A friend pointed me to a great article on “How the journalist prom got out of control” by Dana Milbank. He recounts the state of corporate, political and entertainment orgy around the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and related events.

My late colleague David Broder once recalled how, when he began newspapering in mid-century, journalists embraced the credo that “the only way a reporter should ever look at a politician is down.” He said they “prided themselves on their independence, their skepticism, and they relished their role in exposing the follies and the larceny of public officials.”

For PR and journalism professionals to create such an air of collusion certainly doesn’t help engender trust in the public’s eye. What are your thoughts? Harmless celebration or poor professionalism?

Philanthropy.com the “Newspaper of the Non-Profit World” has an article today on how confusing websites discourage donors from giving online. They point to both communication/marketing issues as well as usability issues with many non-profit sites. Many sites that were tested didn’t even clearly state their mission and where donations would go.

Jakob Nielson of the Nielsen Norman Group released highlights of a study of 23 non-profit websites that the article was based on. The report is $98 on NN/groups’ site, but here are some highlights.

Test subjects were observed performing two tasks: Choosing a recipient and making a donation. By far, the thing the users sought first was an understanding of the organizations’ goals and objectives. Only 43% of the websites studied put their mission on their homepage and only 4% stated on the homepage where the donor’s money would be applied. This information was often provided inside the website, but users had trouble finding it and this affected their donation decisions.

Nielsen Norman group estimates that donations could be DOUBLE current donations in many cases if best practices in usability, communication and trust were used. Shockingly, they say 17% of testers couldn’t even find WHERE to make a donation. Wow.

Unfortunately, many commercial sites have similar issues. I posted in January 2007 “10 Steps: Making it easy for your customers to trust you” based on some research Stanford University did. It’s probably my most-referenced post of all time, as I still forward it to companies that I work with. Keeping these 10 steps in mind and constantly evaluating your website, Twitter, Facebook and other social media properties against them are crucial to effective communications.

Related to this, NN/group also has an “Alertbox” summary and research report on “About Sections of Websites”. These are HIGHLY recommended reading, as the About section of any site, from services, e-commerce, government or non-profit sites all need to explain who they are to visitors. For anyone considering a relationship with an organization, knowing who a company IS, is a first step towards trust and a relationship.

Is your company’s mission, goals and About section clearly enunciated to visitors that don’t yet know you? How does your site stack up on trust metrics? Could your grandmother understand your mission and use your site?

I’ve had an OpenID for nearly 2 months now, and I have to say I’m really enjoying the ease and simplicity it offers.
From the OpenID Wikipedia page:

OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site.

I’ve been using it for as many online sites/services as I can, including my Basecamp projects with 37Signals’ Openbar which ads simple project switching and even product (to Highrise) switching!, online mind mapping at MindMeister, and will soon get some plugins for WordPress to use it on my blogs.

As a site or product owner, I’m not sure how easy it is to enable it’s use yet, but I do know it does a lot to lower the bar for signups and participation. How many times have you stopped reading an article, downloading something, commented, or even join a new service because you didn’t want to go through a long painful signup process? It certainly has stopped me.

But OpenID makes it easy to join any online community activity, as you can control how long your authentication lasts, how much data/info is shared, etc.

There are several providers, but you can also use the url of many common services you may already be on, from Blogger, flickr, Technorati and AOL. I went with VerisignLabs Personal Identity Protection, part of the website security/trust company Verisign.

I’m certainly going to be recommending an optional OpenID implementations to all my clients with sites. If you own a website with logins, what’s keeping you from implementing OpenID as a login/password option and making it easier for new signups/users?

[tag]openid, open id, data portability, usability, product management [/tag]

I love how Bruce Schneier can make complex security issues so clear and understandable to non-technical folks that don’t have a security background. Security, access to your personal data and privacy of it are VERY important topics currently, but they are very complex to understand.

Here he has a great article on the concept of platform security vs. the age-old business concept of “lock-in” – raising the bar of cost/pain to switch to a competitive product. He talks about Apple iPhone/iTunes a lot, but the Microsoft examples (NGSCB or Next-Generation Secure Computing Base) are more telling to me. When you think of his examples, lock-in is pretty pervasive in tech and non-tech areas.

Lock-in applied to Software Services
It makes me think of the “lock-in” concept as it pertains to software services… In many methodologies, including “waterfall” and traditional marketing/advertising processes, the delivery process is the lock-in mechanism. That is, the client doesn’t get work until the end of the project, until then, clients only see documentation, comps and so forth. Very little that can be useful to another team, so the incumbent is locked-in to finishing the project. Clearly that’s good for the service provider, but sometimes it can be a real risk/problem for a client engaging them.

One of the interesting benefits of Agile methodologies and the concept of Agile User Experience, (Agile UX) is that at each “sprint” or short term milestone (usually 3-4 weeks) clients get a set of formed deliverables. Not perfect deliverables, but something that is technically able to be brought in-house or to another development team without losing the entire value.

Now some would say that the lock-in concept here is a very good thing… so would the companies that Bruce references in his article. But for the end client, whether it’s us as consumers, or software services clients, the ability to “switch horses” to keep their project on track is a very good thing. It decreases the risk associated with selecting a software vendor.

Services without the Lock-in
For firms using Agile or Agile UX, (and us at Neudesic) this “non-lock-in” approach lowers the bar for selection and lowers the risk for clients. The strategy is to “lock-in” clients by keeping them happy, and by more frequent interaction and small course corrections. It’s a “soft lock-in” based on client satisfaction… in my opinion, that’s the way to go.
What do you think?

Came across a few old/new logo comparisons, here and here. Not sure why, but I always enjoy reading through those type of evaluation/comparisons. I agree with many of the conclusions posted… Sometimes you have to wonder about the meetings where some of the changes were discussed and approved.

A logo/identity change is a HUGE thing for a company, at least it should be considered with some gravity and broad input. Some of these seem to be changed for the sake of change, just to show that the team did something this quarter. Some really kill parts of their brand that were VERY successful and a core part of their differientiation.

I love the discussion/speculation about what Microsoft’s Silverlight logo is here, scan for what people thing the blue “Blobby Ball of Nebulousness™” thing looks like… it’s hilarious.

Have you been a part of a less-than-considered logo/identity change? What happened?

I visited MSNBC.com’s photo blog (http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com) this evening, using Mac’s Safari browser… On occasion I still get these “we don’t support Safari” messages, and it’s no big deal… but this one jumped out as a very courteous way to say it. I actually believe they are working on it, and fired up Firefox just to continue… most of the time I just skip the places that say it.

Good job MSNBC.com! More software should be so polite.

What do your error messages say? Your website’s 404/page not found page?

This is a video on Identity 2.0 that is well worth watching for two reasons:

1. Like many of you, I’m deluged with logins and passwords for sites all over the web. We need a better way.
2. It’s a good presentation, very quick pace, interesting and little/no “chart junk” to use Tufte’s favorite phrase.

I just came across Jonathan Mendez’s “7 Rules for Landing Page Optimization” blog post. I understand Jonathan is somehow related to Offermatica, an online testing company which I’ve always been interested in working with.

The main points he covers are:

1. Have a Clear and Direct Headline
2. Place High Value on Whitespace
3. Deliver Your Value Proposition with Short Direct Messaging
4. Have a Persuasive Message Directly Above the Call to Action
5. Large Red Buttons Rule
6. Call to Action Copy Matters
7. Trust and Security is Still Incredibly Persuasive

Most of these are things I advise almost daily to my clients, especially the “trust” item. I’ve blogged on that before, as I still see it as a problem on many sites.

The “large red buttons” point though is new… and an interesting thing to explore.

Tell your brand team to go to hell and throw your styleguide out the window. Red buttons can by themselves raise your conversion rate. Green can be good as well but most times in our testing if color matters it is red that wins. Also, don’t skimp on button size. Make users notice where the button is upon landing.

If you visited this site today, 21 March 2007 (with a “non-standards-compliant browser” as the geeks call it, with the initials of “Internet Explorer”) you may have had some errors in links. My apologies.

Besides embarrassing me, it does remind us all that even minor changes to a site should still be QA’d on all platorms/browsers that your customers could use.

Have you QA’d your website RECENTLY in browsers, monitors, connection speeds and operating systems other than the ones you always use?

As Mark Hurst points out here, I think the Jet Blue CEO coming out so strong and in so many media will go a long way to retain/repair customer relationships.

Who else in the corporate world has apologized like that? I, for one, really did believe him on Letterman when he spoke about how much effort they’ll put into making sure it doesn’t happen again.

Also, while some people may want staff to get fired for being involved with such a problem… on some level, it takes a really firm commitment from a leader to NOT fire people, but to train them, using that as a reinforcement point. That’s a postive in my book too.

What do you think, are you more or less likely to choose Jet Blue for your travel?