certain set of patterns, images, and interactions. When this place changes, especially dramatically, people experience loss, frustration, anger, blame, and confusion. They don’t have to. That’s where UX comes in.”

“Running a SketchClub” – Kathryn Parkes

Lightning talks are a new feature in the EuroIA line-up, and Kathryn Parkes has one of the slots, talking about her role in getting a sketching club going in Dublin. As someone who helps organise events, I’m always interested to hear about how other people have gone about it. I’ll be doing a lightning talk myself — “Dinosaurs, Diamonds and Darwin.”

“This is not your parents’ pattern library” – Carrie Buckingham & Erica Decker

We love good case studies at EuroIA, and Carrie & Erica will be presenting one from a web behemoth — eBay.

“In this talk, we’ll discuss the fading relevance of traditional pattern libraries and show you what we’ve done to reinvigorate our Design Standards hub at eBay, making it more engaging and maximizing its usefulness. We’ll talk about pattern libraries as not only agents of change, but also products of change, and how extending the purpose of eBay’s own pattern library has increased adoption and understanding of design standards across the company.”

As well as a case study from eBay, the conference programme also features Diane Murphy talking about her work with Facebook.

So join us…

This year EuroIA is in the UK for the very first time. We’ll be in Edinburgh from September 26th to the 28th. Early bird discount ticket are available until June 15. Come and join us.

The BBC homepage clock first appeared in 2007. It was removed in a re-design in 2010, which generated so many complaints that it had to be reinstated.

Honestly, doesn’t it just make you think that someone at the BBC Trust was looking to up their quota of upheld complaints and started with a folder of correspondence that had been marked non-consequential? Remember, that is the BBC that just squandered £100m on a digital media initiative saying “but at least we’ve got this clock business under control.”

The article does, as Tom Coates pointed out on Twitter, sum up the insanity that working for the BBC sometimes is. It says:

“The BBC had asked its product management team to investigate the issue and it had reported back to the committee that it would take about 100 staffing days to make the changes involved in switching to an independent clock. This could not be justified given the high level of perceived user satisfaction with the clock and an absence of complaints about it, the BBC said.”

So there you have it. A feature previously reinstated due to popular demand is to be axed because one person complained. Still, with the tax-payer media giant of the BBC finally out of the equation, my plans for a massive empire of JavaScript clock related businesses can at last proceed.

UsVsTh3m.

The premise is incredibly simple. Every day we try to make some funny vaguely topical internet LOLs, and pick the best of what has amused us on the rest of the internet. At tea-time each day we send out an email rounding up what we’ve done, what they’ve done, and calculate who has “won” — us or them. You can sign up to the daily email here.

Almost everything about the project is an experiment, from running it like a small skunkworks/start-up within Trinity Mirror, to the way we are producing web content in the manner a topical TV comedy writing team, to the way we are putting aggregating “their” content at the heart of the product. Our main use case is someone on their phone who has just slightly lost interest in what they are doing, whether that is watching the TV, queueing for coffee, or talking to their boyfriend. We’ll be there, providing a stream of internet funnies.

There is also space in the UsVsTh3m model for freelancers, and we’ve got a contributors mailing list if you fancy finding out the kind of stuff we want to commission, and the events we are holding in order to generate and evaluate gags. Sign up to that here.

You can read more about the project at The Media Briefing, and in an interview with me over at Journalism.co.uk.

Not the sharpest tools in the box in the layout department at the Daily Star today. On the left of the page, a massive piece based on Opta’s stats of the Premier League season. On the right, an editorial slagging off Opta’s tedious stats and offering up “If Opta had never been invented we’d, somehow, manage to get along without their amazing insights.”

The amazing insights you’ve just written a 500 word piece about…