Doing Words

Mum’s the words

// May 22nd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Social Media, Startup, strategy, Writing

I’ve written before about the importance of developing great elevator pitches and business narratives, and about how often the best ones come from your customers, not your marketing team.

In the last week I was privileged to observe a group of passionate, involved customers do exactly this for Clay Cook, entrepreneur, angel investor and founder of Minti.com, an online support and advice community for new mums.

Clay had no budget to get some copy written in a hurry for a direct email shot out to a church email list. I heard about this when he Twittered, asking if anyone could help. I got in touch but I couldn’t really help.

It didn’t matter because in the meantime, Clay had a better idea: he already had an abundance of engaged, communicative, passionate Minti customers who would share a lot in common with the women on this group email list. Why not run a competition to see who could write the best email for Minti? (more…)

Getting right to the bones of a business story

// May 13th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Communication, Featured, Startup, Writing

Stephen Sammartino, founder of Rentoid.com, has a great article in Anthill magazine on the importance of good story-telling in business and the article is available online for free.

Blogs are about quick snippets, so here’s the upshot: practice, practice and more practice separates you and I from the great business story tellers of our age (Stephen uses Steve Jobs as a great example – have you ever watched Job’s address to Stanford University students? It’s incredible. I’ve added it at the end of this story.)

Sammartino makes a valuable point: don’t leave it until the moment it really counts to practice your business stories. When you meet that potential investor, you need your business stories polished to a high sheen. When you’re trying to engage a potential hire you really need, you want to set their imagination on fire. When you’re pitching to your first customers, you want them to be swept away. (more…)

Publishing your email address says, “please, spam me!”

// April 25th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Startup

A regular topic in my sermons to startup is the importance of disclosure, of opening the doors to your business to allow customers to learn about who works there, what they do, and how your culture differs from that of your competitors. In an age when so few companies ever meet a customer face-to-face, it’s vital to offer some online disclosure as a substitute.

But too much of any good thing can hurt you, including disclosure. Encourage your employees to blog about their work, write about your plans for your company as soon as the whiteboard notes have been copied onto your laptop, but please… don’t put your email address on a web page.

Despite evil bots hovering out there waiting to scrape up every email address that is published on the interweb and add it to a spam database, people still put their email address on web pages everywhere. The need to be contactable outweighs the pain of more spam. But it needn’t be that way.

There are a number of ways to hide or encrypt your email address when it is published on a web page, but many of these methods can be decrypted to allow a spambot to snag it. So why put the email address on the page at all? Why not use a form and a database?

I’ll tell you why not: forms and databases are dry, unleavened developerbread – I fall asleep every time somewhere between “records” and “fields.” Life’s too short.

Wufoo.com has many superpowers, not the least being some of the zushiest dynamic interface you’ll find on the interweb, making it easy-peasy to design a web form and the database that sits behind it.

You can build something as simple as an email feedback form (so that your email address remains unpublished) or something as schmancy as a 15 minute online survey form. Good CSS support means you can customise a form so that it looks like part of your website, but if that’s all a bit too hard, use Wufoo’s pre-designed templates and copy-and-paste the code into your web page. Job done.

Here’s one I built earlier for my About Page. When someone fills in the form, the details are taken down in a database I can access at the Wufoo site, and then the database emails me the contact request.

Believe me: absolutely no programming required. Sure, I still get spam, but mostly from my parents… another story…

Got a moment? You’ll love this story…

// April 18th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Writing

When I meet startups, I often talk about the importance of “company narratives” – the stories that a company creates and retells to create its oral history, strengthen and refine its culture, and celebrate its heroes. In part, this is a story about the company narrative that is at the centre of a cool little business: Johnny Cupcakes.

Oh, and it’s also a story about why your company needs a narrative too.

Have you heard the one about…

The power of a company narrative is easy to illustrate. Most of us have one or two we remember, some large and significant, some silly but amusing. I like to draw upon some of the company narratives I was taught – and passed on to others – when working at companies like Yahoo!, when the crazy early days of Web 1.0 were fertile ground for imagination.

One Yahoo! story goes: in a particular room, there was a mess of servers and cables that admin guys were forbidden to mess with “because Filo put them together like that, nobody’s quite sure what they do, but if we unplug them to relocate them, it just might bring all of Yahoo! down.”

I’ll leave others to tell the tale of the Yahoo! employee who got a share price tattooed on his butt.

At WordPerfect, a company founded in Orem, Utah, which employed many Mormon staff, my favourite company narrative was about how the company’s database product, DataPerfect, was based on the Mormon church’s own genealogy software, and that completing and returning the warranty registration form was helping the church complete its goal of recording the genealogy of all humankind.

Like all good myths, these little narratives are simplified, tweaked, burnished and enriched by being handed down from person to person, and told and re-told. The weak ones die and the strong ones get stronger, becoming an element of viral marketing, moving beyond your company to customers, partners, competitors and the media. The greatest narratives will survive – even thrive on – being debunked on Wikipedia.

Johnny Cupcakes has an unusual name, and sells t-shirts from a small but successful chain of stores that look like bakeries, with trays of t-shirts instead of. What’s the story behind the name? Why sell clothes from a retail outlet that probably attracts more hungry junk-food fans than fashion buyers?

Johnny has all the motivation he needs to make his company narrative front-and-centre on his website. Before you’re ready to buy his products, you have questions – you want answers.

Johnny’s website is full of character, and the ‘about us’ story is a great example of how to do company narrative. The story is engaging, full of character, well separated into discrete episodes, and entertaining.

We could improve the viral and recall properties of this narrative by chunking it up into several separate narratives, each with their own space on the website, and rewritten so that each has the essential elements of a narrative: a hero, a story arc with a beginning, middle, climax and end, and a take-away message – a ‘moral’ to the story.

The introduction would work better if it started off with something along the lines of, “Hi, my name is Johnny Cupcake, do you have a moment for a great story?” – most good stories start with an introduction from the storyteller themselves. Warning the reader that this is a bit of a ‘shaggy dog story’ (it takes a while to tell) would also be helpful.

Shaggy dog stories like this one definitely need a counter-balance – the elevator pitch. Nowhere on Johnny Cupcakes’ website is there a brief, concise encapsulation of what the business is about and why you should care. Three bullet points that anyone can remember and deploy when a friend asks, “what’s all this about Johnny Cupcakes?”

Still, Johnny’s site is full of personality, wit and charm. It’s a great shaggy dog story presented in an engaging and self-effacing manner.

Every good company needs narratives. Get started on identifying yours and testing how well they are passed on from generation to generation.

If you don’t have one yet, drop me an email!

PickupPal: just drive, they said, with the following terms and conditions

// April 7th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Other news

This post begins a new section of doingwords.com, TOSwatch (Terms Of Service watch). Posts to the TOSwatch category will focus on the shifting sands of Terms Of Service and Privacy Policy documents – that ever-shifting legal no-man’s land where lawyers and web startups try to keep up with the dastardly things we do to each other on the interwebs.

If your TOS is deep, wide and scary enough, site visitors won’t be game to attempt a crossing and become an actual customer. You’ll be legally protected but you won’t have that nice new business you were hoping would pay your lawyer’s bill.

I’m pleased to see PickupPal reviving the lost art of WhackilyCapitalisedBrands. I’m delighted to see them attempt the challenging goal of earning a 7% fee on people’s car-pooling, especially if it means reducing some car-related carbon emissions.

But I’m disappointed to see them interrupt an otherwise OK new user signup process with a large, unfriendly and terribly presented TOS.

Listen to lawyers for too long and soon they’ll have you believing you should have a TOS signed before the kids next-door come around to play, and sometime between here and there they’ll no doubt press upon you a vast, scary legal document meant to hermetically seal your new startup against any form of legal risk, including (but not limited to):

• Attack by alien lifeforms sworn to eliminate the use of the phrase “web 2.0” from the universe by whatever means necessary;
• Any combination of fire, flood, pestilence, act of war or poor hygiene;
• A rain of frogs, fish, and right, sperm, blue and sei whales.

Some of the risks you’ll be notionally guarded against will be likely, some of them unlikely, some of them yet to ever occur in this universe.

“Just because they haven’t happened yet,” your lawyer will argue, “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t protect you from them happening.”

“Just having the TOS list every possible risk to your business is not enough,” your lawyer will go on. “We must also present it prominently so that we can be confident the user has read the TOS and agreed to every term.”

Well, yes and no. In my not-entirely-humble-without-a-law-qualification-but-educated-on-the-legal-streets-of-experience-opinion, that is. Your mileage may vary.

Lets remain alert-but-relaxed about the alien invasion threat

Poor PickupPal has forgotten – or never realised – that should a new visitor take the trouble to read through the TOS, they are very likely to reconsider the whole carpool idea. Some of the horrible and scary things they may experience while being a PickupPal customer but had never thought about before might include sharing the car with firearms and other weapons, nuclear substances, explosives, gases, corrosives, toxic substances, illicit drugs, live animals, birds, insects or reptiles, even “corpses or cremating remains (animal or human)”.

Note the TOS clearly states that drivers are NOT to transport these things but it’s like your appointment with the surgeon, when the idea of post-operative pain hadn’t occurred to you until the surgeon said, “usually, post-operative pain is minor and quickly passes.” Suddenly, post-operative pain becomes a very big deal, and the more the surgeon talks about how small a deal it is, the more your mind wants to dwell on it.

Focus-group the PickupPal TOS, get people in off the street to skim-read it and then tell you what they remember, and I would bet good money that the mention of corpses, drugs and guns would score most highly of all. When we’re trying to get as many site visitors to sign up as possible, making the service seem like PickupDrugDealers.com is probably a bad idea.

Your TOS is too wide and I cannot cross over

The lawyer will tell you that a court will look to see evidence that users were made aware of the terms and conditions they were agreeing to, and that you required their consent to those terms before allowing them to use your service.

PickupPal has taken the lawyer-approved approach of slapping the TOS front-and-centre early in the new user signup process. Because it’s such a large TOS and the site design is fixed dimension, it’s presented in a small frame the user must scroll through to read, which reduced readability and retention, and is just annoying to do.

Before you do the same, weigh the cost of a hefty TOS against the benefits of signing up new users more quickly.

Are you certain that new visitors will be prepared to undergo the inconvenience and frustration of all that scrolling and squinting before they can even begin using your service? They may have just come from a red-hot techcrunch review, a sketchy Digg mention, or a half-remembered URL a friend mentioned. They may have all day to do this, or they may have allowed only a few minutes to do the signup at the end of their lunch break.

Let’s face it, you don’t know their state of mind, can’t possibly, and shouldn’t assume they’ll be reasonable, patient and cautious people when they arrive on your site for the first time. Always in the top three reasons why site visitors don’t complete a registration is “It was taking too long”. If you dig further into the motivations, you’ll find a visitor perceives a registration process with the TOS included as “taking longer to complete” than a registration process with the TOS available via a link to another page.

Even though both registration processes require the same action from the user (checking checkbox “I have read, understood and agreed to the TOS”) the perception is that a registration process with so much to read takes longer.

There’s also a frequent perception that signing up for a service with a prominent TOS is a more “serious” decision – one that shouldn’t be entered into on an impulse. If an impulse is all that got the visitor to your site, you don’t want to work against that impulse.

In the case of Cast-Iron-TOS versus Getting-New-Customers, your honour, you must balance prominence of your TOS and clearly obtaining consent against the possibility that it may discourage potential new customers from becoming actual new customers.

What’s the worst that could happen?

When drafting your TOS, balance the need for protection against the need to attract new customers, and try to keep your TOS as brief as possible. Will someone sue you one day because they used your service and found they were sharing the passenger seat with a corpse? Possibly. Could a court reasonably decide to hold you liable? Less likely. Would the damages amount to much? Less likely still. Aim to protect yourself against the likely risks, and let the cards fall where they may on the outlandish, incredible and extraordinary risks.

You wouldn’t shout in an email, don’t shout in a TOS

Apparently someone, somehow was able to successfully argue that because an important clause of a contract was written in sentence-case, they hadn’t noticed it, and shouldn’t be held responsible for it. That seems to be the reason why SO MANY IMPORTANT BITS OF TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENTS ARE IN ALL-CAPS.

But come on, this is the interwebs! It’s different here! We just don’t treat people like that. Do you really want to shout at visitors to your website before they even decide whether to sign up? No, of course not.

Leave the legalese for the courthouse

We all have an intuitive emotional response to accents and dialects. For instance, depending where you grew up, people with a New Zealand, Irish, Cornwall, New Jersey or Canadian accent will have to work harder to appear intelligent and credible.

Speaking legalese elicits an intuitive emotional response too, invariably a negative one that leaves the reader wary and edgy. Hands up everyone who likes the way lawyers speak? OK, now only the people who aren’t actually lawyers? I thought so.

Legalese is a very strict form of language where every word must have a precisely defined meaning. This is intended to ensure that the meaning of a contract is clear and incontestable. Right, that would be the reason there are so few contracts ever disputed in court? So if legalese puts new site visitors off, and doesn’t contribute significantly to the defence of your contract in court, is most of it really necessary? Much of it may not be. Use a good writer to help you trim your TOS of unnecessary legalese and introduce plain, friendly English wherever possible.

Divide and conquer

PickupPal’s TOS includes all the terms and conditions for both kinds of users (drivers and passengers) and all possible uses of the service in one lengthy document, when in fact, most users will only ever use a third of the site’s features and only ever be either a driver or a passenger, not both.

Instead of one big TOS with one field in your user database (“TOS_agreed = Y/N”) consider splitting your TOS into several agreements, each of which is only shown to the user when necessary, with separate database fields for each of these sub-agreements.

For instance, PickupPal asks you to choose between driver and passenger registration a step prior to the TOS, so it would be great for the user if the TOS reflected only those clauses that pertained to driving or being a passenger. Later on, if the user wants to start doing both, design the website so they agree to the other set of terms too.

In many cases it’s possible to divide agreements up so a particular ‘risky’ activity (such as displaying R- or X-rated content in a search result) has its own small, separate TOS to agree to before you continue. That means most of your users will never have to imagine the horror of being exposed to X-rated content before they even sign up for your service (remember the surgeon and post-op pain example?)

Aliens attacking? Don’t say I didn’t tell you so…

If your TOS is deep, wide and scary enough, site visitors won’t be game to attempt a crossing and become an actual customer. You’ll be legally protected but you won’t have that nice new business you were hoping would pay your lawyer’s bill.

But, remember, I’m not a lawyer. Come the revolution, I will join you in putting all the lawyers up against the wall (along with the CTOs, IAs and marketing managers… I have a lot of work to do come the revolution.) Because I’m not a lawyer, your mileage may vary, but I’m not going to ask you to agree to a lengthy TOS to attempt to limit your ability to sue me for following my advice over a precipice. Don’t take my advice without exercising your own best judgement and doing what’s right for your business.

We’ll just have to see if that holds up in court!

Bullets in frankenvators: the art of a concise message

// April 3rd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Writing

All businesses face the same challenge: capturing and holding the attention of customers, media and investors. Once you’ve captured their attention your second challenge is to deliver a message that will be retained. How can you improve your score on both? Be concise and structured. Let’s expand on that a little!

• Attention: breaking through the clutter so people are really listening to what you have to say.
• Retention: making sure that people remember what you’ve told them so they can tell others.

It’s Love Story on a boat

The original “elevator pitch” was in the movie industry, where you might get 10-15 seconds in an elevator or topping up a customer’s water glass to pitch a script to a Hollywood producer. You might pitch the script for Titanic as “It’s Love Story on a boat”. Very simplified, and by referring to Love Story, an enduring classic with big box office receipts, the pitch has a clever, highly-compressed ‘payload’ designed for easy consumption by a Hollywood producer.

Say Love Story and the producer can unzip that payload for himself and think “big box office, love story about two kids from opposite sides of the track, at the end, one of them dies.” Even better, because he’s unpacked all that meaning himself, there’s a tiny voice in his subconscious telling him that he’s figured out something that you might not know, that might give him leverage over you when it comes to negotiating the value of the deal. You’ve captured his attention.

(more…)

AT&T: if I have to learn your interface, you’ve failed

// March 27th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Other news

Why do so many people in tech management find 3D interface so strangely addictive, when it’s clinically proven to be idiot-forming? Techcrunch reports that AT&T has been developing a new web 3D browser, Pogo, based on Mozilla. I’m amongst the readers who reacted with a strong WTF? at the news, though it brings up some important points about interface design, following trends, and remembering history.

I remember my history. Right about when I joined Yahoo! the company cut a deal with Caligari, a maker of 3D software and browser plugins. The two companies collaborated on a 3D visualisation of the main web directory categories of Yahoo! (News, Finance, Sports, etc.) I can’t find a video of the interface in action (challenge: can you find one?) but each section of the web directory was represented by a giant icon on a huge green field of grass.

From memory, Yahoo! 3D was something a lot of senior yahoos were interested in as something fun to play with – it really wasn’t something the company was expecting to monetize or present as the primary interface for Yahoo! then or in the future. This was in the days of 28.8kbps modem bandwidth, 13" CRTs and Navigator 3.0/IE 3.0. Flying across the football field from one category to another would take about a minute, with frame rates at about 5fps, and you were quite likely to miss the category you were aiming for with the frame rate and lag time.

Yahoo! 3D taught me that desktop web browser interfaces were already  quite mature, and that on the desktop, the old "click on a link with a mouse" routine was widely-understood, easily adopted by new users, and fast to use.

Since then, browser interface design has tried and rejected a few new  ideas, and  the only one I can point to that has really been taken up widely is tabs in the browser, as well as in the web page itself.

Twelve years later, 3D visualization of data and relationships is a powerful tool, but 3D navigation remains a solution without a problem. Why is this so? I can’t point you to research on this, but my trusty gut instinct says:

1. 3D interfaces need 3D input devices and displays. It’s too hard to learn to grasp, manipulate and move objects using 2D input devices and displays. It takes too many brain cells to do the interpolation, even for those with strong stomachs and keen to try new  things.
2. Despite Javascript, AJAX, Flash and all that whizzy coding stuff, websites and web apps are still built using metaphors dredged deep out of print publishing. You can stack a bunch of web pages together and drag them about, sure, but each of those web pages has only two dimensions. I can only interact with the content on a web page when viewing it from "the front". Stacking and dragging are useful for organising large numbers of web pages and bookmarks, sure. But who organises large amounts of web content? A tiny percentage of the internet audience. And that dragging is inevitably going to be easier using folders and tabs until Apple ships me a 3D input device and display with my next Mac.

The other classic mistake I see in these videos of Pogo in action is mimicry without purpose, in this case, mimicking Apple’s Cover Flow interface. I betcha nobody at AT&T knows what percentage of Apple’s OS X customers actually choose to use Cover Flow (versus not knowing how to turn it off) but I am sure Apple knows and isn’t telling.

Cover Flow is chrome: something that’s meant to sweeten the sale or upgrade of the operating system, iTunes and iPods, not to be a primary interface mode.

Knowing your new BMW M5 has a gazillion suspension and transmission settings helps you justify your purpose, and six months later, if BMW surveys M5 customers and finds <5% actually mess with the settings? Who cares? We’ve still sold a lot of M5s.

How do I know Cover Flow is just chrome when I don’t have any data? I asked my friends. The responses are all quite similar: even the musicgeekiest friend I have can identify only 30% of his  iTunes library by album art alone. Subtract the albums he originally owned on CD, then subtract the albums he’d owned for years before buying an iPod, then subtract the album covers that actually have the band name and album name on the cover? He’s down to <5%.

Don’t believe me? Test yourself, I’d love to read about your results.

Meanwhile, who’d regularly use an interface that forced you to stop and think about 95% of the choices available to you?

While website homepages aren’t as obscure as album covers, they certainly aren’t designed to be recognisable – much less legible – at Cover Flow-sized dimensions. And any new content on them worth clicking on won’t be readable unless the Pogo user is viewing at something far greater than 1280x1024px.

AT&T’s Pogo mistakes the chrome for the fundamentals, and then tacks it onto its own product without any understanding of its true purpose, like a Chinese manufacturer designing cars that come out looking like a BMW that got left too long in the microwave with a LandCruiser.

Some of the videos of Pogo in action are well worth watching, and I’m in favour of AT&T and other large companies with too much money/time doing research of all kinds, even if its only into doomed interface design.

But while you watch, don’t let the siren song of 3D interface whizzyness lure you away. Don’t start picturing yourself in a ‘Minority Report’ future with productivity levels 10x today’s. Expect the personal jetpack to ship first!

Feedback on scouta.com redesign mockup

// February 19th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Products

New scouta.com Mockup
Originally uploaded by rich115.

Richard Giles from Scouta was looking on Twitter for some feedback on his new redesign. I charge for this kinda work, but here’s some brief feedback:

S-P-E-L-L out the benefit

You haven’t yet shown the user the benefit. You assume they know why receiving personalised recommendations is a good thing. Start with, “Who has time to find good stuff to listen to/watch online?…” and explain the benefit. Most consumers still aren’t aware of what recommendation is, much less why it matters to them.

Who’s your target audience?

It’s really hard to get a good balance between the consumer target and the media publisher target, so why try? It just clutters and confuses to have a message aimed at publishers wedged in-between two consumer messages. Just put a button-shaped link near the bottom that says, “Are you a media publisher?” and take the publishers to another page. We media publishers are smart, we’re better at retention when scanning a page than joe consumer.

What’s your brand?

You’ve got two competing brands on the page: the “scouta” text and the whirly play button, which is really your chicklet – what should be small, subtle interface cue used before links, instead of player play buttons, etc. Which do you need the user to really recall? I’d suggest it’s the Scouta logo.

Not all ratings are equal

Are you sure you want to collect user ratings on content right from the homepage with no prior Learn More or new user registation? Before they’ve really invested in the idea that rating things well delivers good recommendations? Having worked on content recommendation products before, not all user ratings are equal. I’d expect these ratings would be next to useless in this context, and aren’t likely to give the user a positive result – they’re going to expect a perfect recommendation after the first rating click, or click both of them to see what happens, or worse.

When it doesn’t work as they expected (because you haven’t yet told them what to expect) their simple little mind will come to the end of their tiny little attention span, they’ll click off your homepage and whatever you paid the SEO to get them will be wasted.

CaPiTaLiSaTiOn!

I’m Not A Big Fan Of Capitalising Words That Aren’t Actually Proper Nouns When The Whole Page Uses Them It Doesn’t Focus The Eye, Instead It Decreases Readability Significantly.

25% OFF! Oh wait, it’s free…

Love rosettes for highlighting ‘special deal’ info, though they tend to get ignored by users not interested in clicking on advertising links. They’re not very ‘with it’ anymore. If you must use one, consider one with fewer points. If you’re not wedded to a rosette but still want visual impact, nothing says “Ideal for iPod, iPhone and AppleTV owners” better than a pic of the products all nicely arranged together with some dramatic lighting and a zushy background.

Black on orange isn’t kind on eyes, and, uhh… were you happy with that font?

Love the promise of personalised content recommendations, keen to see how the new site looks when it goes live! Hope that helps!

This is not about me.

// January 30th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media, Social Media

A new post from Nic Hodges helped coalesce some of my recent thinking about social messaging and social networks. Nic talks about how two-way, conversational media is now becoming as involving and entertaining as, say, ‘60 Minutes‘. And a lot more entertaining than ‘Girls of the Playboy Mansion.’ No, really.