Episode 6

Web Strategy with Karen McGrane

October 19, 2011

Karen McGrane talks about planning systems of flexible web content that can be used in a variety of places. And about the need for better content entry workflows.

We have to be encouraging our writers, our content creators, to write, to take large chunks of content and break them down. Write a longer article. But then have different sizes of summaries that might appear in different places. We have to encourage our content creators to be adding all the necessary metadata, so that that content can be displayed, and filtered, and we'll know where to put it in a variety of different ways.

Transcript

Thanks so much to Karen McGrane for providing the transcript of this podcast.

Jen Simmons
This is “The Web Ahead,” Episode 6. A weekly talk show about what’s new in Web design, Web development, Web business, mobile apps, sites, all that good stuff. I’m Jen Simmons, your host. And I just want to say, “Thanks as always to Dan Benjamin and the whole 5By5 network.” Totally fabulous podcasts if you have not checked them out you should go to 5by5.tv and just surf around looking at what other podcasts you might be interested in. And you can go there, 5by5.tv/webahead to find the notes for this particular show. We’ll be putting links into that webpage, the webpage for this show and you can go click on those links to see more about what we’re talking about.
So today I have as my guest, Karen McGrane. Hello, Karen.
Karen McGrane
Hello.
Jen

So Karen is a fabulous designer who’s done user experience design and information architecture and all the, whatever it’s called this week, since like before it was called any of that. She headed up that, User Experience, at Razorfish, currently teaches Design Management at the School of Visual Arts, MFA program and has your own…you have your own thing now. You run your own business now at Bond Art and Science where you can hire her to do Web strategy and interaction design.

So, Karen I saw you this last week, last week at “Do it with Drupal,” here in Brooklyn, the conference that Lullabot puts on about Drupal and Web design, Web development. And I just was so blown away by what you were talking about. It seemed so completely right on and timely for what’s happening right now I wanted you to come and talk about it more.

Karen
Well thank you. I’m always happy to have a platform to talk about things that I’m really excited about.
Jen
Yeah, so what do you… I mean how do you define “web design”?
Karen
I think  it’s the combination of the design and development and content practices that help us get stuff up on the Internet. And I tend to look at it really broadly, I think. I think it encompasses desktop Web, it encompasses mobile, you know it encompasses like any screen on which we’re trying to communicate via the Internet. And I tend to think it’s…You know the use of the word, “design,” you can think of that in a very broad context or a very narrow context. And I think sometimes people…You can slide back and forth between those contexts pretty easily. So when I talk about design sometimes I mean the actual way that it looks, the way it works, the way it functions. And then sometimes you’re talking not just about the visual or the physical or the tactile elements of it, sometimes you’re really just talking about the entire process. And that design process encompasses content. It encompasses development. It encompasses strategy. It encompasses all the people aspects of it. So sometimes it’s more fun to talk about design in a broader context.
Jen
Yeah, because I think sometimes people, when they talk about design, they mean visual design conveyed through Photoshop documents. And they feel like they’re done with design when they have delivered a bunch of PSDs or Photoshop documents and the client has, you know people have decided, “OK, that’s what we want the website to look like.”
Karen
Mm-hmm.
Jen
But you were talking last week about how there’s so much more to it. About planning how to structure content behind the scenes and figuring out really what’s going on with your content that may show up on a website. It may also show up in other places. And figuring out a plan or a structure or design…
Karen
You know maybe it’s called design maybe it’s not but like an intentional strategy for content and what you’re planning for content. I think we have a lot of, sort of, unhealthy legacies of print that are still active in our web design and development practices. Particularly as it relates to content. I think when you look at historically, at the way that people have managed art direction and editorial or a magazine or even for advertising, there's this separation of church and state between what an art director does and a copywriter does, or what the design team does and editorial team does. There's this sense that those people can collaborate a little bit, but in large degree, the writers are writing and then they are handing off their texts to the designers and then the designers are styling it. That just doesn't work on the web because that content is not one static thing, its dynamic, its always changing. The designer that is focusing on building a container, they are making a mistake because whatever content winds up there is not going to fit neatly into that container. So one of the things that I have been talking about is the notion that we have to be thinking in flexible systems. We have to give up our notions of print/art direction and thinking of it as having pixel perfect control, and move towards saying "Ok, how can we think dynamically and flexibly in our designs?" Then on the flip-side, the question that I have been trying to answer is "Great, so we have a lot of really smart web designers who are on board with web standards and responsive web designs and they are thinking in systems, what has to happen on the content side to support that? How do we then start creating more flexible content systems so that we can respect the fact that the web is always changing, the web is dynamic. Given different screen sizes and different resolutions will always be a part of our life. So what do we do to support that from both content and design?
Jen
And what do you think, like, a successful, flexible system looks like? I mean, what does that end up being in the end?
Karen
Well, I think, you know, there's a lot smarter people than me talking about what that means on the design side. So, even in web design. There's Jeremy Keith, and Brian and Stephanie Rieger, have been saying all kinds of smart things about how you actually make that happen, and what's the overall strategy for how you plan the process. And then what are some of the specific tactical things around, you know, where do you put in the break points? How do you increase from the baseline? So what I've really been talking about more is what's happening on the content side? And so, to me, what that means is that you have well structured content that is semantically defined. So instead of explaining how you want the content to look, you have to explain what it is. And we've been talking about that for a long time. But where the rubber really hits the road there is in the content management system. And so we have to be encouraging our writers, our content creators, to write, to take large chunks of content and break them down. Write, have maybe a longer article. But then have different sizes of summaries that might appear in different places. We have to encourage our content creators to be adding all the necessary metadata, so that that content can be displayed,  and filtered and, we'll know where to put it in a variety of different ways. And a lot of people really hate doing that. I think we haven't, we haven't, one sufficiently communicated to the content creator why they need to do that and then two, and I think most important to me, we've been giving them really crappy tools.  It's like, of course they don't want to fill out all these fields.  Of course they don't want to add all the metadata because the content management interfaces that they've been using are cumbersome and complicated and the work flows are a pain in the ass.  They have to hunt through a million different fields to find what they're looking for and of course they won't do it.
Jen
Yeah, and I feel like I've been...  I mean I've been doing this for awhile so it's been like it used to be you just opened up an HTML document like in Dreamweaver and you typed your stuff and you marked it up and you hit save and that was your webpage.  And then we went into...  You've worked with a lot of really big companies so you know this from the big businesses and I think from the kind of small world and it was like things like Wordpress where you ended up with a title and then a giant big text field and you could put whatever you wanted there.  And I was building sites for small clients and actually as I've worked on bigger projects I've seen this over and over on big projects too and it surprises me.  I'm like wait a minute.  How come you guys don't have something more than just a giant body field in the CMS where you're supposed to type.  Like oh over in Microsoft Word I save the template so let me open that up and I'll copy that HTML template that's in my Word Document and I'll copy that and I'll paste it into this giant body in the CMS and then I'll go in and where it says put title here I'll erase that and I'll type my title.  Then I'll make sure I keep this DIV that has a class of whatever and then - it's so error prone because when I hit save the whole thing gets all just messed up. So then working in a system in Drupal or there's lots of others too where you can actually field things out and you can say there's not going to be one giant field in the form.  There's going to be a series of fields and it's a big, it's a film festival website. Well who is the director?  How long was the film?  What country was it in? Each of those are very specific slots but it seems that you are articulating so well the need to very intentionally design and have design in business conversations about what those slots should be and understand the implications for those particular fields on the current website, the future website, the business as a whole, instead of simply drawing a Photoshop picture of how it should look when it comes out the other end and then letting or asking the developers to make decisions about what the fields should be or how the content is structured when they may have never met any of the content editors or when they were not in the business meetings.  They don't really know the purpose of what's going on.
Karen
Yeah.  I often refer to content management as "the enterprise software that user experience forgot."  And I feel like we have abdicated responsibility for developing better CMS interfaces and the tools to do that are well within our control.  I think there's lots of user experience people out there that are very skilled at doing contextual inquiry, to do task analysis, to go into complex businesses.  I mean I know lots of user experience people who are deep into financial services organizations, where they are going in and understanding very complex workflows about things that they frankly don't even understand.  I mean I've done plenty of financial services work and you're just like wow I really don't actually even know what this task is but I at least have the skills as a UX person to go in and understand what the flow is and figure out how somebody...I can go in and talk to somebody and have them explain the flow to me and then I can come back with a process, a work flow, on the interface that reduces the number of steps, that makes a more logical transition from like okay, fill in this field and then you fill in this field and then you fill in this field and the flow of your eye follows along more nicely.  And we just haven't done that for content management or the large corporate enterprise grade content management systems have, they work the way they want to work and there hasn't been a lot of opportunity for people that go in and customize those interfaces.  And so you're right, you either have these interfaces that look like a big database explosion or you have content creators freaking out about that and saying no, no, no, no we don't want that.  We want a WYSIWYG toolbar.  We want a big text field.  We want it to work just like Microsoft Word and we want to be able to dump whatever we want in there.  We want to format the text.  We want to put in a table.  We want to put in whatever image we want.  And so there's no structure to it. To me it's like the solution to our future problems is not to let people get away with having a big text field and WYSIWYG toolbar.  The future of what's going to keep us alive on the web in the next ten years is better designed content management interfaces that make it easier for people to structure their content.
Jen
And so what do you think that future problem, what's the future problem people need to start avoiding now?
Karen
Mobile.  Lisa Welchman, when I saw her speak at Confab, the quote that really stuck in my head was "letting people think about where text is going to 'live' on our 'webpage' is really pretty 1999."  I think you've got people out there right now designing their own personal little Taj Mahal of the webpage that's going to look absolutely exactly the way that they want it in the one particular context that they're viewing it.  So you're going to take all these giant text blobs with all this formatting embedded and you're going to try to put it on a mobile device and it's going to look like crap.  You know?  It's not going to be structured in a way that's going to enable us to get the right messages and the right meaning into the right environment on a mobile device.  And I want to be really clear when I'm saying this.  I am not talking about writing content for mobile.  I am talking writing for a flexible content system that could be displayed in mobile.  It could be displayed on the web.  It could be displayed in email.  It could be displayed on a blog.  It could be displayed on some future platform that we haven't invented yet.  And it's thinking, "Oh, okay, right.  I have to give up the notion that I'm writing for this one particular webpage," and start thinking "I'm writing for a system that might wind up being used in a variety of ways."
Jen
Yeah, or it seems like because the web was pages when it was born we got into this idea that oh I'm working on a big site for a company.  When you go into this section there's a page that has a photo for each of our employees and there's a little bio for each of those employees.  When you click on someone's face you go to page for that one employee and then they've got their longer bio.  So that's two different web pages.  I've got one web page with the short bios and there's fifteen of them and then I've got fifteen different pages that have the long bio. So when I go to enter that content into the system I go to two places. In one place I put all of the little bios and then the other fifteen places I put the one copy of the long. Right? Structuring it from a CMS really what you're doing is you're entering a person and when you enter that person you put their photo in and you put a short bio and a long bio and whatever.  I found it surprisingly hard for people to make that switch in their head between thinking of each page versus thinking of each unit of content chunk.
Karen
Yeah, yeah, like the content object. It’s true. It is…I think that is one of the most challenging things I’ve had to do. And your experience with Drupal. I know lots of people who are Drupal experts. And it’s like trying to explain to people like, “OK, you used to hand-create this landing page. And you would go in and you would select whatever you wanted to put on the landing page. And you would craft the link and you would craft the two-sentence description. And you would decide what the thumbnail image is going to be. And telling them now, “That’s going to happen automatically.” OK? That page is going to…
Jen
Magical robots.
Karen
Yeah, the magical robots are going to go in and they’re going to look at all your articles and they’re going to automatically generate this page. And instead of you custom-creating it, you might then be writing a short summary and a long summary and you might be defining the business rules by which this page gets generated. Like, do you want to show the most recent stuff? Do you want to show the most popular stuff? Do you only want to show stuff that meets like this certain keyword criteria? That’s really hard for people to wrap their heads around. And I think, to me that’s one of the biggest challenges we have is explaining…We have to get in there and really start explaining to our content creators how that works and why it’s important and what they have to do differently.
Jen
Yeah, and metadata…You were talking in your presentation about metadata and how metadata ends up being really important, key to understanding…Like the magical robots are going to look at…You can program them to look at this metadata. And there’s a need to strategically decide what that data should be and…Like the creation date if you want the most, a list of the most recent things then you need to know what the creation date is. Most systems make that automatically on their own. But if you want a list of all, whatever, articles with this particular subject then you need to have a taxonomy structure that is going to reflect those subjects.
Karen
Right.
Jen
And so you, you feel like, in your experience, it's been, it's a big leap for people to, to get to the place where they can figure out what their taxonomy should be, or their metadata structure should be.
Karen
I think it's exactly what you described earlier. That, in many cases, you have developers who are tasked with building the, the data model or the content model. And so they're the ones who are saying, okay. We have to figure out what fields we want in the CMS. And they might not have been in the business meetings. They might never have talked to the content creators. And so then one day, the content creator shows up, and they're confronted with this, like, tangle of fields, not all of which makes sense. And they don't, they don't have a, a sense in their own mind of why they need to, you know, why do you need to add these categories? Or why is it important that you write this summary? Or why is it, you know, why is it important that you provide any of this metadata? And, and so they hate it. And, and, you know, in many cases, and I don't mean this to, like, rag on the developers. But, in many cases, the developers might not have even chosen the right fields to add. Or, frankly, what I see happen with Drupal all the time, is there's this sense of like, well, we have no idea what they'll want. So let's just put it all in there.    
Jen
Yeah.
Karen
And so, you know, my, my attitude is, like, in the same way that we would, from any user experience process. Like, sit down and start talking to our users, and figure out what their needs and expectations are. We have to do a better job of bringing the content creators on board. We have to do a better job of, you know, having, having architects figure out what the strategy should be, and making good decisions about what that metadata should be. And then figure out how to explain to the business, and explain to the content creators. Like, here's why you're entering these fields. And this is, you know, if you do this, and you do it correctly, here's what kind of flexibility it's gonna give you in the future to have more options for what you do with landing pages or dynamically generated pages. It's gonna help you support mobile.  You could imagine if you eventually wanna have a special tablet app, how these fields and places gonna let you do it quickly and easily.
Jen
Yeah I mean I just wanna cry when I think of some of things I've seen. You end up with a content entry field, I mean a content entry form that has like give me a lede, a summary, a blurb, a short lede and you're just like what? A lede and a short lede?  Yeah it just  becomes a tangle. And I do I get frustrated as a person who is a designer and also a developer when I feel like the developers are not necessarily the best people to be making those decisions and they weren't given any of the information that they needed. They weren't in the meetings. And the even when a person is a good designer there is something about the act of development where your brain gets in the wrong frame of mind and you just don't have time to think about what the content entry people are gonna need or want or you know you're not gonna write the help text you just skip it because you don't know and you don't have time.
Karen
Right I'm not in any way, I'm not criticizing the developer, more that I'm criticizing an overall system.
Jen
Yeah
Karen
In which we're , we're making mistakes that frankly in lots of other areas on the web or in software development, we've figured out how to not make these mistakes. It's like oh right like that's why there are these experience designers. It's because we figured out that developers aren't the best people to make these decisions. And why why can't we do that for content management? 
Jen
It feels like there is never, it's always like there's no money, like we don't wanna design the back, the content entry system or the behind the scenes area because we have no money.  We don't want to do any front end development there because we have no money.  We don't want to spend any time making drawings or writing up Excel spreadsheets with proper labels or the help text that we want in that place because we don't have...  But it seems like it ends up costing a lot of money in the end if you spent an extra two weeks in the creation of the website you would end up saving hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of your employees' time when they are trying to enter content.
Karen
Yeah.  I think that the cost of failed software is so much higher than the cost of doing the upfront research and strategy and interaction design.  I think a lot of businesses are… it's a soft cost to be sure but they are losing business value in that they have people who won't create content. They have people who can't create content.  They have people who are creating bad content.  It's all because they have bad tools.  I really do pin this back to business value and if your communication efforts are aligned around needing to connect and share information with your customers or potential customers on the web — and frankly it's like what business today is not in the content creation business.  So if that's one of your business goals then if you have bad tools that are cumbersome and don't work right you're losing money.  You're wasting opportunities and I really believe that mobile is going to catch some businesses up short because they're going to wind up saying hey wait a minute.  We simply cannot maintain our desktop website and a mobile app and a mobile website and whatever is going on in the tablet.  We can't continue to do custom development for all of these platforms and then have content that is out of sync and can't be maintained.  We've got to come up with one more systematized way to manage our content so that when we do decide to go onto a new platform, it's easier and more flexible.
Jen
And have everything in one database.
Karen
Yeah.  I mean god, it's like I hear people say we have a really terrible CMS and so now all these different business units have decided that they want to launch a Wordpress site and so they go off and they launch a microsite that's managed with Wordpress.  So now you've got...  It's like how many different databases do you have back there?  How much have you in the support of a short term goal, how much have you screwed yourself in the long term because now you can't maintain that.
Jen
Yeah, it does seem like a very human problem.  It's complicated.
Karen
Yeah.
Jen
Although it also seems like a perfect opportunity to really look again at what some of these things we've been doing are and a lot of people are switching CMSes right now.  It seems like a great time to take a moment and really plan out your future and what you're doing in the future.
Karen
Yep.  I think I would encourage anybody if you're listening and you're thinking about adopting a CMS you have to think of that as a user experience problem and not as a technology problem. If you are making all of your decisions about your CMS based on what your IT staff says you're missing the entire boat.  It would be like putting up a front end website and not caring at all about the user of the website, caring only about what your developers want to do.  The whole point of it is so that it can be used.
Jen
Or it seems like when the people entering content are random anonymous people off the internet or anyone can sign up like Flicker or Facebook or whatever then a lot of time goes into figuring out and analytics on the success of the designs when anyone in the world can add their photo to your website. But when it’s your staff, somehow when you’ve got 100 content editors, you’ve got reporters, you’ve got whoever entering content, it feels not as important. You were talking in your presentation about using analytics and doing user studies and gathering data on the success of people using the content entry forms--you want to talk a bit about that? For some reason it seems like a shocking idea, like “What?”
Karen
I know, I’ve been talking to Jeff Eaton about this for a while and his point was that if you were in an e-commerce business, you would optimize every bit of those workflows. I mean, you would know every bit of data about where the drop-offs were, you’d be diagnosing why they happened, because that’s business value. Those are lost sales. But here in the content creation business, even if you’re a publisher, you don’t think of that as a workflow that could be optimized. That sort of made a light bulb go on above my head, where I’m like, “Do you know anyone who has analytics data about the performance of their CMS?” Because I don’t. I don’t know anyone who’s out there actually tracking, how effective are these screens. How effective can we make our people in entering and creating this content? We treat it like, “Oh, well I guess we’re paying you, so this can be as cumbersome and time-consuming as we want it to be,” like there’s no point in making that better. Well of course there is. If you reduce the amount of time it takes someone to manage that content, that means they can do more. It means they can do better. If they’re happier and it’s easier to do, they might be more creative.  They might be more willing to do it and that's business value.
Jen
Especially when you're writing a summary or something.  You have your article, you paste it in, and then you have to write a summary.  If the thing is making you grumpy, you're going to get a grumpy summary.  If it's beautiful and fun then you're going to feel great about taking the time to write something good.
Karen
I talk a lot about publishers just because one, I do a lot of work with them but two, in my mind they're sort of the bellwether.  They face content challenges more acutely and more quickly than other businesses do.  So it's like I look to them as sort of the crystal ball to say okay if you guys are facing these problems right now that means that other businesses are going to be facing them in the next couple of years.  And so they're really struggling with mobile and I think they're really struggling with how do we make our content interfaces as easy as possible.  A lot of businesses have homegrown CMSes that are not only not that easy to use but they're very difficult to customize.  Publishers that I've worked with are like yeah we had this homegrown CMS and if we lose a developer it takes us three or four months to get a new developer up to speed just enough to be able to make changes to it. That's a risky situation for a business to be in and so I like and am sort of enthusiastic about people starting to adopt open source CMSes and it's almost like the heavy lifting for sites like Drupal have already been done.  To me it's like okay, great, we have Drupal and it's a platform.  Now let's get...  What I would love to see is armies of user experience people go in and start working with Drupal developers to figure out what those workflow should be. What those interfaces should be. I think Drupal's greatest weakness is also it’s greatest strength. In that, yes, if you just use Drupal out of the box, yes, those interfaces are jaw-droppingly bad. I mean just everything and the kitchen sink is on those screens. But it’s totally customizable, I mean it’s very, if your working with a developer and you have user experience in the matter. They can go in and say ok, here’s what we need to see, let’s show only these fields. Let’s make the flow work like this. And to me that’s a huge selling point or should be a big selling point for businesses that are considering using Drupal.
Jen
New York, hear the horns. Yeah, I think Drupal, especially Drupal 6 was, yeah it was just tough. The nice thing is it feels like it really has evolved far enough, that if there is some attention and time paid to these kinds of ideas. You can get really far with very little effort. And sometimes it is just finding the right word for the label, in Drupal and probably in a lot of content management systems. Although maybe not all of them. You can customize the label, like you can change the label to be what is best for the content editor.
Karen
Yeah, exactly and you can make it consistent. Make sure that it is consistent on every screen, or make sure that you have a really consistent labeling system across all the screens.
Jen
Yeah, that’s the other thing that I think is tough lots of times for developers. Is if your working on a big project you’ve got a big team, all the work that needs to be done is broken up into all these separate pieces. And there’s not a meeting to decide these things as a group. Or you, if it’s not a priority, if it’s not something people are willing to put attention to, budget to. Then you don’t have permission to have a meeting to decide what the labels are going to be.  So you do yours one way and someone else does theirs a different way and you try to go change theirs without making them made but it can be tough.  Yeah.  It just feels like another example of where the process that we've been using for the last eight years is breaking down and it's time to think of a better way to do it.
Karen
Totally.  I mean that labeling issue, to me that's almost laughable because one, that's information architecture 101.  It's the kind of thing in my mind where that's not even...  I shouldn't say this but it's like that's not even like the most complicated or time consuming or expensive thing.  It's part of the process.  I mean for a good IA to be able to go in and do some research and do a card sorting exercise and come up with a labeling schema, that to me it's almost shocking that more firms aren't selling it as a value add because frankly the benefit to the business in the long run of having that done right is way greater than the cost that it would be to bring in an IA to do it in the first place. I talked to Jeff Eaton about this and his take on it was that a lot of those things are...  It's like developers like to solve the complicated problems.  They like to solve the stuff that's like oh, okay, this is what's going to get me attention.  Like I'm going to be able to contribute this module back.  Whereas figuring out the labeling stuff it's like that's such a...  That's seen as not like a development problem and so it's just like why do I even need to think about that.
Jen
It's so easy.
Karen
It's so easy.
Jen
You just type the label in. Who cares?
Karen
Yeah, exactly.
Jen
It's not hard.
Karen
None of my friends are going to be impressed that I did that.
Jen
That I could type.
Jen
What do you see in publishing, with publishers, in the work that you're doing? So much stuff is changing right now. What are they thinking? What's going on in those rooms around all the new stuff, so much new stuff? Stuffs changing like crazy.
Karen
What's intriguing to me is that I think for the major publishers that I work with, they are still locked in a pitched battle between what I might describe as the battle between art direction and information architecture. That there are lots of people who come from a historical print background who believe that the experience of a publication is the incredibly tight marriage between the content and the design. That it's their ability to immerse you in a world that is both visually and aesthetically rich, and also present the content within that framework. I think the excitement and the enthusiasm around tablets was in large part driven by that historical print mindset of, "Great. Now we're going to be able to put our magazine on a screen. And we're going to be able to apply the same level of richness of design." But really, what they mean is, "We're going have to have pixel perfect control again. We're going to be able to design the experience that you will get that will be exactly the way we intended it.' On the flip side, there's all the people who are looking at things like Readability and Instapaper and recognizing, 'Oh, what people, what they’re enthusiastic about even on their tablet is not art direction. It’s control. It’s flexibility. It’s a clean reading experience. And so those are the people who are talking about, “How do we create an API for our content? How do we ensure that we have the right metadata? How do we ensure that we’re thinking about creating content for re-use across a bunch of platforms as opposed to designing custom layouts for single platforms? And that’s…I hope I won’t be tipping my hand too much here if I say that I’m squarely in the camp of believing that information architecture and metadata are the future and that people are not engaging with content on desktops, on mobile phones, on tablets, in any sort of online context solely because of the art direction. Or, that if we do want to invest in better design that it has to be through the lens of having a flexible content system and it has to be through the lens of architecture and metadata and reusable content and not just through one-offs. But you know there’s a lot of people whose whole careers in the publishing industry have been staked on a very different mindset. And I think it might…I think it might be another five to ten years before those battles play out as people start retiring. And that you know there may be a lot of businesses that can’t hold on long enough to figure out what the advertising model and the content model is going to be for the future and they might not survive.
Jen
Yeah, you know in iOS 5 there’s this new news app, what’s it called? Newsstand. And I finally this morning looked at it on my phone.
Karen
Right.
Jen
And I was kind of surprised that it seems… It’s basically like…It’s cool you can download magazines, you can find magazines and download them, then they’re on my phone, they’re in one place. But when I open up those magazines, it feels like I’m looking at a PDF on my phone. And I’m just sort of just trying to scroll…trying to read a line length, I have to blow it out to a certain size to be able to read the text but then the line is longer than my phone. So I’m like taking my finger and going back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth to like scoot the piece of paper back and forth so I can read the content. [laughter]
Karen
And you know God forbid you would ever want to share that with somebody. I mean, send a link to one of your friends that you wanted them to, oh, I don’t know, read the article.
Jen
Yeah.
Karen
There’s a lot of decisions that you see being made…It’s like on the one hand you want to go in there and just smack them upside the head and just be like, “How could you be this shortsighted about what you’re doing?” And then…But there’s a big part of me that’s been in consulting long enough to realize like these problems are not problems of people not…It’s not that people don’t…there aren’t people inside that don’t get it. It’s that you’re dealing with organizational culture and you’re dealing with people’s careers and you’re dealing with mindsets where people are…especially in that industry, desperately trying to hold onto their jobs. And the decisions that get made are made for very human reasons. They’re made because somebody’s like, “Well if I evangelize this point of view, it's going to win me favor with this guy and that’s going to help me keep me job.”  And…
Jen
Yeah.
Karen
That’s not how innovation happens. [laughs]
Jen
I mean I’d like for somebody to go into one of those companies and basically change everyone’s job description, what everyone does and completely restructure the organization so that it comes out with a better result. But there’s no way. You can’t do that. You can’t do that to a group of people.
Karen
No. Yeah, I think…I see a lot of sort of willful…I think a lot of people who kind of willfully refuse to understand technology. And it’s almost like if they…It’s almost like if they cover their eyes and their ears that it will go away. And I think they’re just trying to hold on long enough until they retire.
Jen
Well and then on the flipside, any time that there is that sort of stubbornness happening in any industry there’s the possibility for innovation. And those companies that really want to do things in a way that works well with what’s happening, they can take off because they get it or whatever and they just jump in and they give users what they want when some of the older organizations are unable to change as much. Do you see…Are there anything out there right now that’s exciting you or you feel like people are coming up with much better new or content strategies that are going to work for the new climate?
Karen
Well I always like to give props to one of my former employers…You know, a  client I have worked with quite a lot over the last few years, which is, “The Atlantic”…or the Atlantic Media Group. When I started working with them they brought in a former client of mine named Justin Smith to revitalize their titles. And I think he is brilliant. I have learned so much from him. And when I started working with them, “The Atlantic,” was just this moribund, dry, publication that you felt you just slogged through it. And they have revitalized the whole brand. And I think to a significant degree they’ve pushed that through innovating online. So they were very clear that their content strategy was, you know, “We’re not putting a magazine on the internet.  We are creating a platform." And I think they've done a great job of creating great relationships with readers across the web and mobile and other platforms, social platforms, and that has resulted in greater magazine sales so they have revitalized print as well.  So I think I point to that and say you know what, it's totally possible and the way that you do it is really by embracing the point of view that we are not a magazine on the internet.  We are a platform, a communications platform, and our job is to get our message to people in any channel that they want. Then I also would love to give a plug to Readability.  I'm on their advisory board.  I think that tools like Readability and Instapaper and Flipboard are really innovative examples of understanding how people want to consume content online and giving people...  It's like what do you want?  You don't want a magazine that necessarily was generated by an editor.  You might want a magazine that was generated by your friends and pull out all of the interesting stuff that people you know and respect have recommended and give that to you in one really easy to read platform that you can have access to when you're on the train.
Jen
Yeah, I use Instapaper a lot. For the five people who don't know what these things are or a lot of people.  Like Instapaper which Marco Arment just pushed a new update to his app.
Karen
He did?
Jen
For iOS 5 although it works on iOS 4 as well.  But there I am, I'm supposed to be working, I'm reading Twitter, I click a couple links that look like they're some really great articles, I totally want to read them later.  I really should get back to work so I used to do things like, you know, you just keep all the tabs open so you’ve got twenty seven tabs open and your computer loses more and more of its memory. It gets slower and slower and slower. At some point the browser crashes or you have to force quit it, or you just need it to be working faster. You can’t keep those tabs open. And maybe I don’t want to read it later today maybe I want to read it four days from now. So now instead I use Instapaper, I’m sure Readability is very similar. I just click a little button it tosses the url over to the system. I can close the tab, go on with my life, later I can open up my laptop, my ipad, my iphone, whatever, download. It downloads all the articles that I’ve bookmarked into the Instapaper app. Usually I read it on my iPod. So there I am on my iPod, I’ve got all these articles, once I open the app it downloads them all and their stored on the device. So I can get on a plane, I can get on the subway, I can go wherever I don’t need to be online. And I can read all of this content that I meant to read. And there’s no branding right there’s just the contents. So it’s the text, there’s any images that are inline in the content. And it’s not the art direction.
Karen
No it’s not. What I always think about is that it’s such a little present to myself in the future. Like I’ll see an article I really want to read but won’t have time for it. So I click the Instapaper app and then I forget about it. And then when I’m bored, you know like waiting for the train, pull up Instapaper, and it’s like oh this is fantastic. Like I’ve taken a moment that would have been like total devastation to my life spent, and turned it into something extremely pleasurable.
Jen
Yeah, and it’s a great tool for saying I don’t have time to read this carefully right now, but I do want to read it. So later when I’m not so crazy busy I can take some time. I think people assume, especially people that are attached to old ways, of how the publication works. They sort of assume that these tools are to make us more phonetic and more distracted. When the reality is that I think these tools...  It gives me a chance to really sit down and focus only on that one article and read slowly and enjoy it carefully.
Karen
Yep, and focus on it.
Jen
Instead of reading it when I'm supposed to be doing something else or because I just want to close the tab.  But it is remarkable how many conversations I've had recently with people where I bring up these tools as one of many reasons to use well marked up semantic HTML.  It needs to be accessible, you want it to be found, findable by Google and other search engines, you want people to be able to read the content on other devices or other places like Readability or Instapaper and I just keep hearing over and over that's not a priority for us.  We don't care about that.
Karen
Yeah, we've got to fix that.  I say it a lot but I think the web design and development community have made great strides in talking about web standards, talking about semantic HTML, talking about responsive web design, and I think the content community or the broader business community really needs to get on board with why that's important.  To me I think one of the biggest challenges is where people are coming and explain in real world human terms here's what this means, here's why we need to do it, here's what it's going to get me. So when I hear conversations about structured content it's like it's so rapidly jumps into very specific technical details it's like you can't even bring up the conversation without, it's like somebody raising their hand and being like I can't believe we're not talking about DITA and it’s like, ‘no no we can’t,’ like that is a perfectly valuable conversation and, and somebody needs to have it, but we’ve got to stop jumping right into the how, and spend a lot more time explaining why. 
Jen
Umm.  Yeah, business people probably don’t want to hear the details of RDFA versus Microdata, blah de blah, blah, blah.
Karen
I have been, personally, I don’t either.
Jen
[laughs]
Karen
I mean, I have felt guilty for so many years of my career, thinking, my God, you should be like, learn more about this stuff, but I think my eyes just glaze over.
Jen
Yeah.
Karen
It’s taken me, you know, it’s taken me up to this point to go, ‘oh, wait a minute,’ like, you need to take ownership for like a piece of it that, that you couldn’t feel like you owned. I want to take some responsibility for this and for what it means to me and it’s like, ‘oh, wait, don’t get into any of that stuff at all, like talk about the why, talk about what it means for people, talk about what they can do with it in a way that doesn’t ever get into different standards, like, you know, that, that’s a tactical detail that we can solve later after we have convinced people why it’s important.
Jen
Yeah, it just feels like the bottom line is understanding that a website is a bunch of different objects, different pieces, different chunks of text or photos or whatever, just hanging out inside of a frame, but much like with responsive web design, if you shape, if you change the shape of the frame, those objects will float around and reconfigure themselves for you or, perhaps you don’t have a traditional site with a menu where you click from page to page, but something else is happening where contents is getting loaded or contents is moving, or there’s animations and it’s sort of just floating there, and it looks very different on your large screen computer versus your phone versus your, or you can scrape off the container and send content off to any sort of place.  It might be an RSS feed.  It might be Google.  It might be Instapaper or Readability.  It might be something that gets created.  Siri just showed up on the scene.  It may be very soon that the computer will read content to you in a way that's pleasurable that people start to use more commonly.  Amazon dropped a tablet.  A lot of rumors were flying around but it just sort of showed up on the scene.  Something else is going to show up next year where suddenly your refrigerator is going to read the news to you in the morning.  It feels like anyone working in the business, whether they're a writer or a designer or a developer or business person that this idea that the content is just sitting inside the container and the content is what's most important.  The container is going to keep morphing.
Karen
Yeah. Josh Clark talks about this,  the quote is basically like if you put water into the bottom of a bottle it becomes a bottle and you can pour water into a tea pot and it becomes the tea pot.  We really need to be thinking about creating content that's like water — that it can flow into any container and that the way that we're going to do that is by having well structured chunks of content.  Otherwise it's going to be like a block of ice.
Jen
Yeah, and somehow doing all the design in Photoshop Documents is really not helping with this.  Like we really do need to have better tools and new forms of displaying our ideas and communicating them through documents or code or examples that...  There's a lot of tools in the toolbox.  Photoshop is a great tool.  There's absolutely moments when it's the perfect way to communicate. But most of the projects I’ve worked on recently the only thing I get as a developer is a Photoshop document.
Karen
Yeah.
Jen
Like the only thing I get is a stack of Photoshop documents. They’re like, “Build the site.” And you’re like, “Well, what is this?
[laughter]
Jen
“This is a landing page, it’s being created dynamically. I need to know what business rules you want to use to create this dynamically.”
Karen
Oh God. You just depressed me.
[laughter]
Karen
It’s like how are we still doing this to ourselves? I mean we’ve been doing this for how long now, 15 years?  And we’re still working with this? We’re smarter than this.
Jen
Well and I think you can tell…I think you can really tell when you get done with a project and other people using it, those people can tell how successful the human process was. And we spend a lot of time talking about tools and talking about APIs and talking about new specs but it feels like the reality is is that at the end of the day what had the most impact is not which browser you use but how the human process went when the site was being planned and if the human beings were able to work together well and communicate well or if they sort of fell into these old patterns that are not serving any of us.
Karen
Yeah, I really strongly believe that for so many companies these problems are not technology problems, they’re not design problems, they’re like organizational process and culture problems. And businesses move slowly. I think there’s a lot of companies out there that still treat the website like they’re redecorating the lobby. It’s like, “OK, every five to ten years or so we’ve got to go in there and rip up the carpet and put some new chairs in. But once we’ve done that, then they can wash their hands of this and be like "thank God we've got that lobby redecorating project done."  And the smart businesses are the ones that are recognizing it like oh the web is fundamental to the way that we work.  It is fundamental to the way we do business.  It's fundamental to the way we communicate with our customers in that they are starting to recognize like oh, we are now in the business of designing digital products and services and that means that we have to have an organizational structure that supports that.  We have to have an incentive structure that supports that.  We have to have processes and work flow and governance that support that.  That means organizational change and I think a lot of businesses are maybe just starting that transition or the light bulb is starting to go on like oh, wait a minute.  We can't treat the digital people like they're this thing that's kind of like bolted on to the side of the business.  Like, okay well I guess we have to have these people but let's keep them in a room off to the side so they don't bother the rest of us who are doing the real work on the business.  I think those, I think smart companies are starting to go, oh wait a minute, that expertise has to be integral to everything that we do and everyone that we have in the company has to be on board with what it means to create a great digital experience.
Jen
Yeah.  So what are some tools are books or websites or things that anyone who is excited about this and wants to help shift the culture inside their organization, what do you suggest people, what's some ammunition you could give people to help do this?
Karen
That is a great question and I honestly wish I...as far as like shifting culture and mindset within an organization I wish I could rattle off a set of really great books for people and I just don't know that they exist.  I don't know that people have totally been talking about it in this way.  I do think that there's a lot of great stuff in talking about content strategy and Ann Rockley has done a great job about talking about structured content.  The report called Nimble that Rachel Lovinger wrote for Razorfish on how to create more flexible content. I think it was a fantastic resource and everybody should read.  I'm hoping that as we go through this over the next two to three years there will be a lot more smart things written about what has to happen on the design and what has to happen on the content side.  And hopefully all those things have to work together if we're going to be able to maintain all of the different devices and platforms we have to support over the next few years.
Jen
Yeah.  We'll thanks so much for doing this.
Karen
Yeah, thank you for having me.  I love to talk about this stuff and I'm always grateful anyone will listen to me rant about it.
Jen
And you're going to be presenting at an event apart quite a few times next year I believe.
Karen
I am.  I'm going to be speaking at An Event Apart DC next week and then subsequently in Atlanta and Seattle and Boston.
Jen
Fabulous.  And people can follow you on Twitter?
Karen
They sure can.  I'm @karenmcgrane on Twitter.
Jen
And where else can people find you? Do you have a website?
Karen
I have a website karenmcgrane.com and my company is called Bond Art and Science and our website is bondartscience.com.
Jen
Fabulous. Well, again, thank you so much.
Karen
Thank you, Jen. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

Show Notes