Faced with a delivery address and a billing address, you would expect that clicking on either of the ‘Edit’ links would change just the delivery address or billing address, depending on the link you clicked.

What actually happens is that when you save your edits, you end up changing both the delivery address and billing address at the same time. And then you read the over-long copy at the top.

Observations

1. The copy is likely to be ignored at first in this situation because the expectation set by the ‘Edit’ buttons is to be able to edit addresses individually.
2. The help copy is poorly written. The first sentence – To update both your default billing and delivery information, please click on either of the Edit buttons below – tries to get across the idea that ‘both’ addresses will be changed at the same time but the use of the word ‘either’ confuses the issue by implying independence of action for the Edit buttons.
3. The second paragraph of the help copy (in the red box, added by me) requires more than one reading to understand properly. Even so, it is a classic example of using help copy to paper over the cracks of poor design, rather than fixing the poor design.
4. The ‘Edit’ links aren’t clear enough in their actions. In a weird sense, they follow the principle that links that perform the same action should be worded similarly, but they’re not descriptive enough for this particular situation, given how poor the functionality is here.

Recommendations

My main recommendation here would be to forget about the copy and fix the flow. Forget about letting people save addresses into an address book and just let people edit billing and delivery addresses separately (or give them a tick box that says they’re the same). At the same time, change the links to ‘Edit billing address’ and ‘Edit delivery address’.

The case against address books

I’m not a great fan of address book functionality on ecommerce sites. For a start, to enable this feature, sites need me to sign up for an account, and sites that force me to create an account to buy something annoy me at best or, more usually, make me buy from elsewhere. Secondly, if you’re not a business, just how many delivery addresses and billing addresses do you really have to manage? It’s probably quicker and almost certainly easier to type in addresses than use a saved address from an address book function on a site.

During my presentation on localisation at the Content Strategy Forum in Paris last week (about which I’ll blog more extensively soon) I mentioned a particular problem with assuming that country=language. So I was pleasantly surprised to see this question pop up while I was taking a survey for Eurostar on their loyalty scheme. Clearly someone smart has worked out that just because you live in France, doesn’t mean you speak or prefer to speak French. Good work, Eurostar.

Following the two content strategy events that took place last week in London and in Paris, there’s been good discussions on Twitter and on blogs about the difference between content strategists and web editors or content managers. For example, What’s the difference between a Content Strategist and a Web Editor? (#cslondon10) and Content strategy: the new social media or the old web editing? I love that people are asking these questions because I don’t think it does anyone any favours to have content strategy treated as ‘the next big thing’ without subjecting it to serious debate and thought.

My usual answer to ‘what’s the difference?’ is that it’s what you do that matters, not the job title. Of course the job title can affect how other people work (or not) with you, but at the end of the day, if I’m doing content strategy, I am at least a part-time content strategist, even if my job title is officially, say, Information Architect.

Here’s my attempt to explain it using football (‘soccer’) as an analogy.¹

Let’s imagine a football team takes to the field. They’re just put on the pitch and told to play. If there’s time, usually the players will get together and agree between themselves who plays where. That’ll be enough to get them through the game, but unless you’re lucky enough to have particularly good players and natural on-pitch leaders, you’re unlikely to do very well. The aim of each game is known by everyone – you just score more goals than the other team – yet without decent organisation, it’s going to be a struggle. You might do ok in the odd game, probably through luck or reliance on star players, but you’re relegation fodder, especially if you can’t find anyone to be the goalkeeper. I can talk with some certainty because I’ve been in situations like this – including the goalkeeper arguments – playing amateur football.

So the team needs a manager. The manager organises the team so that they’re playing in the right positions, there’s a good blend of skills, and the team plays in a style that uses the skills available in the best way. They have a game plan that’s more than ‘score more goals than the other team’. A really good manager will look at the season as a whole and manage the squad of players throughout, according to the fixtures and opposition.

So let’s say that content managers, web editors, copywriters, et al are like players on a football team. They can be great at what they do but without a strategy, it’s all about surviving and just getting to the end of the game. There’s no sense of people doing their bit according to a cohesive plan so they’re just passing stuff to each other with no consideration as to what happens next. (In football parlance, everyone’s playing hospital passes.) And let’s say the manager is the content strategist.

Football managers are often ex-players. In fact, the top football managers are ex-players.² There’s a good reason for that: they know the game extremely well from having played it. So it’s natural that content strategists are often people who have been involved at the sharp end, like web editors. But just because they’re the same people it doesn’t mean they’re doing the same job. It’s the same game, sure, but it’s a different role that requires different skills.

My experience of amateur football is that when a team is badly organised, usually someone steps up and takes on the role of manager as well as playing. If you’re a web editor doing content strategy and the daily grind at the same time, you’re like this player/manager. You’re a great person because you’ve taken on the extra burden, but you’re trying to play two roles – come up with the strategy for the team, then be one of the team executing that strategy. It’s not easy and only the best avoid falling between two stools.

As you go up the ladder to semi-pro and professional football, player/managers are rare. The clubs are big enough to attract good managers and are set up so that the players can concentrate on playing. Managers and coaches recruit and train players so that they play in a certain way. Come match day, they leave it to the players to play according to those tactics. Over the whole season, they’re playing according to a strategy. So it goes that at the more professional organisations, a content strategist will be able to concentrate just on content strategy. They’ll have a lot to do with web editors and the like, but they won’t necessarily be involved. If they do have player/managers, you can bet your bottom euro that they’ll have assistant managers and coaches to help out, especially on match day. Without wishing to stretch this analogy too far, you could equate those assistants to external consultants or agencies, who can also supply loan players to fill gaps in your team.

If you’re a web editor thinking that actually you can’t see the difference between what you’re doing and what a content strategist does, you’re probably a player/manager. You’re a content strategist and a web editor. If you’re a web editor feeling threatened by content strategists, remember this: you’re on the same team.

1. On a localisation tip, you might wonder why I don’t use a sport more well-known in the US. My answer: football is the most global sport there is. The American sports don’t translate very well anywhere else. I would have to write a different post just for an American audience. [↩]
2. Of course, you don’t have to be a great player to be a great manager. And not all great players are good managers. Some great players are awful managers *coughJohnBarnescough*. [↩]

Responding to reader input, we are changing Web site to website.

http://twitter.com/APStylebook/status/12296505018

I’ve always found it a little amusing that American publications tend to capitalise ‘Web’ and ‘Internet’, as the US is the last place in the world where I’d expect the web and the internet to be accorded a special status with capitalisation. I’m interested to see how quickly the British style is adopted in the US, now that AP recommends it.

[via Daring Fireball]

At the beginning of my presentation on localisation at the Content Strategy Forum in Paris, I explained that I had two Twitter accounts: my more content-focused account @baddit, and a more personal account @logorrhoea. I said that I’d explain why I chose @logorrhoea later in my presentation but time was tight and I’m imperfect so I forgot. I didn’t think too much about it until I was approached a couple of times after my presentation by people asking me to explain, so here you go.

I chose logorrhoea because, leaving aside the actual meaning of the word:

1. It’s a word that has different American English and British English spellings. I deliberately chose a word that would let me have a British spelling. (Hence the relevance to my presentation on localisation.)

2. It’s a difficult word to spell. Again, a deliberate choice. I wanted it to be something of a filter – essentially: ‘if you can’t be bothered to spell my Twitter name correctly, then your lack of attention to detail means I’m not interested or your tweet can’t be that important’. When you consider Twitter clients and the site itself makes it easy to @reply to someone, there’s even less excuse.

So, yes, I’m well aware that it might look perverse for a content strategy consultant to make a decision that can cause findability issues, but it’s actually fit for personal purpose. You’ll notice that I didn’t go down the same route for my company name of Baddit.

State of the Art – David Pogue’s Review of the iPad – NYTimes.com.

An iPad review written in two parts: the first aimed at techies; the second written for everyone else, i.e. people who consider technology as a means to an end, not the end itself.

A nice, somewhat flippant, example of writing for your audience (as opposed to ‘writing for the web’).

I was asked the other day: What frustrates you most about your work?

I answered: The user experience (UX) v marketing false dichotomy.

I think companies – brands – do themselves a huge disservice if they let this two cultures attitude persist. The customers that become ‘users’ once they go online are the same people. UX is therefore a subset of customer experience, not an isolated entity. And I think marketing teams are in a better position than UX to oversee the whole customer experience, only one element of which is user experience. I’m not arguing that this should necessarily be the case, but until an organisation sets up a team dedicated to providing that brand-sensitive customer experience overview, marketing are in the best position to do so, certainly in a better position than UX teams. To generalise, UX teams are focused on making things easy and lovely to use – they’re less interested in whether how they do it or present it helps to give the customers a sense of what makes a brand unique.

I say this because working in content strategy, if you’re doing it right, you get to work right across an organisation to ensure that the content produced – online and offline marketing collateral, user assistance copy, user interface, and so on – reflects the brand and provides a consistent experience that helps identify the brand, through things like tone of voice, as well as visual design. In my experience, the one team in an organisation that really, really, really cares about consistency of brand experience is marketing.

I talk with the zeal of a convert, because I used to see myself as on the side of UX in opposition to marketing. Nowadays, well, I don’t take sides but I find that I don’t want to restrict myself to working on just online interaction, interesting though that is.  I’m interested in the whole experience around it. In fact, I don’t want to think in terms of online and offline, because I care about the whole customer experience. I started writing this blog post as a reaction to the controversy about Why UX is really just good marketing on 52 Weeks of UX but for me, talking about just UX and marketing risks falling into silo mentality, as if UX and marketing are the only teams who care about users and customers.

By way of an example based on real life, if your PR campaign for, say, an online savings account leads potential customers to an awful website that makes applying an unpleasant experience, they won’t care that internally one team worked on PR and another worked on the site. And they won’t remember what led them to the site, they’ll remember that applying for your account was horrible.

If you’re a UX person, you might say, “That clearly shows why our work is so important.” Which is true. There shouldn’t be a company on earth that wants a website or product to be unusable and prevent sales.

So let’s assume that the online application process is as brilliant as the PR. It works well, the copy’s on-brand, the layout’s beautiful, the font’s on-brand and legible. The next thing is that your customer gets a letter through the post, in off-brand monospaced font that screams “I was automatically generated!” asking the customer to go to their local branch with their birth certificate and two forms of ID, such as utility bills, to comply with ‘money laundering regulations’.

The customer, being the online sort of person the PR originally targeted, thinks:

1. [Before opening.] Is this junk mail? I’ll leave it on the kitchen table for a couple of days. [If you're lucky, the letter gets opened.]
2. I have to ‘visit my local branch’? I only applied because this was supposed to be an online savings account.
3. It would have been nice if you could actually tell me where my local branch is instead of just saying ‘local branch’.
4. It would be even nicer if my local branch opened at times other than when I’m at work.
5. Why can’t I just scan this stuff and email it?
6. Why do they need this stuff anyway? Why do they think I might be involved in money laundering? My other bank didn’t need any of this.
7. Where’s my birth certificate?
8. I don’t have any recent utility bills since I switched to paperless billing.

1 and 6 could do with the tender loving care of marketing/brand to look after the presentation and copy.

3 could be covered off by whoever’s responsible for the auto-generated letters working with someone technical so that the customer’s postcode was used to work out and list the local branches. But who would take the lead? 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 suffer the same problem as 3. They are not necessarily insurmountable issues in themselves, but really they could do with someone thinking through the whole end-to-end process.

I said earlier that marketing was probably in the best position to look at things like this “until an organisation sets up a team dedicated to providing that brand-sensitive customer experience overview”. Actually, these teams do exist: they call themselves ‘service design’ teams.

Whether you call it service design or something else, what this team would do in the example above is look at the whole process of the account launch, from the product design itself to the customer service delivered to potential, new and existing customers, and all the while ensuring everything’s delivered in a way that promotes a brand in the way a company wants. Marketing, UX, operations – every team that does anything that goes anywhere near a customer need to be brought together, and work to a brand strategy that 1. gets the right customers, 2. keeps those customers by giving them what they want, 3. ensures the customers’ feelings about those experiences reinforce the brand identity.

Ultimately, it’s not about just UX and marketing – everyone needs to become a customer and brand champion.

When it comes to the issue of the misuse of the possessive apostrophe, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the argument that unless it causes ambiguity, it doesn’t actually matter. The meaning is known, the idea is communicated, what’s the problem?

Well, before I get thrown out of the content club, let me say that if I see mistakes like its rendered as it’s in business communications (the graphic above shows an email received in a business-to-business context), for me it’s an indication of a wider malaise.

My thought process goes something like this:

• Your company doesn’t care enough to hire good copywriters/sub-editors/people with a good command of English.
• Therefore I worry that your company doesn’t care enough to make your customer service helpful, design your products in a user-friendly manner, or, generally, sweat the detail.
• If you don’t sweat the detail then your company thinks ‘good enough’ is good enough.
• If you’re a premium brand – or at least not a budget brand – I think that the only thing that makes you premium is your marketing, and I start to question the value of your products and your brand.
• I take my disposable income elsewhere.

Grouching about poor copywriting or grammar isn’t (just) about being a pedant. It’s actually really important to your brand image, unless your brand is all about looking ill-educated or ignorant.

Spending money on great marketing and brand image, then not spending enough to get your day-to-day communications and interactions right is pointless.  In the end, it’s the regular contact you have with your customers, and what they say about you based on that experience, that defines your brand.

Product design, emails, letters, customer service, offline advertising, online advertising, surveys, everything. You need to get it right whenever you connect with a customer. Branding doesn’t start and end with the marketing department.

My O2 menu

Ok, O2, I get it – you really like the ‘My’ style of labelling. Looks a bit silly when you see them all together like that, though, doesn’t it?

Recently I’ve seen a few examples where the desire for a conversational tone of voice has led to overly-wordy designs. While I laud the good intentions, it’s worth remembering the context in which your words are appearing.  Just like using white space in a good visual design, good web writing is as much about giving key information space to breathe.  Sometimes you just need to accept that you can’t have grammatically correct full sentences everywhere, especially in user interactions.

Being conversational in a situation when the user is trying to achieve something is annoying.  Think about it like this: bumping into a chatty friend while you’re out for a leisurely walk in the park can be a pleasant way to pass the time (ignoring the horrible weather right now); lost, running late for a meeting, and asking for directions from that same friend who wants to tell you about their weekend  is just annoying. While your friend is rabbiting on, you are staring at them with immense hatred and wanting to punch them very hard in their cakehole.

When it comes to buttons, menu options, links, and key information such as prices, the key is to remove the barriers to that information.  If your desire to be conversational means you’re putting words in that get in the way of that information, you need to stop and think whether you’re being conversational in the right place. Don’t be that overly chatty friend.