quantum content blog

Video game development is a fairly male-dominated industry right now. I belong to a mailing list of female game developers, and one conversation there prompted me to write down my personal list of things I’ve learned over my career about how to work succesffully with difficult personalities.
A few people there encouraged me to elaborate on my bullet points, so I thought I’d share the list here - and the long explanations.

I should note that none of these items are particularly revolutionary. Neither are they original to me. I’ve had some excellent role models, mentors and supervisors over the years. Special thanks to Elise Lanoue, who knew how to explain things.

I’ve been lucky. I think all my bosses over the years have ranged from pretty good to really great. However, I’ve worked on some large projects where many people had varying degrees of control. Some of them had some difficult personalities.

My personal list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities:

* managing expectations in general
* managing “up”
* managing “down”
* managing “across”
* who you must truly please and who you can just smile and nod at
* establishing accountability (not the same as placing blame)
* what to get (and keep) in writing
* what to never put in writing (this includes email)
* when to call security (and when not to)
* how to make effective end-runs
* when to play along
* when to panic (and when not to)
* who you can rant to (and who you can’t)
* what the local currency is (not what you might think)
* who you can trust
* what your limits are
* how to do a personal cost/benefit analysis

I saw a headline on AdAge.com recently. It went something like this: SEARCH ENGINES AS POPULAR AS CONTENT PAGES. I found that intriguing, so I bit.

The article is about a study by eMarketer which found people split their web page “views” pretty equally among search sites, e-commerce sites, content sites and communications sites.

I’ve seen people divide up the web this way before. The implication is that search engines, e-commerce sites (anyplace you purchase things) and communication sites (message boards, chat rooms, wikis?, blogs?) don’t have content. Content shows up only on sites with long, scrolling text where you can research the minutea of tulip bulbs or catch up on the daily news. Those are the people who need to think about content design, and if this study is right - users only go to those sites about a quarter of the time.

That is so not the case. Let’s start with e-commerce sites - a category including everything from Tiffany & Co. to Ebay. A broad spectrum of sites with two missions.

#1 Sell Stuff

#2 Enhance the Brand

That’s where people get the idea that these aren’t “content” sites. But they absolutely are. Don’t confuse the content of a site with the mission of a site. Every e-commerce site has content - and I don’t even mean all that text about privacy policies and how to return something you don’t like. The most important content on an e-commerce site is the catalog of products. This is very serious content and the heart of the site. it’s what users are looking for and wanting to read/watch/interact with. It’s the reason they come to the site. No matter what the “mission” of the site is defined as, users don’t think: Hey, let’s go improve my opinion of a brand. They think: I want to buy some shoes. It’s the list of shoes available from the store and the price - that’s the meat of the site. That’s the content. And the mismanaging of that content can short-circuit the mission of the site. They can’t buy the shoes if they can’t find what’s in stock.

Speaking of finding things - search sites are almost always said to have zero content. Again, I think this is wrong. The content on a search site is a list of links. This is how Yahoo got started, lo these many years ago. Some yahoo put up his personal bookmarks on a webpage and invited people to send him an e-mail if they put up a new web page. If he thought it was good, he would add it to his bookmarks.

Sure, the process has changed a lot - it’s no longer one guy’s list of useful links - but it’s still just a huge list of links. That list is the content on a search site. Users may not interact with it by scrolling down a text-heavy page, but the way you interact with content doesn’t define what content is.

And speaking of interaction, this brings us to communication sites. There’s another buzzword for these - they’re also called sites with “user-created content.” Yep, content. Just because the writers are contributing for free in an interactive manner doesn’t mean it’s not content. It may be fluid, temporary and of limited interest - but it’s still content. And to that community of users, it’s the most important content in the world. It’s theirs. They want to be able to pick it up and move it around and edit it and take it back whenever they want. The emphasis for web developers then shifts to the back-end: How do you give the user that kind of control over a web page? But if the focus goes too deeply into how to empower the user, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re empowering them to do. They won’t care if it’s exceptionally easy or pretty to type in their thoughts - if no one can read them.

Content is simply this: why do people come to a website? It’s not the how or the where, although how and where have a huge impact on the user experience. Why would people want to come here? What’s the meat of the site? That’s your content.

Most people go to websites because we’re looking for something specific. If we type in a URL we’ve already narrowed down which website we think we should start looking on. If we follow a link from another page, we’re hoping it’s the right place to start, but we’re not entirely sure until we get there. Either way, some sites make us play “where’s waldo?”

If you haven’t seen this series of children’s books, you’re really missing out. They’re picture books with amazingly complex drawings of crowds. Somewhere in the crowd is Waldo in his striped shirt and funny hat. He wears the same clothes in each picture so you can recognize him, but he’s not always standing or sitting or walking the same way. You have to keep this generalized image of what Waldo looks like in your mind as you scan the crowd looking for him.

When we visit websites, we do the same thing. We keep an image in our mind of aproximately what we think our information will look like (waldo), and we scan the website looking for it. Some sites give us larger crowds than others. For instance, Google gives us about 5 links max on their homepage. Yahoo gives us about five million. Both sites are very popular and are used for roughly the same thing - search.

The graphics and layout on a page can make a huge difference in how we interact with those five or five million links. Yahoo uses zones on the page and list formats, for instance. The layout is very important. But so is that number - five, or five million. There’s no rule of thumb for how many links should be on a single page. The content has to ballance between the two extremes.

I’ll give you an example with a site I visted today which was neither Yahoo nor Google but somewhere in between.

My waldo was contact information for the Chicago division of Electronic Arts. They’re a big company, specializing in interactive entertainment (ie. video games). I expected their site would be fairly user-friendly and at first I wasn’t disapointed. Just typing in the URL (www.ea.com) brought me to a splash page, showing off their different brands. It was short. It was pretty. I was willing to wait. Then the site made the point - with a world map - that the company is international. I’m okay with that. I’m pretty sure my Waldo is on the North American continent (as that’s where Chicago is) so I feel like I’m getting closer when I choose that option from the drop-down menu.

And then I get the crowd. Holy cow. A quick count - without scrolling down or playing with the hidden menus - gives me 33 places to click. And what’s the difference between “This week in EA Nation” and “Headlines”? For that matter, there are links at the very top labelled, “EA,” “EA SPORTS,” and “EA SPORTS BIG.” Are EA Sports not a part of EA? Are big sports not allowed to play with small sports? I realize this makes sense to someone, but not to me. And then there is also “EA Store” and “Find a retailer.” Why do I need to find a retailer if there’s an EA Store? You’re dressing people in your crowd very similarly to each other and to Waldo, and you’re asking me to guess which one might be the right one. This game is already hard enough - I don’t need a handicap.

Now, I realize different people have different Waldos. Not everyone is looking for contact information. Some people may be looking for information on the latest game, or for troubleshooting hints for one of the company’s products. But there’s no evidence anyone at EA thought about what those Waldos might be. I don’t know for sure, but I’d put money on it. The list of what content went on this page was mandated by a committee. Probably made up of people with warring agendas. That’s a recipe for disaster.

If you’re wondering, I still haven’t found my waldo. I looked under “EA” and “Media Center” and even “Corporate Info.” That one’s hiding at the bottom of the page in grey type on the black background, you have to scroll for it - but even so, it doesn’t have contact information for the Chicago division.

Okay, that’s not quite right. Lots of people are talking about this - content is king, there’s no there there, don’t make me think. The problem is they’re talking about it in big-picture terms with lots of handwaving and vague promises.

This being content.

There’s so much emphasis on having a pretty website, people tend not to consider very much the content inside that sparkly wrapper. Why do people actually go to a website? Very rarely is it to admire the new graphic design. They want to interact with the site’s content in one way or another. They want to read it, or buy from it, or play with it.

That’s why content matters. A lot. And how you organize it matters a lot. No matter what it is you’re selling or showing. Some people call it information architecture, some people call it common sense - but it’s not very common.

I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned about organizing information so that people can interact with it happily. I’m going to use real world examples and point out both the best practices and the worst. There are lots of sites keeping up with what’s new in web design. I’ll be talking about content design.

I’m a writer and consultant specializing in information architecture and interactive information design. My business website has more information about my background. I started this blog to collect and share what I’ve learned about organizing and using interactive information in all forms - websites, video games, cd-roms - basically anything you can poke and get a response from. Everything has to start somewhere.