Birmingham City?

These days many companies use stock photography for their website and print needs rather than spend a small fortune on having their own, unique photos taken by a professional. This can save you a lot of money, and allows graphic designers to be more innovative and creative within their design brief using their skills and knowledge of stock photography resources to create the best solution. Everyone's happy.

Except, of course, if you use the wrong stock photo. Perhaps your tag line reads “Buy red roses this Valentines” and the photo is of a daisy - a flower for sure, but not a red rose. Or perhaps you made the same mistake as Birmingham City Council, and spent £15,000 sending out a flier to your residents thanking them for their recycling efforts with a picture of the wrong Birmingham skyline. Hmm. It's an easy mistake to make - do a search in your stock photo resource for 'birmingham skyline', choose your favourite image, then make your flyer. Simple. Except of course if you know Birmingham in England, you'd know it's not Birmingham, Alabama, USA. Admittedly they are similar, but not that similar.

Even without knowing which company Birmingham Council used to design this flier we can know that it's not really their fault. It's an easy mistake to make and surely someone at Birmingham Council should have checked the flier before it went out, perhaps noticing a lack of famous Brum landmarks like the Bullring building.

Birmingham's distinctive Bullring centre - by Joseph Maestri

So how can we stop this happening? Well two key things; firstly - make sure that whoever is doing the work has a full, descriptive creative brief, perhaps with a few example images that you've found yourself to illustrate a concept or idea, and make people aware of pitfalls (perhaps Brum council's brand guidelines can have a warning that says 'watch out for Birmingham, Alabama!'. Secondly, review the final product carefully! It's so easy to make a mistake unwittingly, from a last minute typo to a generic town skyline, so get someone who's not been involved with the process to do a review as they will have fresh eyes. On that last point, remember that every time you make a change, however small, you have a new product that may have new mistakes in it - if in doubt, review it again.

In this particular case there could have been a third possible saviour - geo-tagging. In this situation if the photo search had been restricted to searches in the greater Birmingham area, UK, then the US skyline should never have shown up in the first place. A good stock photo search will potentially warn you of such 'duplicates' - asking you which Birmingham you mean before it presents results. In the case of using cheap stock photo engines you often pay for what you get, cheaper, potentially good photos, with less comprehensive editorial and tagging processes. Buyer beware!

Labels: Design, Geo-tagging, Stock Photography, Tagging

ReadWriteWeb has a good piece about how different sites get their users to fill in their profiles as completely as possible. They cover LinkedIn which uses a progress bar going to 100%, along with suggested next steps (such as 'Get a recommendation') to move you to the completed state, and this is one of my favourite approaches. Other techniques they've observed include having an embarrassing default photo - in some cases of George W Bush.. and who wouldn't quickly move to put something less irksome in its place.

Years ago I had a conversation with a marketing friend who took the approach that people enjoyed filling out forms once they'd started. To that end she would always advocate adding in relevant, but somewhat random questions at the end of registration forms as this would add colour to our understanding of our guests. It's an interesting idea, and for some demographics this is likely the case, however in these days of signup overload it's a practice that most of us would avoid.

Labels: Information Architecture, Information Design, marketing, Visual Interface Design

Shops have always delighted in setting prices slightly below the full amount of a dollar or pound, and whether it's 9.99 or 9.95 us consumers still feel it's much better value. A new study has shown that this 1p or 5p saving still gets us by the purse strings, with a 15% increase in sales over the 'full' priced equivalent. But why is this? Psychologists talk about the perceived savings that affect our emotions much more than they should - and why our 40th birthday hits us more than our 39th. As emotional creatures we should not be surprised to be manipulated this way, and any shop keeper would be a fool to lose 15% of their business.

Ironically, in the US and Canada the price at $9.99 is not even accurate. Once you take your purchase to the checkout you'll find tax has been added - around 8% in New York for example - making your purchase over the round $10.00 figure that is such a barrier. Of course by that point you already have the item in hand and you're ready to go and as humans we hate to prove our own decisions wrong by putting the product back on the shelf.

Labels: psychology, Selling

Google, Yahoo and Adobe have just announced that they have worked together to enable search results to crawl not only HTML, but also Flash files. Interesting news indeed. For years now web builders have had to build two sites in parallel if they use Flash - one for the users, and one for the search engines that preferred eating text in HTML form.

Now this raises a few interesting questions. First up, what will happen to the search results while Google and Yahoo work out how to rank and rate Flash content? No Flash designer has ever had to consider the SEO effects of their Flash coding so surely there must be some pretty badly constructed Flash content out there, at least in terms of what Google is used to seeing. Secondly, are we really excited to see lots of Flash enabled intros for boring, company sites showing up when we search? Probably not - that's why 'skip intro' will soon be the most hated, yet competitive term on Google. Finally, now that Flash folk won't have to create HTML versions of their sites for SEO purposes - will they still remember to do so for partially sighted visitors? Text to speech browsers are not highly optimized for reading Flash, and although in the UK this audience is supported by legislation this is not the case globally. Perhaps Adobe will also release their Flash 'search reading' software to other companies that make text to speech browsers to help them out there - unless Google just offers it as an API of course. Click here to Skip intro.

Labels: Flash, Google, SEO, Yahoo

Internet marketing guru Seth Godin has another insightful post on how to conceptualize your marketing offerings as five simple pieces: Data, Stories, Products (services), Interactions and Connection. I'd been thinking about the 'story' (or myth) side of this equation for a while, but as usual Godin is four steps ahead of us all. Good stuff.

Labels: marketing

Cory Doctorow has another interesting piece in the Guardian today about how Britain is collecting too much surveillance data to be useful. His argument is that collecting information about everything and trying to create predictions, be it about weather forecasts or terrorist events, will not lead to success due mainly to the computing power required to process such volumes of information.

Although I agree with his stance about their being too much surveillance in British society, something that could well be damaging our population as a whole by removing our need to have personal responsibility for our actions, I disagree with his overall argument. Yes, collecting the movement of every butterfly in the world to predict the weather would be ridiculous and impossible to deal with, but in the world of more directed, human activities information can be much more revealing. Right now we may not know what behaviours indicate a potential attack, but over time with the right data and good analysis it is conceivable that these behaviours can be isolated and hence our limited Police resources can be deployed more effectively.

We're talking about artificial augmentation of our senses here. Right now, watching 1000s of CCTV cameras is ineffective on the whole at prevention, but potentially automated matching technology could draw attention to those looking more suspicious, to a level a computer can recognise, and then a human can do the final filtering. No way can a team, however big, watch every person in London. In the same way that no person could do what Google does every time we do a search.

Augmentation and filtering based on our needs is a constantly expanding field as we go past the information age and into the 'Knowledge Age', whether for security or personal goals. Having a large pool of, ideally non-identifying, data to work on to create these filters is fundamental to success. Although as each level of filter is deployed and improved, then all that will happen is someone will game the system and find a way round - for comparison, spam blogs didn't exist a few years ago, and now they are everywhere. That said, should we be trying to create an all seeing 'Big Brother' computer system that watches us at all time? That's an ethical and moral question that is harder to answer.

Labels: Big Brother, Data Warehousing, Security, Social Change

Recently a trend has started to represent website URLs without the preceding 'www' sub-domain, short for 'world wide wed' and indicative of a web page. For example this site can be found both at www.isuseful.com and isuseful.com, but by default when I talk about the site address I drop the 'www'.

Personally I find the 'www' to be distracting residue from the old days of the web, and advocate removing it wherever possible. This can now be seen in a number of print and TV ads for popular brands, where the 'www' is now rarely used - interestingly for less well known brands the 'www' is still in full effect. However there is a danger for existing website owners here - most people when they set up their wonderful, new website will do the obvious checks from their home page for missing content, typos and the like. However most site owners rarely think what might happen to people coming to their site from sources other than clicking on a link. Mis-typed pages are generally captured by a 404 Page Not Found error, which on well built sites results in a helpful page that allows the visitor to search and find what they want. However in the case of a mis-typed of missing sub-domain (ww.example.com or example.com) the user will be presented with either a missing site error or a long wait, depending on their browser and the default behavior of your host's web server. Either way this could make the visitor think your site has gone away, unless they're canny enough to try adding a 'www' to the front and reload.

So my advice is to ensure, at the very least, you support no sub-domain for your website as well as the traditional www - and make sure you test this when creating new websites for yourself or your clients.

Labels: SEO, User Friendly, Web Etiquette, Website Building