Only Dead Fish

When Every Page Is Your Homepage

"Instead of adding new flooring and fixtures, they've taken the house down to the foundation"

Reuters are redesigning their site from the ground up and the approach that they're taking with it is fascinating. Most websites (news services included) put a lot of focus on the homepage to draw people into the site in the same way that contents pages of magazines are there to aggregate, highlight, and help people navigate. It's a model that is shackled to a print-based world. Yet whilst a proportion of readers may still enter the site via the home page, an increasing number come in from search queries or content shared on social media which are deep linked into the site ("The days when you could drive a big portion of your audience to any single page? That's pretty much done"). 

So what happens when every page is your homepage? The concept of a continuously updated stream of news is central to Reuter's DNA, so it makes sense that they should adapt this into creating a digital 'river of news' where stories are contextualised within the stream, and moving from one to another is as seamless as possible.

Take a look at the site preview and you see a heads-up display of market data across the top, the roster of Reuter's opinion writers (like the usually excellent Felix Salmon) down the side, and a news stream featuring a rolling feed of news, commentary, video, photography and even editorially curated links to relevant third party articles and content. Articles feature as part of a stream of related information with background pieces, data and commentary, and are positioned in the middle of a larger stream of content ("scroll up or down and you’ll find your story’s text actually lives in a bifurcated version of the Reuters front page"). And if you're interested in following a particular issue, topic streams combine multi-format content along with the latest breaking news around specific subjects.

The whole thing is far more reflective of how content works now on the web: living as streams, dynamic not static, effortlessly multimedia, surrounded by contextually relevant information, flowing seamlessly from one piece to the next, reflective of the increasing atomisation of content. A site where every page is the homepage.

Shifting to a content model such as this isn't easy. It requires a wholly different design approach, different workflows, and an in depth and ongoing understanding of user need and behaviour. The idea of context for example, is multi-dimensional, so serving up relevant associated content requires a sophisticated and intelligent tagging system, and staff with the know-how to use it in the right way.

But this kind of approach is a far more 'digitally-native' approach to news and content that reminded me a lot of the work done by MadeByMany in redesigning the ITV News site a year ago. That too featured a continously updated multimedia feed of news that draws on multiple sources, enables filtering by story, and is largely unshackled from legacy approaches. And it's not lost on me that this approach is fantastically suited not just to social and SEO, but also to mobile and tablet. Small wonder then, that unique views on the ITV news site have risen by over 500% since that resdesign.

Once again the value has come from unshackling approaches to content and design from legacy thinking and rebuilding a modern news service from the ground up. There are one or two similar examples of other media owners following suit (the WSJ's World Stream, and Canada's Global News) but the examples are surprisingly few. It strikes me that not only will we see more news services adopting the approach, but that there are lessons here for all content producers. 

Teams That Ship

I've been known to be something of a cynic about tech conferences but yesterday at NEXT Berlin was rich in thought provoking ideas and different points of view about the stuff that's challenging norms and is likely to make a difference in the future.

One of the highlights from a day of sessions dense with inspiration came from Harper Reed. Harper was the CTO for the Obama campaign and so is no doubt in high demand on the speaker circuit right now, but his talk was warm, funny, and packed full of fascinating insights into the team that revolutionised the relationship between technology and poltics (read Alex Madrigal's seminal Atlantic piece on When The Nerds Go Marching In).

Harper was the ex-CTO of Threadless, who'd left because he'd acheived all the goals he'd set himself, and was then offered the chance to put Obama's huge campaign contribution budget to use in building a platform that would enable them to concentrate on the one thing that would fulfil the potential of that huge budget, but also the massive task that they faced: execution. There was some good insight into how they built an API that would enable them to execute and ship large numbers of products (over 200) fast, how they spent a month doing nothing else but 'testing failure' (practicing failure plans), and investing in user experience right from the beginning. I loved this: "the difference between functional and usable lies with the users". 

But perhaps the most interesting aspects of his talk were around the challenges of building and running the team that would do the work. Politicians, said Harper, don't hire engineers. They don't hire hackers. The 2008 Obama campaign had four engineers. For the 2012 campaign Harper hired forty. He referenced Steve Jobs' belief that A's hire A's, and B's hire C's, and the importance of founders and team leaders selling the team's mission in order to get the best talent (sounds obvious, but I suspect is often poorly executed). With the size of the task in front of them, and the speed of delivery that was required (think about the comparison to the length of time it takes most coprorates to implement a large-scale IT infrastructure/Digital capability project) the way in which the team worked with other teams, built and shipped product was key.

Politics is hard. There was a piece of advice, given to him by John Maeda (who was quoting from Larry Bacow) which I particularly liked: 'Manage by your outbox, not by your inbox". Meaning that focusing on pro-active communication with stakeholders and members of the campaign team reduced the time spent on reactive communications.

He talked quite a bit about the relationship between tech and digital teams, the importance of establishing trust, but also how everything was guided by metrics in a way that reminded me of that Mark Pincus quote about how not using metrics is like flying a plane in a cloud with no instruments. Few things are that predictable. The team would bet on which email subject lines or content would get the most response - the Obama campaign had some of the best email/CRM brains in the world but even they more often than not couldn't second guess the results, which meant that the numbers were everything ("Groundhog Day is a movie about multivariate testing").

The campaign is renowned for it's use of microtargeting. At one point Tim O'Reilly advised Harper that instead of just using microtargeting, they should focus on microlistening - the idea of using the power of conversation within small groups. So hence their smart use of Facebook (what they called "targeted sharing") to facilitate supporters (600,000 of them) to encourage their friends to get out and vote.

When asked about whether the technologies they built should be open-sourced and made available to others (including the Republicans) to use, he made the point that the platform can only offer a competitive advantage for a relatively short period of time without the right people to develop it, which says a lot for the idea of advantage coming from agility, talent and approaches rather than secrecy and perfection.

The interesting thing about all that is how much it reminded me of the current work of the Government Digital Service, which as Tom Petty says "is defining how a government interacts with its citizens (it just doesn’t know it yet)". In his recent description of the work of GDS, Russell summed it up quite neatly:

1. The Unit of Delivery is The Team

2. The Product Is The Service Is The Marketing

3. Digital is Not Comms, And It's Not IT, It's Your Business

Google Firestarters 8: The Agency Innovation Conundrum - The Event

The great and the good from UK planning were at last night's Google Firestarters event to hear 8 rapid fire talks on the subject of agency innovation from 8 of the smartest minds I know: Patricia McDonald, Anjali Ramachandran, Antony Mayfield, Phil Adams, Beeker Northam, Glyn Britton, Graeme Wood and Nadya Powell. 

I made a joke in my brief summing up at the end that it was going to be quite some task to attempt to capture even a part of the richness of thinking and ideas that we heard on the night. So much so that I'm going to take a little longer to digest what were 8 fantastic talks and write some more thoughts on it in due course. In the meantime, James has a few cogent ones here. But I did want to reflect some of the content and capture some of the (considerable) buzz around the event whilst it was still fresh. So I've put together a Storify of the event and have embedded it here. There are a number of the presentations from the evening within it (I'll update it as we go), and there's a great collection of Tweets and pictures which are well worth looking through.

My thanks to all the speakers for such great provocations (and they genuinely did follow my brief to be provocative), to John for our Firestarters branded Artefact cards which we had especially commissioned, and to Google of-course for hosting. And thanks to everyone who attended and made it such a great debate and such a great event. Watch this space for more about the next one.

Google Firestarters 8: The Agency Innovation Conundrum

Google Firestarters is back! A new year for Firestarters and an excellent subject to kick it off. There are few subjects that have elicited quite such debate as the why,what,how of innovation in agencies. Every agency says that they are innovative but what does that really mean? Are agencies innovative at all? Should agencies have 'Chief Innovation Officers'?

These are just some of the (very big) questions we'll be tackling head-on in our first event of 2013 and to help us we have a brilliant line-up of speakers. Firestarters regulars will know that we like to mix up the format so that no two events are ever really the same and so for this one we have eight rapid fire provocations from:

Pats McDonald, Chief Strategy Officer, Isobar

Anjali Ramachandran, Head of Innovation, PHD

Antony Mayfield, Author, and founder of Brilliant Noise

Phil Adams, Planning Director, Blonde Digital

Beeker Northam, Govt Digital Service (and co-founder of Dentsu London)

Nadya Powell, Chief Innovation Officer, Dare

Glyn Britton, Managing Partner, Strategy and Innovation, Albion

Graeme Wood, Planning Director, LBi

Some of my favourite thinkers in planning in that line up so I know we'll get some excellent brian food. As usual, the event will be held at Google London HQ, and is next Wednesday 17th at 5.30. It's invite only but I have a good number of tickets for readers of this blog so if you'd like to come along, please let me know in the comments or drop me a line (first come, first served).

Digital Shift

I've been doing a fair bit of work with the smart folk at Econsultancy of late. Our latest venture together is the launch of a new trends service we're calling Digital Shift.

As we all know the pace of change that digital marketers face is relentless. Every day it seems that there are reams of articles, blog posts, product announcements and tweets about things we feel we need to keep up to date with but find it difficult to find the time.

At the same time, many existing ‘trends’ services are focused on relatively intangible and/or longer-term consumer trends. So the idea behind Digital Shift is to curate the real need-to-know changes, and combine it with an interpretation in order to deliver actionable insight into upcoming trends and developments in digital. We're not going to be attempting to talk about everything, but once a quarter to focus on the larger and more significant trends that are impacting, and will impact, on digital marketing.

Our first webinars are tomorrow, at 9.00am and 4.00pm GMT, with me and Ashley Friedlein (CEO of Econsultancy) at the helm. Amongst other things we'll be talking about vertical stacks, embedded social and Facebook Home, new developments in content aggregation and curation, social TV planning and collaborative consumption.

Digital Shift will be a service available to enterprise level subscribers to Econsultancy (Econsultancy has a membership of over 180,000 digital marketers worldwide so there must be a few of those reading this blog), but for this first webinar we're opening it up to enable readers of this blog to sample it. So if you'd like to be part of it, you can find out more here.

Fraggl and the Magic Pyramid

It's not often that I get to write a blog post titled like a Disney movie. Anyhow, you'll recall that I've got together with the smart folk at Adaptive Lab to build a curation app for Twitter that we're calling Fraggl. The vote on whether the problem we are trying to solve is a valid one was pretty resounding with 81 votes for and 5 against, so that's good to know (thanks for the feedback).

We're now moving forward to think about how the app we build might work. Fundamental to this, as I mentioned before, will be the right combination of the key forms of curation: people (or professional curation in another context), algorithmic, and social (from the community). Our thinking is that the quality of the UX depends a lot on whether we can structure these forms of curation and then deliver or enable access to the results in the right way. We'll deal with delivery and access in a subsequent post but for now we're starting with the former.

Discussing this with the team at Adaptive Lab, we've arrived at a taxonomy of factors that can be used to determine the results:

If we were to flip this taxonomy, and think of it as our 'magic pyramid' (so to speak), it would look something like this:

The base layer of this is considering the sources of data that we are going to focus on, and those which we might apply the algorithm to. The options here vary from the widest possible context (all tweets), to just focusing on the people that I follow (as some existing services do), to taking a more focused approach and (API allowing) use Twitter lists. Part of the feedback from the initial post was around how we might incorporate the right mix of popularity and serendipity, which is something I'd also been thinking about. Another way of thinking about this is the mix between content which is popular amongst the people I follow, and content which I don't know I like but may find interesting. An early thought about this is that (API allowing) using Twitter lists could be useful here because users could plug the algorithm into their own Twitter lists, and/or they can use it to source content from pre-curated Twitter lists of people that share great content from certain areas (e.g. architecture, design, content strategy and so on).

The second layer to think about is how we construct that algorithm and the signals we will use to get us to the best content. Here we have options that range from the number of RTs a particular tweet/link has got, the number of people that have favourited a tweet, but we also have factors that might be interesting to look at such as how many followers the people doing the sharing have and so on.

Our final layer is personalisation. I'm a fan of using data (typically consumption or voting up/down) to inform content mix so that apps get smarter and more personalised over time (aka scrobbling), so it would be good to include some degree of that if we could. It's a bit like what Zite does, although the fact that after 18 months Zite has arguably got a bit too specific for me (i.e. it's become too narrow in its content mix and could benefit from widening that out slightly) is quite instructive. Any personalisation we enable therefore, needs to add enough to the mix that it enhances the curation, without detracting from the breadth of content and value of more serendipitous stuff. Perhaps a simple 'show me more of this' and 'show me less of that' is the way to start here.

We're highly unlikey to get the balance of factors absolutely right on the first go so it's inevitable that we will need to iterate. So if you want to join the beta testing group for Fraggl and get early access, you can sign up here.

In the meantime, it would be really useful to gather some feedback on this, and on the kind of curation tools and techniques that you find useful. So, a couple of key areas:

How do you currently identify valuable content? Which tools and strategies do you use?

What's good, and what's not so good about these tools and strategies?

As always, your feedback is appreciated.

Managing by Anarchy

I've done a fair bit of work over the past couple of years on how organisations can adapt structures and resourcing to better equip themselves for the world in which we find ourselves, and so I'm always interested to read about approaches that challenge the norm. James said I should look at the way Github work, so I found and read this piece by Ryan Tomayko, Github's 'Director of Engineering' which describes a non-hierarchical, self-organising approach to resourcing and working that many would call anarchic, yet one that has some clear themes.

Thus, employees work on whatever they want, with autonomy bringing it's own kind of efficiency ('instead of assigning 100% management duties to individuals, the basic role of management is spread between 1) every single employee, and 2) a set of custom in-house tools that serve to keep everyone in the know with regards to other projects'). Leadership is less about authority and more about enabling and inspiration ('lead by example as loud as possible'), which brings another kind of efficiency ('telling people what to do is lazy. Instead, try to convince them with argument...If you can't convince people through argument then maybe you shouldn't be doing it'). The currency of the workplace is trust and contribution ('…go build the thing in your head, show me how you got there, and then sell it to me and all your peers').

There are challenges that come from working in this way, as this post authored by a Github employee acknowledges, but as the post also notes these can be outweighed by some pretty meaningful benefits. Whilst the founders of the company set the vision, having everyone take responsibility for deciding what to work on is a way of both empowering and motivating employees. Ensuring that each person has the responsibility to sell their ideas to the rest of the company means that there is a natural efficiency ('I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company'). If, as Dan Pink suggests, what really motivates people and drives high performance and satisfaction is autonomy, mastery and purpose then this is a structure designed to give employees just that:

'Anarchy works wonderfully in a small group of individuals with a high level of trust. Everyone at GitHub has full access and permission to do whatever they want. Do great things and you earn respect. Abuse that freedom and you violate everyone’s trust.'

I'm not suggesting that such an anarchic way of working would suit every organisation but I often think that there are learnings to be had from engineering driven cultures where everyone feels direct responsibility for the product and the output, a large degree of autonomy is framed within broad strategic objectives or principles, and resourcing for projects incorporates more voluntary working and is focused around small, nimble, self-organising teams. Especially for companies that are working hard to increase agility and address organisational silos (and if you're not trying to that right now you should be). They are learnings that I'd argue should be applied beyond tech teams and into wider organisational practice.

Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk via Compfight cc

Hackers and Casuals

Pats linked to this fascinating piece from Ajay Kulkarni at GroupMe talking about the challenges of designing for different audiences within the Android user base. Android, he says, is the 'Platypus of the mobile world...a complicated beast, a bizarre combination of two very different animals'. Those very different animals being the Hackers (early Android users who invested in the platform because of its open principles), and the Casuals (later immigrants to Android, often upgrading from feature phones because of cheaper, increasingly prolific devices).

This presents a challenge in designing services since each set of users has a very different set of behaviours and expectations:

"Hackers customize. They install their own keyboards, dialers, messaging apps, even home screens. Many are developers. They explore, they tinker. They love settings, settings, and more settings.

Casuals personalize. They like wallpapers and custom ringtones. But they don't tinker. Many are late adopters to smartphones. They use Facebook, Twitter, and other popular apps, but they don't explore new apps or technologies."

So developing for both becomes tricky: you can't just build the app for yourself; each group expects the app to do different things; it makes it harder to test; the former audience loves change, the latter doesn't.

Their solution is insightful:

• Building to reflect both sets of behaviour: "build it for Casuals and let Hackers customize it"
• Viewing the app as a Casual: "You need to get outside yourself...we try to internalize how they think and behave, so that their reactions can become our reactions."
• The importance of beta testing with casuals, not just hackers
• If Casuals sometimes take time to come round to a new feature but might end up loving it, using data to recognise the difference between that and a feature which has simply been poorly executed.

All too easy, I think, to design for one audience and forget the potentially very different behaviours and preferences of another.

Image courtesy

70, 20, 10

I've been talking about 70, 20, 10 models for a good time, and it seems that it's applicable in a wide number of different contexts. Generally, it relates to the idea that the majority of time, focus, attention or resources should be focused on established practices or core methods, but room should be left for both extending those core approaches and taking them in new directions, but also for completely new ideas and input.

So in learning and development, the idea is that powerful learning comes from a combination of on-the-job experience and problem solving (70%), feedback and examples (20%), and training courses and material (10%). Eric Schmidt famously described how Google stimulates innovation by expecting employees to dedicate 70% of their time to core business tasks, 20% to related projects and 10% to unrelated activities.

It's also (as Coca Cola have demonstrated) a useful way to begin thinking about more agile budgeting and content strategies with 70% focused on low risk, bread and butter activity, 20% innovating off what works, and 10% being high risk ideas that could be tomorrow's 20% and 70%. And I think you can take that concept and apply it to create a useful model for content planning.  

I've been wondering why this idea seems to be cropping up more and more, and is relevant for so many different aspects of what we do, I think it's because the structure of the model is so apt for the times we live in:

70%... because video didn't kill the radio star, and the start of something new rarely means that previous approaches are completely redundant, replaced or dead.

20%... since, with the availability of expeditious feedback, test and learn processes and the ability to more quickly and easily optimise and amplify should now be common prcoesses

10%... because the rapidity of market change means that every organisation has to build in space for continuous and embedded experimentation if they are not to be outcompeted

I think we often get stuck, and find it difficult to think outside of the confines of established practices, or to change habits that become ingrained. So this is a useful way of developing a framework that is more befitting of the environment in which we all find ourselves, whilst not abandoning tried, tested and perfectly appropriate knowledge, understanding and techniques.

Rapid Prototyping Google Glass

It's tempting to think that the prototyping for a project such as Google Glass would have been a complex, lengthy process lasting months if not years but this short, charming talk from Tom Chi (experience designer in the Google X team) gives a fascinating insight into how their process of creation was greatly accelerated through rapid prototyping. The first prototype was built in an hour using coat hangers, a tiny projector and a piece of plexiglass. Subsequent prototypes took even less time and used materials as diverse as paper, clay, modelling wire, chopsticks and hairbands. From these models they were able to glean useful insights into the social awkwardness of gesture controls which led to them dropping fetaures which had been thought integral. As Chi says, “Doing is the best kind of thinking”. Fascinating.

HT Tom Uglow