Good communication and good design do what they’re supposed to

Tech for PR posts a great piece today on how technology just gets in the way. This is something I keep coming back to, that good communication and good design don’t get in the way because they help, without hindering. If they’re done properly, you don’t notice them at all.

I spent several years as a designer, including software interface design, and so I spent many hours putting myself in the head of a user, trying to figure out how best to word a message, or what colour a menu should be, or how large fonts to use. They’re all really important and yet I would often have to fight for my suggestions to make it into the software. The tech viewpoint seemed to be that if it worked, that was all that mattered. Mine was, what do you mean by ‘work’? Could you drive a car without any labels on the dashboard? Eventually, possibly, but only after a few bumps. This is why some time ago I had a major gripe about Lotus Notes which has frankly bizarre features such as a menu entitled ‘Actions’ with a submenu entitled ‘Tools’. Where’s the sense in that? I still come across ‘funnies’ daily but I’ve given up documenting them.

I’m currently going through a presentation slide set and the ineptitude on display (literally) astonishes me. The message is very astute – or at least I think it is. I’m still trying to figure it out. I have a strong feeling I’ll be able to distil it from 15 rambling bullet points to about 7 succinct ones. And remove that spaghetti-like diagram altogether.

Here’s a solution for all you bad communicators out there: take up blogging. Find out what it’s like to put together a brief piece of prose, actually saying something in a joined-up way, with a compelling headline so that people notice it in their readers. Think long and hard about which graphic to include. Do this every day and next thing you know, you’ll be communicating like a Friendly Ghost. You too will be someone’s invisible friend.

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What was that about logos again?

This morning, on Today – yes, I listen to it a lot on the way into work – I heard an interview with some fool who was associated with the London Olympics logo, discussing the possible change to the Barclays ‘eagle’ logo if it were bought out by Dutch Bank ABN AMRO on account of it having Nazi associations.

The main thrust of his argument seemed to be that ‘the eagle doesn’t have Nazi associations’. Well, he might think it doesn’t but maybe a lot of other people do. Isn’t this precisely the same arrogance as displayed with the London logo, that design-wise it ticked every box (it doesn’t btw, see below) but they forgot whether people would like it? Talk about forgetting key stakeholders…

Which leads me back to the London logo. After reading some valid criticism of it recently I can see that it doesn’t really work as a logo anyway. You see the Olympic rings and the ‘london’ text in it? Well, how will that scale? If you make it the size of a postage stamp – ie something which works on letterheads or business cards – then you won’t be able to read it. I was discussing it recently with a colleague and he reckons that really the designers haven’t created a logo, they’ve created a brand that other brands can hang off. I think this means that, for example, Coke or MacD will be able to place their logos within the London logo, but I’m not sure. If someone who knows more about this could let me know, that would be great.

And while we’re on the subject of branding, another conversation with another ex-colleague recently kicked the legs from under my great idea for a Cheddarvision-like campaign. The whole point of Cheddarvision and similar feeds is that people feel they have discovered them, that they ‘own’ them, and the emotion associated with that is pride: pride to own the brand. For projects such as mine, the brand would get in the way. So therein lies the challenge: allow your consumers to have pride in owning your brand while still influencing it. Toughie.

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Do people really ‘get’ logos? Do designers ‘get’ the public?

The new London Olympic logo has certainly provoked a strong reaction, not least among epileptics who have been suffering fits – although, it should be pointed out, these are triggered by a short passage in the promo video rather than the logo itself.

Still, it’s just another aspect of the London logo story people are using to justify their opinions that, well, the logo sucks. I’ve designed a logo or two in my time and I’m not going to discuss what makes a good one – there’s plenty about that on the web, such as here and here.

However, what I think this situation tells us is that there’s a lot more that goes into creating them than the public give designers credit for – and that’s probably because bad designers give them insufficient credit.

Let’s consider the logo first. Metro lampoons it and the BBC shows alternatives.

Now let’s not forget that lampooning is easy. It’s much easier to mock something than appreciate it.

So, on to the BBC’s alternatives. I’m not convinced by them. Some of them look pretty and some of them are colourful, but I’m not at all sure any of them are getting across the message of the London logo. To me, the logo is a message about not just the Olympics, or even sport, but about London and even the UK, now and into the future. That’s not an easy thing to represent properly.

How do you create a logo? Well you really should start off with what you’re trying to represent – your brand values – and then think of ways of representing them. The logic goes that, by following this process to end up with a graphic, then hopefully the reverse will happen in the minds of people who see that graphic – that at least one aspect of that messaging is triggered by the logo.

Where a lot of people go wrong in understanding logo design is that this process lies behind it. They claim they could do the same in five minutes. Well, yes, you could probably produce anything in five minutes, but there’s a big difference between producing anything, and producing something. The trick is in producing something that works with the messaging as well as something that works as a logo: in actually following that process and never losing focus. As George Harrison said, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

This ties in with another criticism often levelled at logo designs: the cost. The London logo cost 400 grand and admittedly it’s a hefty sum. But obviously that sum isn’t just the cost of the time it took the designer to produce that actual version of the logo – very often the logo you end up with actually only takes a few minutes to knock together. I would like to think that there had been a good, comprehensive consultation process to make sure everyone was in agreement and clear about what they were going to do, and that dozens if not hundreds of alternatives were considered throughout this time.

Then the actual cost of the implementation needs to be taken into account – signage, stationary, everything. It really does mount up.

So what’s gone wrong with the London logo? Purely apart from the universal truth that people rarely like something new – I’ll wager people will get used to the London logo in time and wonder what all the fuss was about – I think the problem is that, having considered all the clever stuff, the designers did in fact make a mistake. They thought about every message, every design aspect, every ramification and implication, but forgot one critical stakeholder: the public.

The reaction of ordinary people is critical because they need to adopt it. A great design can only be a great design if people actually like it. It can tick all the classic design boxes, but if people just don’t like it, then it fails.

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Do people really ‘get’ logos? Do designers ‘get’ the public?

The new London Olympic logo has certainly provoked a strong reaction, not least among epileptics who have been suffering fits – although, it should be pointed out, these are triggered by a short passage in the promo video rather than the logo itself.

Still, it’s just another aspect of the London logo story people are using to justify their opinions that, well, the logo sucks. I’ve designed a logo or two in my time and I’m not going to discuss what makes a good one – there’s plenty about that on the web, such as here and here.

However, what I think this situation tells us is that there’s a lot more that goes into creating them than the public give designers credit for – and that’s probably because bad designers give them insufficient credit.

Let’s consider the logo first. Metro lampoons it and the BBC shows alternatives.

Now let’s not forget that lampooning is easy. It’s much easier to mock something than appreciate it.

So, on to the BBC’s alternatives. I’m not convinced by them. Some of them look pretty and some of them are colourful, but I’m not at all sure any of them are getting across the message of the London logo. To me, the logo is a message about not just the Olympics, or even sport, but about London and even the UK, now and into the future. That’s not an easy thing to represent properly.

How do you create a logo? Well you really should start off with what you’re trying to represent – your brand values – and then think of ways of representing them. The logic goes that, by following this process to end up with a graphic, then hopefully the reverse will happen in the minds of people who see that graphic – that at least one aspect of that messaging is triggered by the logo.

Where a lot of people go wrong in understanding logo design is that this process lies behind it. They claim they could do the same in five minutes. Well, yes, you could probably produce anything in five minutes, but there’s a big difference between producing anything, and producing something. The trick is in producing something that works with the messaging as well as something that works as a logo: in actually following that process and never losing focus. As George Harrison said, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

This ties in with another criticism often levelled at logo designs: the cost. The London logo cost 400 grand and admittedly it’s a hefty sum. But obviously that sum isn’t just the cost of the time it took the designer to produce that actual version of the logo – very often the logo you end up with actually only takes a few minutes to knock together. I would like to think that there had been a good, comprehensive consultation process to make sure everyone was in agreement and clear about what they were going to do, and that dozens if not hundreds of alternatives were considered throughout this time.

Then the actual cost of the implementation needs to be taken into account – signage, stationary, everything. It really does mount up.

So what’s gone wrong with the London logo? Purely apart from the universal truth that people rarely like something new – I’ll wager people will get used to the London logo in time and wonder what all the fuss was about – I think the problem is that, having considered all the clever stuff, the designers did in fact make a mistake. They thought about every message, every design aspect, every ramification and implication, but forgot one critical stakeholder: the public.

The reaction of ordinary people is critical because they need to adopt it. A great design can only be a great design if people actually like it. It can tick all the classic design boxes, but if people just don’t like it, then it fails.

Technorati tags: design • Subscribe to this feed

Do people really ‘get’ logos? Do designers ‘get’ the public?

The new London Olympic logo has certainly provoked a strong reaction, not least among epileptics who have been suffering fits – although, it should be pointed out, these are triggered by a short passage in the promo video rather than the logo itself.

Still, it’s just another aspect of the London logo story people are using to justify their opinions that, well, the logo sucks. I’ve designed a logo or two in my time and I’m not going to discuss what makes a good one – there’s plenty about that on the web, such as here and here.

However, what I think this situation tells us is that there’s a lot more that goes into creating them than the public give designers credit for – and that’s probably because bad designers give them insufficient credit.

Let’s consider the logo first. Metro lampoons it and the BBC shows alternatives.

Now let’s not forget that lampooning is easy. It’s much easier to mock something than appreciate it.

So, on to the BBC’s alternatives. I’m not convinced by them. Some of them look pretty and some of them are colourful, but I’m not at all sure any of them are getting across the message of the London logo. To me, the logo is a message about not just the Olympics, or even sport, but about London and even the UK, now and into the future. That’s not an easy thing to represent properly.

How do you create a logo? Well you really should start off with what you’re trying to represent – your brand values – and then think of ways of representing them. The logic goes that, by following this process to end up with a graphic, then hopefully the reverse will happen in the minds of people who see that graphic – that at least one aspect of that messaging is triggered by the logo.

Where a lot of people go wrong in understanding logo design is that this process lies behind it. They claim they could do the same in five minutes. Well, yes, you could probably produce anything in five minutes, but there’s a big difference between producing anything, and producing something. The trick is in producing something that works with the messaging as well as something that works as a logo: in actually following that process and never losing focus. As George Harrison said, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

This ties in with another criticism often levelled at logo designs: the cost. The London logo cost 400 grand and admittedly it’s a hefty sum. But obviously that sum isn’t just the cost of the time it took the designer to produce that actual version of the logo – very often the logo you end up with actually only takes a few minutes to knock together. I would like to think that there had been a good, comprehensive consultation process to make sure everyone was in agreement and clear about what they were going to do, and that dozens if not hundreds of alternatives were considered throughout this time.

Then the actual cost of the implementation needs to be taken into account – signage, stationary, everything. It really does mount up.

So what’s gone wrong with the London logo? Purely apart from the universal truth that people rarely like something new – I’ll wager people will get used to the London logo in time and wonder what all the fuss was about – I think the problem is that, having considered all the clever stuff, the designers did in fact make a mistake. They thought about every message, every design aspect, every ramification and implication, but forgot one critical stakeholder: the public.

The reaction of ordinary people is critical because they need to adopt it. A great design can only be a great design if people actually like it. It can tick all the classic design boxes, but if people just don’t like it, then it fails.

Technorati tags: design • Subscribe to this feed

Click, double-click, ALT, TAB, ENTER. What makes a good interface?

Despite not working in the field anymore I do keep seeing interface design issues popping up recently.

In my copywriting feed – feel free to subscribe to it on the right-hand side of this blog, it takes lots and lots and lots of copywriting feeds and syndicates them out – comes a piece on the rate at which most people scan Google pages. It averages out at 140 words in 6.4 seconds. This can surely only be enough to pick out a few words of interest and, as Chris Hoskin says in his post, it must be too quickly for a ‘rational’ decision to be made.

My take on it is that people will tend to return to that search page if the link they choose isn’t right for them, so it’s probably several ‘chunks’ of 6.4 seconds which isn’t quite as random, and through this repetition people start to make better decisions as they become more familiar with what’s presented.

So perhaps the real way to judge an interface really isn’t in its immediate intuitiveness but eventual familiarity. My father  – who used to program in Mobol using punch cards - is trying to teach my 70+ year-old auntie how to use a computer. I think it’s admirable that she wants to get into it but he says it’s a real eye-opener. He has to teach her how to use the mouse, how to click, how to open and close windows and start applications.

These are second-nature operations to us graphics-interface-savvy users but you tell me: what exactly is the difference between single-click and double-click? Why do we single-click menus but double-click icons (I’m talking Windows here)? I can only come to the conclusion that you double-click a picture and single click text, but where does that leave the Start menu, with its combination of icons and labels? Why don’t we double-click hyperlinks? Suddenly it doesn’t seem quite as obvious anymore.

Way, way back I started on the path of enlightenment with a ZX81, graduating to a ZX Spectrum. The ‘interface’ for that - a very quirky command line – was really pretty dreadful, with arcane and obscure key combinations for picking out commands and operations. Yet I was able to churn out code really quickly with it. This wasn’t because the interface was well designed. It was because I got used to it.

The key is a combination of learning curve, consistency, and the adaptability of an interface to work around the user. If the curve is shallow and you can do things in several ways without getting lost, you’re working with a good interface.

You’d avoid using Lotus Notes if you were me – Part II

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Not so long ago, with my interface/application designer’s hat on (yes, I designed this, including website, interface and documentation), I posted a whinge about Lotus Notes. Thomas Adrian was kind enough to comment, and I can understand that he was displeased because from what I can see on his site, he’s big on the subject (although, hats off to him his English is better than my Swedish).

Now don’t take this as a personal attack Thomas, but here’s more Lotus Notes inadequacy:

• Copy from an HTML or rich-text document, then paste into a Lotus Notes email. Then wait. And wait. And wait a bit more. After several seconds (or several more) it will eventually paste. Why not immediately? What on earth is taking Lotus Notes so long to paste metatext?
• So you’re typing along quite happily when an alarm window pops up for a meeting. I don’t object to alarms – they’re very useful – but they do introduce when you’re mid-flow. They also respond to key depressions so if it happens that you press ENTER or ‘O’ for OK you suddenly find it’s closed the window and the following stream of characters have been interpreted by whatever underlying application you were running. I’ve very nearly lost work with this happening. Not good. Also, why call it an alarm? Do I want to be alarmed? No. It’s a reminder or an update. Not an alarm please. It’s so alarming.
• Why can’t I delete labels? When I first started using Lotus Notes I would occasionally type the wrong thing or mis-spell words, and anyway my work has changed since I started so I’d like to delete or rename labels please. If it’s possible then please tell me how. But don’t blame me for not finding out how to do it myself because I’ve looked through the online help and the web and apart from finding one other people with the exact same problem, there’s no mention of how to do this.
• And finally, another alarm problem. Why, if I have several at the same time, am I reminded of them all in one alarm? Because to date I also haven’t figured out how then to set different ’snooze’ times to each alarm because there’s only one ’snooze’ field. So I have to set them all to the same value, which seems to separate them out into individual alarms, to which I can then set different times.

I shouldn’t have to do this. Irrespective of operating system, I shouldn’t have to wait to cut and paste, or nearly lose work, or be unable to delete labels or take several steps with multiple alarms. The version I use (at work) is at number 7. Why weren’t these usability issues addressed in versions 1 to 6?

Granted, it’s a stable package but as I said before, these usability issues can only be because it isn’t given sufficient priority within the development team. They will probably tell me it’s my fault for not figuring it out, or that there are ways around the problems that I’ve found. Well, I shouldn’t have to figure it out, or work around it. It should just work. Properly.

Give me Outlook any time. No, really.

When the medium obscures the message

The original mandate for this blog was to expose communication gone bad – when the medium gets in the way of the message. Whereas I’ve diverged from that a little because you have to be quite anally retentive to write an entire blog on the subject, I’ve noticed three examples of this today.

• First thing: paying for credit cards with those stupid credit card readers. Apart from taking ages – especially when everyone’s paying for rounds with them to three bartenders with only one reader between them – have you noticed how they have a button on them that says ‘ENTER’, when the message reads ‘ENTER=OK’? Why didn’t they just put ‘OK’ on the button? Who in the world doesn’t know what ‘OK’ means? Isn’t it better than a button saying ‘ENTER’?
• Next up: this website. It’s by a print/design agency. So what’s wrong with it? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s crap, that’s what’s wrong with it. Firstly, I’m told that I might not be able to see it at all unless I download extra software. So before I even see any content at all I have to either click, or download. So let’s assume that didn’t put me off. Click the Enter site link. Now I’m downloading an introduction. I’m yet another click and another download away from actually seeing anything. As do 99.9999999% of right-thinking people, I click Skip. Woah! What’s this? Loud funky music? I really really really don’t want this. I’m in the middle of an office and now people think I’m looking at TheSoundOfLove.com (btw, I haven’t even checked to see whether that url exists nor am I going to), when in fact this is company research. Words float around at me. Focused… committed… successful… confident. BLEUGH! BLEUGH BLEUGH BLEUGH. Keep clicking… keep clicking… when am I going to see some content? OK, it looks like things have settled down now. But where are the links? Oh, I see, if I click random squares on the graphic to the left I’m taken to a random page. But that’s largely academic because if I hadn’t been writing to you about this site I wouldn’t have made it this far.An object lesson in how not to do it. Sure, have great branding and cool funkiness if you like that sort of thing but GET people to your content immediately and ENABLE them to navigate it clearly. I think this site is possibly the worst offender I’ve ever seen in terms of doing the opposite.
• Finally, Lotus Notes, more specifically some awful Lotus Notes-based blog-type interface that I’ve been using recently. Now, part of the reason blogs are so successful is that they’re so easy: you just type and publish and everything else is handled for you (this is partly my take on Web 2.0 is that it’s the ISO Application Layer being carried by the network but that’s for another post). It’s the single, simplest interface known to man. But could I figure out how to post on the goddawful thing? Could I? Could I? No, I couldn’t, because it’s bottom left of the screen, in a link called ‘Admin’. I go back to my original thought: an OK button should be called OK. Similarly, a Post button should be called Post.

In fact, Lotus Notes itself is so awful that it warrants an entire slandering of its own. Tomorrow I’m going to compile a list of Things That Are Awful About Lotus Notes and tell you all about them.

If you’re interested in Whitehouse and Wolfowitz, you’ll love this.

I don’t just receive. Actually, I don’t really receive much at all on this blog. But I do give.

Subscribe to my feeds and you get a good all-round view of what’s happening in the PR, journalism, copywriting and tech blogospheres.

I’m not going to tell you exactly how I created these feeds, but what I do know is that I’ve developed techniques to ensure wide-ranging, deep-probing and relevant hits for each category. They’ve been filtered, collated and filtered again, and I’ve tested them and they work. I use them every day in my professional life.

So:

• PR Pros Proclaim – find out what’s the haps in the PR blogosphere. This does not cover regional PR activities in Pig’s Knuckle Arkansas. It does cover the latest, most important PR news, in part voted for, digg-like, by PR professionals.
• Journalists retort – well they don’t really but they do like some antagonism to elicit interest. This feed has been honed down from several hundred to just several dozen, and then filtered again for the most relevant to PR and social media. It’s the Carling Black Ice of feeds.
• Writers mumble – and don’t they just. This is the least active feed and the most informative. Quality over quantity. If only those writers would think less and write more.
• Geeks speak – and don’t they just. Strange, in company they’re the quiet ones but give them a screen and a keyboard and you can’t shut them up. I worked in tech for 15 years before coming to PR, so I know. Bless them. The future is in this feed.

Subscribe to all four and all you’re missing is the one feed to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

The heart of everything you do

Everything hangs on your messaging and your brand personality. This doesn’t just apply to copywriting.

When I take on a new piece of work I insist on going through the copy brief. Some people are brilliant at it, providing me with exactly the right information, mainly because I ask for exactly the right information. Others aren’t so good, but I still use it as my cue for making sure I cover everything. In PR parlance this is probably called a 360 degree view.

But what a lot of people don’t seem to realise is that the copy brief can apply pretty much everywhere else. Essentially it asks ‘what are you trying to achieve’, ‘who is it for’,'what’s the message’ and ‘what’s the brand personality’. You would ask the same questions if you were a designer. You would ask the same questions if you were creating a website.

I don’t think many people take this on board. An inexperienced client will approach an inexperienced designer saying “We want clean lines and bubbles“, so naturally the designer will produce clean lines and bubbles. Or might say “This won’t take you long to write”, so an inexperienced copywriter is annoyed when it takes three days instead of three hours.

Let’s amplify. Let’s realise that really at the heart of what we do lies exactly the same thing, whether it’s writing, design, PR or advertising. It’s clarification of those four basic principles. It’s the font from which everything flows.

I’m sure I’m over-simplifying here. If only someone would read this blog and tell me.