In the last article we have asked ourselves a few questions about twitter and if it fits to your product- and marketing environment. Now you might want to have some tips how to use twitter for your marketing/e commerce endeavors. Here you go:

1. Be useful!
There is nothing worse than sending out useless links to products noone was interested in in the first place. This is nothing less than spam, so don’t do it! If you want to use twitter, make your information useful. This means i.e. sending out gift coupon codes which will give your customers 5% off of their next purchase. For one many might retweet your offer due to its usefulness to everyone but it will also give you a great way to track your success on twitter if you use a special keycode.

2. Be helpful!
Listen! Don’t just send out links to everyone who might be following you. Monitor the twitter universe and listen to those who might be interested in your product. How do you do that? Use tools like Tweetdeck to search for keywords related to your products and you might find those who are looking for the exact product you are offering. Imagine your pizza delivery boy knocking on your door right after you said “Wow I could use a pizza right now” while surfing the web in your apartment. How cool would that be? With twitter you can do just that. Actively search for those who are interested in your products and help them with their needs. You won’t regret it.

3. Be personal
Have you ever called your ISP regarding a problem, hoping to talk to a competent CRM guy but got a computer instead, who just couldn’t understand your problem? Don’t be like this computer. Twitter is a communication tool, and we all want to talk to humans, not machines. So engage in communication with your clients, even if it’s not about your products. It will help you in the long run. Zappos is a great example how to do it.

4. Be honest
We all know it - sometimes things happen the wrong way and it might even be our fault. You can deny it…or you can be honest about it. Twitter can be a great tool to respond fast and targeted to problems your customers have. And the best thing is - everyone can read how you handle your customers. If you do it right, this can help your standing in the community. We all are customers, so we all know how we want to be treated by companies. Why not apply this knowledge to your customer service? Independent from what you do, twitter offers you a fast and open platform for your customer relationship management. And the best thing is - it doesn’t cost a cent.

5. Be visible
There is no sense in using twitter if your customers don’t know about it. So add a twitter icon to your site. Give your customers the ability to tweet about products they are interested in. And make it easy for others to follow you. If you have a blog, write about your twitter activities and explain the advantages your users can get from following you.

6. Don’t spam!
There is nothing worse than spam. You don’t like getting spamed with messages that are of no interest to you and so is everyone else. But it is not just about usefulness. Even too much useful information might be information overflow to many of your readers out there. Keep in mind that they might be following not only you but hundreds or thousands of twitter users. If you send too much tweets, you push everyone else aside and you can be pretty sure that you won’t stay long on peoples follow list. Keep your activities low and send out just a few messages each day.

7. Measure your success
If you use tools like Google Analytics it is easy to track incoming links to your online store. Track your influence on twitter by adding tracking code to your links. Most users won’t mind since it won’t affect them in any way and if you shorten your URLs, no one will see the code anyway.

As you can see using twitter isn’t very hard if you follow some basic rules. Try it out and adjust your strategy as you go along. Learn about and from your followers and engage in communication.

Do you have some more advice? Please leave a comment so others can learn from your experiences!

Twitter has been a phenomenon for some time now - at least for us early adopters who play around with every new tech or application we can find. Although there have been some discussions about whether or not twitter has reached the masses, with just a few million users I think this is hardly the case…yet. Nevertheless twitter has been hyped as the new thing and I have to admit that I enjoy using it very much. And so do all the marketeers and social media specialists out there, proclaiming twitter as THE new tool for social media marketing. That begs the questions - is twitter really relevant when it comes to effective marketing? Lets see…

Figures and target group

With over 8 million users in the US, twitter might even reach between 50-100 million users worldwide by the end of this year. I guess that we have about 2 million users here in Europe, but I lack numbers to confirm that.
Many of those users are innovators and early adopters, who, by their nature, toy around with every new and interesting tool they can find. Given the imense growth of 33% a month (in the US), demographics will change though. Over the next month, twitter will reach a new group called “Early Majority”. But what does all that mean for the question if twitter is relevant from an ecommerce point of view?

Questions you have to ask yourself

There are a few questions you have to ask yourself, if you want to find out if twitter is a marketing tool for you.

1. Is there potential in using twitter for my territory?
So you sell stuff - but to which market? Do you ship globally or do you supply only customers within your country? If you have a very limited territory, do you know how many twitter users there are in this region? This might be hard to research, but you should try to get a good picture of the potential there is for your twitter activities.

2. What kind of products do you sell?
Not every product is suited for twitter marketing. If you sell toilet paper, chances are that noone will look or retweet your information. Ask yourself if you can produce useful information for your readers, rather than just sending out marketing links, but more on that later.

3. Are you prepared to use twitter to communicate with your clients?
Twitter is most of all a tool for communication! It can be used for marketing pruposses, but don’t be surprised if someone wants to talk to you via twitter. Communication is the new marketing, so be prepared to communicate! But is your boss aware of that? Or if you are the boss - do you encurage your employees to communicate with your clients? Never see it as a waste of time to talk to your customers.

In part 2 of this article I will give you some ideas on how to get started with your own twitter strategy. Click here to read the second part of this article.

Yes, it has been a while since I wrote my last post on this blog. It seems there is always something keeping me away from sitting down and writing something useful. At the moment, this reason is Ruby on Rails. Over the last 2 years I got more and more frustrated with my inability to implement my own ideas due to a lack of profound knowledge of programming languages like PHP or Ruby. All my professional life I’ve been very design/usability centered and I don’t want to change that, but I want to add some knowledge “from the other side” to my portfolio. That’s why I started to learn Ruby on Rails. Long story short, I wanted to share some links with you which should get you started with Ruby and the framework Rails.

Where to get it

http://rubyonrails.org

Books

Agile webdevelopment with Ruby on Rails - This is a great book to get you started with RoR. Buy it and you won’t regret it. Although I’m not a big fan of books when it comes to teaching yourself something, this book really helped me to get started. Now I’m using it as a reference while I try out tutorials on the web.

Screencasts

http://railscasts.com - Great screencasts, although you need some knowledge about RoR to understand what he is talking about. If you have never programmed in your life, read a book first!

http://peepcode.com - Another great source for screencasts if you are willing to pay for it. I think they cost about 9USD and in my opinion, they are worth their money.

Tutorials

Nettuts - Starting with Ruby on Rails from scratch - Week 1 to 4 - This was the tutorial that got me interested in RoR, but I never actually tried it. It is build on  an older Rails version which doesn’t really matter, so try it out.

Getting started with Ruby on Rails - If you read my blog, you know that I love Smashingmagazine.com. They have released a two-part article about ruby, explaining why it is so good and how it works. Read it! :)

This is a really short list and there are many many more tutorials out there. Start with those mentioned above and use google to find other resources. Have fun!

The problem with Information Architecture and User Experience is, that most people tend to only have a very vague picture of what those two areas mean in terms of what professionals are doing every day in their jobs.

Actually, most people don’t even know that IA & UX even exist. This makes it very hard for young emerging information architects or user experience designers to find out more about those professions. Luckily there are some really great websites out there, where one can find tons of information, written by some of the brightest minds in the industry. I have written down a very short list of websites I visit on a daily basis to give beginners an easy start to find more information about the profession they are interested in. So here we go:

Basics

Lets start with one article you should read if you have never heared IA/UX before: A Complete Beginners Guide to Information Architecture

Websites

BoxesandArrows
BoxesandArrows.com is maybe THE website about information architecture out there. Online since 2001, some of the brightest minds in the industry have written articles for BoxesandArrows. I have to say that BaA.com can get very theoretical, so it is great for a more academical approach. You can find some great articles on the site, giving you a detailed insight into thoughts behind IA. But take your time when you read those articles, because they require some thought to get the essence.

UXBooth
Another great site dedicated to Information Architecture, Usability and User Experience in general. A team of bloggers writes about their practical experience, offers great tips and reviews websites in terms of usability.

Wireframes Magazine
The Wireframe Magazine is a smaller blog dedicated to practical techniques for information architects. Various short posts describe different ways to do wireframes, sketches and how to produce deliverables during your IA project.

UsabilityCounts
UsabilityCounts.com is another great site about user experience and usability with a lot of useful posts written by three experienced authors. They don’t just write about IA but also about various other topics you might find interesting.

User Interface Engineering
On UIE.com you can find some very good articles written by famous IAs like Jared Spool. They also have a podcast, so if you prefere audio instead of written text, give it a try!

Experiencing Information
This is the blog of James Kalbach, author of “Designing Web Navigation” and User Experience Designer at LexisNexis. He writes about how we experience information and about his experiences in his daily life as an UX specialist.

UXMatters updated (03/23/09)
I just found another site dedicated to User Experience. Looks great, but I haven’t had much time to give it a closer look.

Podcasts

Most of you will have a mp3 player so why not use it to obtain some knowledge through podcasts. There are quiet a few very good podcasts out there, some even contain live recordings of various IA conferences. Personally I listen to podcasts every morning when I go to work since most of the time I’m to tired (or to lazy) to read a book.

BoxesandArrows Podcast
The podcast of boxesandarrows.com - really good information in here!

IA Podcast
This is the podcast of Jeff Parks, an IA specialist based in Ottawa, Canada. He’s also doing most of the BaA Podcasts, so again, some really good content in here.

UIE Brainsparks
This is the podcast from the User Interface Engineering website mentioned above. Again, great content, worth listening to!

Boagworld
Although this isn’t specifically a IA/UX podcast, I think it’s worth mentioning. Boagworld adresses a wide range of topics in the webdesign/development universe. Since I strongly believe that any IA/UX specialist should know a bit about design and coding, this is a great way to know what’s going on. Besides, it’s always real fun to listen to Paul and Marcus.

UXPod updated (03/29/09)
Yet another podcast about Usability and User Experience. Haven’t listened to it yet, so please add your feedback to the comments of this post.

Do you know any other good blogs, websites or podcasts about Usability, Information Architecture or User Experience? Please add a link via the comment form to help other readers. Thank you!

Sitemaps are one of the more basic deliverables one can use to organize a design project. In fact, they are so basic, that most of us don’t use them, especially when a project becomes more complex and doesn’t follow the basic tree structure. I still find sitemaps useful though to not only visualize connections between pages ( you will never be able to put all connections onto paper when a site gets more complex though) but it also helps to plan the whole design process.

During my last project, we had booked a design agency to do a few designs for major landingpages of our e-commerce website. Although we had thought about which screens we really needed, we had to request additional screens during the process of implementation, since we simply had forgotten some important pages. To get a clear overview over the pages we needed and how they were connected to each other, I did a simple sitemap to visualize the major connections between the pages (sorry for the German text. I will try to upload an english version as soon as I have time).

Sitemap with colors for each major template (sorry for the German text)

I then used color to mark the various sites based on the template the would be using, giving me a good overview on which templates I need. A legend explains the use of color and is used to display all templates in a normal list. Dashed circles represent mere links, not templates on their own. They lead to subsites, which use a specific template, so I gave those links their respective color.

If you want to add additional information to the sitemap, you can attach deadlines to each template, thus giving everyone a good overview on when each template will be finished and which parts of the website will use it. This is not only helpful for designers but also for frontend developers who need to implement those templates. Furthermore it offers the project manager an additional tool to plan the project from another point of view and to prioritize different sections of the website.

I know that a sitemap itself is a very basic tool and the way I use it is nothing special, but I wanted to show you this method anyway, in case someone might find it useful.

When you join the twitter community for the first time, it’s hard to know who to follow and how things work.

To make a first entry easier, a lot of helpful people out there have compiled lists on who to follow if you are interested in a certain topic. I will try to compile a list of those posts to collect them in one place. Feel free to add additional posts in the comment section.

How to find interesting folks on twitter on your own

WeFollow.com - A user powered twitter directory

General

• Weblogs - 31 people you should follow on twitter
• Technology - 10 people to follow
• 100 education & e-learning people
• Semantic Web - Lots of great people that tweet about semantic web
• 10 Blog Marketing People you might find interesting
• 25 SEO -experts that tweet

Journalism

• 10 journalists you should follow on twitter

Social Media

• 25 people you should follow that twitter about social media
• 10 Social Entrepreneurs you might want to follow

Information Architecture & User Experience

• 14 UK information professionals
• UX people on twitter

Design

• Top Webdesigners to follow on twitter
• 50+ Designers you should follow on twitter
• 100 Web Designers to follow on twitter
• 300 active web designers you could follow
• 50+ Pro Logo Designers
• 26+ CSS galleries

Webdevelopment

• Top Webdevelopers to follow on twitter
• 50+ Ruby Developers

Public Relations

• 40 PR-related people on twitter

Vladimir Carrer, a webdesigner and SEO specialist based in Verona, Italy wrote an interesting post on his blog about why Google should implement a grid-based search result layout. Though he noted that a grid layout should only be implemented as an optional layout, it sparked some discussion. Since I’m a fan of grid based layouts it made me thinking about the various uses of grid layouts in regards of information architecture.

Google Search Results as a Grid Layout

Basically grids give designers and developders a way to structure content, so at first glance, it should be of great use for a search result. On second thought though, I don’t think it would improve the result in this case.

Search results all have one fundamental aspect in common - they all are structured based on relevance to the search term that was entered. Relevance by it’s nature implies a hierarchy. Although you can visualize hierarchy in various ways, a vertical alignment from top to bottom is most common and therefore expected by users.

Grid based layouts are much more dependend on how users read the site. Although most readers will start at the top left corner, they are offered 2 choises to go forward - down or right. So where should you place the second search result?

Personally I don’t think grid based layouts are a good choice when it comes to  search results, but they are a great way to display information in a structured way.

An idea

While thinking about this, I had an idea. A feature I’ve missed many times while using Google Search was a way to mark search results as important or interesting - not for everyone but just for myself and only for this specific search query. While I skim through search results to find the answer I was looking for, I often find various good sources related to my question. If I could mark those sources for later review and go on skimming through the search results, I could display all marked sources at the end of my search result review as a grid layout to assess and compare my results. A feature like this would make intensive research on Google much easier.

I’ve just stumbled over an article on Traffikd about why the author has come to like Twitter. I will use this to write down my own experience with Twitter so far, since I have a slightly different approach.

Although I had a Twitter account for quiet some time now, I haven’t been using it much until a few month ago. For me, it had more of a nerd toy than being a useful tool for anything. Now that I use it on a daily basis, my opinion has changed though.

There are many uses for twitter, be it self marketing, means to communicate with friends or as a source of information. I know many who just follow people they know since it’s much easier to establish a more personal relationship to friends, colleagues and followers while at the same time remain more control ofer the flood of information that is coming from those you follow.

Until a few days ago I thought the same way but they way I use twitter has changed after I watched the following youtube video on Jessy Newhart’s blog:

I’ve been using tweetdeck for a few weeks now but I never thought about the potential of it until I watched this video. Although I still agree that you shouldn’t follow everyone who follows you or everyone you find on twitter, I don’t have a problem with following a large number of people anymore, as long as the person writes about stuff that is of interest to you.

To still be able to prioritize whose tweets I want to follow I use two options tweetdeck offers.

Groups: My number one rule for twitter is to only follow people who write about stuff that is of main interest for me. In my case that is webdesign, information architecture and webdevelopment. Therefore I have set up 3 groups in tweetdeck for those three topics. I try to organize most of the people I follow based on those groups, leaving everyone who writes about other stuff in the main category.

Filters: The second technique I use are filters. Since I have already set up groups to organize everyone based on three major topics, I can now easily filter those groups for every keyword I am interested in. If I want the hottest links about webdesign I just type “RT @” in my filter to find all links that have been retweeted (and thus being of a certain quality) by the webdesign community.

So this is basically how I work with twitter since I have seen Jessy Newhart’s video. If you found this interesting, you should definetely watch his video. Using twitter this way means to use it more as a repository of information rather than a tool of communication. This is still possible though. Just create a group with people you want to communicate with to take them out of all the noise that will flood your tweetdeck when you follow many people.

I have to add that I just follow about 150 people at the moment, but I feel that this approach is very scalable.

Lukas Mathis over at IgnoreTheCode.net wrote a great article in which he pointed out some really good arguments which stand against the sentiment that webdesigners should know how to write code. His basic statement is that knowing what is possible in a certain programming language will restrain your creativity when it comes to developing the best possible solution for a design.

I have to say that I only partly agree to what he was saying in his blogpost. First of all it is not about designers writing code, since I am convinced that you can only be very good at one thing. Therefore designers should focus on what they do best - design. Also design and development follow two very different approaches - one very structured and the other very..well…”creative” (yes, I know, design follows certain rules but you know what I mean). So there should be a clear focus on one side or the other.

This by no means implies that a designer should not look over the rim of the tea cup and vice versa. Being more of a generalist myself, I strongly believe in a “holistic approach” where members of a team know at least a little about the areas of expertise of their teammates. This is similar to what Joseph Selbie wrote about in his article “Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design” on boxesandarrows.com.

Knowing the basics about adjoining fields of expertise will not only help you with internal communication but also gives you the opportunity to prevent certain problems that might not be apparent during your design process but will appear during implementation (this is especially true for acessibility issues imho) . Knowing the technical basis of a website will help you to recognise when and how to talk to your fellow coder to solve a problem before it even had the chance to become one.

That being said, I also understand the arguments Lukas pointed out. I think that this problem is not only true in the fields of design and coding. I’ve been working in the marketing department of my company for 2 years now and I have seen this problem occur more than once.

People tend to create their own set of rules and guidelines to what is possible and what not. Recently we brainstormed about package design for a new product line we want to publish soon. During this brainstorm session we found it incredibly hard to “think out of the box”, since all that conventions we had learned during our work prevented us from finding a new, fresh approach. We broke through this blockade by looking at totally different subjects that were related to our initial problem but offered new and creative approaches. We also took a look at the technical process of producing retail boxes, which gave us a completely new insight into what is possible and what not.

Conclusion

I don’t think that shutting yourself of from codeing (or anything else for that matter) will help you in the long run. To the contrary I strongly beliefe that it will reduce your potential and will lessen the quality of your designs. In my experience the best solutions came out of discussions with people who offered a different point of view on a subject, since those discussions are often the spark of creativity. You need people to help you consider problems from various angles but having a broad horizon helps you to do this yourself to a greater extent.

Okay I have to admit that I have been pretty lazy over the last 2 month when it comes to this blog. Although I have been pretty busy in my job, I should have taken more time to write something here.

Why so lazy?

Well, thats the question, isn’t it? What I know is, that a few things have changed over the last weeks, the most important being that I think I finally found an area of expertise I want to focus on. This was clearly not the case when I left university over 2 years ago with a diploma in information management. I started out doing some marketing & pr stuff, some IT, but nothing really focused on one area.

The funny thing is, that I think I have found my home in Information Architecture and User Experience. So basically I have ended up pretty close to where I started in the first place, but now with a lot more pratical background.

So what now?

Being more of a generalist, I have focused on web related stuff in general on this blog. I am about to change that to more IA/UX focused articles in the future, since I would like to share some experiences I have made during my work. My current project should allow this kind of focus and we will see what the future holds in this regard.

Furthermore I will try to write this blog in English from now on. Firstly because I don’t want to focus on Germany only (I just know IA/UX guys from other countries but none from Germany…thats weird, isn’t it?). Secondly this offers me the chance to practice my written english skills, and that’s always a good thing.

Looking good!

If you have visited my blog before, you will realize that I have changed the design (again). Yes, I know, I should stick to one design, and hopefuly I will stick to this one. I’m just easily faszinated and there are so many great designs and styles out there to get inspiration from - as a designer I am sure you know what I’m talking about.

As I said I will stick to this new, minimalistic layout but will try to improve it a bit over the next few days. There are still a lot of bugs with this one and I appologize for that! I know I should set up a test environment but I just don’t have the time to do that right now, so the live machine has to do. At this point, there aren’t many who are reading this anyway :)

So, that’s it. I hope I can produce some interesting content for you in the future and I’m looking forward to getting more involved in the IA/UX community form now on.

Cheers,

Sebastian