Chapter and Verse Blog

Socitm, the professional organisation of ICT policy managers in local government, has surveyed nine NHS trust websites in an extension of its annual Better Connected report on local authority web services.

What they found demonstrates that, although most NHS trusts provide websites for the use of their stakeholders, many trusts have lost sight of the needs of their primary audience of users: patients and their families. Only one of the nine websites surveyed was ranked "Very Good"—the rest were merely "Satisfactory" or, in one notable case, "Dire."

The report notes: "Most of the sites surveyed failed to recognise that the primary audience for a hospital website should always be the patient and/or hospital visitor. But most sites surveyed were trying to be all things to all parties—patients, visitors, staff, strategic partners, GPs, and other NHS bodies."

Failure to cater for this primary audience, according to the report, leads to frustration and confusion as users attempt to navigate to important information (such as visiting hours, appointment management, and infection control) and become tangled in the site's poor architecture and lack of focus.

But there is a solution. The report concludes, "Every website will have a small number of tasks that deliver a huge amount of value to visitors… [Web managers should] focus relentlessly on ensuring that customers can complete their top tasks every time, and only then turn [their] attention to the secondary tasks."

In any website development, the needs of the primary user audience should be paramount; putting the user at the heart of the web experience is what ensures that a site is an effective tool for service provision that delivers a return on investment for both the NHS trust and its patients and stakeholders. And the best way to find out what the user wants is also the most obvious: ask them.

Download the Socitm: Insight report on NHS websites here.

Increasingly, communications and marketing teams that we're speaking to in the public sector are being tasked with writing a digital communications strategy for their organisation.

At VerseOne's free Digital Strategy Seminars last week, Nora Harris provided some great insights and much useful information for delegates to take away to help them put together a strategy that is effective and, more importantly, aligned with their wider communications objectives. Nora began by emphasizing that VerseOne's Information Architecture Process can be applied to great effect when beginning this task.

Define your objectives

Before beginning your digital activity, you must have clearly defined objectives, so that you will have an idea of what constitutes success.

There are many benefits an integrated digital strategy can bring—driving more traffic to your website, raising brand awareness, improving SEO—and although priorities will vary for each organisation, they must be clearly laid out in order to measure the effectiveness of your activities.

Profile your audience

Decide who your target groups are, identify the digital channels where their conversations take place, listen first, make a list of what's being talked about, follow people. Then begin to share and comment. Become a source of information that is relevant to your audience, where your audience congregates.

Measure success

Having defined your aims clearly, you can estimate timescales and expected achievements to provide a benchmark for eventual realised benefits.

There is also a wealth of tools to help you analyse your metrics:

• Google Analytics will let you track your website performance and help you measure ROI
• HootSuite will help you to track results and measure success in real time
• BoardReader will let you find out what's being said about you on forums and message boards
• Alexa Rankings will allow you to measure the influence of any commentator or blogger that may have commented on your organisation

Then develop and adjust your strategy and tactics accordingly, and don't be afraid to experiment.

Integrate online and offline

Nora eloquently explained the importance of getting this right, given the way internet users' perspectives have changed over the years:

"The online landscape has changed. Web users want to be able to contribute, engage and share; they want to be part of a genuine conversation, not part of a 'receive-only' audience. They also expect to have access to interesting and useful information, rather than a wall of corporate marketing material."—Nora Harris, Information Architect

This is excellent advice; however, many of the public sector organisations we have spoken to—given the service-oriented nature of their websites—have also raised the question of how to generate interactive and engaging content online. This is where it is useful to realize that as well as activity online, a well-executed event or forum offline can not only generate some useful content for your online channels, but lead to further engagement in the digital space.

Of course, this demand for interaction and useful content is not just limited to the web! And so our roving Tweeter, @VerseOneComms, was keen to find out how well the content and format of the Digital Strategy Seminars would be received. We live-tweeted the seminars with the hashtag #v1tech; as well as receiving a lot of retweets and comments during the session, we found the number of our Twitter followers increased by 357% over the course of the week—simply due to the fact that we provided people with some useful and interesting content that captured the attention of our target audience.

We would like to thank everyone who contributed, engaged, and tweeted during the sessions.

Because we've integrated digital media with our general communications strategy, we also gathered traditional feedback from delegates:

"Very useful day, good info, interesting presentations."—Katherine Gray, Leeds City Council

"The event was fantastic, thank you very much."—Carly Farley, Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust

Thus, as well as providing our delegates with some strategic tips when it comes to online engagement, hopefully the impact that the offline events had in the digital space can inspire our public sector audience to embrace online channels to extend the reach of their other PR or marketing activites, as the two can most certainly be mutually beneficial.

Feedback for our guest speakers was also extremely positive and we'd like to thank:

Digital Strategy Seminars:

• Mark Parry, Porchlight
• Mike Teasdale, Harvest Digital
• Daniel Nolan, theEword
• Steve Downes, Juice Digital

Hot Topics in the NHS: Digital Communications Strategy for the NHS

• Rob McNair, mycleveragency
• Guy Levine, Return on Digital
• David Fatscher, British Standards Institution

...for their excellent contributions.

If you would like to find out the full details of all of the presentations, click here to register for a copy of the slides.

If you were at one of last week's digital strategy events, please feel free to leave a comment below—we'd love to hear from you.

Clay Shirky is one of the world's foremost experts on internet technology: how it works, and how it affects individuals, groups, and social and economic interaction. He's written a number of books on the topic, including the best-selling Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations.

I recently ran across one of Shirky's older articles, "Communities, Audiences, and Scale", in which he ruminates about the differences between an audience and a community, and what role the web has to play in creating and maintaining them:

Prior to the internet, the differences in communication between community and audience was largely enforced by media -- telephones were good for one-to-one conversations but bad for reaching large numbers quickly, while TV had the inverse set of characteristics. The internet bridged that divide, by providing a single medium that could be used to address either communities or audiences. Email can be used for conversations or broadcast, usenet newsgroups can support either group conversation or the broadcast of common documents, and so on. Most recently the rise of software for "The Writable Web", principally weblogs, is adding two-way features to the Web's largely one-way publishing model.

With such software, the obvious question is "Can we get the best of both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?" The answer seems to be "No."

Communities are different than audiences in fundamental human ways, not merely technological ones. You cannot simply transform an audience into a community with technology, because they assume very different relationships between the sender and receiver of messages.

He goes on to make the point that as a community grows, the connections between each of its members become weaker, so that eventually the community (characterised by many-to-many interaction) becomes an audience, where communication is almost exclusively one-way: from the centre to the edge of the group.

Shirky goes on to point out that:

It's significant that the only two examples we have of truly massive community spread of messages on the internet -- email hoaxes and Outlook viruses -- rely on disabling the users' disinclination to forward widely, either by a social or technological trick. When something like All Your Base or OddTodd bursts on the scene, the moment of its arrival comes not when it spreads laterally from community to community, but when that lateral spread attracts the attention of a media outlet.

What he didn't foresee when writing this article in 2002 was that, very quickly, this situation would change. These days, the major media outlets pick up on internet phenomena after they go viral—that is to say, after they have already achieved widespread exposure to communities and audiences on the web.

Or maybe he did. A major theme in Here Comes Everybody is that communities on the web are as likely to be situational as they are to be permanent, and that they grow and disperse with the same life cycle as the topics around which they are centred. What does this mean for organisations that want to make social media a part of their web strategy? Most fundamentally, it means that if they want to create communities around their content, rather than a large, passive audience, they need to keep their content fresh, up-to-date, and topical.

As Dr Kelly Page pointed out at VerseOne's Customer Day last October, the web moves quickly. People will be more likely to engage with an organisation on the web if it keeps up with what they find important at a given moment. This is the essence of social media, and shows how important the many-to-many conversational model has become as the web has evolved.

Copywriting is one of the most often overlooked aspects of website building, and yet it is also one of the most crucial aspects of it. After all, most of the information that you want to deliver to your clients is encapsulated in the text of your website—if they don't read it, then your website is not going to be of much use.

In our free Building An Effective Website seminars, we concentrate heavily on the quality of copy—all too often, clients forget about it until the last minute (it's easy to do amongst the hurly-burly of organising staff, approving designs and harrying IT companies!)—and the text on the website is quickly ripped from policy documents, official communications and other unsuitable places.

Not only can this lead to your site breaching Accessibility rules—the guidelines surrounding which I shall deal with in another post—but it can lead to the utterly fatal trait of your copy being incredibly boring to read.

This tendency to write meaningless stuff (often for managers rather than the website audience) is addressed by online magazine A List Apart, in an article titled Attack Of The Zombie Copy.

You’ve seen them around the web, these zombie sentences. They’re not hard to recognize: syntax slack and drooling, clauses empty of everything but a terrible hunger for human brains:

Leveraging world class infrastructure strengths, mature quality processes and industry benchmarked people management practices…

Findings are recorded in a carefully architected summary that crystallizes the intent of the nation to increase its innovation capacity in a variety of modern economic scenarios…

Indigenous and proven career management tools coupled with a comprehensive series of integrated initiatives have been evolved, to ensure that employees continue to sustain a high performance culture, while recruitment and selection is based on necessary competencies…

It’s a partnering-with-partners strategy…

We've all seen writing much like the above example, haven't we? Does anyone really read it? Of course, for many of us, there are certain buzz- words and phrases that need to be mentioned in order to be taken seriously, but these should be as rare as hen's teeth and, if possible, embedded within a welter of more interesting, lively copy.

Is your website like this? If so, Attack Of The Zombie Copy does have a formula for dealing with it.

Prominent undead expert Dr. Herbert West, of Miskatonic University, suggests the following course of action if you’re attacked by zombie content:

1. Kill the modifiers. This is machete work, so wrap a bandanna around your face and grab some shop goggles. No reader is going to believe that your process is innovative or your product is world-class just because you say so, so kill those adjectives. Don’t feel sorry for them. They have no feelings.
2. Determine what manner of monster you’re dealing with. Once you’ve cleared the modifiers away, you’ll be able to get a better idea of the real shape of what’s underneath. If you can paraphrase the revealed sentence in a simpler way, the paraphrase can guide you to a new, clearer version.
3. Hit ’em in the head, right between the eyes. Once the sentences’ underlying form has been revealed, you’ll be able to start looking at the overall health of paragraphs and pages. You may find that whacking the modifiers and simplifying the sentences will reveal a mushy glop of circular logic and nonsense; if so, it’s time to deliver a merciful death. If, on the other hand, your copy is only mostly dead, you can revive it by excising meaningless or redundant passages and then patching up the remainder with transitions and clarifications.

It's worth reading the rest of the article, as the author demonstrates how much better and—yes—more meaningful the amended text is. So, take out your chainsaw and start lopping the loose limbs from those zombie sentences—everyone will benefit!

There's an interesting article over at A List Apart—many web designers' online magazine of choice—about defining goals when designing websites.

Creativity breathes life into successful websites. However, creative ideas and solutions can sometimes seem like guesswork—and guessing is risky business. So what can designers do to show clients they’re using a solid strategy and have the best intentions?

The article lays out some key tips for ensuring that your site deploys design in order to achieve key objectives.

At this point, I feel that I should clarify exactly what "design" is—at least in my own definition.

• Design is not solely about making things pretty just for the sake of it (although that is part of it); making pretty things for the sake of it is called "art".
• Design is about making art serve a purpose: design is about persuading a user to perform some action.
• In the case of a theatre show poster (where I started my career), you want the user to:
  • notice the poster (particularly tricky during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe!), and
  • buy a ticket to see the show.
• In the case of a website, you want the user to take in the presented information; for instance, you may want them to:
  • read your articles and recommend them to others,
  • browse a product catalogue and to buy items from it,
  • use online services to report faults, make payments, etc.

So, design is about using creativity to direct users to undertake certain actions.

When designing websites, there are many tools available to achieve this, including—but most definitely not limited to—good use of typefaces, using space (or moving images, etc.) to direct people's attention to certain areas, structuring menu items so that they have a logical narrative, etc.

However, a client needs to know that the designer shares the same goals as they do. That is, the client needs to know that the website design is going to persuade the user to undertake the tasks that the client wants, not what the designer thinks that they should be.

This requires a large degree of communication between client and designer. If the client does not communicate what the goals should be, then the designer has no option but to guess what the goals should be: if the designer does not listen to the client, then the website will not achieve the client's aims and they will be very unhappy with the designer.

So, both designer and client need to define, very clearly, and to understand what the goals are. Some of these tips might help to do this.

A modified acceptance criteria exercise is the simplest and most effective tool I’ve found for setting clear and powerful goals. Agile developers use acceptance criteria to demonstrate why tasks need to happen and define how they fit into the big picture. With a few tweaks, it works perfectly for capturing design goals.

Example request:

• We’re redesigning our website because we need more traffic and an updated look, and want to become more respected in our industry.

Example goal template:

• We want to __________ because ____________ so that ___________.

Example goals:

• We want to increase traffic by 20% because we need more exposure so that we can generate eight more leads per month.
• We want to update to a current look because we need to be more relevant to our customers so that we can raise our rates by 10%.
• We want to write four industry-related articles per month because we want to help our industry so that we can form two partnerships per month.

Notice how separating “the means,” “the reason,” and “the ends” clarifies the project owner’s goals and describes why they want them and how they intend to achieve them. Acceptance criteria for design is a great way to flush out deeper, possibly unknown, intentions that will help the designer and project owner make better decisions and dodge surprises later in the process. Revise the goals until all parties agree on them and understand them.

Bonus points: Create several goals so that you can capture secondary and tertiary goals, but don’t let it get out of hand—no single website should have more than a handful of high-level goals.

The article is worth reading in full, especially because large parts of it—expecially the "area mapping" exercises—relate closely to my previous piece about information architecture. Do go and have a look—whether you are a designer or a commissioner.

Drop-down and pop-up menus have always been a problem from a Web Accessibility point of view, but now internet guru Jeffrey Zeldman argues that drop-down menus are, in and of themselves, almost always a bad option—and not simply because they impact on a website's useability.

Now, me, I hate drop-down menus. I hate them as a user. Too many choices. It’s like those big laminated menus you get at a New York diner. Spaghetti, diet plate, French Toast, broiled filet of sole, pizza, ice cream sundae, Atkins menu, veggie burger.... The eyes blur. You slam the menu shut and order coffee.

As a designer, wherever possible, I avoid drop-down menus. For they almost always create an inferior user experience versus drilling down through clearly labeled, intelligently organized categories.

As Zeldman points out though, drop-down menus betray a failure to think properly about a site's structure: in other words, they indicate a failure to consider navigation from a user's perspective.

When I see a drop-down menu, I know that a committee sat around a table, unwilling to think through the organization of the site’s material into a user-focused structure — or unwilling to accept the recommendation of an information architect who spent days making sense of the site’s offerings.

A drop-down menu tells me there were too many decision makers, none of whom understood that the user’s needs were more important than their ego-driven desire to win front-page placement for their little piece of the content puzzle.

In other words, all too often, clients are more concerned about protecting their own turf—the so-called "silo mentality"—than they are about ensuring that their customers are able to find the information that they need. This is not a minor quibble: it is absolutely fundamental to website design.

Your website exists in order to deliver information to people; and this is not an Accessbility issue, as such: it is an issue for any organisation that really wants to deliver the best online experience to its customers.

All too often, websites are designed by committee, despite the increasing numbers of specifications demanding "information architecture consultancy". As Zeldman says...

I look forward to the day when most people who hire folks like us to design, structure, and program their web presences treat us more like the thinkers we are, and less like hired hands installing birdbaths.

When that day comes, websites will become rather easier to navigate than at present. At the company were I work, we are attempting to introduce some novel techniques which will help website users to find the information that they need—but we are also helping clients to understand how to build and maintain their site to achieve the same ends.