Build what you need, not what you want

I met a writer the other night who has spent months freelancing for a prominent national magazine.  The magazine had enjoyed a reasonably popular web audience, including a community of frequent posters to its bulletin board.  The community was mostly middle-aged, middle-American women who used the magazine’s online space to chat and bring up issues that were loosely related to the magazine’s content.

It was an open question how best to take advantage of this community to benefit the magazine.  But instead of starting with obvious questions — Who are these users? What do they care about?  How can we increase their enthusiasm for our brand? — someone high up in the magazine’s interactive food chain had a classic technological panic. Read the rest of this entry »

The Web is Expensive

It’s easy to forget that we work in a new and strange industry.  We surround ourselves with ourselves, so we take the nature of our product for granted.  But for the majority of web users, we create virtual products — they take up no space; their size, complexity, and location are indeterminate; they appear and disappear from the screen in an instant.  So how to value their worth?

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Dangerous Phrases: “I Know a Guy”

This dangerous phrase occurs mostly in the world of development, not in design (although there is a variation: “My friend is a designer”).  It could be a woman, of course, but in the world of IT and web development, you’re usually dealing with men.  This person will have some kind of experience with the web, or web servers, or some technology you associate with the web.  He may configure your email server.  He may be a friend who once had a web site of his own.

In any case, your (limited, possibly anecdotal) understanding of this person’s skills may lead you to think, “I don’t need an overpriced agency to design and build our site.  We’ll just get him to do it.  We know him, we trust him, we already pay him….”  You might also think, “Let’s keep the risk low this first time around by keeping the investment low.  If we need to, we can hire specialists to clean this up later.”

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Digesting the 2008 New Media Institute: Part 1

Last week, HM spent three days in DC for the New Media Institute.  As NBPC’s interactive and design partner, we’ve been there since the beginning three years ago in Boston.  This year, in the wake of Obama’s victory, the mood was a little different: excited; a little amazed.  Attendees from other countries congratulated us Americans for doing the right thing (implied: for once).  And everyone wants to know two things:

1. What was it about Obama’s web strategy that helped him win?
2. What does this mean for the web?  (And: How can I take advantage of it?)

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