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Client: “I need a website in two months!”

It takes our group an average of 5 months to produce a website. Damn… clients get some serious sticker shock when they find that out.

So I share our project schedule document, which was supposed to be internal but shows exactly how we arrive at that timeline. Let’s take a look at why that is:

Notice how our total work time is something like 120 hours? Now count up those client days… that’s right, our average website runs somewhere around 40 days of client hold time. Ignoring weekends, that’s two months of hold time where we’re not working - just waiting for the client to send stuff back.

Even if we’re not doing any other project work at all and both sides hit every deadline, we can assume that the project will take at least three months.

Wait a second… After each one of these stages, we also include some lag time - buffer for missed deadlines, vacations, etc. that might interfere with an otherwise precise schedule. In other words, we wait two days before we start the next stage.

Ideally, we wouldn’t need this. But in reality, every single project uses some chunk of (if not more than) their hidden lag time. With maybe 12 stages containing 2 days of lag time, that’s another 24 days of wait. In other words, a little over a month of work days. This brings our total up to approximately 4 or 4.5 months for the entire project.

Sticker shock begins to wear off. Enter the stage of despair.

Client: “But I need my website in two months!”

Me: “What do you want to give up? Do you want shorter hold times? Should we take out our lag time? Can you promise - on penalty of serious project delay or outright cancellation - that you will hit every deadline?”

Client: “…No, I guess not. I have to get approvals from my [department|boss|committee].”

Me: “Then do you see any way to get this project timeline down to two months?”

Why this Works

Clients don’t get what we do. They might think they do, but they rarely understand the amount of work, the process, and the exact location of the bottlenecks in the project. We have a fairly mature process with content planning, research, wireframes, and iterative design and development. Some vendors can turn projects around much faster - they just skip a bunch of the steps we find critical to the project’s success.

Even without other client work, the project’s greatest inefficiency is slow client response times. But the client doesn’t see this - he simply sees the final launch date and assumes you have slow turnarounds.

By breaking it down, with full transparency, the client can better understand the role he plays in the schedule. It’s 2 + 2 = 4. You might not like it, but 2 + 2 will never equal 3 because of poor planning or sheer force of will.

Still, I like to offer a carrot during these meetings:

Me: If you beat your deadlines, you’ll start saving days. We will probably be able to start work on your next phase ahead of schedule. And we’ll have more time to dedicate to refining the end product. So if you’re speedy with replies and approvals, we should end up launching much earlier. Just remember, it’s all about how long you need to get us the feedback we need to continue working.

Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad, famously said that “marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.”

I have this quote taped to the wall of my office. Sometimes I stare at it, wondering what I can do to be more “remarkable” in my work.

As a marketer, I find the biggest challenge is this: how do I overcome the unremarkable? Most clients and projects are simply unremarkable. They’re exactly what you’d expect, and that puts them at a disadvantage.

If only these clients would come to us much earlier, we could help them be more remarkable. We could help design better produces, services, or processes. Marketing doesn’t start once you have something to sell: it starts when you have something to produce.

A New Definition of Marketing

For many people (albeit unconsciously), marketing is defined as helping to sell an unremarkable product. They think that any product will sell if it has enough “mindshare.” I liken this approach to winning an argument by shouting louder; you might win some arguments this way, but you’re not going to convert many people to your side.

I believe that remarkable products (with remarkable brands, service, support, etc.) sell themselves. People don’t want to give you money because of your fancy ads, websites, logos, brochures, etc. But they’ll gladly give you money for your amazing products.

As a marketer, my new product isn’t print design or web development or advertising or - it’s teaching clients how to make their product (be it a graduate program or a departmental service) amazing.

I have a confession: there are entire days - maybe weeks - when I don’t actually do any work.

Yeah, I show up at the office, go to meetings, do paperwork, and read, write, and forward a lot of emails.

But that’s not work.

In a typical day, I spend about five hours in meetings. These are client/project meetings, team meetings, production meetings, one-on-one staff meetings, weekly check-ins, and so on. The outcome of most of these meetings is a list of notes and action items. These action items then go into my to do list or are lost on paper because I never got around to typing them in. By all accounts, I am tremendously busy and my boss seems pleased with how much I appear to accomplish.

But in these five hours of meetings, I rarely do any work. My boss could hire a garden gnome to sit in meetings, crank out project agreements, and respond to 90% of the emails I get. Most of this isn’t work - it’s describing work. Too often we are measured by task completion and our very presence. We forget to measure value and quality.

One of my least favorite responsibilities is going back and forth over a project agreement. Project agreements aren’t work - they are talking about doing some work later. That is, let’s detail work that may or may not take place in weeks or months. (And since our agreements aren’t contracts, they don’t mean a whole heck of a lot anyway.)

Work is not the passing of time at the office. Work is about adding value and making a difference. Every morning, I drive about 45 minutes to the office and think about what I can do to create value that day.

Blogging and consulting with our clients are great because I’m helping educate others. Creating different strategies are fine, but only if we actually follow through on them. I don’t even mind writing policies or position descriptions because those will eventually enable others to do work and create value.

Nothing chafes me more than looking back on a full day, feeling exhausted from the fray of office life - and not having any sense of accomplishment. My goal, each day, is to make a connection between the work I did and some good that will come of it.

It shouldn’t be hard to do when your employer is working to change the world.

One of the frequent debates in web projects is around naming of elements. When our team recommends a label or title we usually do so from an outsider’s perspective. We make a lot of arguments for our position, but sometimes there’s resistance.

So we do some user testing. Usually, it’s clear that one option is far superior to another, and that settles the argument. But for some reason, this isn’t always enough.

So we have to explain why we got that outcome. Let’s don our psychologist hat for a moment.

Cognitive Load is refers to the demands placed on working memory. Your working memory is typically limited to approximately seven elements (hence the seven digit phone number and so on).

I believe that cognitive load is strongly tied to user experience and information architecture. If users have a working memory limit of approximately seven items, how can you justify twelve global navigation options?

How does this explain naming choices? The cognitive load increases when there are more interactions between elements. Imagine a visitor to a department website looking for course descriptions. She quickly skims through each navigation item hoping to find one that matches what she’s looking for.

Option 1: Process of Elimination

Unfortunately, she doesn’t immediately recognize that Program might contain course descriptions. She rules it out, or at best decides it’s on the short list. However, after looking through all the options she’s still not sure where it is. So she eliminates the other choices before deciding it’s probably under Program.

Option 2: Affirmative Selection

A clearly named item encourages visitors to immediately select that item rather than consult all other options. It’s been observed that users take the lazy route and do not like to read every word. If at all possible, reduce the number of navigation items and name them clearly. This is fundamental to information architecture work.

Cognitive Load

If cognitive load is connected to user experience (though there are opinions to the contrary), I believe it is most easily seen in the user’s frustration level. One study of working memory and choice observed that, as working memory is taxed, people begin to rely on emotional decision-making rather than rational thought. In short, someone who is trying to recall seven random digits is more likely to make emotional, often irrational choices. Does your website unintentionally push people to emotional decisions about where they even navigate?

On Sunday May 17, 2009, the University of Notre Dame held its University Commencement Exercises. Unlike previous commencement events, it was surrounded by “controversy and buzz”:. A highlight of the ceremony was the commencement address by President Barack Obama. His policies and positions on abortion and stem cell research conflict with Catholic teaching, leading many to protest the invitation and his appearance. Further, he was awarded an honorary degree which was considered a violation of Catholic canon law.

Suffice to say, it was a stressful few months leading up to that Sunday afternoon.

I spent most of Sunday watching the events unfold through a variety of tools:

Twitter Search

I had two searches running in TweetDeck - one for notre dame -cathedral -france -paris and one for nd.edu. These gave me a sense of the conversations, frustrations, commentary, and so on. They also allowed me to answer questions for people who couldn’t find a video stream and so on.

At one point, Notre Dame became a trending topic and opened the floodgates - thousands of tweets spilled through and I started skimming as best I could.

uStream Video

One of the protests streamed live video of their demonstration using uStream. I was able to see how that progressed, though I gave up once it turned into interviews.

Live Video Stream

We streamed live video of the event on our own commencement website. While it was also available on many other outlets, ours was one of the few uninterrupted video streams - many complained of “talking heads” from CNN and Fox News continuing over the speeches.

Links, Links, Links

Through these outlets, I ended up discovering hundreds of links to commentary, live blogs, and other Twitter accounts covering the events. While I wasn’t engaging them directly, it was quite educational.

Traffic

Our web traffic was off the charts. The ND.edu homepage saw a 400% increase, and the commencement website itself more than tripled the usual daily visits to ND.edu. I don’t have all the stats yet, but we had more than 75,000 visits to the video page alone - in one day. Not too shabby for a site we built two weeks ago, and our first foray into live Flash streaming.

The New Spectator Gallery

Most of these are readily available outlets for any event. When any breaking news hits, this is where I look first - coverage, citizen journalism, conversation, whatever you call it - all before mainstream media can break the news. There’s no one authoritative source, but that means it’s unfiltered data that can tell the whole story.

Proud of Notre Dame

Those who tuned in got to see some inspired speeches by some brilliant people. The valedictory address will stay with me for some time. The resolve of the University, and especially Fr. Jenkins make me truly proud to be an alumnus, fan, and employee of the University.

For anyone interested in seeing videos of the event or the individual speeches, they are available at: http://commencement.nd.edu/commencement-weekend/commencement-videos/

Working in a higher education environment can be really tough. It’s often accepted that the pay is lower, resources are scarce, and the culture is risk- and change-averse. It can be tough.

But there are some great things about working in higher education, too.

Learning

Online learning from blogs are great and all, but there’s a lot of fantastic research done by really brilliant people and they’re not posting it on their blogs. They’re publishing in academic journals. But subscriptions journals and other publications can cost a LOT of money. Schools do that for you - so use them! Don’t fall into the trap of believing that libraries are relics. If you have a decent library website with an online search - seriously, why wouldn’t it?! - go try out some searches (results obviously vary based on your school’s subscriptions):

• admissions marketing
• social media marketing
• web design usability

Learning, Part Deux

Many schools make up for the lower pay with tuition benefits. Access to courses and programs can help you propel your career forward. Get a Master’s degree, learn a second language, or simply have some fun. Classes are the lifeblood of most schools, so don’t forget to tap into them.

Researching

Higher education respects research. This is your chance to design and carry out your own research studies. And publishing your own research (even if it’s just on a blog) is a fantastic way to build credibility in the community. Just ask Rachel Reuben.

Teaching

One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Many institutions would love to hire their staff as adjunct faculty to teach classes. Make a little extra cash, build some great relationships, and add a really impressive line to your resume: college professor. It seems all my friends are doing this and they seem to love it.

The Bar is Low

Sorry to say it, higher ed is often far behind the commercial world. Which means that many schools look and act like it’s 2002. The obvious advantage here is that it doesn’t take much to impress (though it’s getting harder). But this can work against you, too, since there’s little motivation to continue pushing yourself. But a more powerful advantage is that it can be easier to build trust in your abilities and take some risks. If you can, use this to gain access to cool, cutting-edge tools and have some fun.

Everything Else

Most campuses have a lot of services available to the staff such as exercise facilities, comprehensive benefits, educational discounts on computer stuff, and a conference-happy culture. Combined with the above, is higher ed really that bad?

Higher education is often a slow beast, lumbering forward amidst a fast-paced world of technology and innovation.

Karine Joly asks, Why don’t we talk more about the mobile Web and its possibilities for our field?

But it’s not just mobile Web, is it? Why is higher ed so slow to adopt new ideas?

The wrong people are in charge

Higher ed is very hierarchical and bureaucratic. The purse strings (not just cash, but resource management, prioritization, innovation) are held by people who didn’t grow up with cell phones in their pockets. They don’t text, so they don’t get that it’s the number one way millennials prefer to communicate.

Things change too quickly

When I give presentations on social media, I make sure to show The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis. I do this to demonstrate just how much there is out there, and how we don’t have to do everything. Many (most?) of the tools out there didn’t exist five years ago and many (most?) won’t exist five years from now. So it’s understandable that people are skeptical of these new “next big thing” sites and technologies… it’s hard to pick out the ones that really matter.

The usage is sparse

On our campus, less than 50% of mobile users have the ability to even browse the web on their phones. Almost all of them use SMS, but from the limited data we have it’s clear that mobile browsing represents a very small number of users. In the grand list of priorities, it’s hard to place this very high.

How to Move Forward?

Start by looking for case studies from other schools and show what the competition is doing. Don’t make it a project, make it part of your culture - set aside time for trying new things. You don’t know for sure what you’ll need to do, so you need to build it into your work.

If you want to be a leader in anything, you have to take some risks. Be willing to fail quickly, cut your losses, and move on. Fortunately, web tools don’t always require much financial support so there’s less feeling of a sunk cost.

This afternoon I led a workshop for an industry association for amusement operators - the folks responsible for creating, selling, supporting, and maintaining jukeboxes, arcade games, pool tables, and other coin-op stuff. They’re a really interesting crowd, but they don’t pull any punches. They’re busy people and expect you to cut to the chase.

This was the second time I’d presented for AMOA, and I wanted to share some of my materials. There’s a slide deck and a few sheets on writing for the web, project cost worksheets, and a quick web strategy worksheet.

Thanks to everyone in the session today - you guys were a lot of fun!

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