Category: design

Failure to re-launch? Or ‘subtle evolution’?

Should organizations make a big deal about doing a major overhaul and re-launch of their web sites? Jared Spool, a usability design engineer who blogs at UIE Brain Sparks, thinks organizations would be better off making incremental change. In The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch, he writes that over his 10 years of work with web design, “if we’ve learned anything, it’s that redesigns rarely improve a site.”

“At best,” he writes, a redesign “just rearranges the elements. At worst, it frustrates the existing, loyal users without bringing anything valuable to all those new users the site is trying to attract.”

Spool wrote about this way back in 2003 (that was two re-launches ago for UMR) and urged organizations to consider “subtle evolution” as a way to incorporate changes on websites. He pointed out a few high-profile, real-world examples — Amazon, Yahoo and eBay — that have all benefited from this philosophy.

Enticing email for AutoPreview surfers

…some pretty big mailers (Target, The Company Store, the DMA and ourselves among them) have blah, please-don’t-open-me AutoPreview copy.

You know the routine. If you’re like 69 percent of Outlook users, you scan through the morning’s email using AutoPreview, deleting all the html-email marketing pitches that show up as a hairline box outline where some image is supposed to be and the text, “”Click here to download images.”

Instead, you click to delete.

Again. And again.

So, what if your prospective students, alumni, potential donors and other potential readers are doing the same thing with your oh-so-important email messages?

The crack research staff at Marketing Sherpa has combed the web looking for good examples of email that just might make it past the Outlook AutoPreview gatekeeper. According to Marketing Sherpa, “some pretty big mailers (Target, The Company Store, the DMA and ourselves among them) have blah, please-don’t-open-me AutoPreview copy.”

But there’s hope. In this article, Marketing Sherpa offers some great tips for more readable email.

Among the tips:
Start with compelling copy. “Instead of beginning the text-version with administrative crud, emailers including JetBlue, Mystery Reader and the Motley Fool launch directly into their content — the letter or article summary that the email is hoping recipients will react to.”

Use CAPS to catch the eye. “The average Outlook in-box screen has five-six emails when viewed in AutoPreview. So, your message is competing with four-five other messages to get the open. Putting all caps in your subject line is a no-no due to spam filter restrictions these days.”

Use text symbols to catch the eye. Adding a row of symbols is another way to catch the eye in a busy in-box.

Bonus: some examples of what and what not to do.

Yours, Mine, and Ours

Something that should be required reading for everyone involved in marketing higher education: Yours, Mine, and Ours: How Simplicity and Transparency Are Building the Web 2.0 is a white paper prepared for Dartmouth ‘s web publishing services by Chris Boone of Hypsometry. This paper provides an excellent overview of the interconnectedness of the web and how it challenges our standard modes of operation. We can’t control this medium. At best, we can manage parts of it and influence other parts.

Link via the Future of PR wiki.

Blogs, branding, Computers and Internet, higher education, Internet, Marketing, Media, public relations, PR

‘WOW and COOL’ = LAME and USELESS

So says Josh Hallett of hyku blog, who reports:

I received a web brief for a project I have been asked to consult on. One line in particular sticks out (when discussing the attributes of the web site):

break through the clutter with a WOW and COOL web presence

That’s just the problem, WOW and COOL usually end up becoming Flash-based, lame and foster no long-term relationship with the user, just like every other ‘edgy’ site. Making your web site WOW and COOL means you are the clutter.

branding, design, Marketing, web, web design

Zen and the art of presentation

Ever gone to a conference all enthused about a speaker who is supposedly tops in his or her field, only to be let down when he or she clicks on the big-screen presentation?

Me too.

Regardless of your business, Really Bad PowerPoint (pdf) can disillusion even the heartiest conference-goer. And when administrators and other talkers use PowerPoint slides as oversized cue cards, it makes those of us in the business of marketing and communications writhe in agony.

Which is why I would love for academic administrators to read the worthwhile advice Garr Reynolds offers on his blog, Presentation Zen. His post on the contrasting presentation styles of two lords of the computing industry, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, should be required reading for anyone who wields a laptop and LCD projector.

Take a look at the examples below. Forget for a minute about who is presenting. Focus on the presentation. Beginner’s mind, people.

So, which of these presentations would you rather sit in on?

This one?

Steve Jobs presenting

Or this one?

Bill Gates presenting

OK, so we all know that Steve Jobs is orders of magnitude cooler than Bill Gates, and that Jobs’s Apple represents the aesthetic side of computing, while Gates’s Microsoft represents all things corporate. But for the most part, Gates owns presentations. Microsoft’s PowerPoint is all-pervasive in the world of presentations. It’s used in board meetings, conferences, classrooms, to push product and even to entertain. It’s the 800-pound gorilla of presentationdom.

But PowerPoint doesn’t have to be bad. (Read Seth Godin‘s little ebook (pdf) to learn ways to make your presentations more meaningful, or at least a little less dull. And read what Reynolds has to say about zen and the art of presentation. If you get nothing else, get this:

A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept beauty, grace, and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. Says artist, designer and architect, Dr. Koichi Kawana, “Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.” When you examine your visuals, then, can you say that you are getting the maximum impact with a minimum of graphic elements, for example? When you take a look at Jobs’ slides and Gates’ slides, how do they compare for kanso?

Hat tip to Seth Godin for the link.

Communications, marketing, PowerPoint, presentations