Navigating Web Caves ... How To

Did you hear the one about the two Saudis and an American who go into a cave with 25 Europeans and a Dutch guide holding a lantern? Of course you haven’t because it really happened, and I’m going to tell you about it.

The Saudis are my clients, and I’m the American consultant. We’re in Maastricht, Netherlands for a round of video interviews with their European leadership. The interviews will turn into content for the learning portal I’m helping the company build.

It’s the weekend, and I decide an outing at a popular tourist attraction might be fun for all. The St Pietersberg Caves there are famous. Approximately 2,000 passages comprising 125 miles, the caves were formed from centuries of mining marl, which was used primarily in constructing area buildings. Napoleon visited the caves, Rembrandt’s paintings and downed American pilots were hidden there from the Nazis … many stories. So, why not go there?

The three of us board a boat for the 30-minute trip down river, then a 20-minute climb uphill, followed by a 10-minute walk down inside the mountain. Before we descend, I discover that the cave tour is conducted only in Dutch. I approach the tour guide hoping that he excelled in English in school. He says curtly that, if I stay close to him and if he has time, he will translate for me from Dutch to English the information he just told the group. I will then convey his comments to my Arab-speaking clients, whose English, fortunately, is quite good.

When we arrive in the cave’s first large chamber, whose rock walls are adorned with paintings and stories, the crowd gathers around the guide. I position myself on a nearby ledge up against the cave wall to watch his body language and not block the view of children. The first words out of the guide’s mouth are directed to me in English: “Don’t touch the walls of the cave.” My companions slip into the crowd to avoid being associated with the culprit.

Think about that experience. You are trusting someone you never met to lead you where you have never been, explaining in a language you don’t know about unfamiliar writings and designs on walls in chamber after chamber. And what if your guide was to turn off his lantern and you were standing there in 50° blackness without a flashlight? How would you make your way back out?

Now, think about the website, intranet, or portal you’re building. You’re leading people who don’t know you, down paths they have never been, to rooms of information where you use terminology that is yours not theirs. Fortunately for them but not for you, if they get lost and panic, they simply click out.

Of course, good web designers and user experience experts know the standard tricks for helping people navigate sites. They can logically explain to you how those techniques will work. However, that doesn’t excuse you, the site originator and manager, from the process. Quite the opposite. Your role is to be the human in that process, the user.

Long before getting user testing underway – you will be doing user testing, right? -- you have to be the user. When your consultants and colleagues are saying, “they’ll (users) figure it out,” or “after they read all the information …” you should be thinking, “I don’t want to have to figure it out,” and “I probably would skim and grab information, not read it all.”

So, step aside from the others, realize that you’re on the tour alone, walk around the passages and chambers of your prototype site, and monitor your thoughts and feelings. Let me put you in the right frame of mind. Think cave.

3 Directions

1 Moving vertically
The homepage is the orientation center. You will spend only 30, maybe 60 seconds here. No time for hype. You’re busy, and you came to this page for a purpose: to get an annotated map. If the map is too difficult to decipher, you simply will find your own route using the search function. You have a search function on the site, right?

As you, the visitor, make your way down through a passage from the homepage to the information chambers, you should drop some breadcrumbs that show you how to get back. And you know what breadcrumbs are on a site: they’re the string of categories found consistently near the top of the screen that serve the same purpose as a “you are here” map. The highlighted “crumb” indicates where you are in relation to each step along the path. Click left on a crumb and you are back at a higher level. Keep the crumbs simple: they’re crumbs, not bread slices.

2 Moving laterally
Each chamber in the St Pietersberg Caves has distinct content. Some contain wall paintings, some plaques, and one has baking ovens that once fed people in hiding. No matter how different the content of the rooms, common to all is rock -- rock walls, rock floors, rock ceilings. Wherever tourists are, rock tells them they’re in a cave.

Diversity is good. Yet, taken to extremes on websites by organizational family members who want to establish their own identities -- often meaning separateness -- visitors who wander to those places can get confused and lost. Unless politically impossible, make sure all parts of your site share at least the rock ... that is, share common design elements and structure -- colors, type fonts, heading styles, whatever -- that visually tell users they are in the same cave, just different chambers.

Sometimes a departmental intranet was up and running before you decided to launch the central site. For example, the Supply Chain group has its own wiki-type site, which includes a learning management system and training courses. However, you have planned for a learning section on the main site for centalizing all training. Supply Chain wants its staff to link to your learning options but is unwilling to give up what took so long to build.

You can think territorially about this and wage a battle, or you can think like an employee who, frankly, doesn't care who owns what. Easy access and minimal clicks are all that matter. Consequently, build a transitional page that visually signals users coming from or to the main site that they are about to move into a different zone.

3 Moving out
Bailing out of a site is simple. Once again, think like a user. What would make you do a u-turn and linger just a bit longer, then return soon and often? Of course, the content must be engaging and applicable. Assuming that's true, you the user would want to do something with that content such as:

• rate the value of what you read or heard;
• bookmark a page using your preferred service: Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.;
• capture and store information from various pages (e.g., Google Notebook);
• share information with others by clicking on email, print, ShareThis, and various social networking options; and
• receive email or SMS cellphone alerts on items of interest.

5 Moving Tips

1. Flash motion can add personality to pages, but sometimes that personality is narcissistic. A revolving header screams, “look at me because I’m more important than what you’re looking at."


2. Moving images -- video, animation, etc. -- add entertainment and a human touch to content. Use those formats increasingly but let the site visitor choose to turn them on.


3. The canned message on the homepage from your CEO probably won't move visitors. It's rarely read and never read on the second visit. Save the real estate.


4. Keep the user stationary by integrating all media into pages rather than separate windows.


5. Construct the homepage as a map, but realize that many, if not most visitors will move from another site directly to a page of specific interest on your site.

Richard Skaare 01.11.09
Credit: Photo by Luke Redmond

Slogging through the Early Blogging Weeks

Whenever I paced nervously around our kitchen as a youngster, my watching mother would say, “You don’t know what to do with yourself.” I didn’t understand what she meant back then. I do now because I’ve been pacing nervously around the social network for a month or two not quite knowing what to do with myself. Fortunately, John Updike stepped in to help.

After bouts of intense work over the past year building a learning portal – a.k.a. a social network -- for a Saudi company, I finally had some downtime. I decided to become my own learning portal, loading up and distilling gobs of information about social-everything, and then blogging energetically and insightfully. Subsequently, I read incessantly, bookmarked randomly, blindly built a blog, peddled my best comments on discussion groups, and went to be bed most nights stressed and exhausted.

Whatever enthusiasm I had for potential blog topics was repeatedly dulled by discovering that other bloggers had beaten me to them. I realized that originality might be a myth. Successful blogs use mostly blue-colored fonts; their posts are primarily clicks to other blogs.

Blogging, I sensed, was like re-gifting: whatever one receives, just repackage and give it to others. Write for attention, write with searchable key words, blog for bloggers. So, this social media business was more akin to telemarketing than conversation?

Competing in this craze made me a bit panicky. I simply couldn’t keep up with what I saw others doing.

• Speed-feeding stories on Twitter, like an ATM dispensing cash, from content aggregators such as AllTop.
• Scattering comments across the blogosphere to generate links that would drive up traffic and SEO scores (search engine optimization). One blogger pays $25 for typing 250 quick comments on various blogs -- “Nice post. I was reading a similar article here” -- to lure visitors to his site and spike his stats.
• Bouncing from site to site, rapidly adjusting to diverse formats: video on You-Tube, banter on Facebook, archiving on Delicious.

I started to show early signs of information anxiety and social fatigue. Maybe I just wasn’t hungry enough to jump into the feeding frenzy. I felt like I was, again, anxiously waiting to board a plane at the Shanghai Airport, flesh-pressed at the gate with more passengers than unreserved seats, running to the plane when the doors opened, and finding no place to sit.

Solace finally came oddly in a short interview with novelist John Updike on a wonderfully ordinary blog called Daily Routines. Updike shared his work habits:

Since I've gone to some trouble not to teach, and not to have any other employment, I have no reason not to go to my desk after breakfast and work there until lunch. So I work three or four hours in the morning, and it's not all covering blank paper with beautiful phrases.

You begin by answering a letter or two. There's a lot of junk in your life. There's a letter. And most people have junk in their lives but I try to give about three hours to the project at hand and to move it along. There's a danger if you don't move it along steadily that you're going to forget what it's about, so you must keep in touch with it I figure. So once embarked, yes, I do try to stick to a schedule.

I've been maintaining this schedule off and on -- well, really since I moved up to Ipswich in '57. It's a long time to be doing one thing. I don't know how to retire. I don't know how to get off the horse, though. I still like to do it. I still love books coming out. I love the smell of glue and the shiny look of the jacket and the type, and to see your own scribbles turned into more or less impeccable type.

It's still a great thrill for me, so I will probably persevere a little longer, but I do think maybe the time has come for me to be a little less compulsive, and maybe the book-a-year technique which has been basically the way I've operated.

Here is what I learned (or relearned) from Mr. Updike about what to do with myself in this networked world of frenetic hustle and hyper-promotion.

3x5 Thinking

3 reminders to myself (you can listen if you want)

1. I have no option but to blog. I am genetically and compulsively a writer, a persuader, and connector. “I have no reason not to go to my desk.”
2. I do not have to cover “blank paper with beautiful phrases” but I must deliver a product that I love only a little less than my readers.
3. I need to ease up but not give up. Like Updike, I will “persevere a little longer, but … be a little less compulsive.”

5 commitments to myself (and for you, if you want)

1. Stick to a schedule; produce something every day, publishable or for my soul only.
2. Write first for readers, second for search engines. Don’t sacrifice good word-smithing for key-wording.
3. Avoid being a substance abuser: write factually, credibly, and confidently from my head and heart.
4. Borrow comments from others, but steal the best ideas from my own mind.
5. Do what I do best over and over -- and then do it day in and day out.

Build an Effective Intranet Portal: Dump the Steering Committee … Sort of

If you’re about to build or rebuild an intranet portal for your organization, take just a few minutes and put in your mind the frightening thought that you don’t need an executive steering committee. Could you still pull off the project? “Of course, but …” you say. Stop after “Of course” just for a minute. We’ll talk through the “buts” shortly. Stay with me. There is a purpose in my madness. I want you to understand exactly why and how to put together an effective steering team.

I hear at least two rationales for an executive advisory committee.

1. Rationale #1 Senior management’s blessing and buy-in are needed.
   Don’t you already have management’s blessing? What executive would object to improved employee communication? Sure, cost, sustainability, and maybe one or two other issues might concern them, but they certainly all endorse the concept of a faster, more collaborative, productivity-building tool such as a portal. Assume the project has their blessing.
   
   And what does “buy-in” mean? Personal commitment? Participation? Truthfully, do you want executives to use their expensive time to build a portal about which they have limited understanding?
   
   
2. Rationale #2 Senior management’s endorsement means everyone else jumps.
   It’s true that when top executive speak the entire organization responds. Middle managers will provide the portal content you need, and employees will try it out.
   
   Yet, everyone knows that the CEO and his colleagues put their names on lots of programs, some strategic to the organization and others for protocol and goodwill. Everyone will comply until the next executive initiative outranks your portal project.
   
   Rely instead on cooperation rather than compliance, and opt for sustainability over stimulation. Over the long-term, the portal’s business impact will win over middle managers and its resourcefulness will convert employees to users.

Now, think about this: without executive oversight, wouldn’t the following likely happen?

• You as the project leader would have to tutor yourself -- with a little help from your tech-savvy friends -- on web strategies and software.
  That would be time-consuming – and who has time? Yet haven‘t you been feeling uneasy for too long about your limited knowledge in this area. You have promised yourself that you would read up on the subject sometime. That time is now. You don’t have to become an expert, just smart enough to know and evaluate the various approaches to building a portal: enterprise, open-source, Web 2.0. So, put aside your self-doubt and get started. No more procrastinating.
  
  
• You would have to believe you are the smartest person when it comes to understanding what the audience wants, what the portal should do, and how to organize and manage the project.
  
  Well, arent you? Forget false humility. You are the smartest person in the organization regarding the portal concept. For sure, you know more about those subjects than anyone on a steering committee? If you didn’t have a steering committee, would you be asking those executives to tell you what to do on matters for which they know little or nothing? Don’t upward delegate what you know or do best. Have courage. Take charge.
  
  
• You would have to rely on your staff’s imagination and gutsiness.
  Even though I’m sure they are a talented, hard-working group, creating a portal that really works for people will require every ounce of their resourcefulness. This will take serious stretching.
  - They will have to think from the outside-in – from what employees want and need rather than what the organization wants to promote.
  - They will have to focus on function rather than form: that is, how employees find stuff on web sites rather than the most logical organization of information on the portal.
  - They will have to generate imaginative ideas that not only work but for which they will assume accountability over time.
  
  Stretching means pain, so expect some groaning. But, nothing develops individual potential and rallies team spirit like a good fight against the odds. You know that. Lead them.

Now that you realize you could survive, perhaps even flourish, without an advisory committee, why should you have one? Because you need them to be converts, members, and missionaries.

A portal is not a building that you design, construct, hope employees occupy, and remodel every few years. Think instead of your portal project as laying out a high-speed network that links people with content and other people, and that changes configuration frequently depending on how the nodes – the people – respond.

Converts Your steering group is not a building committee. It is a beta group of neophytes, much like the eventual end-users, who need to be won over to a new way of thinking about portals.

Members Once your advisory team “gets it,” then you will need them as permanent and contributing members of the portal congregation.

Missionaries Finally, you will have to encourage them to be missionaries among employees to ensure that everyone believes in, values, and uses the portal to benefit the organization and their careers.