Posted On April 17th, 2012 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Business, 2
Email is 70% useless.
As someone unfortunately known in our office for writing 'Rackigrams', that is, pointed emails that are specifically designed to let someone know they're an a-hole, I have learned something:
Email should never be used to express anger when you want to preserve a relationship. It causes hurt feelings and needless drama, particularly because to the reader, you sound about 10 times angrier over email than in person (unless you're Steve Jobs apparently).
In an email, writing "I'm disappointed in your services" sounds to the reader like "I'M DISAPPOINTED IN YOUR FACE, YOU S.O.B". Talking in person however, we use inflection in our voice and soften our language with things like "Sort of", "a little bit", "pretty bad". If you aren't worrying about severing the relationship, then great. Go to town.
Now in a lot of cases, email can be great. Particularly when you want to send a message that has multiple components, broken out in headings, in a numbered list, and you want to offer up this soliloquy with no interruptions, no counter-arguments, questions or even expressions of agreement that get in the way of communicated your multi-facteted point, and keeping a handy record of the exchange. Just be sure that you are overly polite to compensate for the lack of inflection.
If you need to tell someone they're an idiot, do it over the phone or in person. Yes, it may require working up some nerve. A bit of uncomfortableness. But it's worth it.
Two incidents over the past month involved someone sending a nasty email and me responding in a nasty manner. In a way the results were achieved, but at the expense of good relationships.
On the other hand, two other occasions involved me being upset or annoyed at someone and waiting until I could speak with them. One was a client who implied in an email that something was our fault when it had nothing to do with us. I wanted to blast him, but instead I waited, called him, and kindly explained it to him. Some words were exchanged, but overall the tone was friendly and professional. Our relationship is good and we both understand each others points.
The other occasion was just in the last week. A trusted colleague sent an email to me and some other team members that sounded apathetic, flippant and irresponsible. Everyone who read it was understandably pissed. I felt my fingers reaching for the keyboard, ready to carefully craft a world-famous Rackigram, but then I relented.
We had a meeting booked in a couple of days anyways so I waited until after the meeting to discuss the email. As it turns out, our colleague had written it quickly and used incorrect language to explain his position. When he explained in person it all made sense and was much more inline with his character. Crises averted, problem solved, everyone was happy.
I hate to think of how it would of turned out if I had emailed him.
Posted On January 23rd, 2012 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Headspace News, Design, Business, Marketing, 0
Yesterday I attended Podcamp Halifax, which is a great annual, free event full of presentations about the web and social media. It's a great place to connect with people face-to-face that you know from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and learn new things that can help you with your business.
Much kudo's to the folks who put it on including Craig Moore from Spider Video. To those who came, it was great meeting you and I hope to you next year (or sooner)
I was privileged to put on a presentation based on Aarron Walter's book, Designing For Emotion. It attracted a good sized crowd and seemed to resonate with the people in attendance. Here were some mentions on Twitter:
HarmonicDev Harmonic Internet
GREAT talks yesterday by @brightwhite @kyleracki @SpiderVideo and keynote speaker @julien #podcamphfx and big kudos to the event organizers!
HStu Hannah
Designing for Emotion session with @kyleracki is packed and has tons of great ideas about creating human websites. #PodCampHalifax
22 Jan
TheRedSparrow Carly Murray
Design for emotion is a full room, very exciting! #podcamphfx
22 Jan
RegisDudley Regis Dudley
Add an element of pleasure for people using the website. Make boring tasks fun. Via @kyleracki #PodCampHFX
22 Jan
mattrogers222 Matt Rogers
Love the analogy usable=edible. Need to make web experiences not only usable but pleasurable #designforemotion #podcamphfx
22 Jan
I've also included my presentation in a PDF form for those who attended if they'd like it for reference.
Posted On November 3rd, 2011 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Business, Marketing, 0
I was looking at a website today and noticed a link to an online application for payroll. Great, I thought. An alternative to ADP. I reviewed their site and found the sign up form to learn about a special offer.
I took the time to fill out the form, which included fields asking how many employees I have, and what I currently use for payroll, and within 30 seconds I received a call from the sales agent. Everything okay so far. But he made several mistakes that lost him the sale in the end:
Uncomfortable Silence
The sales agent seemed like he wanted me to start the conversation when he was the one who called me. After some ums, ahs, and stutters, he asked me what I wanted. He should have already known what I wanted since I filled out a form to learn about a special offer!
Making me repeat myself
The rep then asked how many employees I had and what I currently use for payroll. It wasn’t hard for me to repeat what I already typed in the form, but the point is that I already told them and he should have had that info in front of him already. It just made me start to lose confidence.
He then asked how I found the site and I told him it was through an affiliate site - which he already should have known since the URL and banner on the site showed the online affiliate!
Put me on hold
Finally, he asked me to hold and I waited on the line for about 1 minute hearing shuffling and muffled talking, before hearing music kick in. At that point I hung up. He called about a minute later but by that point I was busy and didn’t care any more.
You would think that these days any company would think of this stuff as common sense what-not-to-do, but amazingly this company is probably wondering why they are having trouble closing deals when the answer is right in front of them - an inefficient sales process and inexperienced sales agents.
I’m sure there are lessons here we all can learn from when it comes to selling for our own companies.
Posted On September 18th, 2011 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Design, Business, Development, 1
Just recently, a big change came along in web design; Arguably the biggest revolution since modern web standards in the early 2000's.
Responsive Design has been invented. It's a term used in new age architecture to describe buildings that behave 'responsively'. That is, they adapt or respond to conditions such as the amount of people in a given room, for instance. They will automatically change heat, air and even room size (yes, the walls expand and contract!) to accommodate more or less people.
And just like Responsive Design in architecture, when it comes to the web, responsive design allows websites to no longer behave like static online brochures that scroll, but rather they adapt by expanding and contracting, resizing themselves to appropriately fit a variety of screen sizes. So for example, a website might have five columns when viewed on a 52" wide screen, but when viewed on a laptop it may scale down to three columns, two on an iPad and down to one column when viewed on a smart phone.
The best way to illustrate this is by viewing this gallery of well-designed responsive sites. You'll see four views for each site, from wide screen down to a small screen. Pretty impressive, huh?
The best part is, designing sites to be responsive does not add a lot of size, scope or complexity to a project. Sure, it adds some work for the designer and developer. But really in the grand scheme of building a website from start to finish, building it responsively is not all that time consuming once you know how.
Now, like all things in life, there's a catch. Building a website with responsive design is not a replacement for a mobile app or site. There are subtle but key differences.
Depending on your business, you may find that you actually need a mobile web application instead of just a website that scales to a variety of devices and screen sizes. The reasons are:
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Functionality
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Weight
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Business Model
1) Functionality
The trick with responsive is that it's all in the layout. When a user is on a smart phone, they are looking at the exact same site as on a desktop computer, but the CSS or style sheet is scaling the site visually to look better on a mobile device. It's kind of like window dressing. The HTML page is exactly the same.
Now you may find that on a mobile device, you want to do more than simply make the website look different. You actually want to take advantage of a mobile device' hardware. You may want to let the user shake their phone to randomize a search, upload photo's through their phone camera, plot their location through GPS. These are things you'll actually have to build specifically for the mobile device - you obviously don't want this functionality for users on a desktop!
There may also be a lot of functionality on your main website that you want simplified and altered significantly on the mobile experience. If you have an iPhone, think of how different the main Facebook website is from the iPhone app version of Facebook. On the latter, the functionality is simplified significantly from how you would use it on the website (no instant messaging for example).
An added benefit of mobile websites is that you can include a link at the bottom of the site "Click here to leave the mobile version". This way, you can present your user with choice so they default to the mobile version, but can always load the desktop version on their phone if they so choose.
2) Weight
With responsive, again, the HTML page is exactly the same regardless of what device you're viewing it on. On a mobile device, every bit of information a user has to download counts - because users often have slower internet connections and their phones have less memory than a desktop computer.
So if your main website has a lot of intensive graphics, videos, and sounds that a user has to download, responsive design is not going to change that when the user is viewing it on a smart phone. A mobile web app on the other hand is a completely different site, made specifically for phones, and there are a lot of techniques developers can employ to make the page as fast and lightweight as possible.
I won't get too much into the technical stuff here, but it would include using HTML5 local storage techniques, limiting the amount of http requests, keeping Javascript libraries as compressed and minimal as possible, loading smaller images and a whole lot more.
3) Business Model
If you have a blog, chances are your website will be used the same way regardless of what device you're user is accessing it with. Blog's are always for finding and reading content, and sometimes commenting on a post. In that case, responsive design is probably a perfect solution, since it allows the content to be optimally viewed on a phone.
Now on the other hand, if your website involves a lot of user functionality, like the aforementioned Facebook, which includes adding photos, tagging pictures, posting content, finding friends and more, it's much better to design a specific mobile experience that varies greatly from the desktop experience.
And you don't have to be as big as Facebook either. There are a lot of companies whose desktop websites wouldn't translate well as merely a shrunken down mobile version, but would benefit from a true mobile app. Some examples may be banks, movie theatres, restaurants, concert venues, e-commerce stores, social sites... the list goes on.
The other factor to consider too is whether or not you want to sell your app and/or make it available on the iTunes Store or Android Marketplace. If you do, responsive is not going to work. On the other hand, you could make a native iPhone/iPad/Android app, OR build a mobile web app using open standards and using the insanely clever PhoneGap, you can package your web app as if it is a native app. This will enable you to use the phone hardware like contact lists, voice and camera, and will also allow you to sell it on app stores.
Closing thoughts
As a general rule, I like to think of it like this: If your website is meant to be viewed, Responsive Design is an amazingly simple technique to please visitors on your site (in fact, I think that building in Responsive is the first place every company should start when they want to dip their toes in the mobile landscape).
On the other hand, if your website is primarily meant for users to interact with (games, accounts, videos, social, e-commerce etc.) then a mobile web app is an important investment worth making.
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