The Value of Effective Prototyping

Getting the correct workflow for your agency is a complex and non-trivial task. We are constantly trying to streamline the way we work, to improve on our processes and establish ways in which we can produce our work in the most effective and satisfactory manner, both for ourselves and our clients. Dealing with projects both small and large begs so many questions about what the correct ways are to roll it out, about what would be cost-effective for the agency as well as our clients, and end up making everybody happy. One of the biggest areas of trouble during any project is when there is a breakdown of communication of some sorts. This can happen very easily between the agency and the client, but very often is prevalent internally as well. The creation of a web site involves many players and thus successful communication between all involved is critical to the success of the job. Internally, project managers need to communicate with the production team, and the production team itself needs to have a clear avenue of communication and understanding with the various team members. If, at some point, someone fails to understand clearly how they are supposed to design or develop something, there can often be quite serious repercussions, considering the time it takes to fix mistakes is usually the longest. So I want to briefly put some thoughts down on why I find prototyping to be a valuable part of a project’s lifecycle.

Planning out a project properly is an essential aspect to its success. This can involve as simple things as basic sketches, through proper wireframing, to comprehensive modelling and documentation. However, if communication has broken down at some point, then one might spend a lot of time planning and documenting an incorrect job. Additionally, comprehensive documentation and planning can take up a lot of time of a project before anyone, especially the client, has even seen anything. Once this is done, the documentation might be put up for review, either internally or to the client, and if issues come up, the ripple effect can be substantial.Quinlan talks about a project he worked on where, as “the project progressed and I saw the size of the document balloon from 50 pages to more than 200 pages, I had the realization that this document would never be read by ANYONE from beginning to end. The business owners who were responsible for ensuring that the requirements fit their actual business needs were completely overwhelmed by the document’s size and complexity. Six months later the business users were given their shiny new software and they were disappointed that the software didn’t match their expectations.” Proper documentation like this is no doubt still preferable to no planning and producing a product that is unsatisfactory which then has to be mended in order to satisfy the business needs, ending up consuming a lot of your budget and creating a general state of unhappiness in and between the people involved. But there is a way to streamline the process even more during the planning and initial development phases, and this involves the effective use of prototyping.

Prototyping really comes into life when you are developing RIAs, as wireframing, simple planning, and other forms of documentation rarely captures the feel of what you are developing. With complicated interfaces that include a lot of animations and conceptual aspects to deliver the message of the brand, static documentation is almost always ineffective in providing a clear understanding of what the project will be like when it is completed. And this is where communication starts to break down. But, as Staley mentions in his article ‘Planning for RIA success’, “a key consideration is that a prototype can help establish expectations on design, functionality, and the resulting requirements of an application. This is particularly relevant to RIAs, because in many cases, the team will be venturing into unfamiliar terrain. Because of this uncertainty, traditional software development project techniques can be difficult to apply. A certain amount of discovery is required in the RIA process. Put another way, user experience design is of particular importance in an RIA, and it is often difficult to predict the outcome of an iterative design process.” In order to give everyone a sense of what you are creating, it is much easier and clearer when you can actually show them what you have in mind.

It is important to strike a good balance when doing this, as you wouldn’t want to create something twice, so prototyping should be a quick process meant to illustrate your point, hence the term rapid-prototyping. When you have something in mind for a particular project it can often save a lot of time and trouble if you are able to show the relevant parties something early on. This will help project managers, designers and developers work together more closely and effectively, provide clients with the means to understand what you are proposing (rather than a stale presentation filled with conceptual discussions on the merits of a fade, transition, or user experience), as well as catching usability issues early on. As discussed on A List Apart, “Prototypes can help you sell a decision that is fundamentally or radically different from the client’s current solution or application. The traditional approach is to create a compelling story and a riveting PowerPoint presentation, and spend a day arguing for the wisdom of your approach. Instead, sit a stakeholder down in front of a working prototype and show him or her why your approach is compelling.”

Once you have created a prototype of some aspect of your project, it is always easy to spot the areas which don’t work, and identify the things that need to be changed or improved upon. Very importantly as well, once you have worked out where your prototype works and where it doesn’t, creating proper planning documentation and rolling out the final product takes a very short amount of time, and is usually spot on in terms of the business requirements. In this way, effective use of prototyping manages to clear up the avenues of communication, as management can quickly establish whether production has understood their tasks and clients can quickly see whether the agency has understood the brief. If not, adapting the prototype is not as serious a matter as rewriting your comprehensive set of documentation or redeveloping major aspects of a site where the effects of a simple problem can undermine the rest of your project to such a large extent that it ends up destroying your budget, team morale and client agency relationships.

Ideas in a creative environment are often very conceptual, and one person’s idea might be completely different to that of another’s. In turn, clients have particular visions for their products, project managers have their own, creative directors have theirs, and the production team have their own. These ideas aren’t always easy to put down on paper, but with the proper use of prototyping, those ideas can be married much more effectively and the overall success of a project is much more certain. Making good use of prototypes during the development of your project opens up communication and helps to ensure the success of your project.

Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Social Media is a hot topic at the moment and marketers worldwide are clambering to stake a claim in this new gold rush.

Unfortunately, just like in the original gold rush of the 1800’s, the processes used to get to the proverbial good stuff are often crude and primitive. Brands have the potential to do a lot of damage by not following best practices.

There are certain protocols that can make or break the impact this medium has on your brand:

Do’s:

• Be interesting: No one wants to engage with something that is boring. If you’re not offering something genuinely useful or entertaining in the social space, you’re simply polluting the stream.
• Add value: The simple question here is; will this work even if you don’t have a prize or incentive attached to it? Make sure that whatever your engagement is, it is adding value, even if only as entertainment.
• Be honest: Nothing beats honesty. Tell the truth, even when you make mistakes. If you are honest and prepared to take ownership of your mistakes, people will generally be more forgiving than you imagine.
• Be human: This may sound obvious, but in the social spaces, people like talking to people; so be a person and respond in a personal, contextual way.
• Listen first: Spend time observing your target market. See how they communicate, how they interact, how they share. When jumping in head first, more often than not your brand comes off as pushy or forced.

Don’ts:

• Exposure doesn’t equal impact: As tempting as it may be to simply get your brand out there as much as possible, ultimately you’re damaging a medium which could work for you instead of against you.
• Don’t broadcast: Social media is not another media channel for you to place your message on.
• Don’t buy traffic: Rather invest in brand building and creating an atmosphere which users will find and share organically with their peers. This includes RT and competitions, or any other tactic that isn’t implicitly adding value to the consumer and his or her social footprint.
• Don’t think in terms of campaigns: Build sustainable relationships. Campaigns suggest that you will disappear at the end of the campaign, terminating the relationship.
• Don’t expect consumers to be your biggest fan from day one: Just like normal relationships, building a rapport with your fans starts with the basics and takes time.

Social media can be a great extension for your brand. The trick is to ensure that you have researched the applications and implications of the different platforms and be sure you are engaging in a way which impresses and adds value to your customers and potential customers.

Words that ring true today – Bill Bernbach

One of the industry greats, Bill Bernbach (the B in DDB) wrote this letter to his  employers at Grey World Wide in 1947. This seems to be ringing true, even more so today then ever.

Dear ___________:

Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we’re going to follow history instead of making it, that we’re going to be drowned by superficialities instead of buoyed up by solid fundamentals. I’m worried lest hardening of the creative arteries begin to set in.

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this sort or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

In the past year I must have interviewed about 80 people – writers and artists. Many of them were from the so-called giants of the agency field. It was appalling to see how few of these people were genuinely creative. Sure, they had advertising know-how. Yes, they were up on advertising technique.

But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God.

All this is not to say that technique is unimportant. Superior technical skill will make a good man better. But the danger is a preoccupation with technical skill or the mistaking of technical skill for creative ability.

The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinized men who have a formula for advertising.  The danger lies in the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.

If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy and not have the advertising philosophy of others imposed on us.

Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.

Respectfully,
Bill Bernbach

Flash today

Flash has always had its naysayers. I have been a developer for many years now with a strong focus on flash, and have repeatedly had to defend myself against the onslaught of anti-flash sentiments. Many have been valid, and many have been based on an expression of other things entirely. With the history of flash starting in the animation timeline and silly gotoAndPlay scripts that were used to make some incredible shockers, it’s no wonder that it had such a bad rep to shake off. These days, however, the language is robust and its features are many, the community is huge, the spread is wide and the results are truly amazing. But still we have to fight, and after the recent developments over at Apple, even more so now than ever. But the question is not really about fighting for Flash, it’s about why we should have to fight for Flash.

Apple’s non-Flash stance has been around for a while, but most people were convinced that they would one day open up full support for Flash. With the release of the IPad and it’s demonstration displaying huge craters of non-Flash bits of web, it has become pretty clear that this is not to be. Steve Jobs has made his position pretty clear and developers and digital agencies are left with some serious decisions to make. Strictly speaking, whether Flash is dying or not shouldn’t be much of a concern. Many users aren’t interested in what technology they view their content on, as long as it delivers it well and in an interesting way. As far as I’m concerned, bar a few ideological points it is not important for me whether I need to develop in Ruby, PHP, Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, Objective-C or whatever else. I have some preferences about some languages, but often find I like some languages for certain aspects. Because of this, if Flash were truly dying, it would be a simple matter – move on to the next thing.

The major issue in the current climate is that Flash isn’t dying, or at least it isn’t doing so any time soon. Previously, with the fight between Silverlight and Flash, there wasn’t too much going on, because it was simply a matter of installing the right plugin and you could view your content on either platform, so if an agency focused on Silverlight, no problem, if they focused on Flash, no problem, if they focused on Unity, no problem. The user experience would be much the same. And as it stands right now, Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch, mentions that Flash’s latest player will deploy to many devices including “Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs”, and its lack of presence on Apple devices is because Adobe has “not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen”, but they “are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users”. With Apple’s active stance against Flash-support, the situation is now different to before. Agencies cannot ignore the fact that the content they deliver to their client’s userbase might not be viewable if they focus on a single target. This isn’t entirely new, and agencies have often had fallbacks in the event of their content not being viewable in a particular way, but the impetus for this has been raised quite a bit now.

The way I see it, it is just a great big pain that we are now forced into specific platforms. With Flash still going very strong, and with its much superior capabilities to HTML5 as well as being a much nicer language than something like Javascript, it still offers some of the best ways for us to deliver content to users. So we will keep using it. But with its blatant ommission from certain platforms like the IPhone and the IPad, we are now forced to duplicate our development practices simply so we can satisfy a market that predominantly doesn’t care or know whether they view their content on Flash or not. And this is all because Apple is following in the footsteps of Microsoft and closing the doors to everything else. I find this utterly annoying. The unfortunate outcome of this is that it will cost more to have your content delivered to your user base, because it needs to be developed and targeted to multiple platforms.

As it goes, though, I am still very excited to be developing for new platforms and in new languages. I just wish Apple didn’t compromise their users and complicate developers’ lives by preventing certain things from working on their devices – it just doesn’t feel great. But their choices won’t be affecting things too much for quite some time. Flash still dominates and is a remarkable, certainly among the best, tool for delivering rich interactive experiences, whilst Apple’s devices are not ubiquitous enough to be a true Flashkiller, as quite a few have ventured to say. Many markets in the world have hardly any Apple devices, so for now, Flash development can carry on as per usual.

Stonewall+ 2009 Trends: Were our predictions on target?

At the start of 2009, Stonewall Digital Marketing released its annual “Ten Digital Marketing Trends” paper. As a tough – but rewarding – year comes to a close, we evaluate our 2009 predictions… and we score ourselves seven out of ten.

2009 draws to a close with most businesses, local and international, heaving a sigh of relief. A difficult year is over and, in general, the storm of recession economics has been weathered. For the many thousands of South Africans who were directly affected by retrenchments or indirectly affected by slowed growth and halted plans, the impact of that storm was a full-frontal body blow. But the fact is that the world seems to have matured since the Great Depression, with more financial checks and balances in place, means there was greater understanding of the need for firm action to halt the economic slide. Fortunately, digital marketing was not as negatively affected as some other industries – in fact, our prediction that digital marketing spend would grow slightly was borne out.

2009 #1

We said:  – Overall marketing spend will decrease; digital spend will hold level – or grow slightly

We score: 1

We suggested at the start of the year that, “as businesses scrutinise their budgets, those that have dabbled in digital will be obliged by the weight of facts to consider it all the more seriously. Relatively low investment (compared, say, to conceptualising, filming and then flighting a television advertisement) yields good returns“. This was borne out in no uncertain terms, best highlighted by the increasing frequency with which traditional agencies approached digital marketers to contribute to campaigns, or with clients themselves insisting on the digital route.

Interestingly, mobile marketing business did not fare as well in 2009, which seems surprising at first glance. Like the internet, email and web channels, mobile is highly measurable, nimble in terms of response and tweaking and more cost-effective than traditional marketing. Why, then, did clients not shift more of their budgets into this powerful one-to-one communication space, especially with the massive penetration of cellphones across the South African spectrum, and with the ever increasing number of smartphones in the hands of consumers?

The answer lies in something which used to be a strong negative effect on digital marketing. It is powered by new technology and is seen (incorrectly, we would suggest) as an immature channel and industry. If the recession had hit the South African marketing space a few years ago, digital marketing would have suffered as nervous marketing managers pulled budgets from something they saw as “new” or “unproven” and focused on the traditional channels they felt comfortable with.

However, by the end of 2008, the web was generally viewed as part of the established and necessary marketing mix. Being evaluated on equal terms as a channel, the obvious cost and trackability benefits saw increased use of digital channels – even as the “newcomer” mobile channel was viewed with caution and some scepticism. This is not something we see continuing into 2010 – at least amongst savvy clients and marketing departments.

2009 #2

We said:  – Increased demand for ROI and measurability

We score: 0.5

Why don’t we award ourselves a full point here, especially since it’s clear that marketing departments made greater demands for return-on-investment on their marketers, and that measurability is a key component of this?

We noted that “Click Through Rates, Email Conversions and Unique Users are all simple to measure, and are relatively well reported“, but that “tracking true return on investment from, say, banner placement through to an actual sale of a product, is not as common“. While marketers have been increasingly insistent on these measures, the fact remains that there’s still a long way to go. Clients are asking for reports, but still not insisting on proper analysis of these reports – or are not willing to pay for the business intelligence resources such analysis requires.

Furthermore, we predicted “a renewed interest in Customer Relations Management and Data Mining” and suggested that the importance of Online Reputation Management would be both recognised and promoted. “The wiser businesses will start demanding this from their suppliers,” we said, but this has not been the case. Or, more correctly, has not been the case to the extent that was predicted.

We award ourselves as marketers, and our clients and their marketing departments, only 50% here. It’s a pass, but it’s not exactly something to be proud of and, very obviously, needs to be improved.

2009 #3

We said:  – Mobile that knows where it’s at

We score: 1

This was a two-fold trend prediction, and we’ll give ourselves a full mark on both counts. At the start of 2009, we highlighted the growth in handset numbers and the use of cellphones to access the internet, and the attendant increase of “brands using .mobi sites to engage with consumers and the growth in WAP-powered content services“. We also pointed out the rise in mobile-based internet access. Cue services like Snaptu, Viigo; cue the Blackberry and iPhone revolutions; cue the rise of mobile apps and widgets; cue the fact that “appstore” has become accepted as a legitimate word.

For the second part of the mobile prediction, we were more cautious. We said that “location based services are likely to be more prevalent in overseas markets“, but we were bullish for the local market around “competition between rival manufacturers to bundle GPS with their top-tier handsets and, on simpler devices, services like The Grid making use of the normal GSM cellphone network to enable positioning“.

At the end of 2008, did you use a GPS regularly, marvel at GoogleMaps on the iPhone and see grid co-ordinates on business cards? Geo-location is a two-pronged revolution. For individuals, it means never getting lost again; for businesses and brands, it means being able to use geo-tagging and location based services in your marketing. The revolution is well underway and will continue.

2009 #4

We said:  – Yes, we can. What now for Web2.0?

We score: 1

Well, whoopty-do – at the end of 2008, we predicted “social media is here to stay and it is time to stop talking about what it is, and start delivering value based on how it works“, and we were right. But that was pretty much a no-brainer since the “Citizen You” and peer-to-peer revolution was more than evident to anyone working in the space.

So, that’s not why we think we deserve full marks here, but rather around the finer nuances social media and web2.0 (please can we stop using the capital “W”, now?). “Things like blogging, Facebook, social bookmarking, video and picture sharing sites, social media and social networking… are components of the modern digital marketing mix,” we said, suggesting that 2009 would see them being understood to be “merely platforms or tools that can be used as avenues or vehicles for brand messages and customer interactions“.

For those brands ready to embrace the new world, that’s exactly what they proved to be, and we were pleased to see our in-house term of “Feedback3.0″ in action amongst some South African brands and companies. Last year we asked simply, “Is ‘listen to your customers’ really such a revolutionary thing to suggest?”

2009 #5

We said:  – More cause for causes

We score: 0

Despite superb campaigns like Hopenhagen around the climate change conference, local efforts at using Facebook to rally South Africans to question Eskom’s tariff hikes, and the superbly tongue-in-cheek “Retrench yourself” campaign for Savanna, our prediction that “as  companies consider cutting back on corporate social investment, they will interrogate where they want their spend to go and the truly meritworthy programmes and organisations stand to benefit” proved to be… over-enthusiastic.

Put it down wishful thinking, or daring to dream, but we have to award ourselves a solid zero on that score.

2009 #6

We said: – 2009 is the first part of the permanent change

We score: 1

It’s cheeky to give ourselves a point when “permanent change” can only be assessed in the future, but we’re confident enough to do so – especially given the changes we’ve seen during 2009. In the closing days of the year, we’re even seeing international digital agencies being appointed as lead agencies on major clients – over the traditional advertising agency incumbents.

We said, “2009 is a year that will see the media and marketing landscape changed in ways that are fundamental, and long-lasting“, and we’re sticking to that.

Invoking the metaphor of a Highveld storm that’s been threatening to break for ages, we also said that “when the lightning and the thunder are over, the world will be a different place – and one where digital marketing has more fully come into its own“. Nowhere was this more evident than at the 2009 Bookmark Awards. Here, not long after the usual grumbles about the Loerie awards been about mutual industry back-slapping, was the fledgling digital marketing industry toughing up and not awarding itself any gold Pixel awards. Why? Because we know we’ve come a long way, and that we’ve helped to change the world of marketing, but we know there’s heaps more work to be done. 2009 marked the change; 2010 will reinforce it.

2009 #7

We said: – “I, computer”: Is the semantic web here yet?

We score: 0.5

Scoring this one is tough, largely because it’s one of those under-the-bonnet components of the internet. We were cautious when we asked “will 2009 be the year that… the web finally [gets] “clever” enough that computers can start finding us the perfect book, or pair of shoes, or place to eat – without us having to put in the hard work?”

Quite clearly, that didn’t happen, despite the continued growth of the things we advised trend-watchers to keep their eyes on: “OpenSocial;  clever interface design [using] Ajax and XML; new content publishing system… linked to sophisticated data mining tools; complex search engines algorithms [and] developments in visual search interfaces“.

Also, although WolframAlpha (Google it to find out more, and that sentence is an in-house geek-joke, if there ever was one) earned the Grand Award for “Best of what’s new” in computing from “Popular Science”, amongst a host of industry plaudits, it still hasn’t made much difference to general civilian internet use. Also, Google got a lot cleverer in its search algorithms, albeit in a very behind-the-scenes and under-the-bonnet way.

So, as we said, the new generation of hypertextually-linked world wide web is happening, but not so you’d really know about it. Yet. We give ourselves just a half a point.

2009 #8

We said: – Email continues to die

We score: 1

We started that shrill prediction with the the caveat that our real hope was that 2009 would see the end of “the shrieking hyperbole of so many trend-spotting headlines in 2008“. Fortunately, buffoonery like every second piece of software being as billed “the Google killer” or advances in digital channel advertising being hailed as heralding “the death of print” do seem to have gone the way of the gutter they deserved.

More importantly, email continues to decline. As we noted, this is “probably not amongst anyone reading this forecast, but certainly amongst the generation raised on SMS, Instant Messaging, social networks, MXit and networked games“. Add to our prediction the slew of collaboration tools – GoogleWave got the most press, but also consider Salesforce’s Chatter and Microsoft’s Azure – and the future of email seemed even more under threat.

Also, late 2009 saw the increasingly shaky MXit platform facing a new threat in the form of the Microsoft-backed and Bafana Bafana aligned Mibli. It also saw the cellphone networks rewarding SMS-use and the continued growth of South African Facebook and Twitter communication.

Email will remain as an important corporate tool, but its dominance continues to diminish. We’ll take a full point on this one.

2009 #9

We said: – The return of content as king, almost…

We score: 1

We made clear the difference between the “pre-bubble-burst” era of “content being king” and the emphasis, in 2009, of “content [as] differentiation and brands adding real value to reward customer loyalty“. We saw this prediction in action, and saw the undeniable growth of Twitter as a channel for news both “hard” and “social/entertainment” related. So we feel a full point is warranted here – and all the more so given an even more exciting development regarding digital content in 2009.

New niched content sites saw the light of day, with sober and realistic revenue and growth models. It is with great interest that we see how these sites progress, and it’s a 2009 hats-off send-off to the likes of DailyMaverick.co.za, TechCentral.co.za, Mahala.co.za, of trend-setting list sites like 10and5.com and MoralFibre.co.za and, of course, the snoot-cocking enfant terrible of the blogosphere like 2OceansVibe.co.za. Hats off, too, to the relaunched TimesLive.co.za (a Silver Pixel winner at The Bookmark Awards) and to the subtle, but constant, revamping underway at the Mail & Guardian’s MG.co.za.

2009 #10

We said: – Last, but not least: A scandal that will rock 2009!

We score: 0

Look, we billed it as a “gutsy prediction“, so don’t hold the blemish of another round zero too harshly against us…

At the start of 2009, we coined a term. “‘Analytics-gate’,” we said, would not be an act of active deception (like 2008’s manipulation of magazine readership figures), but rather the consequence of more “good minds being paid to focus on analytics and measurement” leading to “some inconsistency [coming] to light“. But there was no “predicted mini-scandal” which is, of course, good. Although the second part of that prediction, that this would “raise awareness, tighten up practices and assist with setting standards… a good thing for the industry, for clients and consumers” has also not happened.

Will we be as bullish with a similar prediction for 2010? Probably not – but that’s only because, with just ten trends that we can suggest, we’re not going to rehash something from last year.

In conclusion

We rate ourselves as having scored 7 out of 10, which you may agree with or not. Most importantly, we said that “2009 will be a trying year, but also a year of consolidation that rewards vision, efficiency and strategic actions” and we’re pleased to see the rewards that have been reaped by our clients, and by the digital marketing industry in general. Our 2009 conclusion reiterated our main strongest prediction, that 2009 would “be the year that changes the relationship between digital and traditional marketing forever” – and it certainly did.

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Stay tuned for the Stonewall+ “Ten Digital Marketing Trends” for 2010 paper to be released in mid January.