Geeks vs. Users

In my relatively short working career since my undergrad degree, I have worked in various roles broadly in the area of media and communications.  The last three of these have involved a lot of work on websites; coordinating, improving, completely re-working them.  This means I have had the questionable pleasure of working with website developers many times.

There is always a sense of promise and excitement when you are discussing changes to a website. Little things which have always annoyed you can be resolved – and because developers have specialist knowledge, it’s like someone doing your homework for you.

Except that like someone doing your homework, there are sacrifices to be made in return.

Worst Nachos EVER!

With apologies to anyone who knows/loves a website developer, they are on a completely different – and somewhat bizarre – planet.  My usual analogy is the comic geek from the Simpsons. I know it’s really unoriginal to use an archetypal nerd to illustrate my feelings for a software developer, but I have met about 6 in my life, and everyone of them reminds me of that character. Very often, they barely manage to hide their disgust at having to talk to someone who does not speak a computer language (I’m not sure if you say ‘speak’ HTML, but that’s what I’m saying, and it only supports my point).

Anyway, this rant was inspired by a tweet I just saw from Jay Rosen at NYU, who wrote:

Geeks lack empathy for users and most users lack geek. Meanwhile, designers make it look good. Usability eludes them all.

This might be a little simplistic, but it does summarise the dilemma of dealing with developers, and how to do it well.

Generally, if you are working as an editor, or consultant, or coordinator on a website, you have to act as a translator between developer/customer or geek/user.  And, because the geek, user, and designer all lack an awareness of usability, that has to be your primary concern.

Image: Worst Nachos Ever by Elvissa. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence.

Update: In related news, this article from A List Apart, ‘Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus’.

Links: The media future and modern publishing

Well, it has been a while, but I have a good excuse. I have spent my semester break in Iran, where there is internet (cafes are inexplicably called ‘coffeenets’ though have no coffee…) but it is fairly slow and all manner of sites are blocked. More on that later.

In the meantime, here are some links from the last couple of days:

• ABC’s Mark Scott has predicted the future of media, and unlike Murdoch, has his head well and truly out of the sand. It takes a bit of time to read, but is worth it.
• A lovely New Yorker humour piece about the brave new world of publishing in the digital age.
• Somewhat related to the Mark Scott speech in terms of the attitude of media organisations towards the new media world, is an interesting discussion about the social media policies of NPR vs. The Washington Post by Michelle McLellan and also by Steve Buttry. As McLellan put it, the old guard sees social media as a ‘hazard’, where as NPR sees it as valuable. Reading through the two excerpts, I thought the difference between the two policies was a little overstated by these bloggers; except that NPR does explicity encourage its journalists to exploit the potential of social media.

More on Iran to come…

Paywalls and new media

A couple of things I’ve listened to/watched here that talk about the demise of newspapers, the idea of paywalls, and the potential of new media.

The first is from Telstra’s blog (which is often cited as an example of a corporate blog that works) nowearetalking, and is a discussion with Tim Burrowes who publishes the media and advertising site Mumbrella:

The second is a link to ABC’s PM, which yesterday had a short report on Murdoch’s push for newspapers to establish paywalls.

What was most interesting about this discussion for me was the idea that News Ltd bosses in the US were looking at creating a consortium of media owners to start charging consumers for content – so they’d all be in it together. After all, paywalls won’t work if only one site or group of sites is doing it and people have alternatives.

Apart from being- as Alan Fels points out in the PM report – anti-competitive, this solution seems disingenuous to me.

My reasons for doubting the power of paywalls are theoretical, but then again, so are the mogul’s reasons for believing in them. The success of new media and digital technology as a whole is based on the fact that it is accessible and infinitely replicable.Charging for the majority of content online goes against both those instincts.

To use the phrase Murdoch applied to himself, this is a policy thought up by digital immigrants. They seem to be missing the point: that you can’t control the internet. It’s like Eliot Bledsloe from Creative Commons Australia said once: “Copyright – get over it.” Granted it was a different discussion and he was being slightly facetious, but in terms of online content, the same principle can be applied. Perhaps “exclusivity – get over it” or at least “if it’s exclusive it better be almost perfect.”

Or maybe you can go against the free will of the digital format – I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. Paywalls certainly work to a certain extent for niche websites or sites to which people assign a moral as well as informative value ( I’m thinking of Crikey when I say this – I believe that their subscribers see them as an important voice in the media landscape, even if they don’t read it every day).

But what Murdoch is proposing is that we essentially lock up one of the major activities undertaken on the web, news sourcing. Won’t that annoy anyone who has accessed news for so long for free? More than that, I think it will annoy people who are digital natives, because they live their lives online for free – free blogging software, free music listening, free email, free photo sharing – and this will seem like an affront to that way of using the web.

One way I do see it working in Australia, though, is that you could charge more for a combined subscription to the site and the print copy to be home delivered. I’d certainly buy one.  Either way, I hope they come up with something.

Digital vs traditional media: by design

In all the discussion about the death of newspapers and the appeal of online content, the importance of the aesthetic appeal of a medium is sometimes ignored. In relation to online media, it is often the usability of the site which will most significantly affect its design – and although aesthetics play a part in usability, they do not necessarily take precedence.

I think this is an area where newspapers still win. The traditional newspaper design is actually incredibly appealing and doesn’t create the same choice anxiety as an article on a webpage might. I think people like simplicity in design. I first started thinking about this in relation to newspapers after seeing this talk by a newspaper designer – here Jacek Utko talks about the effect of good design on the newspapers on which he has worked:

When I think about my online reading habits, there are three main things that keep me returning to a site. They are:

1. Relevance
2. Quality of content
3. Design

The first two are quite obvious – I am online to look for something in particular, or something to enhance my everyday experience. Relevance usually trumps the others – for example, I don’t think The Age website is of an incredibly high quality or very well designed, but it is not horrible on either of those counts and because it is local is relevant to my daily life (in general) it is my most frequently viewed site.

I will return to a site for quality of content even if it doesn’t have the other two factors – although will still be relevant in the sense I am interested in whatever it is focused on.  The accessibility and speed associated with online content has exposed us to an unprecedented level of bad writing, so when I find something that is considered and well written it is really exciting.

But it is the third factor, design, that I think is probably least discussed when considering the success /failure of websites. In our first class for Digital Media, we had to choose our favourite site. Without too much hesitation, I chose The Guardian. In terms of my three criteria for reading a site, I would rank the Guardian thus: 1. Design 2. Content 3. Relevance.  Despite the news website being very UK focused, I am happy to return because it has some interesting articles and I like to poke my head up above the Australian view of the world sometimes.

But mainly I keep returning because it is so pretty. See:

I pretty much like everything about the design of this site, both in the sense of usability and aesthetic appeal. The multicoloured double layered menu along the top acts as a colour and visual key to what you read, so that no matter how many times you click, you know how far you have gone from the homepage and how you got there.

They also use high quality images for all their tabs on the page, which can make the most unappealing  story seem interesting.  The Age could take a leave out of their book and stop publishing bad, blurring, overexposed, tabloid type photos that someone has hurriedly added text to in Photoshop.

I am constantly amazed at how few websites get design right. Obviously they cannot function under the same design theories as a newspaper, but maybe we should be thinking more about the successes of that design (not to mention the design of print magazines, which are often the most beautiful examples of content and images combined) when creating websites.

A final example is a publication, InDaily (out of Adelaide) which is hedging its bets by retaining the newspaper design online.  It is not a perfect format, not least because it kind of ignores the potential of the online medium, but there is something to be said for its hat tip to newspaper design – it is an effort to retain the simplicity which makes reading the newspaper pleasurable.