iProfessionals

Our debt to the past...

2012-01-29T17:49:00.000Z

We had a visit to Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing (in Block H) during the week and were amazed by the speed at which computing had changed over the years. We were humbled by the early pioneer's work too, without which none of what we're all about would be possible. We had heard of Bletchley because of Alan Turing and the Enigma code breaking during the 2nd World War - that's in a separate museum featuring war related efforts, but the equivalent pioneers of early digital computing, Tommy Flowers and Max Newman, did equally astounding work with Colossus, the first electronic computer, to break the German Lorenz cypher. This was a more complex code than Enigma and would have been impossible to decode by hand.

Front and back views of Colossus

The first Colossus machine used 1800 valves (vacuum tubes) and the Mark II had 2400. Received wisdom at the time was that a machine with so many valves could not be reliable but Flowers countered this by pointing out that valves were used reliably (in the telephone system) simply because the equipment was never switched off. Even now, one of the valves in the Bletchley Colossus is over 40 years old and to minimise the thermal effects of switching the power the machine is powered up and down using a rheostat to change the voltage gradually.

Here's a summary of the different code breaking machines.

If you're into gadgetry from mechanical calculators to Cray super-computers, from valve-based data processing systems to Domesday Reloaded with its state-of-the art touch-table, they are here in working order. And they really do want accessions that represent key points in the transitions of computing - even technical manuals. Do your parents have any staches of stuff in their lofts? Are you second or third generation computing/IT ites? Does your company have the cupboard full of 'things' in the basement?

What business computers looked like 40 years ago

We were there donating some items and we got a comprehensive tour by an ex MOD rocket scientist (really) volunteer. They do corporate events, school visits etc. Why not have a works outing? It's quite accessible from London (UK) as Bletchley Station is about 500 yds from the Park. There's the historic house with cafe, the War Museum, a Toy Museum, the Projected Picture (ie cinema) Trust and American memorial planting in the grounds. Could suit a family outing where you all split and do your own thing to meet for refreshments? Here's what to see at Bletchley.

A bit different from our usual blog but too good to miss. Spread the word!

Interactive prototyping – the faster the better?

2012-01-19T13:06:00.000Z

You know the problem. Your clients can't visualise the interactivity (functionality) they want nor the look and feel of the application they want. This combination is one of the most common pitfalls that causes projects to drag on and on ...

Time means money, as we understand. The more resources tied up the more the pound signs rack up. The clients won't be happy. We’ve looked at how programming practices have changed to help get the build faster but perhaps we haven't really looked at advances on the visualisation aspects as much. Let's put that right.

Prototyping frameworks and tools can help, depending on what you want to achieve. Tom Russell (4th January 2012), gives some useful pointers and reviews of some of the tools he finds useful for web application building.

Leigh Howells (30th December 2011), A prototype is worth a 10,000 word specification, gives an honest appraisal of his design pain working with tools and the freedom but lengthy process of wireframing. His tool of choice for the moment is Axure that, although expensive, gives him the most features he wants quickly including outputting a written specification document, if that's what's requested.

You haven't long, if you live in Leeds UK, to make it to a review event of three such tools - Mobile First, Balsamiq and Axure - where you can win a copy of each tool. See NUX Leeds: Prototyping with Mobile First, Balsamiq and Axure, 23rd January 2012, 6.30-8.30pm.

Maybe you have your own favourite tool - or not. What's your experience?

Reboot for computing in UK schools

2012-01-13T19:02:00.000Z

"... bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers ... " is how UK Education Secretary Michael Gove put it. The teaching of ICT in schools has drifted off track from a time when everyone and his mate tried to program a BBC Micro or Sinclair Spectrum in their bedroom and some, like the legendary David Braben and Ian Bell of Elite fame, managed to write a genre-changing game.

Instead of learning how to use a spreadsheet, said Mr Gove, "... we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch. By 16, they could have an understanding of formal logic previously covered only in University courses and be writing their own Apps for smartphones."

I will admit that I hardly ever get into a classroom these days, but the indication was that computing in schools was no longer about creating software. It was a bit like teaching English without ever writing it. The curriculum document I found didn't even mention programming. Yet, as friends at the National Museum of Computing tell me, schoolkids visiting them really enjoy sitting down at a BBC micro (it is a museum after all) and writing a fun bit of BASIC.

The ghost of Alan Turing (and Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace steaming in behind) is usually invoked for occasions such as this. The UK pretty-well invented computing with everyone from universities to the corner tea house embracing the technology at a time when the government felt that five machines would supply all computing needs for the foreseeable future. Now, just as our televisions probably originate in the far east (even if via South Wales) our computer hardware is probably American, the software we run on it either American again or of no-fixed abode, and the social networks we use are also probably American (or if they're any good, get bought up by an American).

OK: so far so promising. I must ask how many brilliant programmers you know were actually taught how to do it? Didn't they teach themselves? But that is missing the point. This initiative should bring new opportunities. Teachers will have "freedom over what and how to teach" and "Universities, businesses and others will have the opportunity to devise new courses and exams" especially GCSEs. The Royal Society has already chipped in recommending that ICT is actually a group of subjects such as computer science and digital literacy. It should be treated as a "rigorous subject" as are maths and physics, and "digital literacy needs to be put on a par with reading and writing" (BBC news story here). This is the result of a report led by Steve Furber, one of the designers of the BBC Micro (it's that machine again) and the man I remember as having invented the ARM computer.

I should also mention that David Braben is one of the people behind the Raspberry Pi $25 computer, which would also fit into this brave new ICT curriculum as it's intended as a kind of latter-day BBC Micro equivalent to teach children how to program. (There's an interesting post on the Raspberry Pi front page about their problems in manufacturing in the UK, including a tax conundrum ... UK government please note ... that duty is payable on components but not an assembled motherboard; hence it's tax-efficient to manufacture overseas.)

So, now is the time for your company, especially if it has links with education, to have some input into the curriculum for the next generation. Influence your local schools and what they teach as ICT. Let us know what you think ... and how you get on. Let us hope that this bodes well for the growth of the UK iMedia industry as much as it does for other branches of the computer tech revolution.

Digital Archiving – who should, and, what to archive?

2012-01-06T14:47:00.000Z

Happy New Year.

It is timely to address the thorny issue of archiving projects because, as with the other aspects of digital project management, this area has matured and continues to develop in its own right. As developers, we have encouraged you to systematically archive each of your projects to protect yourselves from issues about the project being raised later by your clients, any companies that take them over, or even increasingly in this present economic climate, administration companies.

However, archiving has been a wider society issue for several years with national interests like museums, libraries, universities and governments taking the lead in recognising the importance of harvesting, defining and providing access to the vast online information resources. Software tools for each of these stages have multiplied to the point that now archivists have to understand the differences between them and assess which suits what they need best.

See for a Government level example : www.guardian.co.uk
See for a library level example: www.bl.uk
See for an academic level example: www.data-archive.ac.uk

We've realised that perhaps you need to go further with archiving than before. Now you should be seen to recommend that your clients take archiving their own online resources seriously. It is an area that needs defined personnel resource, expertise, a strategic perception and an understanding of the social and legal implications for an organisation. For example, in the Digital Curation Centre’s 2010 report Web Archiving, Alex Ball defines points under the section Motivations for Web Archiving, Page 5, that demonstrate an organisation might need access to their historical online resources for audit, investigation and/or freedom of information obligations. He notes that if a site provides advice or guidance, the precise wording and presentation may be questioned if the guidance is called into question later. This has immediate relevance for any financial clients you have from pension providers to banks. Do your clients expect you to archive because nothing has been stated? Would they perhaps take the opportunity to use that excuse to imply blame on you if they were asked specific questions later? You never know! So better that you are seen to encourage them to take their own archiving seriously, surely. Alex covers many interesting points in a very readable report. It is worth a scan, particularly the Tools Employed section where there's a useful summary of the type of tools and their focus.

Copyright consultation rumbles on

2011-12-16T17:38:00.000Z

The next stage of the UK government's copyright consultation is now under way. This follows on from the Hargreaves report and picks up several specific points on which comments are requested via a web page at the Intellectual Property Office.

It's a complex set of proposals and I've only just started to look through it but things I note initially are:

Copyright exception for archiving and preservation
Current law allows limited copying for preservation but this, surprisingly, does not extend to sound recordings, films, broadcasts, or artistic works. The irony here is that material which has most difficulty surviving in a digital age is excluded. The proposal is to extend the exception (to more kinds of work and to allow more copies) and to allow more kinds of institution to do the copying. The consultation refers to 'such as museums and galleries' in this context so we might assume any other kind of organisation or even an individual who feels the need to copy to preserve an artefact they possess would be excluded. Would a music company, for example, be allowed to copy masters to preserve them ... assuming their contractual arrangements did not already allow this. There is also an assumption that this exception would not apply to anything that was otherwise available to be bought.

Exception for use of quotations or extracts of copyright works
This, like other proposals in this consultation, intends to bring UK law into line with a wider European legal framework and, at present, UK law only allows use of extracts for the purpose of criticism, review or reporting current events. I assume that use of an insubstantial portion of a work under fair dealing fails because things worth quoting in this way are probably not insubstantial.

Exception for copying of works for use by text and data analytics
This is the so-called Data Mining exception. The proposal here clarifies the question (for me at least) significantly and applies to cases where you already have legal access to material (by subscription for example) but could make further use of it by copying into a database and running analyses.

Protecting copyright exceptions from override by contract
Primarily this seeks to level the playing field for organisation such as libraries who currently have to either take note of restrictions on individual sources of material or adopt a worse case approach. In the light of the data mining exception above, such protection seems to me to be essential.

Copyright Notices
As Hargeaves suggested, the plan here is for the Intellectual Property Office to produce legally-binding opinions on rights questions, called Notices. There would also be 'a duty on the Courts to have regard to any Notices published'. This is designed to help businesses. While I really welcome this I don't think it goes far enough and a more general set of such notices, forming a kind of copyright Highway Code, should serve the public as well as those small businesses who feel restricted by the cost of legal opinions.

Orphan Works
Yes, TwistCo reares its ugly head once more. In fact, the analysis in the Intellectual Property Office document here seems well-considered. It does however hedge the qualms of the photographic community, of 'active orphaning' by stripping metadata, more than somewhat. Given Hargreaves side-stepped moral rights altogether I am of the opinion that the link between moral rights (particularly attribution) and orphans needs a lot more thought. I also note that the wish of the photographers for any use of orphans to be non-commercial has been ignored.

All the sections (and more) are linked from the main page I linked above.

And that's all from us for 2011. Elaine and I wish you a happy and restful seasonal break and a successful 2012.

Signs of the times

2011-12-09T12:35:00.000Z

A British motorway sign has just been added to the collection of the Design Museum in London. Road signs in the UK have been standardised for years now based on designs by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert which included icons, colour schemes and type faces (called transport and motorway). There's a story about this on the BBC web site and it got me thinking about what we used to call normative icons. The idea, dating back to early graphical user interfaces, was that a simple button icon should clearly identify what the button does. As the advertisement/catchphrase says; it will do exactly what it says on the tin.

We are used to quite a few such icons still, even making their way from computer screens onto other devices such as mobile phones. There's the wastebasket, the piece of paper with a folded corner, the loudspeaker cone with waves of sound. Often they are called, or confused with, GUI widgets (depending on whether you consider a scroll bar an icon or a widget). Embellishments like drop-shadows and polished highlights may come and go, but some icons stay with us.

The key thing, the object all sublime, of such things is two fold: they transcend language and (with luck) culture, and they save space. Language sometimes doesn't cut it: I recall being told that Danish had no word to carry the meaning of eject (a floppy disc) so when the Mac user interface was translated in Danish the term put away had to be used. You see the word STOP on French road signs, presumably because arrettez-vouz is a bit long-winded. Some do say arrêt but isn't this a noun rather than a command? The English is usefully ambiguous. However, pretty well all stop signs are the same shape and colour: octagonal and red. You notice that long before you read the words.

Computer screens, having grown larger and with more pixels as time went on, were lulling us into a false sense of security over our icons. The arrival of mobile devices brought the problem of designing icons back to its origins. Have a look at any web pages or mobile apps you use or design and think about how you use icons and how you use text labels in your navigation.

And remember the notorious Welsh road sign incident and always check with someone else.

Usability - hints and tips update

2011-12-01T18:36:00.000Z

As the iMedia sector has matured and splintered, so has all the associated expertise around the sector. And this includes usability intelligence. The tools used to assess the reactions of users have developed out of necessity. So now we can eye-track how users relate to screens, layout and functionality, for example. We can assess emotional engagement with sites if that is considered important. Gone are the days of large numbers of users being tested - unless you need quantitative testing.

But usability companies claim to need only up to half a dozen users now to discover the key usability problems with a site. Often, the usability experts can utilise their knowledge and assess common problems just by themselves. This is now a sophisticated offering in its own right.

What does your company do about usability? Do you outsource offering it as a cost addition to the proposed project? Do you have an affiliation with a specialist usability company? Do any of your clients ask for such a service? Because more money is spent on interactive advertising than traditional print advertising, more clients are concerned with feedback from users to understand how to influence them better through technology.

If you just want to keep abreast of what is happening in this area there are sites and associations to help.

Usability News as a special interest group of The British Computer Society, offers a good up-to-date service. Check out their guidelines on iPad and iPhone usability.
The COI offer a set of tools to test yourself on usability.
Finally, the UL Usability Professionals’ Association has held its World Usability Event in November 2011 where the focus was ‘designing for social change’.

Usability is a fascinating subject that has risen to the challenges of iMedia. We do need to understand our users in each interactive environment we develop for. How we do this and whether we involve any experts is open to debate. Any thoughts?

Collective Intelligence – we do this

2011-11-18T16:28:00.000Z

A growing international market is there to be won by creative ... businesses that are able to innovate and do not see any inherent conflict between creative excellence and commercial success.

This quote from a NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) report, Creating Growth, 2006 started our first chapter in Managing Interactive Media in 2007. We wondered what this "independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative" was covering now, so we took a look at them at: www.nesta.org.uk

This proved to be timely as they are spawning some interesting events for the UK iMedia Industry now under the Silicon Valley comes to the UK 2011 16th-19th November with many speakers including representatives from Google, Linkedin, Nokia, MySpace, and venture capital firms. (Note the social media and open information site bias)

This is a strategic-focused UK company that hasn't really taken on the wider iMedia Industry difficulties as we have struggled in the past and continue to do so with recognition of the technology-led, inter-disciplinary nature of what we do, but they have latched onto interactive segments like social media and gaming. We're glad to see they are beginning to broaden their perspective.

They have a draft report online where they invite comments. See Draft Discussion paper on Collective Intelligence October 2011.

We have to admit that the draft paper is VERY HEAVY STUFF. Don't think you can just skim it at all; you get nothing that way. It isn't web-friendly reading and obeys none of the tacit rules we know offer better absorbtion rates for electronic information. (They are actually wanting to study the effects of large amounts of data on "entrepreneurial cognition and creativity" ... Page 26). But, if you persevere, in bite-sized pieces over some time, some of the paper might begin to make sense. Their hearts are in the right place, probably. Please contribute for our industry's sake.

Collective Intelligence is seen as a strong contributory factor to the success of innovative companies who are driven by technology. It is defined tentatively as an attribute of groups and systems of people that enables them to employ their distributed intellectual faculties to behave more as if they were a single agent, thus generating outcomes beyond what could be achieved by their participants. Actually it seems to characterise the popularised Star Trek 'Borg' behaviour more than anything else, don't you think.

Getting serious here, we reckon that we have had to listen and learn from our diverse group of specialists – interface designers, programmers, graphics designers, interactive marketers, learning technologists, users, and so on - depending on the type of interactive project and technology platforms we have had to deal with. We've been doing this for years and have had to recognise each wave of tech-savvy response from the 'collective' user to affect our design and interaction models just to keep ahead. This intelligence hasn't been gleaned from traditional educational methods but from close contact and street-wise (web-wise or interactive-wise?) gut-feel initially, followed up by digital market statistics later.

There is some recognition of a team's and organisation's role in this 'collective intelligence' analysis on Page 17 of the NESTA document where what we're doing features as visible at the micro level. There's a meso level applied to industries, regions and communities, and the macro level of whole economies and societies, mankind (hello flowers, hello trees!).

Then there is a light-bulb moment on Page 18 where they ask some fundamental questions that we know some of the answers to, don't we?

"How do you run an effective innovation team?"
"How do you organise an institution or cluster to improve its Collective Intelligence for innovation?"

But they don't want to rate some of our comments because we may be sullied by a bias out of the need to apply innovation to make money: 'commercial' seems to be a dirty word for some of this document which is strange given that collective intelligence is meant to lead to innovative, creative companies that venture capitalists want to back. Maybe they need to be a bit more explicit about the type of companies they mean by these next comments:

“Finally, there is the work carried out by management consultants and technology providers who design, implement and support organisational models and technologies supposed to enhance aspects of Collective Intelligence. Their work is eminently practical, but the knowledge that they generate is not generally available publicly, and where it is should be taken with a grain of salt because of their commercial interest in this area.” (Page 20)

Complex this paper is. But, at least it shows thought for where we are heading in the technological maelstrom. We've often pointed out that we lack the time to think any more. The type of intelligence has changed with the territory. Can and should we continue to apply the old models of analysis/intelligence? Now there's a thought.

Are you a SWOT or a PEST?

2011-11-11T14:37:00.000Z

Keeping on top of your company's strengths and selling them to your clients is never easy. We work in a volatile market at the best of times and, some might argue, these are the worst of times. Back to basics then and time to re-evaluate your SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This is a standard approach used in marketing to decide on your company's way forward taking into account your core strengths that come through despite any weaknesses, the opportunities in the present climate and what your competitors are up to. However, threats range wider than just your competitors, remember.

This is where PEST comes in. This stands for political, economic, social and technological factors. You can see that the SWOT looks inwards to a company while PEST looks outwards at the market forces. You need to keep an eye on both since both can sink you under certain conditions. So swim hard!

Businessballs offer a free SWOT analysis but their article about SWOT and PEST implications contain a good summary that may help you.

A really positive way to help find your strengths is to take a look at yourselves through the information at SGI Marketing, The Disadvantages of Using Free Websites (27.10.11). They look at the weaknesses of free website development for clients. Now as professionals, surely you can see your strengths from this comparison? This analysis gives great intelligence for you to use with your clients to explain the worth of your offerings, don't you think?

Because you are developing across multiple technological platforms now – web, social media, mobile, for example – you need to apply SWOT and PEST analysis across these platforms because the type of use influences who uses the service and how they use it. There is growing recognition of the type of interaction users want from different devices and this should affect our design and marketing on the devices. You can gain some insights into those companies at the edge of digital development that are using digital marketing to influence their decisions at koozai digital marketing and Mike Essex's blog from 14th October on the Econsultancy Jump 2010 Event Review – unless you were one of those attending the expensive Jump Event.

Digital Marketing has matured. We need to understand our users of each platform to better serve them and our clients. Listen to their findings and apply them to your company. Now, PEST analysis will have to wait till another time. But what headings to stimulate thoughts as the euro and euro heads of state shake – political, economic, social and technological – wow!

A decade of dot-UK domain disputes

2011-11-08T10:52:00.000Z

Domain names are now so much a part of an organisation's branding that it comes as something of a surprise that it's only ten years since the UK domain manager, Nominet, introduced a process for handling disputes over domain names.

Without such a process, issues over a name would fall back on somewhat costly legal areas, such as passing off or trade mark legislation. The dispute process is the equivalent of mediation or the small claims court in many ways, and cheaper access to justice ... for the accused as well as the accuser ... is always a good idea.

All the good short names may have gone - ATSF's short domain is a testament to the age of our domain rather than any fancy footwork on our part - but more and more people want domain names. We looked at the opening up of the domain name system back in July, and choosing and registering a domain name is still a common part of web build. It's worth reading the BBC web site's story on Nominet's resolution process over the last ten years. Some of the examples are well known: but did you know that a Ryanair 'hate site' lost its domain because it made just a few hundred pounds from ads, and, that a married couple called Starker and Bucknell ran into problems when a relative ran their surnames together in a domain name (think of a chain of coffee outlets)?

There's also more on domain name disputes at the ever-useful Out-Law.com site.

Website maintenance issues

2011-10-29T18:51:00.000+01:00

Website maintenance is yet another area that has developed into a business segment of its own in the iMedia industry in the last few years. We used to remind you to check with your clients how and when they might want maintenance done, so that you could cost it into the deal for the initial project, but maintenance issues have grown as businesses have recognised the value of regularly updating their content and services because their users expect this.

It used to be recommended that companies take notice of their websites more seriously for updates on look and feel factors every 6 months. However, as web access has become the first point of interaction with a company, the onus on updating has increased too. Therefore, maintenance means more time, more costs, and more resources.

What then does website maintenance cover? If you are offering a maintenance service you would have considered this carefully. It might well cover the following:

Editorial updates for content
Changes to services/products offered
Advice to users in the form of newsletters, blogs, announcements, offers, calendar of events etc
Seasonal promotions etc
Redesign of look and feel
Changing images to give update appeal
Review of search engine optimisation
Checking on submission terms/timings
Analysis of web logs and recommendations

How many people will be involved? Well, that depends on the site, of course and the type of activity needed and how often, but, you'll find this resource from Shane Dillily useful; an abridged Chapter 2 from his book, The Website Manager's Handbook 2006, called Website Maintenance, very useful in answering that type of query.

Have you researched how your competitors are offering their maintenance services? You need to keep an eye on what's being offered and how much it costs. The Websiteaday company have split their maintenance offers into three: Pay-as-you-go, Basic, and Advanced packages.

This might make you think how you are offering maintenance services. Do you give an SLA (Service Level Agreement) to your clients detailing what you will and won't provide for the money? Do they ask for one? These are recommended at Small Business Website Maintenance so you may well get asked for them.

It is hard keeping on top of everything in this business but to survive you do need to charge fairly and offer the type of service the clients want. Lots of food for thought then...

Website content clearance issues

2011-10-21T13:48:00.000+01:00

We've all had the client who delays giving us their content for their web pages, mobile pages etc, and faced the knock-on effects of this on development. We have warned against this and recommend that you make it clear upfront that the client has certain responsibilities in project development; such as providing the content when indicated and taking responsibility for ensuring they have the right clearance to use the content electronically worldwide. Actually those both relate to legal issues of ownership and rights in material - very contentious issues at the moment.

The BBC Technology news covers a story around these issues, Websites should carry libel risk for anonymous posts 20th October 2011. You see, although you might well try to advise your clients' on their use of content prior to development, any social websites where the content is generated on-the-fly by users is beyond such control. Usually, unless the web site owner (who is legally the publisher) monitors and removes contentious postings themselves - reactive monitoring - they will respond when someone else points the material out to then. This is known as 'notice and take-down'. There hasn't been any difference between posts by people who give their name and anonymous or pseudonymous ones ... not until now!

A joint parliamentary committee has come out against anonymous postings that breach defamatory rights of individuals. This ruling extends the responsibilities of the website to posting complaints next to an identified offender with take-down rights upon application of a court order. If the offender is not identifiable - has used a pseudonym - the website can take these down immediately unless the author agrees to be identified. There are more details in the article, but, this means more editorial onus on website maintainers.

If any user of social websites posts illegal material - and illegal can mean a range of issues other than rights infringement, who is responsible? For copyright infringement and libel it is generally the 'publisher' (as well as the person who posts the material). It's worth noting that a web hosting company or the postal and telephone services are not seen to be the publishers of content that flows through their channels.

The guys who have been sentenced for inciting public disorder during the UK August riots when they posted Facebook pages urging people to riot, have had their lengthy sentences upheld by the court of appeal recently. See 18th October news article by Owen Bowcott. In this case it was the poster who was responsible, not the 'publishers' like Twitter and Facebook, however, the use of social media and Blackberry messaging came under scrutiny as a result of the unrest. So watch this space.

More responsibilities equal more time and more cost – so just remember that for your next project where you'll be involved in monitoring any content provided on-the-fly!

Our iMedia responsibilities get more and more each day as the law catches up with technological advances.

Who are your key men and women?

2011-10-14T16:30:00.001+01:00

You have probably noticed that the world of computing lost two important people during the past few days. One was Steve Jobs, without whom Apple just wouldn't be the hugely successful company it is, but also without whom computers may just possibly be still responding to typed instructions (OK: an exaggeration, but you know what I mean).

The other was Dennis Ritchie. Less well known than Jobs but arguably just as important, Ritchie (as you'll know if you followed that link) created the C programming language and co-created Unix. These two things took computers from being a disparate collection of rooms full of machinery attended by white-coated acolytes to the almost invisible devices that permeate our lives.

These two losses got me thinking about what is known as the 'key person' problem. While the loss of Ritchie is sad his death hasn't raised questions like the Quo Vadis Apple that some ask on the departure of Jobs. I don't want to get into a discussion of how Apple will continue without Jobs but the way he ran the company and turned it around make him an archetypal 'key man'.

Sometimes it is the charismatic and very visible head of a company, sometimes it could be the programmer who knows the password to get into a corporate system but hasn't yet got around to sharing it (I recall a possibly apocryphal story about a Norwegian programmer and a tram). What might happen if this person, to use the usual English terminology, 'goes under a bus' or, more likely, becomes unavailable, even temporarily, for some reason such as a hospital visit or a family funeral?

One the one hand there is insurance, which usually addresses business continuity issues for a fixed amount. On the other there are much simpler tactics such as documentation and planning. I have occasionally met programmers who boast that they never need to comment their code. Don't believe them. Comments don't slow down modern code and don't usually waste space. (Big JavaScript libraries like JQuery are a notable exception but even then you can get a long version and an optimised/unreadable one.) Get everyone talking about what they are doing. If you're a one-man-band then think about asking a friend to act as back-stop for you.

Your client will feel more comfortable if you have some system in place to cope with exceptional circumstances and, in most cases, a deal of a day or two while the backup person gets up to speed will not be a problem.

Emotional responses to iMedia sites: an internal training session

2011-10-06T18:46:00.000+01:00

In your scoping of the new client's sites we have recommended that you take some time to question the type of response they expect/want from their users. This should stand you in good stead for the look and feel aspects of the site. Perhaps you've found it difficult to get clear instructions here. That would be understandable. You might have tried getting the clients to look at previous iMedia sites you've designed and have noted their responses. Otherwise you might have asked them to tell you which sites they've liked generally and liked from their competitors. There are various ways to tap into what may be a hidden emotional reaction.

But are you applying the same probing to your own company and your employees? Are you educating your own staff by cross-fertilising their creativity and experience? It will be a complete eye-opener for you to find that the different specialists in your team will probably have a specialist bias in relating to what they consider 'good' iMedia sites. This emotional response will lie at the heart of the potential conflict between the members of your team. Give it a go for an internal training/awareness session, perhaps during one lunchtime.

Get several cross-functional team members together: design, build, project managers, marketing or whatever. Ask them to demo one of their favourite websites (not any of your own) and explain why it is – in 5-8 minutes. Note down the key words they use to describe why it is positive. These should indicate their bias/specialism. If there are common words used across the specialisms, these will be core essentials for website design that underpin your website developments. These in themselves might be surprising. But what about the other concepts that show bias and are mentioned? These might indicate the types of dissension that can happen across a team during project development. They may be 'good' in a narrow specialist sense but not in a general sense. However, a client may want a bias – say a marketing bias – in their site but they haven't been able to vocalise their wish. Then the leaning towards the specialist bias of what is 'good' in a website might become dominant for that project. And so on...

What's your favourite website then? Have a go yourself at this exercise. And to help maybe, here are a few links to what other people consider 'good'.

After your look at websites, repeat the exercise for other forms of iMedia sites too.

The changing world of 'Know your customer'

2011-09-29T19:01:00.000+01:00

Knowing your customers used to be a marketing issue. The more you know and understand what your customers want the better you serve them, the happier they are and the more likely you get return business. In our iMedia sense we may need to apply this from two angles – understanding our clients, and understanding their customer base. You might, for example, indicate in the scoping phase of the project, that you can – for a cost – get market intelligence on their customer base to aid targeting them more effectively interactively. They may have this intelligence already and offer it to you if you ask. You would perhaps have needed the first set of information on your client prior to this when you were winning the project. (There are many companies that offer to find intelligence on customers such as Onesource)

But things have got more complex, of course. Now the waters are muddied by the Know your customer (KYC) legislation that has been out in place for anti-money laundering initiatives. You may need to consider this angle when implementing any project in the financial services sector. See the pwc article April 2011, for more on this.

But let's get back to the marketing sense of know your customer. This is good business sense and the basics are covered in a Business Link Guide.

Knowing your clients goes hand-in-hand with knowing your competition, since if they are offering more services for the same or less money, it is easy to see why your clients might migrate to them, especially in the present stringent financial climate. You'd better be sure of your own reputation/branding if you want to counter any client's comparison with cheaper services being offered, or take the hit. Again, the basics are outlined by Business Link.

So, do you know your clients' business well enough to define their needs? Do you know their customer bases well enough to proffer goods and services to them in a way that is visible to your clients? Do you keep an eye on your competitors so you are in tune with your own sector and what it is offering at what cost?

All these are necessary and yes, I know there are so many other things taking up your time too.

The commissioner perspective and website development problems

2011-09-23T18:42:00.000+01:00

It's easy to criticise the clients from hell, but commissioners have many bad experiences with their developers too. Often, the criticisms over-lap as one blames the other about the mess they are in.

Lack of experience on both sides leads to confusion, bad definition of what is to be achieved, and delays from both. If either side is experienced then they are sensitised to risks so they can foresee what may happen and take early action to remedy the emerging problem. The clients still have the upper hand so experience within the clients is actually more important because they can initiate action far more easily than the developer.

Here's an article by skyje in January 2011 where he describes 12 Tips for Hiring and Working with your Web Design Company, and the second part about Working with your Web Design Company. In some of the points he emphasises the actions that the client needs to take such as having a good grasp of what they want from the website i.e. the specifications, not causing delays and being prompt with payments if the milestones are reached. That's the experience I was talking about.

Perhaps inexperience is evident in the plea from Dawer on the Graphic Design forum. He wants to know if he can get an upfront payment back from his developer now he has concerns about their work.

At the other end of the client-spend scale, earlier this month the politicalpress group despaired of the sums of money spent on the development of government websites. The figures should make your eyes smart unless you're one of 'those' companies developing them.

The premise is that the figures themselves point to an abuse of developer/client relationship. The expression taken for a ride comes to mind.

But instead of depressing you with such examples as the general news is so glum too, cheer yourselves up by looking at the self-proclaimed World's Worst Website and take heart that despite rooky relationships with your clients, you are doing some things right! Show it to your clients too!

Sticky fingers

2011-09-16T14:30:00.003+01:00

I remember a story about the Disney EPCOT theme park in Florida (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow ... a dream of Walt's back in the 1960s) about touch screens. There were some interactive touch screens in the facility and they were popular with visitors. One interesting side effect was that every screen at EPCOT, whether interactive or not, was covered with smudgy fingerprints at the end of the day. What lodged in my mind about this is that touch screens and people go together.

OK, you are probably saying, surely it's gesture-based interfaces that are important now rather than touch screens, and they allow you to stand back. This is a fair point, and the Minority Report kind of remote swipe gesture approach, which now shows up in several TV drama strands such as CSI Miami and NCIS Las Vegas, certainly looks fun; but it lacks the precision of a touch screen and is more like throwing things around the room. There are situations where a big touch interface would seem ideal, such as 'you are here' location maps in museums and even cities.

If you've never seen this kind of thing, here's an example from 2008 ... although MIT was prototyping this kind of thing in the Put that There project in 1979. This is G-Speak from Oblong Industries.

Touch screens go back to the light pen interfaces of early computing. They could be easy to implement (you could even get one for the 8-bit BBC Micro in the 1980s) and easy to program. Detecting a finger touching a screen is more difficult. Early examples used infrared beams shooting across the screen from the surrounding bezel. What we now see relies on electronics detecting the presence of a finger on the display ... the so-called touch current ... using a conductive but transparent layer.

There's an interesting story on Wired UK at the moment, GeekDad's daughter reimagines interactive TV, where the writer's 16 month-old daughter really likes the touch interface on her (yes her) iPad. She's a fan of CBeebies In the Night Garden and one evening tried to drag a character from the iPad screen onto her bed ... and was frustrated when it didn't work.

Here's another telling quote

Our TV screen, fridge door and bathroom mirror are all testament to this, upon which her toddler-sized sticky-fingered smears (or should they be gestures?) give a real insight into the way in which these devices and appliances could instead be more intuitively manipulated.

In the metaphorical vehicle in which the family is driving towards the future of interactive technolgy, the kids are sitting in the back shouting 'Are we there yet?'.

Time, cost, quality variations in Project Management

2011-09-10T11:07:00.000+01:00

The traditional project management mantra has related to the time, cost, quality triangle where the project manager controls these variables as well as possible according to the defined scope of the project. But there are variations as we've noted where quality can equal 'scope', 'cost' can be substituted by 'assets/resources' or an extra consideration of 'customer satisfaction' is added.

Are there other variations that have crept in now? Well, you may come across 'quality' being swapped for 'functionality' – that would make sense to us in the iMedia arena. See Spottydog's Project Management web site for more on this approach.

Then the Project Management Blog March 2011 expands the core 3 to 8! Scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, risk, procurement and communication. That certainly should make us think carefully as to whether we should expand our thinking.

Then, although a bit dated in our terms, as the paper is 2007, Roger Atkinson covers interesting ground in his plea for a re-assessment of what he calls the iron triangle to take account of other factors such as 'stakeholder benefits'.

So although the core terms may change the principles remain the same. A project manager will be held responsible for the successful outcome of a project not just in terms of delivering the project on time and within budget but also the satisfaction of the client and (for us particularly), the users. What terms does your company use? Do they cover all these aspects? It seems that we did in our last Managing Interactive Media book, and that the trends we projected still remain true.

Happy project management!

Are website gremlins ‘black swans’?

2011-09-01T15:30:00.000+01:00

Well, no they aren’t strictly – but what are black swans? Now, this is an interesting project management concept from IT. Black swans in project management terms are catastrophic risks that happen rarely but when they do, they have dire consequences.

We have used IT project management concepts of risk management in the past as the closest to our field of developing iMedia. The classic risk management assessment asks you to assess the risks to your project, starting with the most frequent and important, so that you control these away in the course of the project by various means. But, black swans would appear low on the traditional assessment, if at all. They are low probability but high impact. They are rare in threatening the business and if and when they do occur, humans have tended to sorted them out onerously. However if the technical system is not designed to deal with them and people come to rely on the systems, it can be too late once someone recognises what is going on. Also, the consequences to the business can be compounded by other factors happening at the same time that have nothing to do with the software.

Take a good look at the BBC Technology article on Black Swans earlier this week, where Auto Windscreens is cited as having been the second largest company of its type in the UK but after trying to implement a new IT system, it went into administration in February.

We have the Boo.com story and the dot.com bubble as salient lessons in our sector – hope you’re all old enough to know about those! The article centres on research from Oxford Uni investigating massive IT project budget over-runs and the causes. Perhaps we should be thinking black swans too? Upgrades (for example) can be a big problem for shared hosting, since updating a web or database server on a system where they are shared by hundreds of different web sites risks some of them being broken by the changes. Unfortunately this results in shared hosting continuing to run using out-of-date software, including missing out of security patches.

And the website gremlins? This is a common concept where small changes to a site can have radical and unforeseen consequences. We’re quite used to the idea that any change must be checked out thoroughly and that it can have unforeseen impacts. Most of us rely on systematic testing to check out any changes, I imagine. But where non-professionals are building and repairing sites often for themselves, these gremlins cause lots of angst and can affect business badly too. Here are some examples to bring a smile to your faces – unless you recognise some of the consequences!

P9 forum has a classic rant – a bit old, but amusing nevertheless (I like the boffinus notaclueii).
Cast Fireplaces saw a change in customer behaviour when their website developed gremlins.
Smart Telecom aren’t immune either as a rant on their Broadband Customer Support thread shows

Look out for ‘Black Swans’ now!

Password with eight characters

2011-08-27T01:35:00.000+01:00

It was the best joke at the Edinburgh Fringe, as reported by the BBC and others. Comedian Nick Helm won an award from UK digital TV channel Dave ... and stop me if you've heard this one ...

I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

This got me thinking about passwords. (Yes, there had to be a reason for telling a joke in this blog.) We're interested for two reasons: we need passwords of our own and we set up systems where users need passwords.

Googling choosing passwords brings up over 7.5 million results. The top one, from lockdown.co.uk, is a good summary. I won't go into details about my personal password strategies but I will admit two things:

I have a little program, called Xyzzy, produced by Haxial software ... this can generate pronounceable but imaginary words, with optional numbers added. Unfortunately, Haxial no longer exists although Xyzzy is still out there on the web. An alternative, online, is a Java-based generator from Multicians and there is a JavaScript option.

Passwords are a balance between being able to remember (because we never write them down do we!) and being difficult/impossible to crack or guess.

The infamous hacking song from the BBC's Micro Live put it like this ...

Try his first wife's maiden name,
This is more than just a game,
It's real fun, but just the same,
It's Hacking, Hacking, Hacking.

I recommend you follow the Wikipedia link as it tells you how the hackers got into the system ... and I bet it's not what you think.

My second admission is to put punctuation into passwords ... this includes plings (!) and circumflexes (^) and other seemingly esoteric things. This is a good practice and is the reason why you should not restrict your web site users to alphanumeric characters. The 'difficulty' of a password increases geometrically with every character in the string but also every character that could be in the string, so using anything you can get your fingers on makes sense. But stick to characters in the character set your webpage and server are using: the odd bit of Tamil probably won't work in Europe.

What's in your cupboard?

2011-08-19T02:02:00.000+01:00

I've been doing some clearing out. I realised that over the years since we moved to ATSF Towers, and to some extent even before that, I have accumulated a lot of obsolete bits and pieces.

It started with an old Mac that I was keeping around as an emergency backup. Well, the power supply failed and so it had to go in the electronics skip at the local dump. No graceful retirement in central Africa for that old dear ... just crash and smash!

I realised that I actually had at least a whole shelf of software that would only run under older versions of the Mac OS (that is before OS X) and that even where I was into a long upgrade cycle (such as with Photoshop) I didn't need to keep all the old versions. It included boxes of software that installed from floppy discs for goodness sake! I was embarrassed by how long I'd kept this stuff hidden on a shelf and not even looked at it. (At least I'd thrown away my original copy of Netscape Navigator, which I paid for and which came in a box.) There were even a few old Windows things that wouldn't run under Vista they were so old, so this isn't just a Mac thing. The irony there is that an old DOS CD-ROM still works perfectly in my virtual PC ... so that can stay.

With the departing Mac went a SCSI card, although I had copied over what I needed from the remaining SCSI discs (huge capacities of one and four gigabytes) and security-wiped them before they too crashed into recycle limbo. I decided to 'Freecycle' my Jaz, DAT and DVD-RAM drives, and someone actually wanted them.

Why do we end up with obsolete software and hardware? Sometimes it's because it seems like a good idea at the time: the DVD-RAM drive was for backup and archiving but it turned out to be far too slow and then DVDs came down in price instead. I don't think anything I had backed up onto DAT tapes (and even some Exabytes) would run now so I don't regret binning those. Sometimes even the systems you made them for vanish (CD-I anyone?) and, of course, operating systems change over time.

Apple's move over to the Lion version of their OS is causing some grief, particularly because they have decided to drop support for programs that do not run directly on their current Intel processors (see this BBC story). Oddly, Apple did not give people any real notice of this and for most people the way they find out is a dialogue box saying that their application won't run. IMHO this intention should have been flagged with the launch of the previous version of the OS. Discussions on the excellent Mac-In-Touch web site have covered this problem in depth, even suggesting that there may be a way around it. It's unfortunate that a very cheap OS upgrade is likely to lead to a substantially larger bill for updating applications. Personally, I'm putting it off for the time being and whatever happens I'll be keeping an older OS version available for 'special occasions'.

But back to downsizing ...

It seems easier at the moment. DVDs for archiving (in duplicate and reburned every few years) and even hard discs since they are so cheap. The Mac backup system called Time Machine regularly backs me up to a separate internal disc (which is due for an upgrade) and even lets me dig back to previous versions if I really mess something up. Projects for the web using open source systems like PHP and MySQL don't require boxes of software, just the occasional O'Reilly book to help understand them. Even Word, Powerpoint and Excel are currently replaced by a version of Open Office. It just leaves dear old Photoshop and Dreamweaver among the regulars and even their boxes have got smaller.

So look under your desk, open those cupboards at the back of the room. What can you chuck out or recycle now? I just shout 'millstone' every time something goes out. It's a good feeling as long as I don't think about the money it cost at the time.

The business mindset – are you adjusting?

2011-08-12T01:28:00.000+01:00

Allthough we're in the iMedia business, our clients by and large are from traditional business. As such they have a different mindset to technology and innovation – but is that changing? In the past you might have found clashes of approach with your clients. Remember, you need to convince them of your proposed solutions to their business problems so you have had to talk to them in their terms. That has meant understanding their businesses and mindsets and tailoring how you speak about your proposed solutions to their needs so that they line up with your proposals.

But, the general business mindset has shifted a lot faster than before in the last five years; maybe as fast as our expansion in the use of technology platforms. We need to line up with our clients' mindsets so what are they?

Christoph Smaltz from Headshift gives some well founded advice for us in his blog July 25th, From traditional business to social business. He analyses the shift in traditional business thinking to the socially aware business thinking - driven by social media. He puts forward four key changes.

Businesses have moved from 'transaction' where they supply products/goods for their customers and finish the communication with them, to 'interaction' where they are concerned with the customer 's experience with them, they listen, amend, accept criticism etc. They just don't sell goods/services or whatever.
The older classifications of B2B and B2C have changed to P2P (person to person). The premise has changed to a person wanting to interact with a person, not with an anonymous business entity.
The past was about control or 'gatekeeping' information and communication within a business. Now it's about facilitating communication between all levels and with customers. This means that the business has to provide a communication platform (technology driven) to facilitate rather than control.
The last concept he develops is the change in communication within and around the traditional company. Traditionally communication was hierarchical – the top-down approach. Social communication via technology has shifted this to be networked even inside companies. Communication is equal between employees and customers.

Well worth a look, Christoph's blog might help you communicate some of your thinking to your clients. It may prompt you and your management to rethink some of your business strategies of how you communicate with your clients. Mindsets change; but we have been used to them shifting slowly. Now we have to recognise that the speed of technological advances can and does have spin-offs for the way our clients conduct business and that we have to notice the shift in business terms!

Government buys into copyright 'update'

2011-08-08T18:34:00.000+01:00

Last week the government response to the Hargreaves report on copyright was published. It seems that they have accepted the report pretty well lock stock and barrel, which may at least save the report from the black hole the Gowers report seemingly fell into. It will also suit many in the interactive industry, who wrote an open letter to the powers that be urging acceptance and then welcoming it.

There is much common sense in the recommendations. Format shifting is something 'we all' end up doing and I have always thought it a bit ingenuous of rights owners in granting a licence that only allows intangible use of something while tying it to a physical artefact such as a CD. There is a circle to square over making this work in a European framework that asks for reasonable remuneration for rights holders in such cases (such as a blank tape levy). A right of parody possibly seems better than it actually is; the existing French right includes a requirement to be funny, which must be an interesting thing to argue in court. Data mining (by which I think they really mean indexing) should be OK as long as you can't reverse-engineer the original from the bits that you mine.

No, the 'were they listening at all?' moment comes over orphan works. In principle, the idea of being able legally to publish a work where you really can't find out who owns it or can't track them down to pay them makes sense. The difficulty is that it could open a hole big enough for unscrupulous or ignorant publishers to drive a bendy-bus through, and that was what really worried the photographers. A compromise solution was to agree to non-commercial use of orphans (whatever 'non-commercial' means exactly), but even this has been ignored. I can't see a compelling case for orphans licensing outside of the heritage sector. If you're the British Library or the BBC and you have an item in a box with no label on it that clearly has an historic relevance to your project then I can be persuaded. Using an orphan photograph of a polar bear instead of getting one from a library is not what such legislation means at all.

Two things could ameliorate this: better treatment of moral rights of authors/photographers (particularly as manifested by metadata attached to photographs on the web) and a better way for an aggrieved photographer to take action. Sadly, Hargreaves had no brief to consider moral rights, so that battle is still on-going. En passant I note that the moral dimension is perhaps more a subject for the Culture minister, Jeremy Hunt, than Business minister Vince Cable. The watchword is that copyright is the means by which culture does business, and it should be a two-way street.

There is an unexpected bit of good news in the government's response. It's on page 12:

The Government will, subject to establishing the value for money case, introduce a small claims track in the Patents County Court [which deals with all kinds of intellectual property, not just patents] for cases with £5000 or less at issue, initially at a low level of resource to gauge demand, making greater provision if it is needed.

This is something I and others have been banging on about for a while: for small (ie SME) creators, the fees you get for an individual publication of your work are relatively small and so a court for such small claims is overdue.

That old scoping question!

2011-07-30T02:51:00.000+01:00

We realise by now that the key to successful iMedia project development lies in the analysis performed upfront with the client – otherwise known as 'scoping' the project. There are different ways of approaching this dependent on your expertise, the market sector of the client, the business objectives and the proposed users. However you approach this important phase of your project, you can and should constantly improve it by learning from your mistakes, listening to your colleagues and checking up on the trends in your competitors.

In recognition of the difficulty of this scoping task, some companies are now offering it as a separate paid service. Now that's interesting, don't you think? They offer to go in and help the clients write a briefing document for other companies but they may well end up doing the project themselves, of course. Many iMedia companies know how difficult it is to get a client to state exactly what they want and then stick to it or pay for changes. There is constant pressure to begin a project before the true scope is known. How ingenious that some side-step this hassle by separating the process out into a piece of paid consultancy. Not bad, eh? Take a look at a few who offer this and see how they sell their service. It seems to make good sense.

webdev Studios use this approach quoting $80 an hour for it.

dotAgency approach this stage from a slightly different angle where the fee for scoping is a percentage of the larger project fee. They don't cut themselves out of the development part but offer a service to help with the definition of the project.

HP go for the middle ground where they will do a scoping document that the client can take on to others, but they are happy to develop the project as well taking the fee for the scoping off the full project budget (or building it in to the budget costs, as we see it).

All positive moves to demonstrate to clients the importance of this initial stage, we reckon. What do you do? Could this be an answer for you?

Just to remind you of what happens to your projects if the scoping is skimped, Tadd Barnes has some advice in, Scoping an Enterprise Website? Keys to avoiding Scope Creep.

He examines the role of revisions, testing different browser versions, adding a mobile version of a site, and integrating backend systems with the site as the worst offenders for causing scope creep Do you agree?

Interactive media testing - what type?

2011-07-23T01:54:00.000+01:00

As the interactive sector grows new interactive market segments emerge. Many are adjuncts to traditional media that are used in interactive ways – so we get interactive social video on Facebook and YouTube sites, for example. We get interactive ways to audition and buy audio and video downloads using applications like iTunes. We get interactive retail of 'real' goods through sites like eBay and Amazon. Because interactive media is now able to command contact with so many of the public because of the plethora of interactive channels available, the push to match the interactivity with the particular market segment needs becomes important. This means testing out various aspects of the interactivity from concept to performance in use.

Take a look at the range of research that can be (and is) utilised by the larger players at Interactive Media Research and learn what will be expected by the medium and smaller players in the interactive market in time. They quote User and Market evaluation, Concept and content testing, website usability, user profiling, brand evaluation, and Ad and sponsorship tracking, as what they offer. All these mean assessment in some form. Remember the difference between evaluation and testing is that evaluation has a broader remit to assess the development, delivery and reaction to the interactive offering; whereas testing means pre-defining criteria of assessment and then testing to check the performance of an application. Testing is part of evaluation methods.

The Human Factors Test Centre (HFTC) at Fraunhofer takes a slightly different approach, citing their offerings as Usability Tests, Expert evaluation, Accessibility Tests, Design studies, User Requirements analysis, and market research.

Maybe it is time to evaluate your own company's approach to testing? We would have to add many options to our Testing section in our Scoping Questionnaire now instead of just listing 5 common options and then adding the 'other' category as a catch-all. Remember to decide whether you'd do these as in-house tests or contract out to specialists when working out the budget for your clients. Have your clients started demanding such wider ranging testing yet? They will. Are you ready?

Updating the glossary of iMedia project management

2011-07-18T23:16:00.000+01:00

The terms keep coming, don't they! Even though some aspects of technology have stabalised somewhat, the plethora of terms spread out as the once niche markets grow into separate segments.

What am I going on about – well, take for example the following terms that are now commonplace but have only emerged in the last few years.

Social Media
Mobile media
Digital signage
Twitter /Tweets
e-retailing
Web analytics
Creative technologists
Crowd-sourcing
User-generated content
Content personalisation
Apps
Vouchers (mobile and digital)
Location-based data/services
Cloud-based services

You may think you understand these terms. They sometimes seem self-explanatory. However, often their meaning shifts over their lifetime and that can be relatively short. Technology terms shift quickly so the meaning of terms changes too. At present here are the definitions that we reckon attach the market meaning to these terms. Anyone want to pitch in with any more – and don't forget the definition too!

Social media – an online conversational dynamic media where the participants shape the creation of the content. The content can take the form of interactive text, graphics, audio and video in whatever form the creators wants. It is dynamic because it is collectively constructed as an ongoing dialogue between people. Check out 30 Social Media Definitions by Heidi Cohen to drill down a bit on this evolving concept.

Mobile media – the mobile technology platforms such as iPads, iPhones, tablets, MP3 devices, laptops, that allow us to access information/data on the move. You might be interested in the stats given in the GSMA Mobile Media Metrics Report.

Digital signage – Use of computer or video technology (or both) for applications ranging from simple direction signs to advertising billboards. This has the advantage of both versatility and instant updating combined with the ability to manage a large number of sites at once over the internet. The technology can be very sophisticated, including use of 3D and pseudo-holographic imagery.

Twitter/tweets – an instant messaging system that allows text messages up to 140 characters to be sent to a listing of followers. Twitter is the system designed to allow colleagues and friends to stay in frequent touch throughout the day via tweets, the individual messages. But its communicative power has migrated to wider communication serving commercial, political and celebrity users among others. Tweeting is a part of social networking/media. Subjects being discussed can be marked with hashtags (a word preceded by a # symbol) to facilitate searching.

e-retailing or e-tailing – the use of interactive media platforms to sell items. The development of Amazon is often used as an example of a successful online e-retailer.

Web analytics – the analysis of data about visitors to a web site or other online facility. This has grown from simple counting of hits to pages to look at users in more detail, sometimes even their other browsing habits, and to study the paths users take on their online journey. Some web analytic techniques, which may track users across many web sites, are seen as unnecessarily intrusive.

Creative technologists – a new job title that tries to plug the gap between creatives (as in agencies) and technologists (as in computer geeks) where the combined skills are necessary to achieve an interactive solution rather than the solution being skewed towards one skill or the other.

Crowd-sourcing – large numbers of people providing information or even data for a project. Examples include the Geograph project, where people take photographs in every 1km square of the UK national grid, and Wikis, which are written by a (sometimes) large number of users.

User-generated content – From a social media perspective, this means content that is created and uploaded by the users themselves, then shared with others. This can grow as users cite and then link to a particular offering they like.

Content personalisation – From a commercial point of view this is what is offered to an online user that can be tailored to their specific interests based on analytics or location-based information. This is mostly used to restrict advertisements shown to those considered most likely to elicit a response based on what is known about the user.

Apps – applications have often been called apps by programmers but the term is increasingly used to denote small focused programs especially on mobile devices. Angry Birds – a top selling game on the iPhone and Logmein good for business/commercial people wanting to log in to their work computer from a mobile. See a recent top ten selection for the iPhone.

Vouchers (mobile and digital) – a number of companies such as Groupon and Voucher Cloud (http://www.vouchercloud.com) negotiate discounts for their 'members' with retailers and service providers. These offers can be accessed by printing out a voucher or by showing a voucher on the mobile device screen.

Location-based data/services – services that take note of the user's location to tailor the offering. This could be based on geographic mapping of computer IP addresses, often used to restrict access to content by people in the 'wrong' country. In mobile services the location of the device (determined by cell tower, wi-fi hot spot or GPS) can be used to accurately offer local services such as 'where is my nearest restaurant?'.

Cloud-based services – the ability to use online storage at an indeterminate location ('in the cloud') instead of physically located in the user's premises. At one level this allows a small user to take advantage of security and instant scalability offered by large data-storage offerings but it also means the user can access the cloud storage from any physical location and, if appropriate, the data can be shared with other users anywhere in the world. There are some security concerns with cloud storage, both in terms of privacy but also protection from corruption or loss of data. However, it can be argued that the scale of commercial cloud storage allows more sophisticated security techniques to be used than most users could employ themselves.

What's in a (domain) name

2011-07-09T11:54:00.000+01:00

On the one hand it has been difficult to understand restrictions on what could be made into a domain name. After all, the domain name system works by looking at a string of alphanumerics (plus the odd bit of punctuation) in a database that then tells your computer the IP address that matches that domain. But there have always been restrictions.

Some were localised, such as Nominet in the UK does not allow third level domain names to be made up of just two letters: so me.co.uk is not allowed. Some were more general, such as the use only of letters in the basic non-accented roman alphabet. (I should point out that we should not think of these as characters with accents, they are different letters. In Danish the letter Å comes after Z in the alphabet ... making it difficult to find Århus in a gazetteer ... but in DNS terms it is 'unaccented Roman letters' that count.)

Actually my favourite historic oddity is that back in the early days of domain names, academics tried to get us to accept a domain name structure that had a descending hierarchy (ie uk.ac.ucl rather than ucl.ac.uk) on the basis that it was more logical. They had a point, if you think about it, telephone numbers work this way around, so why not domains. However, they lost that battle.

DNS, as it is called, is all about to change in a big way, because ICANN, who 'run' the domain name system have thrown the doors open to non-Roman characters (including things like Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese) and are also freeing up the so-called generic top level domains (known as gLTDs) so that 'anyone' could devise and set up their own equivalent to .com. The former has to be a good thing since the world has come a long way since upper case ASCI characters were considered a suitable way to communicate. The latter is a little more complicated.

The cost of entry into this brave new DNS world is not going to be cheap. $185 thousand is the starting price, and the published FAQ says

Any established public or private organization located anywhere in the world can apply to form and operate a
new gTLD Registry.

This would exclude individuals ... but then is running a domain registry something an individual would do?

So what kind of organisations might apply to set up new gLTDs? Some will be brands, and I could be cynical and say this looks like another way to part large companies from their money in the name of brand-protection. So there might in future be such domains as .bbc, .sony or .macdonalds. However, such addresses would probably map to web pages already in an existing domain. Some gLTDs might provide a focus for beliefs and opinions, so we might see .vatican, .democrats or .flatearth. Some could even encompass spaces with a more artistic or emotional intent, so I may consider registering .photography, .thaifood or even .funonafridaynight.

For those of us with clients to advise on domains this may not, at first glance, be a big issue since few of them would want to bear the cost and hassle of running a registry. However, we need to keep an eye on what is registered, since one or more of the new gLTDs could be tempting to a client ... and remember, the registrar of the gLTD will be setting the price.

Types of Interactive Media Projects

2011-06-23T22:13:00.000+01:00

With the increase in platform availability from web, mobile, and iTV, and the widening of use from business to social media, the range and type of interactive media projects has increased dramatically over the last few years.

This places an added burden on developers since the type of project together with its intended audience shapes the relevant content and interactivity (interface). The platforms dictate their own interface limitations on top of the concept of relevance as well. So, the mix of decisions has escalated, the work with the client to define the scope of the project has splintered, the need for a strong project management hand in the developers has increased.

We had problems enough to define the type of interactive projects in a business context a few years ago. In the end we took a project management stance looking at the context in which they succeeded and what clients had found going wrong. This included things such as the objectives of the business changing from the agreed objectives during the lifetime of the project so that although the project was completed according to the original scope, time and budget, it didn't then meet with the changed business/market direction. We highlighted other dilemmas where the developers knew more about the interactive market needs than the clients, but the clients didn't listen and then the ultimate project was found by them not to work in the market as they wanted. Finally, we admitted that sometimes projects don't succeed because the users find them too problematic to use. This might occur because the clients dictated the interactive interface without understanding or trialling use, or that the developers didn't stress this as an absolute so that their design didn't function as it should.

We went on to define the type of project an interactive company does according to where their time was spent. This fell under the categories: client, bread and butter, investment projects, Maintenance projects, quick fix, R and D, Good will, Pitches/tenders. (See Chapter 1 of Managing Interactive Media: Project management for Web and Digital Media.)

How one categorises the type of project depends on many factors. Although our concept remains good in principle, it needs expanding perhaps. But where you spend your time and effort might still work for you as a company.

The only other place we can hope to see a definition of project types might lie in the categories of awards put forward by the interactive associations. Take a quick look at these because each awards group defines them very differently and/or concentrate on particular aspects of development. It's fascinating – well we think so. Maybe it'll encourage you to enter some of your projects for awards. Many categories are still open for 2011. Good luck.

BIMA (British Interactive Media Association)
IMA (Interactive Media Awards)
IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group)
Europrix

Scope creep - not our problem

2011-06-18T01:00:00.000+01:00

Well wouldn't it be nice if we could say that! It's the bane of every project. But we can and do take measures to control changes/creep, don't we? It's always a good thing to remind ourselves of basic sound principles that will work in our favour and that's the point of this week's spotlight on recent insights into dealing with creep.

Just in case, scope creep means changes to a project that necessitate extra work often wanted for free. Ah! Yes! Remember what it means now? It's those projects where clients keep expanding what they want as they go along after a price has been established for a particular set of needs. There's a lovely admission of guilt from a client who realises they do this at I'm a self-inflicted scope-creeper! Arggh, on Bracket Project's web site, and the comments on this read reassuringly too.

Mind you, sometimes it isn't just the clients who get inspiration and want to change a few things. These ideas can come from your team and management too. Someone has to stand firm and focus all back on the objectives agreed. Is that person you? Often it is part of the project manager's role.

Patsy from Front - web strategy, design and technology studio - in Manning up your project crew defines the roles needed on a web design team recognising that someone has to stand firm on the scope creep issues. She defines the person as a Guardian. Perhaps that appeals to you more than the title Project Manager.

If you're sitting there wondering that it's all very well but how do we stop creep, How to identify and clarify a Project Scope, Dwight Dunkley 6th June 2011, gives strong sharp advice. Do scroll down to the Tips and Advice part of the page to get the most benefit.

Of course we address this a lot in our Chapter 3 Scoping the project in Managing Interactive Media - Project Management for Web and Digital Media, but we're always willing to listen and find a new perspective; anything that can help in one of the most crucial issues to affect our projects. Any more advice is very welcome.

Conflict resolution and the workplace

2011-06-11T01:42:00.000+01:00

Those of you that did our project management course will know that this is one of my favourite topics. iMedia teams are necessarily cross-functional with their skill sets and this can lead to more differences of opinion/perspective as a result. Then add in the different personalities and the risk for conflict increases again. It still has not been appreciated that conflict in the workplace has increased in businesses perhaps as a result of workers being squeezed for more work and the tougher working conditions during and continuing after the recession.

I was pleased to find that some figures - meaning monetary values - had started to be put against the cost of conflict in the workplace. Often it is only once a problem has been quantified in terms of money that management realise that minimising this can bring dividends. See Workplace Mediation - Dispute Resolution at Coaching 4 Success, and How to stop Conflict in the Workplace before it Happens, at eHow by Coleen Reinhart, May 2011.

£33 billion in the UK annually makes you think, doesn't it? So much management time, so much team member time and emotions all operating against productivity.

We advocated the use of ground rules where all team members (including management) agree on how to conduct themselves in any discord situation, what procedures to follow and who to use as a mediator if necessary. This signing up to ground rules continues to be a strategy that is recommended but we realised that the culture of some of your organisations might not find this acceptable. The concept of ground rules is reiterated and expanded in the Interest-based Relational Approach (IBR) section of Mindtools , Conflict Resolution - resolving conflict rationally and effectively, and Barbara Bradbury addresses the concept in a lighter fashion in Resolving Conflict - 7 Inspired Tips for leaders, May 2011.

And, just to end on a visual note for those that have a more pictorial learning style, you'll appreciate the myriad images used to try and capture that conflict moment! Which makes most sense to you?

Happy resolutions!

Clients' prior business experiences and the consequences for us

2011-06-02T19:25:00.000+01:00

In these financially constrained times it means more to retain your clients rather than put your time and effort into finding new ones. That is, of course, unless the client has more than taken advantage of the relationship to the point that the people involved are in danger of losing your company money!

That said, do you know your company's churn? The average online company churn as of 2 years ago was reported as 98.7%! 60% of first time clients dropped their company within six weeks! See Harris Interactive Src Risk, Churn Win Back Workshop, slide 9. Harris Interactive states that if you retain clients then their value/spend increases with time. Now that can mean a lot.

Why do your clients leave? Have you any intelligence on this? Perhaps you should try to find out. It tends to be the role of the Account Manager/Project Manager to understand the reasons for leaving, but is the intelligence brought together and analysed in terms of your company performance?

Harris Interactive cites several reasons for clients defecting: unmet expectations, low perceived value, competitive attraction, and unexpressed/unresolved complaints. (See slide 14 Causes/Effects of Risk and Churn.) How are you defining defections?

It is hard to find general business information on client reactions and their impact but harder still for interactive media businesses. However, Garry, in his Intelligent Positioning Blog, the Integrating Value section of The Value in Understanding the Customer Journey, May 2011, makes clear statements about the failure of some companies to fully understand the customer experience of their clients. He says that only 30% had looked at mobile habits and only 34% had taken account of social media behaviour.

If what he says is true — that winning a new client costs up to 5 times more than retaining an old one — shouldn't we be analysing the risks of churn?

Working together – the client/developer relationship

2011-05-28T02:40:00.000+01:00

The key word here is relationship. We know that interactive project management is a collaboration between client and developer. Each needs to know their specific role and responsibilities within the project for the project process to flow. The 'relationship' element in the partnership has to be managed sensitively especially in interactive projects because the risks of misunderstanding between client and developer increase over and above other types of project. It's that cross-functional communication again - potentially causing gaps - let alone the changes/slippage syndrome.

The people that have bridged the relationship gap in iMedia projects have had various job titles depending on the background culture of the company. So we can have Account Managers, Project Managers/Team Leaders, and Client or Customer Relationship Managers. The Account Managers come from the Agency type of culture and has been deemed more on the creative side; the Project Manager/Team Leader is from a newer breed of iMedia companies and emerges from the software side; the Client/Customer Relationship Managers hail from the business and management side.

The Account Managers have traditionally had a more hands-on and personal relationship with the clients whereas the client/customer relationship managers are linked with the use of software packages that track and flag information about the clients that action responses from the managers. The Project Managers are in the middle of this. Whatever the role is called, it is a difficult one. A successful relationship manager has great people skills, keen business skills and a strong sense of commitment to finish a project that is successfully perceived from all sides. Hard, yes.

It was difficult to try to define this relationship role. There are some definitions of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and so by inference what a CRM role is: see Verbatims - and is there parity across all the definitions?

Then there is an Account Relationship Manager's job description sample at Great Sample Resume

Andrew Sobel has defined 15 common pitfalls to Client Management in his Client Loyalty newsletter (PDF). Take a look and assess if you fall into any.

Finally - just because I'm a stirrer - have a look at the salary scale for Client Relationship Managers at, SalesTarget.

These don't answer all the questions raised by the various people in iMedia projects who fulfil the 'relationship management' role, but it starts the conversation!

Copyright back on the political agenda

2011-05-20T21:54:00.000+01:00

I have written in the past about some of the currently contentious issues in intellectual property, such as orphan works and the use of metadata to preserve a creator's moral rights.

Recently there have been two calls for public input into the copyright process. One was a call for evidence by the Culture select committee, which has been put on hold for the moment, and the other was the Hargreaves Report.

Hargreaves had been touted as the 'Google Report' since it was suggested that one of its issues, changes to our copyright exceptions (called fair dealing) to match the American fair use model, had been somehow suggested to the Prime Minister by Google, by saying that our rights regime prevented the Googles of this world from starting here in the UK. Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC put that very point to Google's Eric Schmidt, who admitted that getting a business underway in the USA was easier than in Europe but said he was "not aware" of Google saying this was a rights problem.

Elsewhere in Rory's BBC blog, and that of Arts colleague Will Gompertz there were postings on Hargreaves. What I recommend you do is read the comments, for the Battle of Waterloo will these days be won on the playing fields of blog comments. I have chipped in (and bit my tongue on several occasions) but ... within the severe size limits currently imposed by the BBC on such things ... the comments expose a lot of the obsessions and occasional ignorance of what is a very arcane area of law and very difficult for people to understand.

Apart from the fair use and orphan works bits in Hargreaves ... and a welcome call for format shifting and parody exceptions, one theme is of what I might dare call an improvement in fairness and openness in rights dealings. The Intellectual Property Office is urged to give examples of what you can and can't do, which would have some force of law, and the government is encouraged to make it more practical, and cost-effective, for small rights owners who have been infringed to gain redress.

One omission is that moral rights don't get a look-in. There will be areas of the creative industries, including the small corner where I shine my light, that will find that a serious flaw.

Oh, and the report (PDF here) also asks that it doesn't suffer the fate of some previous such reports and that the government acts on its recommendations. It looks as if copyright is back on the agenda.

Cookies ... half-baked or crumbling?

2011-05-14T02:56:00.000+01:00

The Information Commissioner's Office has been busy with not one but two brand new documents for us to look over.

The first is a Data Sharing Code of Practice.

Those of us who handle data related to web sites are most likely to be doing this on behalf of a client (which makes us data processors rather than data controllers) although for our internal business purposed we will probably have some data that needs to be carefully handled in a controlling capacity, even if it is only personnel records.

However, even as data processors we have responsibilities, and you should make sure that the person responsible for your data looks over this code of practice.

In some ways that's the easy one. The other is yet another piece of legislation about cookies.

Just when we thought we'd covered ourselves for using cookies by explaining opt-outs and making sure we really needed to use them, those nice people at the European Commission are tightening the rules and the ICO has provided some guidelines.

Whereas clause 6(2) used to say we needed to advise the user about how we used cookies and told them how to opt out, now the clause says we have to advise the user about how we use cookies and get their consent.

There are exceptions for repeated visits (It looks to me that you only need to ask the first time) and for'strictly necessary' for a service requested by the user, which the ICO suggest is things like shopping carts. A user can also set global consent levels in a browser to signify consent.

Now I know you can set such things in a browser at the moment (no cookies, cookies only from the web site I'm visiting, any cookie) but the web site can't interrogate this. I'm sure the major browser manufacturers will have this sorted in time (sarchasm alert). Would a consent in sign-up terms and conditions be enough? What do you do about systems which already have signed-up users?

Oh ... and we have until May 26th to sort this out.

Responsibility in projects - what it's all about

2011-05-06T21:25:00.000+01:00

A project manager is the person that has the responsibility to complete the defined project within the time, budget and resources allocated. Sounds straightforward doesn't it? But we know differently. Andy says the best project manager he ever worked with used to say he was the man who had to say 'no' in the morning when the creative boss came in with new ideas. Many projects (not that one) are poorly defined or even undefined which makes the job well nigh impossible. Often the project manager has to do lots of ground work to contain the area of responsibility by defining the boundaries. We all know about project 'creep' if the boundaries aren't established, and 'creep' spells the downfall of the project – be warned.

How about the people who cause the 'creep'? How do we control them? Can we? It is people who change the boundaries that cause project creep so once the project has been defined it is the people who need to be managed. Not easy. Jamie Flinchbaugh, in his blog 30th April 2011, 10 Management Traps - and How to Avoid Them, puts it nicely when he says, “It is as important to design people out of the process as designing people in to the process.” That's experience talking.

People push boundaries. They will be vocal especially if they are managers in their own right. But expertise in fields often drives people to think they have the right to push the boundaries too. And we know that the mix of expertise in digital projects is greater than many other forms of project. It is this mix of other managers used to having their way, and experts, who believe their greater knowledge in one area gives them the right to be heard and influence the outcome of the project, that contribute to the difficulties of digital project management.

The right to be heard is essential for all. The right to influence the outcome of the project lies in fewer hands - those with the authority to negotiate changes to the project boundaries with the consequences on the time, budget and resources. This is where using a RACI chart in your project can really help. Remember RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. It's a chart that maps the amount of influence any person involved in the project has and determines who you need to listen to and act on the instructions. If you need a refresher on the RACI chart process, look back through our blog and/or see: The Project Notebook 22nd May 2009, Expectations, RACI and Raci-VS.

There may well be very vocal people who don't have the necessary authority to command the influence they want. They may use sheer force of personality - a common approach. But you can have a measure of control if you show that it isn't you they need to influence but X, Y and Z people in their organization who have the authority to make changes to the project and accept the resulting impact on time, cost and quality. This can throw the responsibility back to others and away from you unless the pressure is coming from your own organization! Then the same applies but you will need to handle it and possibly decide whether you take up the baton and ask for changes yourself based on the input. However, this will keep the communication flowing better around and through the people in the project while giving you some protection.

Some project managers have found the definition of Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed confusing. Alternatives have been used instead and may suit you better. Define your own if from your experience the traditional RACI indicators have not worked for you. The principle is good – which people have the power and authority to make changes – usually the sign-off people you've identified as part of the defining process, and which people should be kept informed for different purposes. Some examples of alternative definitions can be seen at the Wikipedia entry.

It's a difficult part of project management but one that can work for you particularly if you have had difficulties with people butting in where they shouldn't. You are not alone in that, we can assure you.

User-centred design: how good is your usability?

2011-04-28T22:25:00.000+01:00

If you are working across industry sectors, this question of usability can get complex. There are, of course, some basics that prove valuable for general usability of iMedia sites and we won't repeat those here. Jakob Nielsen's Useit website has an established reputation because of his long involvement in the area and it's a good place to start if you want a comprehensive updated overview.

If you haven't visited his site for a while you'll notice that the usability research area has become divided by business sectors and age groups. Those are telling in that usability guidelines have found variances according to the function and profile of use for the interactive user, be it for web, mobile, or smart phone device.

An increase in usability means more satisfied customers ... means better return from the exchange whether that is monetary or affinity to the brand/information. The increase in awareness of the importance of usability has led to a proliferation of Usability jobs. If you're after a usability job or need pointers for advertising for a usability professional, you can browse various sites and we nominate Total Jobs as another indicator here.

If you're involved in producing UK government related web sites, they have issued new usability guidelines in the past week so you may need to check your offerings to this sector to make sure you'll conform for the future and/or revise your current offerings accordingly. Take a look at the COI for the latest where they cover page layout, navigation, writing content, content elements, forms, search, QA and standards and common pages.

If you're involved with e-commerce sites then there's a timely article on econsultancy's site by Paul Rouke with an eye-catching title, WTF does usability best practice mean?, 27th April 2011. Do take a quick look at the Lakeland research that he notes written up by Graham Charlton 7th April 2011, Ten Best Practices from the New Lakeland website. There you'll see examples from their revised site in action with apposite analysis.

It's been a while coming but the sites influenced by Location-based services have a strong following that is growing because they make good sense to any user. Just think of trying to live without the train arrival and departure board information on your smart phone if you regularly use trains, or sat-nav in your car. What about Google Earth/Street maps/view and their spin-off apps? Social media shared information can lead to business opportunities for local businesses when they may least expect it. Lots of people didn't know where Carlilse/Cumbria is even though they'd bought tickets for an event there online. The anonymous blogger realised that many would be looking for accommodation nearby as well as other services and that if the local businesses hadn't placed a Google map app on their sites they would lose business. See: Location-based- marketing will find its feet this Summer. 20th April 2011

If you are working on smart phone apps then you'll also need to keep up with usability issues specifically related to their use: see Where News Apps Come Out On Top in Ground-breaking App Usability Study, 15th April 2011.

This is why usability experts are in more demand than ever. Do you have some? Do you have an alliance with a specialist company or two? Are you costing usability into your project budget breakdowns and if so how? Usability research methods vary a lot and their costs vary in tandem. Not an easy subject but usability methods will have to wait for another time.

Team management - some recent insights

2011-04-22T02:42:00.000+01:00

I really relate to this topic and think it has been underestimated in its importance for managing successful projects. The team composition has changed significantly over a decade or more, as well as the communication channels with team members, and it follows that management practices should change too. What, if anything, does the present research find for us?

I have taken a different tack this time by only looking at some of the latest scholarly findings. Yes, there is still a gulf between the academic and business world, but they do have one thing we don't have: time to research. They have a different approach to communicating findings too - there is an academic vernacular - I wonder if that's been the topic of research! However, their insights do make you think and that in itself is worth a lot. Get your 'little grey cells ready' for an onslaught!

There's a summary of an article, Effective Leader-Employee Relationships in the 21st Century, by Edwin L. Mourino-Ruiz, as part of the 2010 Pfeiffer Annual: Consulting book edited by Elaine Biech, in Google Books.

Edwin cites good LMX (Leader-Member Exchange) as a concept linked to the positive and fruitful exchange of communication between a manager and employee. This builds up trust and commitment from the employee. Poor exchange, because of difference in personality etc., has a less fruitful outcome: it's like a self-fulfilling prophesy syndrome. We can relate to that. Not everyone gets on with everyone else. The theory grew from research 25 years ago from Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) and has been built on since. It's a concept that you may come across in some training courses. But with the increase in virtual teams - yes, we've seen that - positive communication patterns, the building of trust and commitment become harder. Current researchers find that although technology increases the forms of communication it also allows for more miscommunication; citing the lack of non-verbal clues, the predominance of written communication and cross-cultural differences as factors. So, organisations with virtual teams are given the advice to recognise five challenges: building trust, cohesion, team identity, balancing interpersonal and technical skills, and recognising the performance of the virtual team members. (Kirkman, Rosen, Gibson, Tesluk and McPherson 2002). Notice that trust is number 1 on the list, hence the linking back to the earlier research about LMX!

Trust surfaces again in another article from a collection of symposium presentations 2010 - SIGMIS-CPR '10. Here, Mary Summer and Judith Molka-Danielsen take a look at Global teams and project success. Their tips are:

... that team commitment, trust, and team processes played a more important role than cultural differences in the effectiveness of the global IT teams.

Find the summary and access to the full article at: portal.acm.org.

However, others are probing what cultural differences mean. They are beginning to think that cognitive differences in the way individuals have of solving problems may influence team conflict, as well as the differences of culture having an impact. See Managing Cognitive and Cultural Diversity in Global IT Teams, by Katherine Jablokow and Mark Myers, in the IEEE Proceedings of 2010 summarised at: www.computer.org.

So, the question of trust with team members seems to be a popular issue, and cognitive and cultural differences might need to be managed in virtual team environments. Do you have any experiences that point to these being important issues. Who do you 'trust' in your organisation and does it make a difference to you? Will the popular concept that men and women think differently have to be expanded? What culture are you from and how does it affect your interaction?

Hope your little grey cells are not aching too much now!

Does an app mean better business?

2011-04-13T23:22:00.000+01:00

Two related stories on the BBC web site last week:

Does your firm need its own mobile app? from April 8th, which asked about use of mobile apps to develop brands.
Trimming the fat: Tech tips for start-ups at GeeknRolla, on April 4th, which looked at 'trimming the fat' in tech company startups ... including making good use of (you guessed it) mobile apps

As user behaviour gravitates towards hand-held devices it's easy to see that applications to make use of these can be beneficial both inside your business (a kind of intra-app) and outside (an extra-app), especially if you have a requirement that is aided by knowing where the device is located. Such things can be as simple as a properly formatted web page read in a browser on the device but increasingly it's a dedicated piece of stand-alone code that communicates with your backend using some kind of web services protocol.

In many cases, especially internal ones, a browser-based solution will be more cost-effective, especially if you have ready access to web-type expertise. Since you probably need to call upon lower-level programming to write an app for, say, the iPhone this is more costly and tens of thousands of pounds are often bandied about, which will frighten off some smaller companies. It would be nice if easier toolkits were available, with a lower cost of entry but Apple, at least, seem to me to be discouraging such things. On the other hand the number of teenagers writing apps almost in their spare time suggests that it can't be that hard.

What are you doing? Are you having C++ apps written for you; are you coding for web browsers; or are you possibly missing out on a useful tool. Think of this; one of my clients has an inventory of hardware that they need to check against a database to verify compliance with various standards. The ability to wander around the racks of kit with an iPad or even iPhone in hand to check data and do things like correct model numbers is something that will be very useful to them. In this case I think we can use the browser method to do the job and it'll be an interesting task to work on.

Do you have any intra- or extra-apps that you produced for your business? Tell us about it.

Evaluation of web sites

2011-04-08T00:07:00.000+01:00

Most readers will relate to usability and accessibility issues when the term evaluation is used in our context of iMedia design. Here, we'll concentrate on sub-sets of usability/accessibility issues for a change. The term evaluation has grown in its scope over the years, and its importance has increased as well. The users themselves are more savvy than they used to be. Many have received evaluation of web site training especially if they have been part of modern educational institutions. So our sites may be evaluated using a whole set of criteria that we haven't taken into account before including credibility of authorship and ethical practices.

You can get the gist of this training - designed to counter the quick cut and paste of digital information, little thought and little time, academic answers by students in educational establishments - by looking at some of the training itself. Mind you, we are conscious that you can apply it all to this blog as well...

First, Mr G PD's training module for Website evaluation for students, and secondly a company approach, Easybib, which claims it has evaluated and rated over 50% of web sites (Wikipedia gets the thumbs down, by the way).

Why am I bringing this up? Well, we can all get in a rut. We can all decide that evaluation is someone else's job. Whatever! It's refreshing to take a look with new eyes at sites we have created. When was the last time your company revised its evaluation criteria? Do you have one?
Here are a couple of freebees that can prompt some thought if you need a nudge in the evaluation direction. There are many more available if you need to do a better appraisal – just do a search for free guidelines.

Web Site Audit Experts.Com has a basic checklist and you can then access a 170 item listing from there. And NGNG Enterprises (No guts, no glory!) Amber Ludwig offers an 11 page guide.

Different types of sites need different appraisal/evaluation criteria. So a single list may not suit all that you offer: bear that in mind. Some advocate having a user survey on the site so that you can keep abreast of changing attitudes in the user-base. Do you use those, for example? You can find examples of those through an internet search too.

Then, an article on Intranets started me thinking. I'd forgotten about those types of sites. The captive users who work for the company form a sub-set of users that have their own agenda, attitudes and opinions. See Michael Marchionda's The Key to a Successful Intranet Site Evaluation.

We work in a fast changing field but it's not just the technology that changes. We are meant to serve the users of the technology. How best to do that involves constant evaluation of ourselves.

Should we worry about metadata?

2011-04-01T16:57:00.000+01:00

What is metadata? One way to think about it is as data about data. Metadata is to your data file as the contents, index and 'back of the title page' are to a book.

On the web there is metadata provision in every web page, in the form of the meta tags in the header of the html file. Here we can put key words, a description of the page, and a variety of other pieces of information that, to be honest, we often don't include. It is also possible to include metadata in image files, including JPEGs. When you take a photo with a digital camera, the camera will automatically include metadata about the settings when the shot was taken, and in some cameras you can set that to include the photographer's name and copyright information.

The use of metadata in online images is becoming increasingly contentious. One of the problems being that in some cases any metadata, including the data that might identify the copyright in the image, is being removed, by accident or by design. Many in the photographic community are worried that widespread posting of images on websites, especially social media sites, risks creating so-called orphan works; where the author is either not known or cannot be traced. This is because sometimes the internet seems to be viewed as a copyright-free zone. I particularly like the copyright notice on the middle photograph.

So, what should we be doing if we publish images on our web sites?

Make sure published metadata includes attribution data (ie who took the photo) and the URL of your web site
If you allow user uploading of images be sure to include any metadata in the original file
If you resize images make sure any metadata is carried over
Don't use images without permission unless you know they are out of copyright

There's a great online tool which can show you metadata for a bewildering range of file types, including the common image formats. It was written by Jeffrey Friedl in 2006 and you can find out about it on his blog and try it out for yourself.

[PS: Jeffrey Friedl wrote the O'Reilly book Mastering Regular Expressions. An essential programmer's read.]

Stand by for changes in the pitch process

2011-03-17T20:54:00.000Z

Will it really happen? There seem to be two movements that might help us with this. The first was the government recognising that small firms are excluded from the pitch process for government tenders through no fault of their own. A great wake-up moment was provided by Fubra - a small website company - that recognised how it could save their government client 97% on the Businesslink website but they were rejected and lost in the bureaucratic detail. See The Telegraph story by Richard Tyler 15.11.2010

Vince Cable appeared to recognise the problem several months ago and then David Cameron has given a personal message to SMEs in February at the SMEhub website indicating that 25% of government tenders should be aimed at SMEs and doing away with the prequalification process for lower tenders.

Is anyone seeing a difference? By the way, there's a contract finder government link in that SMEhub page that some might be interested in.

Also, you are encouraged, if an SME, to voice your views to the OGC (Office for Government Contracts) as part of a wider EU procurement initiative to modernise EU procurement processes at the Win Tenders web site.

The second movement that might have an impact on the problematic pitch and tender process is a new set of guidelines devised by the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) and ISBA (Incorporated Society of British Advertisers) and showcased today at the ISBA Annual Conference, The pitching conundrum... a better way?, and at the IPA website in The need for a new pitch process. This will link you to The Marketing magazine for a fuller explanation but you'll have to register there (registration is free).

The pitch and tender process for digital contracts had difficulties over and above normal contracts so I hope the involvement of agency CEOs in the development of these new guidelines have taken that into account. It remains to be seen. We have noted many times how digital SMEs are hostages to fortune in the older style agency pitch processes. But now agencies have had to embrace rather than marginalise their digital colleagues as the sector has become more mature, hopefully these new guidelines will help. Who knows! But watch this space.

Testing your interactive products and services

2011-03-12T00:54:00.000Z

Testing has become more sophisticated over the last few years as clients recognise the impact interactive products and services can have on their market segment. The breadth and number of tests has increased and although some of the processes have become automated (Watir and Selenium appear to be tools of choice), many more rely on targeted testing of their particular market. This places the emphasis on the front end product testing while the back end (software related tests) are still important since the functionality and reliability of the product drives the responses of the user tests.

Testing every stage of a new product or service is part of the quality process. In project management terms every extra test, over and above a standard set of tests offered by your company, should be costed and budgeted for each project. The importance of dedicated and skilled testers is reflected in the growth of jobs in this field and the increase in salaries they have enjoyed. Because testing has grown in complexity and specialist knowledge, it can command a premium for its skilled labour.

Look at the jobs available for web testing and the skills they seek at The Job Board.

You may need to take stock of the tests you offer as standard. What back-end (software related) testing do you carry out for each platform? What front-end tests do you offer as standard? What extra tests are you happy to manage? When would you bring in dedicated specialists?
To help, we offered 32 different types of test in our listing in Chapter 9 of our book, Managing Interactive Media: project management for web and digital media. But, you need to keep up with the changes.

Take a quick browse of what's on offer from a couple of specialist testing companies, Labspace and Test Partners, it should give you plenty to think about. We give you the links to a Quality list of tests and software functionality tests, but take a look at others they offer too.

User testing has burgeoned. You can even make money from it as test agents need to target certain market segments so they try to build up their online test pool. Know anyone who wants to earn an extra £20 an hour? See Cogapp.

The exploding mobile business market – are you on top of it?

2011-03-05T19:48:00.000Z

You can't make a convincing business case to your clients about moving into mobile apps unless you have the overview of what is happening. You might well be busy developing the latest 'must-have' app, or extending the web presence and branding of some of your clients by linking their offerings to mobile platforms. But, will this mania survive? Will the money dry up?

Someone needs to keep an eye on the overall market and what's happening. There have been recent predictions by market researchers, and we're not saying they have definitive answers, but, there are some insights worth considering. Maybe, these insights might drive some of your conversations with your clients and get them to think strategically about what mobile presence means to them now and in a couple of years.

This FT article summarises a lot of research findings and includes some analysis of these: Enterprise mobility: Machine will speak unto machine, but will it pay?, Stephen Pritchard, 13th Feb 2011

He reckons that although mobile phone-based apps have caught the present imagination and will grow strongly, it is the business-led thrust that will push consumers in the markets of telematics, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, healthcare and security. There is a dual thrust for employing the better broadband availability and geographical analysis of data via GPS systems. He quotes the European Union's telematics research project 'eCall' where every car in Europe would have the equivalent of a black box and in the event of an incident would wirelessly send information from GPS and impact sensors to the emergency services. See the Wikipedia entry on eCall.

Forrester Research produced several reports into Mobile penetration and the possible market sectors of banking, advertising and media messaging at the end of 2010. See a search on 'Mobile' on their site.

And if you can't put the time yourself into strategy research for the emerging mobile channel, there are companies that have their finger on this particular pulse, so to speak. The Mobile Interactive Group offer to educate your clients for you - but I imagine they'd educate you too if you pay them. They claim they've done all the research and offer. 'Mobile Industry Research and Forecasting', 'Business Analysis and Change Consultancy' (relating to businesses developing a mobile strategy), and 'Mobile Program Definition'(related specifically to the business needs identified in the analysis'. See www.migan.com.

The complete mobile picture is built up of device and platform awareness as well as realising the strengths of broadband and GPS because mobile web, cloud computing and embedded data streaming form part of the bigger picture - to say nothing of the features like Augmented Reality (AR) that some tip for the top!

Let's be ready for the next market swing by understanding the consumers' reaction to emerging tech mobile offerings.

New journalism- is that what we're doing?

2011-02-25T11:30:00.000Z

The world affairs correspondent on the BBC web site, Paul Reynolds, has been musing over how his job has changed over the nine years since he 'left the "mainstream" BBC'. The most significant change has been communication with the public via the internet and the internet itself as a source of news. As Paul said in a lecture to journalism students 'some time ago' that 'the concept of the world waiting for news crews to get to disaster zones was over - witnesses there would be taking their own pictures'.

As the current situation in Libya demonstrates, sometimes the only source of information (aka news) is from those witnesses with their cameras, usually cunningly disguised as mobile telephones. In a less extreme example, it's interesting that now, with the court's permission, you can tweet from a UK court. That exemplar of nominative determinism Lord Chief Justice Judge has said so, but he limited this to journalists.

So what is a journalist? Is it (in the UK) a member of the NUJ, carrying a press card, or is it (as the OED says) "One who earns his living by editing or writing for a public journal or journals". Is the 'earns his living' important? Some would say so, and a simple Google search on the subject brings up conflicting opinions. There's a particularly interesting analysis on The Next Web by Jacob Friedman called Blogging vs. Journalism: The Ongoing Debate.

On one level this matters because in many jurisdictions journalists get special protection, notable to protect their sources. On another it matters because down the line the material that is written can become a source for further research and even further news stories. So the provenance of your sources is important. It is OK to report a rumour as long as you say it's a rumour and to give opinion as long as it is clear that it is opinion. One criticism of blogging is that it can be opinion masquerading as fact. In the Friedman piece one quote likens bloggers to people who used to write letters to newspapers but not get published.

Ironically, one blog referred to in the piece is by Jolie O'Dell and called How to tell a Journalist from a Blogger. Apparently it has caused quite a stir and makes interesting reading ... as do the comments.

I could argue that the multiplicity of sources of information brought to us by the web (and of which any web pages you publish will be a part) are now parts of a new journalism. Journalists are an important part of this, but so are bloggers, commenters on blogs, tweeters, Wikipedia editors and so, even, are the pages on a company's web site promoting a new product. As readers, we now need to have some of the attributes of researchers, since we need to know how to weight our belief in what we read based on our knowledge of its provenance. Think about how your web pages might stand up as journalistic sources and also wonder whether we should now be teaching everyone how to carry out research as part of the school curriculum.

Project Life Cycles and Project Management

2011-02-20T00:03:00.000Z

This used to be a simple question - not providing simple answers though - of understanding the planning, the design, the build and the implementation phases of a project. These underpinned a company's approach to developing projects. They were based heavily on IT inspired phases of software development as this was the closest to interactive media development.

So for the early years, the Waterfall approach dominated and for many this approach still does. If you need reminding about the Waterfall life cycle take a look at SoftDevTeam's site and their Life Cycle Selector software tool description. We don't know anything about the tool itself, by the way, but the diagrams and summary advantages and disadvantages descriptions of the spiral, waterfall, incremental, evolutionary prototyping, rapid application development, and V-shaped models of software life cycles , are illuminating. Some are new for us but then we've not been in pure software development.

Check out more definitions of models at Business E-solutions.

The planned and designed inherent Waterfall approach is iterated by Alex Baker recently in Life Cycle Stages of Website Design Process, but it is dependent on the client stating the business goal and requirements – something that proves pretty hard most of the time.
Another take on a life cycle comes from Jason Montague, An Agile Project Lifecycle, and he has a visual denoting the process. He also explains difficulties he's met in organisations when trying to explain the usefulness of using Agile processes. Remember that Agile tried to address the 'refining' of requirements that often occurs during interactive projects. The strict Waterfall software approach did not allow such changes and caused conflict between client and developer, so Agile techniques may help overcome some of the difficulties.

There are masses of Waterfall versus Agile debates still going on in cyberspace if you care to Google it, but few solid answers about the life cycle of an interactive project whether website, mobile, iTV or whatever. Shame, I'll keep looking periodically though and let you know if I find any answers. Meanwhile, how is anyone managing any project!

The CAP Code - are you ready for March 1st?

2011-02-11T20:30:00.000Z

You've probably heard through the extensive ad campaign that the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) is getting ready to implement new rulings concerned with marketing on web sites from March 1st. The CAP Code (The UK Code of Non-Broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing, issued by The Committee of Advertising Practice) is in its 12th edition from September 1st 2010, but awareness about its effect has been raised by an extensive campaign from the ASA - all done with donated ad space, apparently. You can get access to the CAP Code at the Committee of Advertising Practice

Essentially the new ruling extends the power of the ASA's digital remit. It allows the ASA to name and shame non-compliers, place warnings alongside the search result listings of non-compliers, force the removal of paid links/adverts to the non-compliers, refer non-compliers to the OFT (Office of Fair Trading) and/or the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulators.

There's quite a debate as to whether the notorious difficulty of policing the internet will dilute or even negate these powers, but companies should make sure that they understand the implications and take the necessary steps to devise and implement a strategy for them. This might include: regular checks on your web presence (this includes social media sites too), training any employees who contribute content to digital media, update any agreements used - particularly with advertisers/agents - to reflect the changes in codes of practice.

The paid link veto is supported by Google which had its own guidelines on companies using these links to improve their search ranking but which they found difficult to enforce. In fact they have part funded the CAP Code initiative. See Changes to the CAP Code - Google finds an ally in the war on paid links by Alex Postance 28th January, at Epiphany.

The ASA work from the premise of people producing marketing that is legal, decent, honest and truthful by applying The Advertising Codes, but this applies to communication that is wider than adverts, such as competitions and use of user-generated content if pulled into and used in a company's marketing for its own benefit. See the Digital Retail Advice page of the ASA.

It's just as well to understand new moves like these to make sure you are informed and take a company stance that suits you and the legal implications. You wouldn't want to fall foul and plead ignorance as it wouldn't help, now would you?

Crime hotspots pinpoint data problems

2011-02-05T02:54:00.000Z

You can't have missed the news earlier this week that UK crime information was being made available online, linked to maps and searchable by postcode. The story made the news for possibly the wrong reasons: the site was unreachable and the results seemed nonsensical in some cases.

The problem with access to the site, www.police.uk, seems to have been resolved and can be put down to intense consumer interest coupled with widespread publicity. Building a web system that can cope with thousands of hits a minute isn't easy and isn't cheap, especially if the base load predicted for the system is much less. But that's not why I'm writing this here.

I am interested in data, and have been for a long time. Data isn't really something in isolation: it usually needs interpreting and quite often needs background of how the data is collected to allow you to understand it completely. There were a couple of newsworthy elements to the crime data, one of which relates to the meaning of location.

The crime reports seem to be displayed based on postcode centroids (essentially the geometrical middle of the postcode) which tends to shift them to the middle of roads (meaning the middle of the length of a road, not the white line). This may be misleading if the criminal activity tends to occur at road junctions since centroids are rarely located there, and activity spread across a postcode will tend to be pushed to the centre, as if it was falling downhill towards the centroid. But as the web site display says: To protect privacy, crimes are mapped to points on or near the road where they occurred. That's a data output issue.

On the other hand, data input can be misleading. A call centre was logging nuisance calls to its own location when they didn't have a real location for it. That meant that the call centre itself was listed as a crime hotspot! That's a data input problem, which could be ameliorated if a 'confidence' ranking was given to logged locations.

One final thought concerns data correlation. With access to this crime data it is likely that someone will start to compare these maps with other data. This is unwise unless you really know what you are doing and what the data represents. To give an example, there may be an apparent correlation between the distribution of red admiral butterflies and car crime on Merseyside. But if you thought you saw this in a map you wouldn't take it seriously would you? I know it's a somewhat ridiculous example, but I'm sure you get my point.

Those butterflies eh?

Digital Artifacts - are they still around?

2011-01-30T02:20:00.000Z

Well, first we have to address the 'artifact/artefact' debate. It seems that initially in the UK we accepted both forms of spelling to mean made by man, but then when it was transposed to the digital domain it meant the errors that cropped up in digital production of image and sound. But in the US they preferred the spelling artifact. Now digital artefacts owe more to the archiving or production of digital items made by people while digital artifacts appear to still denote the errors in digitising or processing! That's our interpretation - any comeback? (We've seen the same with program and programme, which now have different meanings.) So, can you pass the test below? Would you be able to identify digital artifacts if you saw them? Can you visualise or hear the errors below?

Image file possible errors: Staircasing (aka jaggies), Blocking, Posterisation, Incorrect colour/gamma
Movie file possible errors: Smearing, Pulsing, Low contrast
Sound file possible errors: Whistling, Quantisation noise, Burbling

Not an exhaustive list but at the end we'll have a quick run through the list with effect and possible cause These are only some of the artifacts around and as the inherent quality of digitisation improves – eg more bits for audio and higher definition for video, with better compression algorithms and more bandwidth available for the result, the errors are getting less noticeable.

Rather than generating your own errors in production now, because they are better understood and catered for than they used to be, you're likely to run into problems with files that your clients give you and insist they have integrated into their digital project. They may be 'left over' from the previous version of the web site. Did you build in leeway on time and money for any consequences arising from difficulties with the content provided by your clients? Andy's golden rule is always to get the highest quality original but sometimes it just doesn't exist. It isn't only getting copy from them that can prove difficult. More food for thought!

And so to the results ...

Staircasing: Diagonal lines don't look smooth, rather they seem to go up or down in steps. This is usually caused by inadequate resolution and/or antialiasing of the image. Often it's that there are not enough pixels to exactly represent the line and appropriate blending of the edges of line with the background has not been done to compensate.
Blocking: Areas of the image that should show smooth and gradual changes in tone and colour break up into square blocks of pixels. This is usually caused by trying to compress the picture (eg with JPEG or MPEG) too much.
Posterisation: What should be smoothly varying areas in the image actually look as if they have contours, like a map. This is because the difference between the adjacent areas of colour is enough for us to see. This is a problem compounded by our ability to detect the edges between the different colours very well. This used to be a big problem with 8-bit colour images but is less so with full colour ones, but it can still occur, especially if any processing of the image has reduced the tonal range. The answer is to diffuse the boundary with noise, a technique called dither. This is a reason why noise in an image can sometimes be helpful.
Incorrect colour/gamma: The image you see in Photoshop looks different to the one in your browser. The probable reason is that the colour profile information in the image is missing or incorrect. It's also possible that the browser doesn't obey it. (If in doubt use sRGB colour space.)
Smearing in a movie: What I mean by this is that when the camera pans across something like a grass field and then stops panning, the smeary texture of the grass suddenly clicks into shape and you can see the blades of grass. Although MPEG compression of video has a mechanism to allow for movement in the image it does have limitations. Basically, more bandwidth or a better codec are needed. This effect can be made worse by some LCD screens.
Pulsing: In a static scene the background seems to have slight pulse to it. Early MPEG encoders could suffer from this but it is much less common now. The usual cure is to adjust the space between the I-frames and many codecs will do this automatically for you.
Low contrast: With professional video that is re-encoded for the web you sometimes think the image has the contrast turned down. This may be because the codec used to produce your web version 'did not know' that black and white are not at zero and 255 in professional video. Your codec should allow you to adjust the black and white points to fix this.
Whistling sounds in an audio file: This is an aliasing problem. The original digitising of the audio failed to filter out high frequencies that were beyond the bandwidth of the sample rate chosen, this usually results in a whistling noise that comes and goes with the sound. Sometimes an inaudible high-pitched tone can mysteriously appear at a lower frequency in the digitised file as a result. You may be able to filter this out but usually you should go back and re-digitise.
Quantisation noise: Normally background noise in an audio file is a constant hiss but occasionally you can hear a cracking or hissing noise that seems attached to the sound and only appears underneath it. This will probably be noise caused because the number of bits in the digitisation is not enough to represent the sound. While this used to be a serious problem with 8-bit audio is is hardly a problem with 16 and more bits. However, it can occur with quiet sounds and some codecs will introduce noise into the process to hide this: dither again.
Burbling: You'll notice this mostly on music, where a long musical note seems to have a regular burble in it. This means that at some point in the process the sample rate of the audio has not been set correctly and the playback is compensating by adding or dropping bits. I hear this a lot on low-bandwidth digital TV channels.

Some places to see more information:

DP Review has a good technical glossary covering these and other still image issues.
An EE Times paper called Solving digital image artifacts with advanced video processing by Phuc-Tue Le Dinh and Jacques Patry is five years old and somewhat technical but covers video and is still current.
That Dither Thing is a paper by Werner Ogiers that is again technical but includes a dramatic demonstration of how dither can 'rescue' a 4-bit audio file.

Open => Movies

2011-01-19T23:46:00.000Z

A friend in Canada sent me a DVD at Christmas. It was a little different to your average DVD in that it contained another example of an open movie, and a very fine one too. But it's an open movie with a cautionary tale attached.

I'll get the good stuff out of the way first. It's called Sita Sings the Blues and tells a story from the ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana, about the failure of Sita's marriage to Rama and its aftermath. This is juxtaposed with the breakup of another marriage; that of the film's maker Nina Paley. Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email.

It's an amazing film; moving, witty and beautiful. It also includes some lovely music, most notably songs sung by a lady named Annette Hanshaw, on shellac 78s from the 1920s and 30s.

Nina has released this movie under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. As she says on the movie home page, "From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes." The reason I'm mentioning it here (other than that I really want you to watch this movie) is to remind you of how convoluted and counter-intuitive copyrights can sometimes be ... especially in music.

Those of you who have been on our course or read the book will no doubt recall that I explain that a recording of a song contains two different copyrights; one for the recording and one for the song itself. In most cases the copyright in a sound recording expires 50 years after it is first published but that other copyright continues until 70 years after the death of the longest-lived composer or lyricist. Nina wasn't aware of this until after she had completed the movie and had to apply for licences from the music publishers retrospectively even though the recordings were out of copyright; never an easy task. She achieved this but it cost her - personally - $50 thousand. The publishers, on the other hand, may have been tied into contracts with their composers that restricted their room for manoeuvre (although they did drop their original fees from over $200K!). I should also add that including music in a movie or TV program involves a thing called the synchronisation right, which is different from the mechanical right which allowed the recording to be made in the first place, and the performance right which would allow it to be played in public.

So Nina has paid personally to allow us to download or stream the movie for our own personal use. It's right there up to 1080p HD resolution ... donations accepted.

While we're discussing open movies, have I mentioned the Blender Foundation to you before? Blender is a very powerful open-source animation package. Someday I really want to get to grips with it. The organisation behind it - based in free-spirited Amsterdam - have made some movie 'shorts' to show it off. There are three so far and they are also really worth a look. They are released under another Creative Commons licence, this time the Attribution one. Elephants Dream is a surreal journey inside a giant machine, Big Buck Bunny is Rambo meets Disney (sort of) with rendered fur ... and Sintel is a cautionary tale about a search for a pet dragon (with fast action). Each movie tests another feature of the software.

You can find the three on Blender's Open Projects page.

My and finally is to ponder whether there is a way of explaining the intricacies of intellectual property (like copyright) so that anyone stands a chance of understanding it. Now that almost everyone is using and creating and publishing (over the internet), rights are no longer something for experts and companies: they directly affect everyone. Maybe we need some kind of Highway Code for copyright. What do you think?

Business cases and social media

2011-01-14T02:45:00.000Z

It's been hard enough to make business cases for the other forms of interactive projects we're engaged in, but the move into social media has made it harder – why?

Well, yes, we're dealing with what have been called intangible benefits and traditionally these soft issues have not formed a core part of the business case mix. However as interactive technology has become more individual more mobile and more location sensitive, personal preference personal recommendations and personal opinions have more clout on the bottom line. We know this but how can we be convincing when making a case or pitch for a new social media project?

I imagine some of you are saying that it doesn't seem to matter as clients are just falling over themselves to get a presence in the social media market because they realise it is influential beyond expectation. But if you don't work with them to define what they expect from your offering for a time and cost, they may well have inflated expectations and you'll disappoint them. Now, disappointing clients is not a good option and certainly militates against return business, as we know.

Immerse yourself a little in some ideas from people trying to convince their own organisations to use social media. These people know they have to present strong business cases in terms that management will accept. Katy Cowan in Getting buy-in of social media, 11th January 2011, gives good tips for people trying to influence their companies that should make sense to you too. Jon Jackson, The Business Case for Social Media – stop being so analytical, 29th December 2010 gives equally sound advice despite riling against people that try to over-analyse the benefits. Don't miss Daniel's comment on this blog because whoever he is, he probably gives the best tips!

If you are having problems inside your own interactive company or section, why not get your lot to invest in the Social Media and Online PR Business Case, econsultancy Report, January 2010. It might be a little dated now in this fast-moving field and look expensive at £250 for 14 pages, but they have an offer of getting total access to all 350 reports for a year for £50 more. Maybe your management would accept this spend as an investment in training for employees? Keeping abreast of your field is Continuing Professional Development (CPD) after all.

Creative working and Project Management Software

2011-01-07T00:05:00.000Z

A few years ago, it was hard to find anyone in traditional Project Management who understood why working in digital media creative companies was different. The difference lay in the workflow: work allocation, flexible resources, variable costing, changing markets, clients demanding ongoing revamps, work starting before written approval and so on. After all, traditional project management is all about control while creativity doesn't like control. No wonder there were clashes.

But once creatives started demonstrating that their workflow was different and that project management software didn't quite fit, software was developed specifically for creative companies - often by creatives themselves. Well, after a shaky start, this has come of age. Now there are choices of software to suit digital creative companies. We thought it was high time to revisit this aspect of project management. If you have tried and given up on traditional PM software solutions, why not appraise some of these creative solutions instead? They may well offer a better fit for your way of working.

The most well-known and (informally) endorsed project software for creative working that we've come across is Basecamp. It prides itself on being very easy and intuitive to use, and it started from the project communication process rather than from the chart / stats angle. It is a good way to get employees into the concept of project management but may need progression afterwards (See Copper below).

Workamajig is an integrated system from task to accounting – and says it's Mac friendly too. Used by mainly by ad agencies, it is customisable for size of company as well as functionality.

Proworkflow is a hosted service that has 3 different plans for different sized solutions. It is also an integrated system that covers several of the main company functions.

Gantter is a FREE web-based PM tool. Ryan Dube endorses it in Oct 2009 MakeUseof.com where he enthuses over it and compares it to Microsoft Project. The files from Gantter are compatible with Microsoft Project too. Also tipped on Google Apps Marketplace as in the top 10 PM Apps in 2010.

Timefox aims at Freelancers and is more of a Timesheet and task tracking system. Monthly payment per users.

Copper is the one to watch! This might be the progression after your employees take to Basecamp. They focus on saving your company time and therefore money by better project control. They say they save between 20 and 100 hours for you a month!

Better project management for your company sounds like a good New Year's resolution! Now even creative companies can't just turn their backs on the opportunities.

Change on the way for Digital Project Management?

2010-12-30T22:37:00.000Z

As the last posting of the year, it is traditional to step back, review the past and try to project into the future. So here we are. Is digital project management at a crossroads? Should it be? Where does it serve us and where does it fail us? Pretty strategic questions, in keeping with that backward/forward look, don't you think?

We could feel a bit complacent because we've championed Agile software development methods where traditional waterfall methods of software development were found lacking. Agile engages changes, moves iteratively in small development cycles, incorporates more feedback from the client and users and so on. Yes, it did have a few glitches like how to cost the process so that a company didn't just address the old problems without getting paid for the work. But the important thing was that the software development process changed fundamentally.

Now there is chatter about employing such software development processes wider in business processes. Imagine that. The implications are huge. The keys in the process are the faster response to perceived need and small, incremental steps. Others in business want these too. It isn't just a large percentage of IT projects that fail; many business projects fail to achieve their objectives. So business analysts have been assessing the situation and have become attracted to the concepts of agile. Various new names have emerged to define the business processes but we'll be able to recognise the origin. Neil Perkin, New Media Age 2nd December in, 'Digital could give firms the agility to change', equates the need for agile processes with a coupling for companies to accept failure in a cycle of revision where the failure is fed back quickly and remedied. This is rather like the fast release of agile code, the checking on its feasibility of use and the revision of the code accordingly. Change has to be embraced in companies in a culture of innovation and 'well structured experiments'. He quotes McKinsey (2005) about putting 75-80% of a budget into proven media but the rest into these experiments. (You need to register for the full article)

Other advocates of applying such processes to other business problems can be found at:

Kevin Smith, Get Agile: Applying the lessons from software development to business process design. December 2009
Jorge Dominguez, Agile Project Management: AFP, September 2009

Maybe all this will have impact on the way we scope projects for new clients. Perhaps we'll have to educate them in which processes they might want to employ to dictate the way they want their project managed. They may need to consider what strategies their company wants to use in general business and which they want in project management as a result? Complex stuff - but what dreams used to be made of!

Sign-off: are you getting this right?

2010-12-22T03:51:00.000Z

It is vital you agree who is to sign-off which stage of your project. Identifying the sign-off people is a MUST before the project begins or you will quickly be put in that equivalent of the never ending spiral of planes waiting for landing!

Actually, not getting a single point of sign-off causes so many risks that it may be the most important part to agree prior to start-up. The consequences of not having a sign-off include many people having their own opinions and wishes of what to change, delays to the project that quickly escalate at each sign-off point, the opportunity for the client to demand changes to the agreement/contract, and the higher probability of conflict between you and the client.

That doesn't paint a smooth project path. Does it?

Yes, the clients may well rile against having one sign-off at each stage. You need to counter their wish for debate and consensus, or, build this into the timescale. By explaining the consequences to them of having several sign-off people, or several rounds of agreement for each stage, you can educate them on the cost savings of a single sign-off; the time-scale savings, and the positives of getting the project out faster, gaining feedback from the true users and a second phase revamp-project based on true use rather than gut feeling. Now, I'm not against gut feeling when it is backed by experience in the market with digital media – that's informed opinion. And it is true that many clients have different perspectives on what suits their market and branding, but just like you managing your internal teams' expectations and specialisms, the client faces the same from their individuals. In the end, someone has to call the tune. So the faster you identify the person with the clout and budget responsibility the better for your project.

One way to incorporate some leeway for the client is to corral the timescale for a sign-off period. So you give the project to them and allow X days turn-around for a sign-off. Then it is up to them to reach consensus. But beware, this sounds a trite way out and has to be managed carefully. They may well get back to you with a list of change requests that they have co-ordinated between them. If you have your change-management agreement with them so that you re-evaluate the time and cost to achieve these changes, then you won't suffer unduly. They soon learn that the more changes they make the longer the project time-scale and the knock-on costs - then they learn the need to make compromises.

There are various template sign-off agreements that are available online so if you need a form to help you sign-off, Google "project sign-off form or template" and take your pick.

The UK government has various legal agreement forms for web design-support-maintenance-hosting on their Simply Docs site. It needs registration and a small payment but might be useful.

Richard Boardman's advice to lock everyone in a room until you have sign-off goes a bit far, but I have heard of worse! See: 18 ways to speed up a CRM Project 26.11.10 - in particular the speedup milestone signoffs section .

And lastly, an interesting dilemma that might get you thinking – and acting. See: Should you make clients sign-off on their bad decisions? Chip Camden, 26.11.10

Happy sign-offs and Happy Christmas

No such thing as bad publicity

2010-12-13T20:56:00.000Z

The Irish playwright Brendan Behan is credited with uttering the immortal phrase there is no such thing as bad publicity, although he goes on to add except your own obituary.

This all comes to mind in the story last week of an American online peddler of eye-wear who had supposedly gained his high Google ranking as a result of the online criticism his actions attracted. A story in the New York Times on November 26th told the story of a lady in New York and her customer experience after buying some glasses from said outlet.

Can this be true? Well, apparently it was, but is no more. Two things have happened.

Firstly, Google have reacted to the situation by refining their algorithms further. They have posted about this on their company blog and it makes interesting reading. Have you ever heard of sentiment analysis? It's a new one on me but I can imagine what it is. You demote disparaging items about X while promoting positive ones. However, that doesn't work very well since genuinely controversial subjects will fall foul of such a rule, as might what Google refers to as elected officials. So they've done something else, and they're not saying what it is, except that

we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience.

Secondly, the retailer has now been arrested, as this story in the Register tells. The charges include mail and wire fraud, which the Americans take very seriously. Follow the story through to the PDF of the criminal complaint.

Not quite an obituary, but close.

Stakeholder analysis

2010-12-02T23:29:00.000Z

Remember that the stakeholders in a project are any people or group of people who can influence the project. This, as we've found, can widen the common idea of stakeholders as many in our industry align stakeholders solely with the clients. The important analysis prior to the start of the project is to identify the stakeholders and agree with them how you are to communicate with them about the project and how often. We've advocated using a stakeholder analysis matrix, a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix, and a communication chart. (See our book, Managing Interactive Media, Chapter 4)

So is there anything new in the field? Well, the field has expanded and there is more written about stakeholder analysis now as well as software tools specifically for stakeholder analysis. If you're under pressure from your company about stakeholders adversely influencing a project's outcome during a project's life-cycle, you might consider a tool because it offers objectivity and gravitas to your discussions with new stakeholders. We're not recommending the tools below, just drawing your attention to them as examples of what's available.

If you haven't yet experienced the fall-out from stakeholders and are not so convinced about their impact on projects you might like to read Lynda Bourne's short article, Avoiding the Successful Failure! Salient warning for those that over-zealously apply the time, cost, quality mantra in project management.

The number of training courses on stakeholder management has increased too, as well as the skill being mentioned in more job descriptions. It wasn't surprising to see more understanding and buy-in to stakeholder management in a recent project management survey of allpm.com (September 2010) where stakeholder analysis was considered a key factor for project success. This was a small poll and it was for all types of projects, not just digital development such as we are interested in, but surprising all the same.

Many influences change over the course of even a short project so don't get caught out by thinking that you've done your upfront analysis so that's that! Keep re-examining the analysis and changing the results as you go through to keep right on top of your stakeholders and their influence.

Log analysis, SEO and where are we now?

2010-11-27T02:32:00.000Z

I began by trying to find some independent reviews on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) software tools and drew a blank. Anyone have any pointers? Instead, I have found some reviews of the state of SEO today. This has burgeoned quickly in 5 years to become an industry in its own right with awards for companies that can prove results in improving web sites in specific ways for their clients. It has also migrated into the newer channels of Twitter and Social Media with SMO (Social Media Optimisation) as an acronym. Many web development companies partner with an SEO organisation and work with them in developing a site that behaves as the client wants.

As search and the way results are filtered, ranked and displayed have become more sophisticated (although some would dispute that), the optimisation techniques have had to change, driven by the increasingly powerful search engines such as Google. The changes leave bodies in its wake as SEO companies run to stay still. It's a tricky business working with moving goalposts! When search engines announce a shift in strategy it has serious implications for SEO companies that have based their offerings on other factors driving the search ... and so on. The medium develops, matures, takes some false steps, stabilises for a while and then moves on again. This isn't so new in our line of business. But because SEO is by its very nature measurable, an SEO company often takes the ongoing responsibility for reviewing and reporting the results to the client after the site has gone live. When the search strategy shifts, the SEO company needs to revamp – naturally.

It used to be easy enough and well within the control of the web developers when meta-tags and keywords dominated. Then the importance of links grew fuelling companies specialising in cross-linking between their clients. Now social media has expanded and has driven the perceived need of how to influence/reach more people, analyse data, refine search matches and so on.

If you're interested in the historical overview, The SEO Theory and Analysis Blog, by Michael Martinez, has a good outline of the development of SEO half way down the blog 17th November beginning How search engine optimisation has evolved

Tim Nash has a more techie and amusing take on an historical approach outlined at So you want to be an SEO.

The more serious stuff is found in The SEO Best Practice Guide, econsultancy April 2009, but you have to pay £250 for the full monty.

Finally, you might like an opposing point of view from the SEO Whistleblower, Steve Chapman, ZDNet, where he explains why any company promising to make you Number 1 in Google rankings has it wrong.

Whatever, interesting times in the SEO/SMO arena, eh?

HCI (Human Computer Interaction) in jeopardy?

2010-11-19T03:21:00.000Z

This week I've spent hours on the phone complaining about poor interface design on diverse web sites that I've tried to use (for personal use) in all honesty – and failed. I failed in my complaints too! In the end I've realised I'm talking to the wrong people. If you go through to the Helplines noted on the web sites you get through to Customer Services and all the people want to do is ignore what you say, sell their products, and get on with the next call.

What I was trying to achieve was a change in the interfaces to help the User Experience, lower the companies' complaints and increase their service/product conversions. No one listened, no one recognised that mine was constructive criticism, no one offered to put me through to their web designers. I've given up.

The first issue arose because a company only allowed you to choose one category of definition for a training course when our training courses don't fit because they are cross-discipline (iMedia Project Management and related courses, I'm talking about here). I genuinely couldn't stretch the categories/sub-categories to suit - with the best will in the world . You either had to be Business and Management, IT and Telecommunications, or Design and Media.

This narrowness would have implications of how people searched to access information about the courses and we cross all - taking into account the people who have attended in the past. Added to that issue, although the company did allow online courses, they insisted on you putting in a number of hours, days, weeks that it would take someone to complete a course. That's an oxymoron for online as people can access and complete as they want. I'd have been happy for a range of hours but no, it had to be a definite number! And so on...

The second issue involved me trying to buy a product online but the number of personal questions I had to complete for the shop to form an account was off-putting, and then their Terms and Conditions made it so hard to opt out of the details being sent to all and sundry, that I aborted the transaction. Yes, you guessed it. The company contacted me by email anyway asking if I'd had trouble with completing the request! That just confirmed my poor opinion of their online ethics.

Finally: the most frustrating. I'd received documentation (from a supposedly Top 100 company) indicating that a service I'd had offline for years was now online if I wanted. Yes, good, I thought. But when I tried to register online, the info in the document bore no relation to the online screens. Really, I mean as basic as the words Password and Account Number were not called those names on the screen when in fact that was what they wanted in the end to start the process. When I muddled through by trial and error expecting to be accused of trying to subvert the system at any moment (hacking?), I was finally told on screen that the second stage would take 5-10 days to be posted to me. No mention of a two stage registration process in the documentation and I haven't got that amount of time left to register now because I hadn't thought it was time sensitive before my service period runs out!

Sorry about all the whinging but too much in too short a time for me to throw off! And, I did try and rectify the situations as best I could by speaking to the organisation. Where are the interface designers? Where are the trials with genuine users? Or, are the professionals not being allowed or paid to do their jobs? After all, online is just business now, isn't it, nothing special!?

In the spirit of and on behalf of the HCI professionals, I'll end on a positive note. Take a look at Joshua Jonson's article: "The difference between good design and great design", Sept 2010.

I found this through a great site for HCI – or UX (User Experience) if you prefer, called InspireUX. InspireUX have a strapline explaining their mission as:

User Experience quotes and articles to inspire and connect the UX community

They have amalgamated loads of relevant material. Hope you can use some to influence your clients.

The untold truths behind Project Management!

2010-11-11T23:00:00.000Z

It's rare that you get someone telling it like it is – but this week we found a veteran project manager, Ken Young, exchanging war stories for you. It's good therapy!

His account, Project Managers: Fall guys or Heroes?, on The Register, 8th November, contains some gems of experience. Do you relate to these definitions of Project management?

'...as with accountancy, its beauty is usually apparent only to the dark masters of the art.'

Or,

'PM is part science (think fiendishly difficult maths meets string theory), part psychology (combine the persuasiveness of a salesman with the bloody-mindedness of the doorman), and part making the impossible happen ("we need it yesterday")'.

It's evident that Ken deals with traditional Projects rather than iMedia because his account doesn't match our situation exactly. We're less chart-bound and more hands on, I'd say, but even discounting the odd statement now and then, it has the ring of truth.

But if you look at the comments attached to this article, there's a sad tale. Loads of workers hate Project Managers, it seems. They don't buy into the skills, the human shield aspect, the fall guy to stave off management, etc. Now that cries out to me to be addressed. What's going on? We're winning the battle with management recognising our skills but not with the workers, it seems. They don't realise that they can only get on with going their job without the stakeholders, clients and management all interfering because the PM takes the strain over many of the aspects. We'd thought that in iMedia there was a potential problem of the 'doers' not respecting the PM unless he/she had come through the ranks and had demonstrated good hands-on skills in one of the key areas, but it appears this lack of respect is wider.

We'll be following the set of articles – hope you do too. The next has happened: How not to do Project Management, 10th November, The Register.

Accessibility in the mobile arena

2010-11-04T20:46:00.000Z

It took years for the interactive industry to recognise and implement web sites that conformed to accessibility guidelines for disadvantaged people due to physical or learning impairments - many would argue that this still hasn't happened and lots of web sites are still impenetrable for disadvantaged users. However, at least guidelines exist and research been done so that when and if clients demand accessible sites, your designers can demonstrate compatibility and you can build the requirements into the Time, Cost, Quality spec.

What about mobile? In many ways the development of mobile offerings has been experimental, entrepreneurial - in the spirit of interactive communication development, you might say. And after finding out how, when, and what to offer in the mini interactive environments on the mobile devices, and then how successful they have been, everyone wants a part of the action. There's no stronger motivation than feeling left out!

So it'll be no surprise that the guidelines for mobile are coming! Watch this space. But don't worry. You need to deal with these as you have web accessibility guidelines. The ones that become legal requirements you must heed and educate your clients that you have to operate in this way. The voluntary guidelines will depend on your client, their ethics, and their market requirements. All you need to do is ask the right questions at the right time in the project start-up and work out the implications for time, cost and quality. Perhaps time to revise your scoping questionnaire?

What's happening then? In mid October the UK government convened a forum of experts to address the issues of interactive accessibility and making services more inclusive. This will have implications for web and mobile.

The well known web accessibility initiative, W3.org , is already addressing mobile accessibility issues.

The RNIB, renowned for championing web accessibility for its sector, offers useful resources for its members about the use of mobile on its site. They are useful for us to note too.

Finally, yes, the phone operators themselves have some initiatives for disadvantaged customers – such as Vodafone, who will concentrate on two strategies. The first will look at assistive products and services, and the second Inclusive design.

Our strategic objective by March 2011 is to offer an option that makes access to telecommunications possible for hearing impaired, visually impaired and elderly customers in each of our markets

You never know who's listening

2010-10-31T20:13:00.000Z

I suppose it comes into the category of a story that will run and run: it has legs, as they say, even though the problem was caused on wheels. What am I on about?

It looks as if Google Street View could be in breach of some laws in the UK, after having had similar problems in other countries and been blocked from the odd village for 'snooping'. It even shows our neighbour, frozen forever in the act of reading a book in the conservatory in front of his house while we all wait for our bins to be collected. I was in but Elaine was out, according to the cars in front of the house. Do I care?

Not about the photos, but if I thought that Google had recorded a snippet of my Wi-Fi traffic then I might be. That seems to be the nub of it: incidental and, apparently, inadvertent recording of data. Data that might contain part of a confidential email exchange or even a password sent unencrypted to an FTP server. The interception was, as I understand it, done to match a WiFi router's MAC code to the physical location. This would enable, say, a mobile phone to check its location by looking to see what transmitters of any kind were in range. Those of you with iPhones will have seen that blue dot dance that occurs as the Google Maps application refines your location, from a combination of cell tower information and WiFi until it can, finally, use GPS to give you the real location. The story goes that some extra code from another project got into the Google car system and instead of just recording the WiFi's location it also recorded some of the traffic.

There is a lesson for us all here, which is the danger of amalgamating code snippets without fully understanding what they do. The 'snooping' code was presumably attached to something less contentious but both were incorporated in the street view system. On the one hand it's good coding practice to efficiently reuse your legacy code ... to not reinvent a software wheel ... but it is vital to look in detail at what that code does. In turn that comes down to documentation and code comments. It also comes down to making sure that any code put in a routine for testing purposes is removed or disabled in the release version.

There is also a great temptation to cut corners with code for internal use; but you never know when things will get out into the wild. In radio they tell you never to swear in front of a microphone because you never know when it might be live. Treat code the same way.

Rights, cyber crime and us!

2010-10-22T01:23:00.000+01:00

In some ways it isn't surprising that cyber crime has risen up the government's and country's agenda in the revamp of expenditure in the recent security strategy review in the UK. For those working in this area we've known and understood the possibilities. And just as we've had to endure spam waves, identity thefts, and piracy, the possibility of electronic attack on nuclear power stations, electricity supplies and electronic espionage is not, unfortunately, the stuff that dreams are made of.

Just as some are hell bent on exploiting the fringes of this amazing communication revolution, others are still working to regulate aspects of it to tidy up loopholes such as the rights issues. There are still the administrative necessities of clearing literary rights in text on web pages, rights in the computer code behind the running of the pages, electronic database rights if so warranted, artistic rights in the sound and visuals, and so on.

You'd have thought that by now many of the traditional rights issues would have been addressed for the electronic age but there are still clashes of expectations and actuality in the use of the Internet creating a large gap when general market demand is held up by legalities they don't understand.

Take for example a request we had recently (not the first from ex-pats, I add) where there was a genuine disappointment about not being able to access the BBC iPlayer from abroad. The ex-pats would have paid for access and downloads of the programme they wanted if they could, but they were not given a choice as access is denied outside the UK.

Of course for those of us in the industry it was easy to explain why that is the case, but the reaction from the general public was akin to taking sweets off kids. Now, these were adults who could make sense of the legalities once we explained - the need for electronic rights clearances from all the actors/producers etc. with or without residual payments, deals done country-wide for releasing programmes only via the established land TV network at their time and scheduling convenience, and the restriction on BBC releases to other countries because of the implications of only UK taxpayers paying for the programmes in the first place. Those are some of the issues affecting release of BBC material, but although the ex-pats understood the words, they were genuinely gutted by the denial of their consumer demands.

In the end, I suppose what I'm getting at is the span of legal and illegal activities that the electronic revolution has given us to consider in this new world. It's an ethical question as to where we stand in this mêlée – where do you stand?

P.S. Yes, we do know how to work round some of these issues so don't send us your answers as many are still not legal , but you may not have fully appreciated it!

Business benefits of websites

2010-10-15T00:05:00.000+01:00

Yes, it is very competitive at the moment in iMedia. There are loads of web companies trying to win fewer clients. Companies are demanding more business-focused results before committing their shrinking budgets. So, you have to work smarter. You have to explain the potential benefits of your work and be able to show you can achieve what you promise. You need to talk their talk too which means adapting your generic benefits into sector-sensitive benefits that make undeniable sense to the client you are talking to.

We provide a two page table of generic business benefits on Page 100-101 of our book, Managing Interactive Media, under the headings of People, Processes, Technology, Design, Business, Marketing and Infrastructure, and suggest that you refine them to suit your clients/market sectors in the Top Tips on page 111. Have you tried doing this? Now more than ever, you should consider this to differentiate your offerings from others. Here's the table.

If you want to get your new client thinking before they start giving you a brief, perhaps you'd be interested in an article, 8 things to think about, from UTC Web Design that make a lot of sense to the rest of us and are aimed at a client – but it's good to have someone else say them!

In the same vein, Adrian does a good job of listing the advantages and disadvantages of websites also in a way that talks directly to a client. This may help you too. Advantages and Disadvantages of Websites for Business, 6th Oct 2010.

You can get an idea of what we mean by looking at some benefits tailored specifically to clients that want a redesign of their website. This is a common project type, but now you'll need to sell it to them more than you used to. They will have to justify their spend more and so they'll need the benefits explained very clearly to enable them to pass them upwards in the organisation. This perspective on re-design comes from Pixelsworld, a content writer from India, but again, it makes perfect sense for us all. Get refining your benefits table for your own benefit.

Interface design trends

2010-10-08T05:50:00.000+01:00

We suppose you are Gadget Show fanatics like us – sorry to those reading this outside the UK. This TV show highlights new and emerging trends in gadgets, tests gadgets across technologies and devises challenges for its presenters using technology. Well we were really interested in a feature on emerging computer interfaces in the game world that will have a ripple effect across computer fields too. It's the use of brain waves to drive computer action. Have you seen this? If not take a look at the TV clip at The Gadget Show, Five TV, and move to about 1 minute in to avoid the advert and intro blurb to get to the heart of the interaction with the Canadian company, 'Interaxon'.

This brain-power trend was also featured in CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2009 and is available via YouTube at johnnyholland.org

It seems that finally the reliance on typing, writing and mouse clicking is being challenged in computer interaction. The speech recognition software continues to improve while the touch/slide interface of the iPhone/iPad has been embraced wholeheartedly. It is difficult to keep up with the trends but as it's part of our profession we need to try. The advances in this field of computer interface design may well shape the careers of the future; so get your head around the possibilities and keep your eyes peeled.

One of the most succinct representations of the emerging trends has been captured by Gartner in July 2009 with their prediction graph for interface design. They plot over 30 trends including emotion detection, augmented reality, haptics, public virtual worlds, home health monitoring and digital pens among others. See this chart from New Scientist.

So if you're inspired by these, why not consider a training break in New York, 15-17 November for the Future of Web Design conference. Looking good.

Collating feedback on your iMedia team – how're you doing?

2010-10-02T00:02:00.000+01:00

We have suggested that you evaluate your team members' performance as well as the overall project development process and share this with other project managers in the company a few times a year. The aim is to both improve the contribution from the team individuals as well as refine company processes so that projects run more smoothly. So, are any of you doing this? Has it made the difference it is meant to? The sense is obvious, but carrying out the task may well prove elusive. Hope not.

By way of encouragement to embed this practice into your company, we like the gist of Kiron Bondale's comments in Post Project Resource Evaluation: a forgotten contributor to success, Project Smart 3rd May 2010 where he pushes for each project manager/team leader to evaluate the team individuals at the end of a project using an objective 1-5 scale of performance with five questions defined by the company about expected project contribution. These are then fed into the employee's appraisal with his/her manager so that they can be referred to in the annual appraisal. (Do you have those yet? Strange if you don't.) Although Kiron suggests this when there is a split between the type of work a person does - some functional work according to a specialism and some project specific work - where the project manager is not accepted or seen as the actual manager of the person, this practice may well be useful for us in iMedia. What do you think?

It is as well to remember however that it is up to you to motivate your team and that ongoing timely feedback over the course of the project is essential and your responsibility. Feedback needs to be positive as well as negative too, so remember to praise where praise is due. Michelle Labrosse in 10 Ways to Inspire your Team, also from Project Smart, will remind you of the value of positive reinforcement, among other good points.

Finally if your team is performing as well as they can under difficulties generated by the clients themselves - and that's common in our line of work as we know - perhaps another point of view might help get them to coordinate their input to you. Joe, the web site manager at Water Aid, does a great job of explaining why his charity needed an internal project manager to help the success of their digital projects. Yes, they were doing it themselves but the same principle applies for your clients to feed clear instructions to you if they aren't doing their digital projects themselves. Streamlining communication always helps success. Nice article: Three Ways to Organise Staff for Digital Media Success, 3rd September 2010.

Get evaluating your teams!

Finding new business

2010-09-23T22:13:00.000+01:00

Are you keeping an eye on how your company gets its new business? Well, if not you, is someone doing this? All you need is an analysis of the projects you landed over the last year according to some categories like; won pitch/tender, recommendation, through the door (meaning they just came to you), reputation, niche market leader, repeat business, and so on. Some may fall across certain categories but that doesn't matter. You just need to understand how the business is coming in so that you can plan where to place your efforts to increase your chances of winning new business.

Actually, a chart across a few years would be best because you can better see any shifts in how you landed business. You may find that your company's perceived talent has shifted. Is the business happy with that? For example, you may have been landing business because you were the top creative company at one time but now much of your work is repeat business. There's nothing wrong with that if that's what the company wants and business is very healthy. The risk increases though that some clients will decide to revamp their media image and feel that they need to break with tradition and try a different company. You may need to look at why clients have moved on over a number of years to complete your analysis.

So, on a brighter note, can you do anything about unwelcomed shifts in business? Yes you can, that's the value of analysis.

Although the quote below isn't aimed at our line of business, iMedia, it has relevance and if you read the article, try to apply the general rather than the specifics to yourselves.

In summary, our top tip to help you grow your business and save money is; understand why people do business with you and who your customers are. With that knowledge you will increase the opportunities to attract potential new customers to your business.

From How knowing your customer can help you find new business, NXO, Forum for Private Business, 16th September 2010.

Understanding the shifts in consumers may drive your own clients to decide to change their products/image. Will you be in tune with them about their changing business needs and be able to suggest media solutions? Perhaps it would be good for you to keep abreast of consumer trends especially if your clients are from the retail and consumer base. Trendwatch.com may provoke some stirring in your brain cells – and that’s good even if you reject the suggestions (See trendwatching.com/briefing ).

Finally, your clients may start using social media against you! Have any of your prospective clients started asking for the Twitter names of the team planned to work for them at a pitch? That's what happened to Nigel Sarbutts recently and he explains in MetaPR - the implications for recruitment and new business, September 14th , at Brand Alert. Certainly food for thought - what information will you trust?

It's all 3D now!

2010-09-18T01:00:00.000+01:00

In the last post I explained that, as you might expect, 3D was the big topic at IBC. Even the featured movies were 3D with a special 8 minutes more version of Avatar and the chance to see Toy Story 3 (or is that Toy Story 3D?) ... good movie by the way.

The jury is still out as to whether 3D in the home will take off; and they may be away for some time. But I don't doubt that 3D is a key thing for Hollywood, and it's noticeable that the 3D look of movies is getting more subtle. We were shown a trailer for Tron Legacy, which was 3D but didn't wave it in your face. I'm very happy with that: it's like the early days of stereo records, when table tennis games were a common demonstrator. It wasn't called ping pong stereo for nothing.

So how is 3D doing on the desktop? If you have the right graphics card it can be already here for some games, and for CAD systems. Since the 3D movies are assembled and edited on computers 3D has made it there too. I wonder what would happen when 3D is so ubiquitous that we are expected to use 3D techniques and metaphors for real on the desktop. Of course we have been using 3D elements in a 2D desktop world for years. It started with the idea that one window was in front of another, moved through drop shadows and eventually reached immersive environments like Second Life.

Should we be thinking now about this? What are the three-dimensional equivalents of and extensions of our two-dimensional desktop and interface? Are there any brand new things we could do to help users with more space at our disposal?

Have you any thoughts ... or is this just another temporary fad or even a preliminary phase on the way to something better? Holographic desktop anyone?

Talking of temporary fads, or at least those things known as internet memes ... here's a little light relief to either encourage you to put your baby photos on line ... or perhaps not!

Connected TV brings it all together

2010-09-12T17:11:00.000+01:00

We are currently in Amsterdam, attending the big IBC exhibition and conference. This grew out of a broadcast technology event and has got larger year by year, so that it outgrew central London, then outgrew Brighton and is now literally pushing at the boundaries of the gigantic RAI Centre here.

This year's top topic is undoubtedly 3D, with lots of 3D camera rigs on display (every manufacturer seemingly wanting to show that they too can do it), lots of displays ranging from ones with glasses to ones without and even one that can draw pictures in thin air. This last one is a sad victim of the demo effect, in that having shipped their big box of tricks over from Japan, the engineers found it would not function. Their video, however, gives a tempting indication of what they can do. (I sympathise, as a thermal camera arranged for my infrared session on Monday has been delayed in transit and I hope it will arrive in time.)

Besides 3D another big buzz is for connected TV. The connection refers to the internet. In some respects the display of web pages on your TV is not new, and it hasn't really taken off so far. Our nearest experience of this is using the BBC iPlayer through our Wii console and watching IPTV on occasions when abroad. But whereas 'traditional' IPTV is basically cable TV using internet protocols, connected TV comes much closer to my decade-old vision of what networks could do for us by opening up our home entertainment instead of walling it in.

At the heart of connected TV is the concept of using a 'living room' device/display to access content from a range of sources but do it seamlessly. The electronic program guide of today would expand its scope to include things you downloaded earlier, things available streamed on the internet and anything else it could get metadata for. Obviously as the range of material grows, browsing interfaces become less useful than searches and eventually you might need intelligent agents searching out things for you online. One world in one box.

A secondary issue is how best to use the display since your connected world could be offering you extra information while you watch a movie or programme ...if you want it to. The television solution is to pile all this information into the single screen space, where there is a risk of one thing obscuring another. That not only detracts from the viewing experience but it could result in sponsor messages and other paid for content being hidden. The computer solution to such issues is to allow the user to configure their own screen and to use separate windows to display separate things.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to making this happen with connected TV is the resolution of the screen. At least with high definition TV many people now have a 1920 by 1080 pixel TV, but they would want to display some 1920 by 1080 content on it rather than shrink this into a window. Does this mean that the TV industry should be looking to over-sized (in resolution) screens? Not something that has come up in any discussions I have heard so far, but possibly food for thought.

Open != Absolutely free

2010-09-03T14:01:00.000+01:00

The organisation who handle licensing for MPEG, MPEG-LA, have announced that they will not charge royalties on using MPEG4 encoders ever. This is an extension of their earlier stance which had a time limit.

I think this is very good news, but my somewhat vocal encouragement of MPEG-LA in this direction (through BIMA) did surprise some people. One very senior person in the MPEG fraternity thought I believed that the owners of MPEG shouldn't receive recompense for their efforts. But this misinterprets my perspective, which I see in the larger context of the value chain for creative tools of any kind.

The announcement from MPEG-LA means that you will never have to pay royalties to encode your movies using MPEG4 and put them on the internet. Anyone making an encoder or decoder will still have to do so, and presumably so will broadcasters using MPEG4 for digital TV, as does HDTV in the UK. This seems fair. I likened it to to Kodak selling me film and Nikon selling me a camera but not having any financial interest in the photographs I took. I think it goes without saying that any standard will only succeed if people use it, and being open is a big step towards that.

One current argument over the meaning of open is that between supporters of Flash and those of HTML5, which usually stems from Apple not allowing Flash on the iPhone.

The BBC's Erik Huggers recently discussed this on a blog and illustrated the BBC's support for open standards by referring to DVB, Digital Video Broadcasting, which is the specification behind digital TV. This does seem to have caused some confusion as open standards are not necessarily the same as the use of the word open when talking about software like Apache or PHP (see comment 9 on that BBC blog page). It's getting back to money again, because you probably have to pay a licence fee to use open standards like DVB, whereas you don't pay to use open source software such as Apache or PHP. The key word in the definition of open standards is actually nondiscriminatory, meaning that everyone pays (or doesn't pay) a fee on the same basis. It might not be the same fee because that might depend on the size of the organisation (for example), but anyone can join the party. It's also worth adding that in many cases (including DVB) the money from licences is used only to support the development of the standard.

So we have a triumvirate of proprietary/open standards/open source from which to choose, often for the same kind of thing and sometimes for exactly the same software. How are your companies addressing this question? Is HTML5 the new sliced bread?

Project controls - contingency and tolerances

2010-08-27T19:06:00.000+01:00

The practice of adding contingency funds onto a project costing has often made clients sceptical. You only have to recognise that the term slush fund is used negatively and that they make the correlation between contingency and slush fund more often than not. If this attitude is present then it undermines the level of trust between you - not good for projects.

Prince2 project management practices ditched the contingency fund concept in its revision in 2009 replacing it with risk fund. They see the fund as linked to unforeseen project risks.

Max Wideman (in Comparing Prince2 and PMBOK)gave a good explanation of the difference between contingency, tolerance and change control in 2003 that can stand today, although remember contingency would be changed to risk fund.

In the context of control, PRINCE2 establishes a good distinction between "tolerance", "contingency" and "change control". Tolerance is the permissible deviation from plan allowed to the project manager without having to bring the deviation to the attention of the project board.

Contingency, in PRINCE2 terms, is a plan including the time and money set aside to carry out the plan, which will only be invoked if a linked risk actually occurs.

Change control is a procedure designed to ensure that the processing of all project issues is controlled, including submission, analysis and decision making.

Remember, we liked the tolerance concept as clients were predisposed to think of this positively. Effectively if you agree with your stakeholders that you have room to manoeuvre within say 10% of time and budget, then you won't have to keep pestering them with small things that impact every project. However, Prince reworked their tolerance concept in the 2009 revamp of project management practices to apply to time and cost, as before, but these are now extended to scope, quality, risk and benefits tolerances.

Elizabeth Harrin's pages are well worth a look as she explains tolerance in detail and defines all of the extensions from the latest version of Prince2 methodology.

April 2010 Project Financial Management: Tolerance
January 2010 Inside Prince2: Tolerances

Often the difference in perception between positive and negative comes down to the words used – food for thought!

Usability – updated best practice

2010-08-20T03:00:00.000+01:00

Here as indicated last week - till I got distracted by that wonderful project management comic strip – is an update on Usability.

Once your clients understand how important usability is to their customers and that it can increase return business at the very least, they have to balance the cost of designing for usability and some pertinent usability testing against their business goals. Just give them some facts and the projected costs. What percentage of your general costs for a project is allocated to Usability?

If you deal in designing and building retail web sites across channels in the UK and US, you may like to tap into a white paper from the IMRG from July 2010 Respect the Shopper: Harmonising the Multi-channel Experience, which looked at shopper behaviour in London and New York across digital channels. It's listed at the bottom of the Usability page.

Then there is a 2009 list from the Tripwire team but it is comprehensive and gives links to loads of Usability sites under categories – even free usability tools!

Usability does call for expertise so you may want to contract it out to specialists. However, it is just as well to keep a level of understanding about what it involves so you can manage the process better.

Snapshot of a web design career? Where's the project management of clients?

2010-08-13T18:58:00.000+01:00

I actually began to research the latest on usability of web sites - and maybe that'll come up soon, but I came across such a gem of a potted project process that you should see it! Andy and I are just in one of those uncontrollable laughing/giggling fits (ROFL as they say online) after reading it. And, Andy's going to send it on to one of his favourite clients who fields internal minor changes before involving Andy in the web design.

But before you enjoy the comic strip, the serious side for this is Project Management. When you use it with client control and change control, all the minor and major changes have a cost attached and at least soften the pain!

Very happy reading - we seriously considered the poster too!
Design Hell comic strip

Localisation, translations and more

2010-08-07T20:38:00.000+01:00

The globalisation of the net has actually increased the need for clear, informed translations as each local market and country tries to market globally. Don't assume that just because your company works only in English (and UK English at that), that you won't need to widen your perspectives for some clients in the near future. Web site localisation means translating the site into other languages to appeal better to people speaking those languages – including US English.

We only address the issues in our book in passing as localisation is too big a subject to address by itself. We can only raise awareness and suggest you ask the questions to find out the breadth and depth of what is needed. We investigate the clients' need under the scoping questionnaire at the beginning of a project, and then later guide you in the care needed in trying to cross cultures with communication especially with marketing and branding of products – some words, colours and humour do not transcend some languages and cultures well.

What services can a specialist translation company offer? Is it worth subcontracting a need for localisation? Yes, it is. This is a specialist area needing experienced people to do a quality job. The type of information in the site can increase the specialist need. For example, legal terms, medical or pharmaceutical terms, colloquial style, engineering/manufacturing bias and so on all demand more than a general native or near native speaker of the target language.

Sometimes the result of a mistranslation can be hilariously confusing. When Concorde was being developed, a promotional video was produced and one version was in Arabic. The story goes that during the voiceover session the speaker looked through the script and asked "What are water goats?" This turned out to be hydraulic rams (in the landing gear), although water goats does have a nice feel to it.

A good way to get more aware of the traps in this translation area is to look at a few online translation sites, how they price the different services they offer, how they delineate between the need for the use of highly paid people and the use of facilitators for a quick understanding. It isn't just what information you want to get across, it can also be how well it needs to be put across! In our project management process, we would see this as offering different costings for different levels of quality and allowing the client to decide how much they need an option for which cost. Of course, just as with all the other decisions about your project, you'd need to recognise the client expects translated sites and then probe to see what they want these sites to achieve.

Translating services have increased in complexity, price structure, and sophistication in the last few years. We know, yet another area to keep an eye on in such a complex project management maze as interactive media projects! Worth fifteen minutes, surely.

Browse the following to get a feel for what's on offer and how much it might cost (just for information; we have no experience of or connection with these companies):

London Translation: www.london-translations.co.uk

World Translations: www.world-translations.com

ASK Translation: www.translate.co.uk

There are even specialist software tools for Localisation - of course! SDL Translationzone.com offer a few tools for the specialists, and a review of translation software tools 2010 is here: translation-software-review.toptenreviews.com

Check that you are raising the issue of Localisation of digital information at the initial stages with your clients.

Client complaints – do you have a strategy?

2010-07-30T17:35:00.000+01:00

Well we'd all love to say we never get any complaints but...

So, the way they are handled can make all the difference to the perception of your company. In general business practice they are even going as far as to say that complaints should be handled like gifts - they give you the opportunity to make things better.

Are we as an industry doing that? We were pretty shocked to find Brian's catalogue of complaints against web design companies. Some of his tips of what not to do go against some of the tips we suggest you do in project management. But you can see why he reached his decisions with the situations he came up against. It seems that the old adage of Give a dog a bad name is right in this case and unfortunately, it will stick to the profession.

The no hourly rates tip becomes a big issue for us if the client just runs away with changes all the time even when the site is technically finished. Not paying upfront for a job is another thing we have found is an issue when a developer carries out loads of work prior to getting paid and the client just walks away from the job and goes elsewhere. We don’t say get paid for everything upfront, but we do recommend splitting the work into paid phases that you all agree on (assuming it's a long-enough task).

The not believing him part is sad. There needs to be trust between client and developer that is built up mutually. Once a client thinks they have had a bad experience with a developer, it can make any other web design relationship problematic. This can cut both ways, with the risk of a poor experience degenerating into a client from hell for the developer.

And if you're sitting there feeling virtuous because you don't get complaints, perhaps the reasons given by people for not complaining might niggle - 52.2% of 26 thousand respondents didn't think it would make a difference! See The Institute of Customer Service survey .

So what should we do? It is good business practice to have a complaints procedure that is transparent for your clients. Do you have one? Does it say how the complaint will be dealt with, how long the response will take and who will deal with it? These are key factors in a complaint handling strategy. What's more the company can learn from complaints and improve processes so that complaints get few and far between. There's a transparent procedure at wnw design company stated on their site.

Just think complaint resolution as well as conflict resolution - although I admit we address conflict resolution more than we have complaint resolution. Maybe time for a change!

Learning from CoJo

2010-07-23T18:06:00.000+01:00

CoJo is the snappy handle for the BBC's on line College of Journalism, part of the wider BBC Academy. Presumably this material is developed for the BBC's in-house staff training but it is also openly available (or some of it is) via the BBC web site. Another aspect of public service broadcasting.

One part of this I have been exploring recently is the law section, particularly things to do with copyright, contempt and defamation (things that apply online as much as on air). These are part of the Law section.

I took the tests on defamation, contempt and copyright. I didn't do too badly (some issues over the wording of questions but sometimes me not knowing as much as I thought I did) but it made me think about a subject I think (!) I know a little about ... so very worth while. This is one to bookmark and come back to.

Don't forget that any web site is a publication whether it's a carefully thought out web page or a comment on a blog or forum. So you too (and your clients) can be a publisher, with all the legal responsibility that brings.

The BBC site also led me to an interesting blog by teacher and blogger Paul Bradshaw. Start with his law for bloggers and journalists and explore.

Cross-cultural implications for iMedia design

2010-07-19T21:42:00.000+01:00

I love cross-cultural issues and I have rarely seen them alluded to when interactive media is taught. Aspects of design are so subtle but can have such an impact - we need to remember that the positive impact in one country and culture may not be so positive in another culture.

I came across cross-cultural aspects when teaching foreign students English - a lifetime ago. Then, once you've lived in a different culture, you get savvy about the small but significant differences in interpretation of colour, layout, gesture, association, tone, body language, and so on. Not so small are the differences in the use of humour between cultures. Humour is one of the last aspects of a language that a person masters in a second language. Irony, understatement, and satire may well underpin a lot of rather British humour, but many other cultures don’t relate to the information in the same way.

What does this all mean for web design? Well, a web site is global so can and does get traffic from many countries. Adriana Margineanu in Cross-culture accessibility: Web design that crosses cultures suggests you look at your web analytics and note if the site is getting a significant number of visitors from particular countries, then you need to look at the site with those countries in mind and perhaps offer versions that will tap into their cultural aspects better. In that way the site will have maximum impact.

Some salient examples of real cross-cultural disasters in PR terms are given by Kwintessential. Knowing these may help you win time and money to test out translations and visuals for web sites that your client demands has cross-cultural versions. It's too late once your site has a negative impact on your client’s brand. Are you covered for any retribution?

On a lighter note, if you reckon that my reference to the cultural differences of humour really can't have that many implications for other English-speaking countries like the US, Australia and most of Canada etc. do look at this page about Australian humour from the Australian Government. At least it explains quite a lot about their use of humour in various media (unfortunately not web sites) and makes you laugh! Have fun.

Website costs under review - do your sums quickly

2010-07-08T03:07:00.000+01:00

With the Government reviewing its spending and the drastic cuts it has to make, it isn't unusual to find website costs featuring in the review. But, the sheer audacity of some of the costs is astounding - nay practically unbelievable! The Business Link site has had repeated £35 million running costs for the last few years, for example. See the full exposé at Rory Cellan-Jones' blog on the BBC News web site. (The comments make for interesting reading as well.)

There's a valuable explanation there about why large companies tend to get the government contracts - will this change? Have you had problems getting onto those notorious preferred supplier lists?

But while making us all feel virtuous in relation to how much we charge our clients, all firms will follow the government's lead and review their website costs. Be ready to justify your costs far more and have some efficiency cost cutting scenarios to hand for all your major clients. Account Managers will have a hard time, along with Project Managers, as clients tighten up their questioning along with their spend. Whatever the market conditions, the mantra of time, cost and quality will still work for you.

Do your own reviewing of costs before you get asked. Approach your clients with efficiency saving offers to retain their trust in these stringent times.

Happy reviewing!

Benefits of web sites for businesses

2010-07-01T23:12:00.000+01:00

In our scoping questionnaire we suggest that you ask your clients what benefits they want from their web site in order to help you define the functionality needed and to be able to prove that you have achieved what was wanted once you have created a site.
You can of course take a more pro-active stance and list the benefits your clients might achieve and then ask which of them they want. It is always easier if someone else has defined items and you select appropriate ones, don't you think?

With this in mind then, here’s a list of possible benefits. You should present price tag increases for the more options your clients chose.

An Online presence allows:

Improved communications
Access to information 24/7
Improved efficiency
Opportunities for new business
More close contact with customers
More close contact with suppliers
Online recruitment for your company
After sales service
Enlarged market reach
Marketing new products/offers to suit the customers

Selling online allows:

A Global marketplace
Direct selling - no middlemen
24 Hour business - If your web site can process payment information you can be open 24 hours a day!
Increased customer information therefore reduced information distribution costs

Accessibility issues can add more benefits too.

Now it isn't just about the web site. Blogs, Social Media site presence and mobile resources can add more of those intangible benefits like street cred, urgency, emerging trends, personality cults, opinion waves, hype and so on. For more on accessibility benefits see Granite5 7th June 2010 or econsultancy 9th March 2010. For more on the benefits of blogging see Webbiquity 21st June 2010.

Maybe it is time to review your list of benefits of your online offerings for your clients to make your scoping easier?

Identify your competitors and evaluate your marketing strategy

2010-06-25T02:40:00.000+01:00

The ideas of competitors and markets used to squarely belong with marketing strategies for off-line companies. The online world has shifted the focus because it allows fast, automatic, analysis of your competitors. Many tools are offered under Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) allowing inside information on what your competitors are using as keywords to hook people in to their site, what search engines they are listed on, what links enhance their optimisation, what ranking they command in the engines and many more pieces of intelligence. Are you checking your competitors regularly? Worse, are they checking on you?

There's a free tool that analyses some basics that you can use for your own site or for a competitor at Search Engine Optimisation.co.uk

Search Quest gives a breakdown of what analytics they offer for small, medium and large companies. Of course, the charges go up accordingly, but it helps to see the range of analysis that is offered for a price. What price is competitor intelligence worth to you?

It's as well to remember a few caveats about trying to emulate your close competitors. They have perhaps forged ahead in their branding for several reasons. Is it worth you always trying to catch them up or should you use the intelligence to out think them? Just reproducing the same strategies but later than competitors will not give you an advantage.

So are you a blue ocean company or a red ocean company? The article from Mind Tools about blue ocean strategies is worth reading to help focus your strategy on winning by establishing difference, not by copying your competitors. Food for thought. Happy strategising.

Social Media Crunching

2010-06-12T01:01:00.000+01:00

You can't blame people for getting a bit paranoid about what people are saying about them on Facebook and worse, Twitter. But it is now a serious business if your brand is being dissed on them and you haven't got a strategy to deal with this. Are you advising your clients to think this through? Are you trying to deal with it by using tools to monitor what's going down on the social grapevine?

Well, luckily a few companies are ahead of the game and Fresh Networks with their sister company FreshMinds Research have done an analysis of seven social media monitoring tools in a free report you can download from their site at www.freshnetworks.com.

This also gives some insight into the basics of social media monitoring, where to find social conversations, and the drawbacks of monitoring social comments. I imagine from my linguistic days that it can be a nightmare to analyse chatter let alone texting but I'm interested in this side of things because language analysis has progressed leaps and bounds. I just wonder if the analysis gets hold of the wrong end of the stick more often than not! (Imagine trying to analyse that last sentence!). Get more about this by looking at The Problem with Automated Sentiment Analysis 28th May by Matt Rhodes.

Whatever, social media networks are giving the trad media boys some puzzlement over what good they can be to them. New Media Age (3rd June issue) featured the dilemma for broadcasters after the BBC have integrated the iPlayer with Facebook and Twitter enabling users to share and recommend shows to each other. Of course, the rest of the TV players want in on the game.

Talking of games – yes, we'll be avoiding the World Cup so there won't be a blog next week. We're off snorkelling in warm waters, ash permitting.

Managing client expectations – a common project problem

2010-06-04T01:28:00.000+01:00

From the number of job descriptions where this phrase features, this is a skill in big demand. What's more, these jobs are in the higher pay brackets too. Most difficulties stem from lack of understanding on both sides, lack of clarity about what will be produced, and in the end a lack of trust. It needs someone to apply some analysis and jump in and sort out any emerging problems.

In iMedia projects the risk from miscommunication increases. Why is that? Well, we’re talking about what for most people is an intangible process (computing processes), we are working internally across specialisms that have their own language of description, and working with clients who have their own specialisms, descriptive languages and markets. Then, of course, we deal in look and feel – very subjective issues.

Very often it is the things that are not said that prove to be the gremlins. These are implicit expectations the client has about the project. The only way to get clients to verbalise these is to ask specific questions. The client may not have realised that they even needed to consider X,Y and Z, but if you raise the issues and insist you have to have some answers before proceeding, this educates the client into giving information that is vital. (The project 'Scoping' questionnaire we have discussed previously can help with this).

For example, it is very important for you to know if a site has to be designed for the client to update. The client might presume that is what they'll get as all their contacts operate in that way. But, unless you ask the key question about the assumption (implicit expectation), you’ll be up **** creek! And we've all been there!

Just to be clear, managing client expectations is part of the wider role of stakeholder management, that we also discuss in these pages. Stakeholders can be anyone who can influence the project and so this can include clients, your direct contacts there as well as indirect contacts in their company. It can include your internal team and management too. All their expectations have to be managed in appropriate communication – dealt with elsewhere but I felt it needed to be put in context here.

So not an easy issue at all but a skill that is highly valued although not one that is analysed well in cyberspace! All I can offer you in the way of recent thinking is:

Managing Client Expectations (April 2009) on Continuous Thinking (author unknown)

Managing Client Expectations (December 18th 2009) by Raj Modi, Ezinearticles.com - a slightly sideways look as he discusses consultancy and client expectations but has validity

Finally, if you really can’t manage the client any more as they are beyond managing this might hold some answers! How to fire a client (August 2005) by Andrew Neitlich in Sitepoint

Visual perspectives and their impact on iMedia projects

2010-05-29T12:25:00.000+01:00

This week we were introduced to a new visual perspective from a client who is a jeweller. In the past we have worked with clients to produce iMedia projects across such diverse areas as digital TV switchover and fashion. But here, the need for close-up, clear images of the jewellery actually showed up blemishes of the hand-worked metals. We didn't notice these as we were concentrating on photographing detailed, well-lit images. The client was easy-going and just said that she’d never realised the blemishes were there despite working under lights and using strong lenses to produce the pieces. Actually, she also decided that they were good because they demonstrated the pieces were hand-crafted, so although we said we could Photoshop them out (ah, yes, what did we ever do without it?), she decided against this to remain true to the image.

It got me thinking however about how often in the past a lot of controversy in projects has been caused by clashes in visual perspective where the differences between how the client views things and how we view the same things were not so evident and appeared subjective. I wondered what the latest theory was on visual literacy and embarked on some research.

Did you realise we've been part of a massive revolution where visual overtakes textual intelligence as technologies such as the Internet, video games, CDs, DVDs and social networks become the communicative media of choice? There remains a gulf between how visual literacy is measured/rated in people and how their intelligence in text environments is measured. Our educational measures lag behind and don't even fit the emerging capabilities and skills used in electronic media. Well, I’m not surprised!

All this leads to how we understand and value other perspectives. Do we stick to what we know and feel happy with, and therefore insist we are right, or do we hold back, wonder if there is another valid perspective, and compromise? Maybe there is more to the saying the client is always right than we realise!

For those who want to drill deeper into this massive field of visual literacy, here are a few current online refs. Enjoy the ride.

Theories of Visual Perception: Problems and Perspectives by Professor Alan Johnson of University College London - bit outdated but academic historical text-based overview of visual literacy theories to the end of last century.

A Perspective on 3D Visual Illusions in Scientific American - makes you think about visual images in a new way, with pertinent illustrations.

Digital Technologies and performative pedagogies: Repositioning the visual by Kathryn Grushka and Debra Donnelly of Newcastle University in Australia - pretty heavily academic but has meaning for us iMedia lot.

Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis? from PhysOrg - a bit of the alternative point of view about what visuals do and don’t do for us.

Your UK iMedia salary in these uncertain times

2010-05-21T03:38:00.000+01:00

Do you think your skills are undervalued? Have you morphed your role in your company through experience without anyone noticing? What do you think you are worth?

Now and again it's a valuable exercise to try and understand how your salary fits with the average for your role. It may be reassuring but it can be a shock that may prompt you to think about moving, or educating the right people in your company by getting them to take a look. Mind you, a surprising number of you (three-quarters) would forego a salary rise for a supportive and interesting work environment apparently. Would this include you? See the paragraph under 4 in 10 media players unaffected by recession at www.recruiter.co.uk.

There is the age-old problem of what you call yourself since we've griped for years about the lack of role definitions in iMedia, and this means that it is hard to compare like with like. Do you actually have a job title that makes sense?

Still, it's good to get an overview and one of the best matches we've found is at payscale.com

They also allow you to look at related charts according to experience, employer type and location which are useful since these do affect figures, of course. Don't worry if you're a contractor as they offer a chart for you too.

Times are probably going to get harder before they stabilise again so you may need to factor that in to your thinking as well. Let’s hope the great majority of you are pleasantly surprised.

Have fun.

RACI Chart and iMedia Project Management

2010-05-17T21:17:00.000+01:00

Firstly, a quick apology for being 'off-air' for the past week. We inadvertently fell foul of Google's robotic anti-spam mechanism on Blogger and were 'disabled' as a result. Getting this reviewed by a human being turned out to be a process of which Kafka would be proud but reviewed it was and here we are again.

It's been a while since we looked at the specifics of filling out a RACI Chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consult and Inform) although I had to revise the concept for an enquiry about our Stakeholder Management training course last week. We suggest that this tool can really help project managers at the beginning of a project once you've a strong idea of what the project is about and who's involved i.e. you've done your stakeholder analysis both internal and external.

Often the project manager's role is a dumping ground for the responsibilities and accountabilities of other management. So if you've ever suffered in that dreaded lonely field where the fingers point at you and you are thinking. '... but that had nothing to do with me!', then maybe a RACI Chart can help. Essentially, it defines roles and responsibilities in a clear unambiguous way. Ah! Yes, the catch is getting all of you to agree on the role definitions!! So if you get the definitions of the roles very clear in your mind, you will lead others to realise precisely what their role is for a particular stage in the project.

Paul Ritchie does a nice job in finding definitions of Accountability and Responsibility in the Crossderry blog 26th April - his simplified definitions certainly impress me!

Responsible = Those who do the work in question
Accountable = The one who signs off on the work that Responsible provides

And, if you want to understand more about drafting a RACI Matrix, Ginny Edwards in, Constructing a RACI Matrix will give you plenty of tips. I know she seems to cover variations on the RACI Matrix but not nearly as well as Wapedia – be sure to scroll to uncover the alternatives.

These alternatives may help you if your way of working and assignment of roles in your organisation differs from the usual suspects (RACI). It's nice to have someone else's confirmation that organisations differ and your organisation may be so locked into its ways that they won't shift and would rather stick with one or two names for comfort. Yeah! Been there, done that!

The expanding concept of an interactive project

2010-04-30T18:08:00.000+01:00

In our book, we begin by defining the types of iMedia project that you can come across. This drilled down to projects within projects, and invited you to do an analysis of your organisations' projects over the past year by type and revenue.
The interactive landscape has changed allowing a proliferation of types of project. They can all be subject to the general principles of project management, but it is good to stand back now and then to read the changing landscape. How do we do this?

Well, there are several indicators. Job roles expand to define the diverse skills that are needed for the growing number of projects. There's a snapshot at www.peopleperhour.com which is a site that aims to find you a freelancer based on skills that you need. It's a shame that web design and all related web-type roles fall under other, but on the other hand, the sheer number and categories should stimulate some serious thinking.

It's good to get hold of some statistics about the industry to look at some forecasts. This has always proved problematic because the UK doesn't really support good stats about it - iMedia isn't seen as a cohesive industry yet. However, there is a prediction from the US about interactive graphic designers and the projected increase in numbers of them needed by 2018 – an increase of 13% from 2008! See www.ehow.co.uk

At least this article by Meagan Van Beest (now there’s a name) categorises iMedia designers as Flash Designers, Game Designers, Information Systems Designers, Interactive TV Designers or Web Designers.

Finally, to wake you up with lateral thinking, those off-the-wall projects happening now may well shape whole sections of the interactive market in the not too distant future. There's a great toe-dipping experience at Goldsmith's College London explained at Creative Choices UK about the use of smart interactive technologies affecting theatre, medicine, and textile sectors.
See www.creative-choices.co.uk

Customer Relationship Management going social?

2010-04-23T18:23:00.000+01:00

It could be argued that CRM (Customer Relationship Management) lifted the lid on the potential of all this social networking. Well, if we just imagine how influenced teens are by their peer group, it's not rocket science to extend this idea of strong influence to friends and family. So CRM, which bonded people by brand association and/or buying habits, is not that far from companies trying to influence people bonded by friendship or family ties to buy similar things.

This seems to be a successful advertising formula improving recall by 30% if friends' names are linked to buying a brand. See the article from MyCustomer.com.

You’d imagine that the links between CRM and Social Networking are a bit obvious if I make the link as a non-marketeer! But it is not, it seems. Although Facebook and Twitter have passed the fad stage, traditional CRMers have not bought in to them - as cited in another MyCustomer article.

Watch this space because the social networking sites are still growing more rapidly than any other communication media. But again if we try to learn from the past, the social sites grew for other reasons and may react badly to adverse influence. It has to be handled carefully. Where's the solid research?

Talking of research, Forrester looks at the trends of CRM 2010. They see this year as one where the hype about social media and CRM leads to some pilot projects. Take a look at a summary of other CRM trends at Forrester.

Perhaps you can do your own bit here. Would you be happy to see ads with your friends and family names and faces linked to them? Would it influence you positively?

Speeding your way to SEO

2010-04-16T19:32:00.000+01:00

Google has announced that it is now including site speed in the metrics it uses to calculate page ranking. There is a story on the BBC web site which links to the page on the Google webmaster blog.

Basically what Google are saying is that users like web pages that load quickly. I personally prefer pages that start to load quickly as well; ones that show some signs of life.

The comments on the Google blog post are interesting. One blog-commenter points out that Google analytics can itself slow a page down as the JavaScript it uses loads from an external site. In fact many pages build in material from numerous sources, especially now that so much content is dynamically generated using Ajax and the like. We have come a long way from simple HTML where only one web server (plus the DNS to find the domain name) was involved in a transaction.

A web site is already very asynchronous, meaning that the various parts of it will be loaded simultaneously rather than queuing and waiting for each other to finish loading, even if all the component parts are coming off a single server. But there is more that could be done, especially in back-end coding. Think about the way your code works ... can any parts of it be forked off independently? Does your environment allow you to do this? What are the risks if some of those forks don't finish for some reason?

And if you are involved in SEO, what new factors should you take into account?

UK Digital Economy Bill April 2010

2010-04-09T07:48:00.000+01:00

This bill has caused uproar in many circles as it was pushed through with seemingly little debate last night in what's known as the wash up period as Parliament moves to dissolution in the build-up to the election.

Andy raised a few issues about this bill in another posting recently and perhaps it is interesting that the clause that directly concerned many photographers was deleted. But with many aspects to cover across diverse developers and users of digital communication/business, there were many hats to be thrown into the ring of debate. Too late now! This was voted on and passed late last night with a seeming deal between Labour and Conservatives.

To see what issues might affect you take a look at a summary of the clauses at The Quick Guide to all 45 measures and a shorter summary at services.parliament.uk.

The strength of reaction can be tangibly measured in Ben Camm-Jones' comments on Web User where he casts shame on all MPs for the bill and shame on the very few MPs who even bothered to vote despite voiced concerns by over 20,000 people to their respective MPs.

Gary Marshall too makes his feelings very clear at Tech Radar where he states that digital democracy clearly doesn't work!

Will the bill affect you or your business?

The Moral Imperative

2010-04-01T11:12:00.000+01:00

Last week, wearing a Royal Photographic Society hat, I went along to a seminar on moral rights. This was organised by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP) and aimed to discuss the international perspective on the subject.

Now as I'm sure you remember, moral rights are an adjunct to the economic right of copyright. Rather than your right to control and earn money from your creations, moral rights protect your artistic integrity. They are relatively new to UK law but long-standing in countries like France.

The seminar was interesting and often too technical to go into in detail here but I wanted to flag a couple of things.

The first thing is the subject of attribution. I argued that all other rights stem from this; if you are not known as the author/creator then how are you going to exploit your work or protect its (and your) integrity (another important moral right). UK law does convey a right of attribution but it has to be asserted ... you have to say you assert your right to be identified as the creator of your work. You can, by 'agreement' waive your right of attribution in contract (it doesn't apply to things you do in the course of employment) and there is a big exception for reporting news and current affairs. This latter point is seen by some as something the newspaper and web publishers take advantage of regularly.

In some countries you can't waive your moral rights ... they are yours and you are not allowed to give them up. I hope that the questions and discussions at the seminar made the point that authors need attribution ... you are only as good as your last credit, as they say in TV. Some publishers argue that their business model relies on no individual contributor being credited but, as someone else pointed out, countries like France still have newspapers and web sites. The days of stories being simply credited to 'our reporter' are long gone surely? (Mind you, I once knew a man who edited a girls magazine for a while in the 1960s and the editor was always called Pete Lennon, no matter who he really was ... that was the image.)

My second point is something that only occurred to me after the event, when I looked through the attendance list. There was no one representing software authors and programmers. (Someone was there from Microsoft but I don't count them.) There was no one from BIMA or the BCS or even the games industry.

There is an exception in UK moral rights for computer programs. The argument was that 'computer programs are always written by teams'. Well that is patently untrue and I suspect you only believe that if you have an old-fashioned view of programs and programmers. Personally I think programmers are as creative as the rest of us and deserve their moral rights ... a point I shall be raising with SABIP.

Any thoughts?

The Freelance culture - what it can mean for your project

2010-03-25T18:18:00.000Z

How many of us employ freelancers on our projects? In iMedia it seems to be quite the norm to supplement the team with extra skills from the freelance pool. We should admit that we can’t work without them. But with their non-conformist, free-spirit culture do they fit in with a team ethos?

iMedia development needs a mix of skills, creativity, technical know-how, hard-graft, attention to detail, time sensitivity, business nous, market awareness and project management. It’s a project development activity that cries out for a team of people. Quite often the client wants something that makes a difference whether in look or feel, and a team that has gelled through working together can operate more efficiently but may lack the spark of difference. This is what a new member may bring. Will the existing team squash or embrace the newbie freelancer? Will you? Will your management?

The interface between employees and freelancers has not been the focus of much attention when it should be. It poses risks and benefits that need managing sensitively.

The good news is that iMedia freelancers along with general creative freelancers have a pool of resources to help them. They have become more professional, tap into one another and listen to advice from more experienced freelancers. It is not the isolated black art it used to be and we can’t relate to it like that any more. Perhaps it’s time to reappraise it. Take a look at the analysis from an experienced freelancer, Jacques van Heerden, who explodes 5 myths in 5 freelance myths busted from the start. Do any of these myths reflect your attitude/ your company’s culture?

To understand freelancers better, why not take a look at how they need to relate to contracts that you may offer them. Often companies just have standard tweaked contracts for freelancers and it can cause a lot of trouble when they query them. But they do so with very good reason and we need to employ them so we should do it right, shouldn’t we? Hopefully you have recourse to legal advice and after reading 10 things to be wary of when signing a consultancy contract, by James May, from the interesting FreelanceUK site, you’ll be able to read your own company freelance contracts with a bit more appreciation.

The 10 points here relate to the IR35 tax regulations where if freelancers are not seen as sufficiently independent in the revenue’s eyes, they will be treated as employees when it comes to tax and national insurance. This could be detrimental to the contractor but it can also have knock-on effects for the company who hires the freelancer, and these can be applied retrospectively. Remember this only relates to IR35 and the ‘employment’ position but of course there are other issues that need to be addressed in a freelance contract, such as intellectual property and liability.

Web usability trends

2010-03-18T18:45:00.000Z

Usability issues change as the users become more experienced. We all know this and can trace differences in approach to the issues over time on the various iMedia devices. Engaging with your users in meaningful ways now drives design far more than it used to. Understanding your market either happens because you have a track record in developing for the niche, or you build in time/money in your project's development to define the users' behaviour.

So, it came as no surprise for us to find an interesting research project on specific reactions to interactive devices for defined childrens' age ranges (0-6 and 6-12) on behalf of the BBC. They want to employ a psychologist who has experience with eye tracking interpretation to help assess reactions particularly from pre-school aged children. This group of children present great difficulty for researchers as they find it hard if not impossible to put their feelings into words. (The job deadline has just passed if you were interested.) See www.ktponline.org.uk.

Human Computer Interaction is an exciting field. It has come of age with the plethora of interactive devices coupled with the growth in use of the devices, and the understanding that making interaction usable and accessible can mean added value. This happens through increased sales, or, buying into a brand because of a connection with what it offers, or, faster comprehension of the content on offer - whatever makes the difference between competitors.

You may like to dip a toe into this HCI world if you’re not already party to it. There's a conference coming up in April in the USA with presentations on such aspects as: Making meaning in large displays, Understanding Cool, Avatars and virtual environments, Seniors using technology, Pixels and perception, Designing User Interfaces for Multi-touch and Surface-Gesture Devices, HCI in China, etc.

See the full advance program at www.chi2010.org.

Exciting developments, don't you agree? How would you define your company's expertise in such matters? Do you collaborate with specialist companies?

Collaboration – the mantra for successful teams and leadership for the future

2010-03-14T23:43:00.000Z

It was refreshing to find recent confirmation of what we’ve been expounding for years for iMedia teams in our training courses and books. The confirmation comes from the strategic analysis on the future of work by such people as Lynda Gratton, Prof from The London Business School, and, Tammy Erikson, Thought Leader of nGenera, a strategic consultancy company.

So, what are they on about? It’s this idea of collaboration between diverse team members who may or may not be co-located (virtual teams). It won’t surprise anyone that collaboration comes down to trust. Therefore, how should a team leader build trust among diverse talents across cultures? This is the sort of dilemma you’ll have been facing in coordinating people within your teams or even in specifying as a trait you want in recruitment. Increasingly, people will need a balance between people-management skills and task performance skills to survive.

Collaboration “...can be catalyzed, but it can’t be mandated – and to that extent, it requires a shift in management mindset.” Tammy Erikson

One of the keys seems to lie in the ability of management to engender a culture of collaboration – how’s your company shaping up?

See the inserts from Lynda and Tammy on Pages 13 and 15 and read pages 13, 14, 15 for quick insights from the report Building the collaborative enterprise. Ten questions to ask about business opportunities through collaboration. nGenera Corporation 2009

Link: www.globalleadersevents.com

Prior experience in iMedia affects present design issues

2010-03-03T21:58:00.000Z

One of the first issues we recommend you tackle with new projects and new clients is to understand any previous experiences your clients have had with technology and designers. Their prior experience will have an impact. What did they like/dislike about their experiences? These insights can affect your decisions of whether to work with them, how to work with them and what solutions to suggest.

Often as a result of this analysis, you may recognise that you might have to educate your client. They may have inappropriate expectations about what can be achieved for the time and money. They may be too internally focused by their own corporate politics and forget that they are trying to influence their audience. Who is their prime target market? Can they articulate who they are? Do they really know their market and its relationship with technological communication?

Equally, prior experience works both ways. Your experiences are part of your expertise. Your client should value and listen to your intelligence. Do they?

As part of your education you might like to point your clients at 10 Harsh Truths about Corporate Websites suggesting they think long and hard about all the points but particularly 4: Your website cannot appeal to everyone, 6: Your website is not all about you, and 8: Design by committee brings death. Nice analysis, Damien and Tania!

What you want from your clients is an enviable list of recommendations like WStore – surely they all can’t be made up! (No, they’re not because we know one person in the list.)

These would demonstrate positive prior experiences with iMedia, satisfied clients and return business. How would comments from your clients shape up?

More on TwistCo

2010-02-23T18:48:00.000Z

By a strange twist of coincidence I found myself discussing the orphan works legislation with officials at the UK Intellectual Property Office yesterday. The context was photography, which the IPO recognise has the worst orphan problem.

Firstly, orphan works legislation is required because the practice of trying hard but publishing anyway is actually illegal to the extent of being a criminal offence! The idea is to make it possible to publish an orphan work within the law.

Secondly, the plan, as outlined to us at the meeting, is to make it as hard if not harder to use an orphan work than to licence a known one or even commission something new. Anyone wanting to use an orphan would have to apply for permission to do so (to our hypothetical orphan collecting agency TwistCo ... see the previous post), prove they have diligently tried to find the rightful owner, and pay a fee appropriate to the intended usage.

Thirdly, this is an extension to the way rights are handled. No existing rights are to be compromised. On the other hand, the proposals would only apply to the UK: there is no international aspect to this.

Fourthly, there is no reason or even implied incentive to register your copyright works with TwistCo in order to prevent them being orphaned. That's not the way it works: TwistCo is reactive and reacts to publishers registering orphans they wish to use. TwistCo will probably be obliged to advertise the orphans they have on a regular basis, so that potential relatives have the opportunity to claim them. Falsely claiming ownership would be fraud but the legitimate parent would still need to prove their case; this is the case with a copyright claim under existing law anyway and we would hope that a claim by a copyright owner to TwistCo would be less arduous than a copyright infringement suit.

Personally I feel somewhat reassured by all this, with the caveat that these plans are not written into the bill, they would have to be facilitated by the Secretary of State if and when the bill is passed. The IPO are also aware that tracking photographs on the web will rely on effective image recognition that can cope with cropping, changes in gamma, rotation, inversion ... and so on. Incidentally, keeping the bill vague is apparently a way of giving it a chance of getting through. The discussion going on at the moment is nothing to what would be happening if the bill actually went into detail.

We should be aware that any kind of work can be an orphan. After the meeting I realised that this could just as easily apply to a computer program, or routine from one. With so much JavaScript floating around the web there are lots of opportunities for lines of code to get separated from their copyright notices. Just when you think you've found all the worms in the can you find another can on the shelf.

Orphans cause stir in copyright plans

2010-02-18T22:37:00.000Z

Sorry for the bad headline! This is related to the Digital Economy Bill that is currently going through parliament and the plans within it to deal with what are called orphan works.

Basically an orphan is a work whose owner can not be found. Publishers are often unable to use things like images because they have a copy but don't know the copyright owner in order to ask permission. Probably the biggest type of rights involved in this are photographs, but it can just as easily apply to a movie or a piece of text or any kind of work.

The bill makes provision for the Secretary of State to determine how to deal with orphan works. I find this, in itself, odd because it seems rather like baldly saying that theft is bad but we will let someone in government sort out the details of what we do about this.

The text of the section is here: www.publications.parliament.uk

My reason for mentioning this is that the internet is leading to a proliferation of orphans. People put their photos (to continue that example) on things like Flickr, other people link to them without attribution and, hey-presto, you have an orphan in the making. The bill seems to make no provision about how much effort needs to be taken to find the owner before the work can be considered an orphan (that's for the Secretary of State to decide). There seems to be no mention of what happens when someone's orphan is returned to the electronic bosom of its family, beyond authorising the Secretary of State to include provisions in whatever regulations may be produced as a result of the bill. This is all very vague for the rights holders but what might it mean for publishers ... such as you and your clients with web sites?

We may find that there is a body who will issue licences and collect fees for the orphans on behalf of their unknown owners so that if you can't track the owner down you will at least be safe from copyright infringement if you get a licence from this new hypothetical body. Let's call it TwistCo. Note that TwistCo would charge a fee, whereas currently if you do your best but decide to publish anyway, you do not have to pay anything; unless and until the rights holder finds you and, probably, asks for a fee. This new process could take a lot more time since you will, presumably, first have to prove to TwistCo that you have tried your best before approaching them for a licence.

It is likely that the orphan provisions will become law in some way but it reinforces not only your need to use reasonable endeavours to get the right permissions up front for everything on a web site; but also to make sure it is correctly attributed ... and that you correctly attribute everything you use. Who knows ... one day the orphan may be yours.

PS: To save you looking it up ... twistco.org and twistco.org.uk are currently available!

Microsoft Project 2010 – is it different enough for consideration?

2010-02-14T00:46:00.000Z

Many interactive sections of companies have been forced to use Microsoft Project because it has been the de facto project tool in the organisation. In the past it hasn’t really suited our way of working. With the new version due out soon, has this changed?

The older versions had criticisms from not being web-based, not giving a time-line view of the project, not being team and resource sensitive, and not suiting small businesses. The older versions began from total project management of a single, large project from conception to completion. This mirrored the older style of project management. It went hand-in-hand with the large software development projects coupled with their processes of development – the waterfall method of software development.

Of course, much has changed with approaches to projects, the definition of what a project is, faster software development techniques, simultaneous development of several projects, collaborative team-based processes, and expectations of how to report on progress. The two biggest new features are the timeline view and the team planner. Of course, these have been fundamentals for us from the beginning and that’s why interactive companies have tended to go with other project software solutions that were more suitable.

Well, it seems that this new version can be flexible enough to suit our ways of working. You need to know that there are three versions and apparently the Professional version works in web space while the Standard version doesn’t.
Possibly good news for those forced to use Microsoft Project. There are over 20 million users and 98% of people that use a planning tool use Microsoft Project according to Ivan Lloyd in his article Microsoft Project 2010; Is this the release we’ve all been waiting for?, Project Manager Today, Jan/Feb 2010, pages 12-15.

The last we knew was that Basecamp was proving the most popular project aid in iMedia Companies. Has this changed? What are you using?

Clients from hell or what are the client’s responsibilities?

2010-02-05T00:23:00.000Z

Despite clients learning a lot in the last few years about digital projects, many of the same gripes crop up from developers. Projects are a partnership. They cannot be successful without both sides pulling their weight. This means responsibilities on both sides throughout the project. Now if you work with a Prince2 Project Manager and your client also has one, then they will work to a framework that both understand. Without this mutual understanding, you have to create one prior to starting the project.

We groan at the quotes on Clients from Hell but we all recognise them! Perhaps we can use them in a positive to help us educate clients. Show your new clients some of the top gripes as quotes and explain why the attitudes are counter-productive in digital design. Agree that they will not make you groan in the same way by working together to produce the project.

Take a look at the gripes in the links below and smile, but make them work for you. The companies that work successfully with their clients get repeat business and respect. How do you avoid having similar gripes?

Enjoy

Clients from Hell (this one changes almost daily)
Five client statements that frustrate freelancers – Patricio Robles 15th January

What is a project?

2010-02-01T00:45:00.000Z

Maybe it is a good opportunity at the beginning of a year for you to reassess what project categories your company is involved with. We analysed the following in the first chapter of our book: client based projects, bread and butter projects, investment projects, maintenance projects, quick fix projects, R&D projects, good will projects, and pitches/tenders to win projects.

We suggested there that you identified and categorised the types of project you dealt with over the last year to see how and where your time and efforts have been deployed. Try it again. What projects have been most profitable? What projects have generated more business? Which projects have increased your company status? And so on ... Monetary return may not always be as straightforward in terms of the progress of a company. Looking back at projects can help you devise strategies for the future in terms of which projects may have to most impact – even in these uncertain times.

Perhaps we need to go back to some basics like ‘what is a project?’ Here are some views.

For those looking for a formal definition of a project the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines a project as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. The temporary nature of projects indicates a definite beginning and end. The end is reached when the project’s objectives have been achieved or when the project is terminated because its objectives will not or cannot be met, or when the need for the project no longer exists.
What is a Project? Module by: Merrie Barron, Andrew R. Barron.

A project in business and science is a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.
Wikipedia: Project

But cnx differentiate between a project that is new and unique and an operation in business that is a repetitive process. Where does this leave us with web site revisions (maintenance?) and micro sites (small client projects?) Are they new projects or not projects at all, just part of a process; and if that is so, should project management tenets be applied in their production?

We have argued previously that they should be considered separate projects and costed out with time, resources and expenditure. We still maintain that, in fact. They can be grey areas but they do have new or different objectives and therefore represent a unique product or service even if they are refinements of a previous attempt.

Well, agree or disagree?

Winning Web Design Proposals

2010-01-21T22:34:00.000Z

Clients are becoming choosy in the recession about who they want to develop and maintain their digital media offerings. Maybe it’s time to review your company’s proposals because it is at the initial stages that you can win new business with new clients who won’t make your life hell. How’s that, you may well ask? You need to cover all the bases in the questions you ask upfront to ensure that the new business doesn’t hide any nasty dark corners that you haven’t costed in the quote. Equally, the clients need to have complete understanding of the processes you’ll employ and then you ought to have a relatively easy ride.

It’s the misunderstandings that cause the problems. So, if you clearly explain upfront how you will assess the needs, how you will develop, what you will develop, how you will communicate the process to the client, and what their role is, you will start on safer ground.

SpeckyBoy Design Magazine has put together a really good set of resources to help you with web site proposals. It came out on 18th Jan 2010 and has already had lots of positive comments posted. Worth a long hard look.

See: speckyboy.com

iMedia Project Management and time, cost and quality issues

2010-01-14T23:52:00.000Z

Sorry about not posting something last week – we were without power for 2 days! Anyway Happy New Year etc.

The fundamentals of time, cost and quality project management in developing interactive media continue to feature in any interactive add-ons such as developing mobile apps. It seems that the mantra of the time, cost quality triangle applies to all projects, of course. But, people get fazed by thinking ‘this is an incidental add-on to our main project’ when clients want mobile apps, a viral campaign, micro-sites or other spin-off projects from their main web site. These extras need to be considered as separate projects and scoped and costed accordingly remembering that if anything affects either of the elements of time, cost or quality then there is an impact on the other two. (And you have educated your clients to know this, haven’t you!)

Yes, iPhone Apps are different because they are bespoke, subject to Apple inspection and have a leaning to the software/database skill set rather than web design. But Tim Ocock, VP at Symsource has strong advice on developing iPhone apps that reflect time, cost and quality issues at: technologyweekly.mad.co.uk

His costs were a bit startling until he explained the overheads of these micro projects. However, the article seemed to have a ring of truth about it. What do you think?

Usability for web sites - where?

2009-12-18T21:05:00.000Z

This is the last posting for this year and we'll be having a 2 week break then leaving Yahoo and moving exclusively onto this blog site in 2010.

Don't forget to set up your RSS feed so that you can get the postings automatically just like the Yahoo Group. We're moving because it allows us more flexibility for archiving the posts under relevant headings which makes for a better resource for searching for information when you want it.

So, usability guidelines. How have these changed ? Yes, there are more resources now and they are more extensive. As the web has grown, and the number and range of sites expanded, the intelligence on what helps people view information - and make sales - has grown too. You can drill down under about 20 sub-headings about various usability aspects at: www.usability.gov

This is a US government site that offers advice to web designers about how to design sites. But they do have a caveat:

Although considerable effort has been made to base the guidelines on research from a variety of fields, including cognitive psychology, computer science, human factors, technical communication, and usability; other disciplines may have valuable research that is not reflected in these guidelines.

That's a nice heads-up and shows the tenor of their guidelines.

Some people love him and some hate him, but whatever your view, Jakob Nielsen is a leading light in Usability. See his site for the latest at www.useit.com.

Finally, for a more recent and UK centric view, and one with online Christmas shopping at its centre, have a look at the article from Imprezz. A staggering 42% of people abandon their online shopping because of a perceived or actual slowing of the site.

www.hosting-news.net/tag/website-usability

Merry Christmas and a fantastic 2010 from us.

Elaine and Andy