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Measuring content strategy: Not a piece of cake | Words Are Delicious

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 20:10:41 +0000

Measuring content strategy: Not a piece of cake | Words Are Delicious

Interesting blog post that gives an insight into the difficulties of measuring content effectiveness when content is part of an overall design process. ((There’s an almost incidental insight into the compromises that are made when your company’s culture is most certainly not to sweat the details, although the author of the blog post may disagree with me on the culture.))

This bit in particular I found interesting.

We need to recognize content is the voice of our brand, and we have to take responsibility for what we say to our customers and how we say it. I want us to ask ourselves not, “Will this new content make us more money?” but, “Is this new content right for our brand?”

The company referred to in the blog post is the company I used to work for up until eight days ago, but it seems that a battle we fought and won a couple of years ago in the UK – working with the brand team so that the tone of voice guidelines are an integral part of the overall brand guidelines – is something yet to be tackled at the mothership.

The Bridge Cafe from The Apprentice

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:36:02 +0000

BBC.co.uk feature on The Bridge Cafe from The Apprentice: BBC NEWS | Magazine | Fry-ups and dressings down

It probably says an awful lot about me that when the losing team on each week’s The Apprentice gets sent to the Bridge Cafe to bitch at each other, I often think that I’d rather be there having a bacon butty and a cuppa than where the Surallan has sent the winning team for some poncetastic experience.

Betalogue » Blog Archive » Adobe CS4: Yet another lousy Adobe installer

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:32:17 +0000

One of the reasons I won’t be upgrading to CS4: Betalogue » Blog Archive » Adobe CS4: Yet another lousy Adobe installer.

Cisco Career Connection’s horrible pop-up

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:33:12 +0000

Cisco Career Connection pops up a modal dialogue box containing some legal gubbins when you want to submit your details to them. The problem with it being that the lawyers have done their usual trick of making the text so long-winded that no one would bother reading it, thereby making it very easy to make people sign their souls away without realising it.

Oh, that’s not the main problem.

The main problem is that the text in this dialogue box is so bloody long you can’t actually see the all of it if you’re on a standard MacBook 1280×800 screen. It’s a big problem because you can’t actually get to the OK or Cancel buttons at the bottom, and you can’t do anything like resize the window or make the text smaller in an effort to squeeze it all into a visible area because of the terrible way it’s been coded. (The experience up to this point is pretty horrendous, too.) You end up having to ‘force quit’ Safari to make it usable again.

I hate pop-up confirmation dialogue boxes at the best of times. If you want me to agree to something, use the standard ‘By clicking on Submit you agree to blah’ or use an ‘I agree’ tickbox. Don’t pop up some other window – especially not a modal one – that makes me have to click again.

Here endeth the rant.

‘E’ is for envelope…

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:11:52 +0000

It’s understandable if you can’t remember that ’stationary’ means ’still’ and ’stationery’ refers to paper, &c. (although the ‘e is for envelope’ reminder works for me). It’s unforgivable if you actually sell stationery, though, and managed to spell it correctly in your navigation.

Found on: Clippykit London’s website.

Really useless web form label

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:32:24 +0000

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Great example of lazy form design with no thought for the user experience, found when registering for a hotel’s rewards scheme. The form has plenty more examples of lazy/non-existent design, but the one I’ve picked out is the best.

There’s just absolutely no context or explanation given for this thing. Even if they’re working under the assumption that users are experienced enough with web forms to know that this has something to do with consenting to receive direct mail, there’s still no clue as to whether ticking the box opts you in or out.

When localisation goes wrong…

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:24:51 +0000

From Singapore Airlines’ description of its business class cabin (bolding is my own):

Providing you with top-shelf choices, Singapore Airline’s inflight entertainment system, KrisWorld, offer more than 450 entertainment options…