The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

A lazy Sunday evening entry ... building up on the two previous ones

If websites were buildings in the real world, half the web would collapse during the first storm. And prior to that strom, the majority of the people could not tell which half would resist :-)

Harmony v cacophony --- Most web designers are unconsciously incompetent about standards.

In the previous entry, I offer the opinion that few people can tell a good website from a bad one and that, about ten years after the emergence of the web, many sites are still terribly wrong.

Like in music where there is a quasi infinite variety (from concertos to pop songs, from cool jazz to hard rock, from pentatonic Celtic folk music to opera), there are many sorts of websites, from simple one-page sites with contact info to cascading multinational compositions looking like intricate oil refineries.

• Good websites are fluid constructions offering harmony, tempo and rhythm. Examples of good sites and of useful features: amusing personal sites, practical info services; SME sites with de facto standard menu bars; sites offering clearly what visitors expect; simple designs; relevant pictures and multimedia documents; one-click shopping capabilities with email follow-up with relevant links to check progress; intuitive navigation with indication of position within the site; balanced blend of text, illustrations and colours.

Amazon.com is still among the best. See my analysis of the site in an entry of last August. To me, the e-commerce aspects of the site are close to perfection, setting the standards for shopping on the web. Otherwise, the site is very good, maybe a tad too cluttered to my taste. And the algorithms setting personal recommendations need fine tuning: they are confused by the fact I buy items in multiple categories and what they propose to me tends to become a messy potpourri.

• Bad sites are awkward assemblies imposing cacophony, inconsistencies and chaos. Examples: pompous corporate brochure sites making it very difficult to understand what the company actually does; hollow government site with broken links to useless info; e-commerce sites where it’s impossible to check out; sites that take ages to come up, even with broadband; hysterical home pages looking like Tokyo by night; intricate multi-level navigation; confusing contents; horrible graphic design; and so on.

Let’s move away from music and take books as analogy. Books have been with us for centuries and they follow fairly clear standards for both form (front page, chapters, paragraphs, table of contents, credits, etc.) and contents (grammar, syntax, unity of style, etc.). Since the mid 1990s, de facto standards have emerged for websites, including main horizontal menu bar, about us, contact, etc.). My friends at the Nielsen Norman Group have published a lot on this subject.

Unfortunately, too many website designers and most of their clients are still at what is called the unconscious incompetence level: they don’t know what they don’t know. That’s why there are still so many horrible websites out there.

What’s a good jazz piece, pop song or piano sonata? What’s a good website?

Producing a new website is like creating a piece of music. You need a composer to define the architecture of the site, its main components and the navigation from one part to another. The composer writes the score, i.e. the software putting all parts together. You also need an interpreter to translate the desired objectives into some harmonious graphic design blending forms and functions. The interpreter makes the site look (sound) right.

In the music sector, the creation is mostly ex nihilo, i.e. without input from audiences or other persons. You often have a poet writing the lyrics, a composer inventing the melody, an interpreter giving life to the song, and a producer promoting the piece. In other cases, the same person or group plays all four roles. The public, music pundits, DJs and media of all sorts (and of all levels of ‘influence’) decide on what’s a good song and what’s not.

For websites, the production responds to the site owner’s need and wants. The owner’s requirements are translated by the producer who is, in many case, the site builder and architect, i.e. the software guru who knits all the pieces together. The producer liaises with the graphic artist who interprets the original requirements to generate banners, menus bars, logos, illustrations, pictures, colour schemes & tutti quanti. The producer integrates the technical elements with the artistic pieces to create a prototype for review by the owner. After several iterations, the owner gives his/her blessing and the website goes live on the net. Phew! In some cases, these different roles are played by independent professionals. In others, agencies offer a one-stop shopping (at a price).

Up front, the main decision on whether the site is good or not is with the owner. Later, the ranking of the site is decided by a ‘subtle’ combination of users / visitors, media of all sorts, search engine optimisation techniques and … mighty Google. But the ranking doesn’t necessarily tell whether a site is good or not. I’m flabbergasted by the number of horrendous sites that rank high in searches.  

How come? I think we have to keep in mind that music has been with us for centuries. It is part of our diverse cultures. People can instinctively decide when a song is nice and harmonious; when it vibrates with moods, feelings and emotions. We must have some music genes somewhere in the ADN.

In contrast, websites have been with us for less than twenty years. The genes are not formed. Few people can tell a good site from a bad one. There are no yardsticks like a Duke Ellington piece, a song from the Beatles or a Chopin sonata. Many websites out there are a total cacophony frustrating visitors trying to enjoy the journey or achieve something. Too many website producers are still ‘cowboys’ flogging bad technical and artistic quality to gullible owners for ridiculously high or, paradoxically, low prices.

More on this subject in upcoming entries.

An art 100 years ago --- more and more a science today?

In the 1930s, artists like Alexis Kow produced wonderful art pieces to support advertising for industrial brands such as Panhard, Hotchkiss and Salmson in the automobile sector --- Left,  a photo of an original gouache by A.Kow that I bought at an auction in 1981.

Yet, at that time, marketing was aiming at becoming a science helping production and manufacturing to adapt to distribution and to customer demand and motivations. But businessmen quickly understood that forecasting is very difficult, especially when it concerns the future.

So, for most of the twentieth century, marketing became almost synonymous with advertising, pushing mass manufactured products’ features & benefits down isolated communications channels. Marketing involved intuition, creativity, chutzpah, and other qualitative factors. Even consumer research was more subjective than scientific, aiming at making advertisers feel good about their bloated marketing spending.

Today, the pendulum is swinging back to the scientific side. Marketing has become:

• Customer-centric v product-centric
• Mass customisation v mass production
• Value propositions v features & benefits
• Total customer experience
• Two-away interactive v one-way push
• One-to-one targeting v haphazard broadcasting

With internet-related techniques such as placed ads and search engine optimisation marketing is transformed into a scientific discipline enabling the precise calculation of the ROI at very detailed levels (e.g. impact of changing search terms). Marketing is becoming more maths than art, more accountability than chutzpah.

But we will still enjoy a nice-looking leaflet, an enticing sonic logo and a really funny TV ad, won’t we?

Like music, marketing is both an art and a science – another slant

In the previous entry, I introduced Webster’s definition of marketing, that includes neither ‘art’, nor ‘science’; and I introduced my own definition that clearly leans towards art. I often compare marketing with music because I think there are many similarities between the two.

My next-door neighbour and good friend is a professional musician, composer and organ player. His personal studio includes amazing pieces of hardware and software technology. He spends significant time mastering and managing these tools, training himself to turn them into instruments, and rehearsing for concerts, recordings and other performances. In other words, his creativity periods are relatively scarce but, when he composes, with all this technology, he can synthesise a whole orchestra and produce the draft of a song in no time. The modern illustration of a one-man band.

At that point, you will argue he is mostly a technician with a strong basic knowledge of music. Wrong! He is mainly a passionate artist and creator. As an example, for final recordings, he insists on having a ‘real’ guitarist, trombonist and, of course, singer. There are still many nuances that technology cannot simulate properly. I often can’t hear the difference but, for him, not getting the perfect final touch would be a sin.

So, music is some sort of scientific discipline requiring deep basic knowledge and constant training. But, above that, it’s definitely an art. This is how Webster summarises it: “music: the art and science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds or tones in varying melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre, esp. so as to form structurally complete and emotionally expressive compositions.”

Now, how about paraphrasing the above?: “marketing: the art and science of combining verbal (words), visual (images), aural (sounds), other sensorial, and affective elements, concepts or ideas  in varying atom- or bit-based documents and programmes, esp. so as to form attractive, persuasive and memorable compositions or events.”

I think it sounds pretty good. Think of TV ads and glossy brochures. This definition of marketing does make sense, doesn’t it? More on music metaphors for marketing in upcoming entries.