by Eric Reiss - 26 September 2004

 

A rant to my professional colleagues

The web has progressed tremendously since February 2001 (that's the month the financial markets really began to slide). But you wouldn't know it by looking at the many neglected B2B websites hanging around cyberspace.

Those of us still in the web business (many have left) know what this medium is capable of. We've kept up with developments. We've honed our skills. We're ready for action. But all too often, our careful clients aren't.

 

From the back burner...

...to the back burner!
For many organizations, web activities have been virtually nonexistent the past few years. Happily, now that the economy is picking up, so is interest in the dormant company site. And everyone is enthusiastic. Clients pepper their briefings with phrases like:

"Major redesign"

"Cutting-edge technology"

"Kick-ass interface"

"We?re really gonna push the envelope."

Sound familiar? But when push comes to shove, you're likely to hear:

"We want an updated logo"

"More PDFs"

"Nicer buttons"

"We have somebody who knows FrontPage"

The budgets are tiny. The deadlines are tight. Why? Maybe because clients are making decisions based on their own limited range of experience rather than our (hopefully) broader perspective.

 

Why our industry is in trouble
All of us who are supposedly "in the know" are busy touting the virtues of:

• Experience design
• Interaction design
• User-centered design
• Information architecture
• Content management
• Knowledge management
• Personas
• Scenaria
• Thesauri
• Sensemaking
• Storytelling
• Usability
• Accessibility
• Credibility
• Brandability
• Findability
• Searchability
• Some-other-damned-ability

Just to make sure our message comes through crystal clear, we use abbreviations like IA, UX, IX, UCD, CM, KM etc. Except no one?s actually asking for IA or UX ? so the sales process is all uphill.

The secret of life
What clients really want is a better website - and we seem to be doing everything we can to make that simple request seem absolutely unattainable.

Imagine a team of car salesmen subjecting you to individual PowerPoint presentations on:

• the fuel-injection system
• four radial tires
• each of the 24 titanium valves
• the diamond-cut double overhead cam

Gee, and all you wanted was better gas mileage?

It?s not snake oil if it really works!
The thing is, we really do have something valuable to offer. It doesn't have to be expensive. Or difficult. Or time-consuming. But before anyone's going to buy what we're selling, they have to either understand our discipline or trust us!

If someone understands a discipline, they know why it's important. That also means their personal experience is broader and their budget probably reflects this. Yet to understand any discipline, people must be educated. And many of the folks holding the checkbooks have neither the time nor the inclination to study our fields. Can we educate them? Perhaps - we certainly shouldn't stop trying - but,,,we're going to have to win their trust.

Don't our clients trust us?
In the early days of the web, many of us belonged to an elite group of cyber-alchemists who could make gold out of recycled electrons. We enjoyed the mystique. We invented obscure job titles. We came to formal meetings in expensive t-shirts. We knew everything better than the suit-and-tie crowd.

Even though idiotic business plans finally triggered the dot-bomb, we became guilty by association. And perhaps with some justification - more than a few web agencies gleefully provided insanely beautiful, but entirely superfluous deliverables. Others made sure that highly paid "Wisdom Engineers" sat in on all meetings. Tasty icing on a half-baked cake.

There's a vaguely "boy who cried wolf" feeling to all of this. Not everything we sold back in the 1990s had real value, but the money was loose. Now it's tight and we need to exercise some damage control - we need to rescue the disciplines that do provide value.

ROI business cases - fact and fiction
"What's the return on investment?" cry the powers that be. What I think they're really saying is, "Reassure us that this really is going to help." They want to trust us - this is an emotional decision. "Nobody ever got fired for choosing [insert name of appropriate blue chip company here]."

Even so, too many professionals take refuge behind the mantra "It depends?" But let's face it, everything in life "depends" on other factors. Our responsibility is to give our clients viable choices, not hedge our bets. Often, executives want short, black-and-white answers because they really do understand the complexity of their industries and want help making a decision. "It depends" does not build trust - it often looks like we?re trying to weasel out of something.

Alternatively, for lack of better statistics, some folks invent fictional case studies that are occasionally so absurd in their assumptions that any remaining credibility is lost - "Bad usability is costing this company almost $16 million annually!? (quote paraphrased to protect the author - but go ahead and Google it a bit anyway)

So how do we build trust?
First, we need to teach people to trust the basic concepts (we should work together on this). Second, we should draw on these concepts in an appropriate manner (we shouldn't sell them stuff they don't need). Third, we must get them to trust each of us personally (you're on your own here).

"Wait a second - didn't you just say education was NOT the key issue?"

Yes. Because "teaching" and "education" are not the same thing. To go back to the car analogy for a moment, it's probably enough to know that radial tires provide better gas mileage without knowing how this is actually achieved.

That's why I think we should be branding our disciplines.

Branding our know-how
You probably know what a Jaguar, Mercedes, or Lexus represents in terms of quality even if you've never been near one of them. Well, that's what branding can do.

Case in point: there are probably more people who know what Jakob Nielsen does than how he does it. Jakob Nielsen has many of the attributes of a commercial brand - most people who have had anything to do with usability know his name. He stands for something. People have formed an opinion - and respect his. When he said links should be blue, they turned blue. He's the Lexus of the nexus.

Personalities are fine and Jakob has marketed himself effectively. But that's just it - Jakob is basically selling Jakob - so it's easy to mistake "usability" as the means to an end rather than the end itself. And almost all of the disciplines mentioned earlier have their respective gurus, too. Be glad I don't mention you by name,

Alas, gurus are easier to remember than what they actually stand for. The same applies to political candidates - what, for example, were Gore's key issues in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election? Or Bush's for that matter?

So let's start branding our disciplines - information architecture, etc.

"Intel Inside"

"Balanced Scorecard"

"Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval"

There are lots of ways we can go and I don't have a clear-cut answer - or even very good suggestions at this point. But I'm going to keep thinking. Stay tuned.

Comments or questions?

Back to "Articles" page