Strategy Blog: Post

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

For the most part, we act as a User-Centric Design (UCD) shop for our clients. In its most basic sense, this means that when we're wireframing an e-commerce site, prototyping a new web application, or putting together a page description document for a client's about page, our foremost concern revolves around the needs and wants of the users. Usually, that means we go about shaping our client's business goals in the context of user goals, and ideally the client recognizes that achieving the latter helps achieve the former. But if they don't get it...

Continue reading "User-Centric Design is About User Goals AND Business Goals, if the Client Gets It"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

Here’s a simple postulate to consider: active moderation is a bad idea for anyone who wants a dynamic discussion on their site. 

Base your practice on the 80/20 rule.  Hopefully 80% of your content is good, in which case you should give new posts the benefit of the doubt, and not actively moderate.  If more than 20% of your content is something you’d want moderated away, then you have bigger problems.

Continue reading "You’re Moderating Your Site to Death"

Stephanie Hay - Project Manager :

Creating personas that are representative of the key audiences clients are trying to reach is baked into our process here at Viget.  We undertake this process for a number of reasons, not least of which is to guide our decisions about priorities and to re-orient discussions when personal preferences get in the way.

How do we do it?  Well, ideally, we’d have no budget constraints or time restrictions so we could survey at least three individuals from each audience group the client identifies.  We’d gather quantifiable data about their likes and dislikes, record their demographics and goals, measure their actions and behaviors on various sites, and keep them in the loop so, upon launch, we have the perfect use cases for testing.  Whenever the engagement terms allow, we love being able to conduct this intensive research so our clients have feedback straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say.

More often than not, however, we are on tight schedules and an overall estimated budget that doesn’t take into account the many weeks of intense research audience research requires.  So, instead of scrapping the process all together, we compromise and create personas based on our local contacts plus internal and external assumptions—and it has proved invaluable for our clients. 

In this typical process, we start by talking to clients about who they’re trying to reach, then we make some assumptions about those users.  We assign them expected demographics, goals for using the site, desired actions we want them to take, and even a picture so we all know what that person might look like.  We’ll circulate ideas to other staffers and identify potential contacts who embody these characteristics.  We get staff and client feedback over the course of a couple weeks rather than a couple months, which is what more robust market research usually requires.  In the end, our typical persona-generation process yields modified market research that’s pivotal to guiding the entire project without requiring excess budget and timelines.

Continue reading "Why Personas are Valuable"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

Those who have worked in retail (I worked at Radio Shack while in high school) almost definitely have been taught that the old adage that "the customer is always right." Those same people probably would also be the first to say that it's total crap -- customers are often wrong. From small mom-and-pop shops to Southwest Airlines, companies are increasingly firing their customers, realizing that happy employees provide good customer service, and crappy customers make employees unhappy.

On the web, we're supposed to pay a lot of attention to the needs of the customer. After all, we tend to accept that in general, a great customer experience yields whatever we want: more sales, regular customers, greater engagement, or whatever. So how do we balance these seemingly mutually-exclusive perspectives? The devil is in the detail...

Continue reading "The Customer Isn’t Always Right, but the Customers Are Always Right"

Ken Yarmosh - Former Staffer :

Mahalo is serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis‘ latest project. The goal of Mahalo is to create a human powered search engine for the most commonly searched terms of the web.

In a time in which everyone is starting a business by trying to take advantage of the long tail—that is, attempting to profit on the niche nature of the infinitely niche web—Calacanis and Mahalo buck that trend. Calacanis says the “big fat part of the tail are the searches that people do over and over again.” When people search for ”Lindsey Lohan” or ”digital camera,” he wants them to think of Mahalo.

Mahalo has been compared to Wikipedia and About.com. Wikipedia, however, leverages the wisdom of the crowds and is a collaboration of groups of interested individuals crafting and editing the entries of the world’s largest encyclopedia. About.com and Mahalo are similar but the former focuses on subjects and topics (e.g., Money Planning) versus search terms. The commonality of the two is that they are written by guides.

Calacanis recognizes that his human-powered search cannot compete with the likes of Google when it comes to the extensiveness of its results. But he’s not trying to dethrone Google. He wants to “hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs [search engine results page] available today.”

In an interview with Loic Le Meur, Calacanis talks about his problems with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and its experts, some of whom toyed with Mahalo.
Jason advocates for a different idea that he calls “Site Experience Optimization,” which focuses on making sites better for people.  SEO, by contrast, is all about optimizing a site for a machine—a computer algorithm.

SEO and Site Experience Optimization are not conflicting ideas. Blackhat SEO, determined to create SPAM results and game search engines, care nothing about Site Experience Optimization. But any intelligently designed web site considers both computers (algorithms) and humans. They are designed to ensure that sites are found by search engine robots and, ultimately, are useful for visitors.