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From July 20-22, 2009 I attended (and presented at) eduWEB Conference 2009. Go check out my presentation slides on Budget Usability Testing.

Things I Noticed

There’s a wide spectrum of experience, beginner to expert. Some sessions are designed more for one or the other, and it’s not always clear until you’re in the session.

There’s a healthy mix of tech, design, marketing specialists and others. It makes for diverse discussions and perspectives, which I loved.

There are 487 different organizational structures: central vs. silo, IT vs. marketing, one-man-shop vs. large teams, and everything in between.

There are different challenges for each organization. Some are purely concerned with increasing applicants, while others are focused on changing the nature of the applicants, engaging alumni, or even retaining students. You have to think hard about how each lesson can be applied to your individual situation.

There’s a backchannel of activity on Twitter during the entire conference, often adding commentary. This was scary as hell while I was presenting, but immensely valuable to the participants.

A central theme of many conversations was to ask forgiveness later. This is a fast-moving industry and you can’t afford for a committee to kill your ideas just because they can’t keep up.

Things I’m Excited About

Facebook Connect for single sign-on. I want to look into using this to help our Alumni Association overcome authentication issues. We have our own internal website, and I can never remember my login. So I don’t use it.

Integrating social media with sites, promoting it to people, connecting social media participants across networks. You can’t just be on social networks, you have to drive people to them.

Mobile is going to blow up. There were lots of mentions in the sessions, but not a lot of dedicated time on mobile use. As far as I can tell, there’s not a ton of real investment in this area, but from watching other participants almost everyone had their phones out for mobile web or Twitter texting at some point.

My Favorite Part of eduWEB 2009

Meeting online friends in real life… instant connections, credibility, and relationships. I also met a ton of people in person and then immediately started following them online – adding a new dimension to the usual networking atmosphere. This is the social part of social media, and it’s fantastic.

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.

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/

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.

Why aren’t you invited as a keynote speaker at the top design conferences? Why aren’t the biggest design firms falling all over themselves to hire you at exorbitant prices? Why don’t you charge $500/hour for your time? How many interview requests do you get each week?

There’s only one “best in the world” and you’re probably not it. So where do you fall? On a scale from zero to 100:

Zero

No talent, not even an ounce of ability. Couldn’t draw a pixel except by sneezing and a fortunate click of the mouse in MS Paint. Let’s assume that you’re well beyond this level. It takes all of an hour to move out of this level.

Novices

These are the starters. Maybe self-taught, maybe a student or an intern or just lucky to get a job in the field. Chances are, a novice isn’t doing this full time yet. This level can take days, weeks, or years depending on how much effort one puts in before moving up.

Professionals

On a normal curve, most fall in this range. But the range is wide, and the prices are all over the place. You can pay $150/hour for a poor professional, or you can find a good pro for $30/hour. It’s amazing. Within this range, it’s also very difficult to identify a good designer from a bad one. This is a good area to find yourself, but it takes some serious work to move up: find a mentor, start a blog, collaborate on projects, and seek out projects that will let you do them well.

Experts

What makes an expert? Attention to detail. Ability to understand the meaning behind the pretty pictures: marketing, communications, user experience, etc. It takes a lot of work and experience to get to this level. And that commands a price. But be careful about judging skill solely on price – business acumen also helps drive price up, so a talented businessman with professional design skills can look a lot like an expert.

Design Gods

These are the select few that will be remembered by the rest. There are no corners cut. Decisions are backed up not by force of personality but by research, experience, and measurement. But it’s hard to know whether this status comes from celebrity – blogging, public speaking, high profile projects – or talent. I believe that great ability should be judged by achievements, not promotion or branding. We may not know the names of the brilliant designers behind some of the products we use, but we’ll remember their work for many years to come.

Where are you?

Which of these are you? Where do you fall on the scale?

Recently, oAk, Jim Gosz, and I were discussing our weekly usability testing program. Someone made the comment that this is the kind of thing that separates the top designers from the rest. Why is this placed here? What makes this more effective? Do we know or are we just guessing? It’s an important step: are you humble enough to admit that you don’t really know the answer and look for ways to find the best solution?

I get asked this question all the time: how often should you redesign your website?

The answer? When you need to.

Recently, a client compared it to a car: sure, you can get a new car every three years, but if it’s still meeting your needs, isn’t that pretty wasteful? Then again, you could drive it for 12 years and it will be pretty obvious.

If it’s communicating what you need and achieving your goals, don’t change it. There’s no rule that says you should redesign your website every two years. What you should do is evaluate your strategy and communications plan all the time. Only then will you know whether your website needs to change.

Notre Dame is a great place to work, and AgencyND is on the forefront of a lot of trends in both higher education and the web industry in general. We’ve won a smattering of awards and we’ve had a lot of fun doing it.

We’re hiring a web developer to help us keep moving forward. Cool projects, cool people, and a cool place to work. Check out the job description and if you think it’s a good fit, you should apply.

Read the posting at agency.nd.edu…

According to TwitterFacts.com, the first tweets were sent March 21, 2006. Happy Birthday, Twitter!

I went back in time to find my first tweet:

Giving in to the twitter side 8:56 AM Feb 24th, 2007 from web

What (and when) was your first tweet?