Graham Jones - Blog

How not to read everything you need to online

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berliners are celebrating today the 20th Anniversary of the collapse of "The Wall". That great dividing line between East and West was beaten down by ordinary people - and probably you have a "flashbulb" memory of where you were and what you were doing when the news broke. But with their new-found freedom, the East Berliners started to experience a problem they had never realised existed.

The Brandenburg Gate symbolises the opening up to a free flow of information into East Berlin

Up until that point, East Berliners were effectively told what to think. In an emotional interview on BBC Radio Five Live this morning a former resident of the East (now the curator of the museum at Checkpoint Charlie) pointed out that in the East people were not free. Of course, that much is obvious. But one of the benefits of being free is also one of its main problems - the free flow of information.

Nowadays - something that could not be predicted when the Berlin Wall came down - is the extensive freedom of information we all enjoy. That freedom meant recently that the "old rules" of preventing us from knowing things was destroyed by Twitter users, allowing the Guardian to publish details which were previously hidden as a result of an injunction. That freedom means that every week Facebook users spend a total of 8 billion minutes on the site; indeed one in every seven pages viewed by UK web users today will be on Facebook. That freedom also means, according to Web User Magazine, that so much information is being published that we are now missing out on new things which appear even on our favourite sites.

We are - in this free world we live in - surrounded by so much information that we are in danger of missing out the essentials. Back in the days of East Berlin, people didn't really know what they were missing out on; the information was so restricted they did not realise what was not there. Now, like the rest of us (except those in restricted states like North Korea or China) the Berliners are swamped with information. And just like you and me, that's a problem. As WebUser says, we can miss out on some useful and essential stuff. As the Guardian and Twitter has shown, preventing other people spreading information about us is now almost impossible. And as Facebook use continues to grow, our information free world demonstrates we are sharing even more material with more and more people.

Feel like you are drowning?

Information overload is nothing new - except for some people in Berlin perhaps. As we discover and do more things in free societies, so the information increases. But these days it is an exponential rise. Keeping up-to-date in your chosen field is becoming increasingly difficult; according to Google the internet is growing by several billion pages each DAY...!

So, what can we do about it? There are three choices available to us:

Try to keep up with everything, spending more and more time reading, sorting and analysing information
Restrict the subjects we want to really know about, narrowing our information topics to those which are truly essential to us
Forget the rise in information and just go about our lives ignoring most of it

It seems that most people try to do the first on this list - they attempt to keep up with everything. Then they get "information fatigue" - where they just stop trying to swim against the tide and essentially give up (only to start again after a break).

Here's what you need to do: act like a CEO of a major multinational. For decades, these CEOs have known that they can't possibly read everything they need to about their own company or their industry sector. They would never get their job done. So what do they do to solve this dilemma? After all, if they don't know everything there is to know about their business and its place in its niche, they are doomed.

CEOs pay other people to sift through the information. They have an IT director who gives them the essential technical information they need, they have an HR director who provides the latest news on personnel matters and they have a logistics director who updates them on distribution information. CEOs pay people in a wide range of disciplines to filter the information they need and provide them with the essentials. This leaves CEOs more time to mix with other CEOs where they share the important material with each other and analyse it.

Rather than trying to swim amongst the mire of information, sort out your "topics" you want covered then pay people in those topic areas to filter out what you need to know and only let you have that information. There are people on Elance, for instance, who offer such research services for much smaller amounts of cash than the money you save by freeing your time. In other words, outsourcing your information collection and filtering becomes profitable.

Strange how the world turns full circle. Back when the Berlin Wall existed the people of Berlin effectively outsourced their information filtering to the state. But, don't do what they did - having one person who filters all your information. Rather like a multinational CEO, have several different outsourced "information filterers"; that way you can be sure you are not being "fed a line".

Or you can continue to try and spend every night and half the day reading through all the information you think you need, eventually suffering from information fatigue, stress and the resulting loss in profits.

Have you got an Internet Mentor yet?

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Mentor was such a wise and trusted ancient Greek, that Odysseus put him in charge of his son when he had to go off to the Trojan War. It is from that - via a book written in 1699 - that we now end up with the process of "mentoring" whereby someone with experience and knowledge helps us improve and succeed.

Who is your online mentor?

But do you have a mentor? Do you have someone who helps you grow, gain from their experience and achieve success? In particular, do you have someone who helps you succeed online, someone who can help you make the most of the Internet for your business?

These are relevant questions in the light of new research which confirms the significant benefits of having a mentor. Although the research looked at schoolchildren it agrees with other studies which show that mentoring makes a real difference to success. In the latest research on children conducted in Utah, USA, a mentor meant that teenagers were 50% more likely to go to college, when compared with those who didn't get any mentoring. For disadvantaged youngsters, it was even more striking.

In other words, this study shows that having a mentor makes a real difference to success. However, a mentor needs to be more than someone you look up to. They need to be actively involved in helping you succeed; the need to be available, accessible, communicative, supportive and knowledgeable. Simply having some kind of "hero" who gives you guidance is not mentoring.

We need mentors in all walks of life. Sports people call them "coaches" of course. But even Olympic medal winners, with all their success and ability still have coaches. The fastest man in the world, Usain Bolt, still gets coaching from his mentors. No matter how good you are at something, having a mentor can make you better at it.

So who is your Internet Mentor? Who are you going to call on to increase your success with the Internet?

Are you socially isolated?

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine teenagers in their bedrooms right now, hunched over their laptop, tapping away on their keyboard and checking out their favourite tracks on iTunes or MySpace. It's an image that many "do-gooders" would have us believe is all too common and which is really bad for youngsters.

Will using the internet isolate you from the rest of the "real world"?

You can almost hear the Daily Mail headline screaming "Ban kids from the Internet" or some such diatribe. The assumption, for several years now, has been that the internet and other modern technologies, such as mobile phones, makes us ever more socially isolated. The notion is that as we spend more hours in front of our computer screens we have less time for "real world" human connections. It is a theory that hasn't really been tested - until now.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project (a respected research group) has studied the apparent social isolation of internet users only to find the reverse of what has been thought for years. According to the report, Social Isolation and New Technologies, internet users have much more diverse and deep human connections than people who don't use modern technology. The research also found that Facebook users tend to have the most diverse and deep relationships.

Popular theory is that the internet reduces our social diversity and makes us ever more isolated. This new study confirms what many of us have thought for ages - the internet INCREASES social activity, not reduces it.

Now, if you are in business this is an important notion. The one thing that any business leader will tell you - whether they use the internet or not - it's your network of contacts and connections that determines your degree of success. Ultimately in business it's not what you know, but who you know.

This means that people who embrace internet technologies - particularly social networks - are likely to be more successful in business than those who don't use such things. This is simply because by using social networks you end up with more diverse and deeper connections to a wider range of people. Far from being isolating and reducing your business, engaging in online social activity is bound to improve your business. If you avoid Facebook and the like, you could actually be doing your business harm as you are likely to have fewer connections and less deep relationships as a result. And in business, it's relationships that count.

So, do yourself a favour. Ignore those Daily Mail headlines which suggest that using the internet too much will isolate you and disconnect you from the real world. The reverse is actually true. You need to engage in online social networking to enhance your real world social activity and to deepen those relationships. If you haven't signed up for Facebook or Ecademy etc etc - don't delay any longer; you are doing your business a disservice if you do.

Twitter is dead - long live Twitter

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Twitter users love the system and are very passionate about the benefits it brings them. But increasingly, Twitter is looking like it is on its deathbed. High profile celebrities, such as Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana) have left Twitter and Stephen Fry threatened to leave but returned.

Facebook continues to rise, while Twitter remains stagnant

Now, new data from the web intelligence company, Hitwise, suggests that Facebook is simply overpowering Twitter. Indeed, Twitter's initial growth appears to be falling. Over the past year, according to Hitwise, Facebook has trebled its market share of visits. Whereas, Twitter hasn't grown; indeed, Hitwise shows that Twitter has actually fallen from a market share of 0.2% to one of 0.14%.

Combine this with high profile celebrity walk-outs and a recent report suggesting Twitter costs UK businesses £1.4b a year in lost productivity and you have a perfect recipe for everyone starting to think negatively about Twitter.

So, should you ignore Twitter too and take a lead from Miley Cyrus? Should you realise that Twitter is an online "flash in the pan", something that was good for a while? Should you stop wasting your time tweeting at every opportunity?

Should you heck. Here's the problem. Comparing Twitter with Facebook is rather like comparing a text message to a book. The people who insist on making the comparison between Facebook and Twitter simply do not understand that like text messages and books, they are completely different forms of communication. In the past few years the number of books published in the UK has more than doubled. Did that mean that text messaging was near death? Of course not. Suggesting that Facebook's increase in market share implies the end of Twitter is making the same fundamental error.

Twitter and Facebook are entirely different communications vehicles that do different things. People are able to separate them in their own minds and use them differently. The market share comparison actually tells us nothing, other than the fact that the more people you have in a system, the more people you get using it. Durrr...!

So, forget the naysayers, ignore the critics and use Twitter in the way you and your followers want to. It is simply a conversation and no-one can tell you what is right or wrong in such a two-way connection. Do what you want with Twitter - as long as it works for you and your followers, that's fine.

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Don't believe all the views you read on the Internet

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Many bloggers and those "internet gurus" are alike in one respect - they often hold viewpoints which don't quite match up with the rest of us. Indeed, you might think that much of what is written online is somewhat extreme in its position. Take, for instance, making money online. You will find countless blogs and websites explaining some rather dubious ways of getting your "list" and milking it until it is dry.

don't believe everything you read online; it might be extreme

Sure it works; but how sustainable is it? Often such people have to keep building new lists in new areas because they have got all they can from their first list. It seems that such people have rather extreme views on business compared with the rest of us, who probably believe it is down to building relationships and maintaining them for the long term.

The problem is, if you take a snapshot of the internet on almost any subject what you will get is a feeling that the extreme viewpoint is the most common one. Now, researchers at Ohio State University have explained this phenomenon. It seems that people with extreme views are much more willing to share their ideas in public. People who hold mainstream viewpoints are less willing to publicly declare them.

The result is that online what we see as the most common viewpoint on a subject is probably the extreme position. Indeed, as the extreme views take hold, those who subscribe to those positions are encouraged to believe that their view is the right one. The internet is acting as a confirmatory system of extreme viewpoints to those who hold such views.

So, what does this mean for your business and your online activity? It suggests two things. Firstly, always check out the ideas you read about online. Don't take the apparently common view to be the right one - think about it and analyse it carefully for your own particular circumstances. Secondly, and more simply, just take everything you read online with that proverbial "pinch of salt". Almost always, your "gut instinct" is the right one. If you think a view is extreme, it probably is. If you think those commonplace internet business "gurus" are not your kind of business people, then you are probably right.

In other words - don't believe everything you read online...!

Don't read this you'll hate it

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Oh, you decided to read anyway. Strange isn't it? You see a negative headline and you go straight on to read the article below. You may even have clicked on the headline to get here in the first place. Why? You were told not to read it...! Like so many other people you have been lured in by a negative headline.

Positive headlines are not as appealing as these negative ones

Negative headlines are immensely powerful and are not used anywhere near enough online. Take a look at your typical daily newspaper and it will be crammed full of negative headlines - even if the story is positive. They grab our attention and make us look. For instance, consider "Ten Reasons Not to Hit Your Kids". Would you have been as interested in "You should love and respect your children" - which is essentially what this article concludes by saying. It doesn't have the same attention-grabbing feel does it?

Or what about a headline that says "WordPress provides control over images for Twitter users" instead of the actual headline "Why you should NOT be using TwitPic, TwitVideo or any other Twitter media sharing service". Yet, this article is merely advising you to retain control over your images by using WordPress. The negatively framed headline is much more likely to grab attention.

In spite of what we say about being put off by negativity, the reverse is actually true. We need to focus in on negative things - it's all part of our inbuilt survival. We need to protect ourselves from possible harm all the time, hence we are finely attuned to noticing negatives (potential threats). It means that your website visitors will be attracted to negative headlines more than to positive ones.

And remember, it is the headline that gets them to read. Even if you have enticing images or videos, unless the headline is compelling people don't read on. Eye tracking studies show that people often give-up after reading the headline - largely because they are not interested in what it is telling them.

Typically a good, popular and successful newspaper will spend more resources on the headline writing than it will on the writing of the articles themselves. Headlines make a huge difference to sales and readership in the newspaper business. The two or three words on the front page of The Sun are probably the most expensive words produced each day in the UK because without them working effectively, sales can fall. If those couple of words are right, sales can rise. Hence the newspaper agonises over those words and pays high salaries to the team putting that page together.

So, you need to ask yourself a question. How much effort do you put in to the headlines on your website? And are they focused on attention-grabbing negatives? If you merely used headlines as "labels" - including the ubiquitous "Welcome to our website" - you are not going to attract the levels of readership you want or deserve. Put in considerable effort on headlines and make as many as possible negative - you'll see a significant rise in readership and time spent on your site.

Searchers aren't looking to buy online

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Two-thirds of people who are searching for local businesses have no intention of buying anything from them online. That's the startling statistic from new research conducted on why people search. The study of search intentions shows that 66% of people are merely trying to find a business location, phone number or driving directions. This has important implications for any business web site.

Offline methods of connection appear to be very important to people

Indeed, the research found that only one in ten people actually went on to contact the business using the internet, having completed a search. Some 89% of people went on to use offline methods of connection or to conduct further searches. It suggests that even after 20 years of web activity, the offline world is still highly important to people. Companies who concentrate their efforts on being "virtual" or entirely online are clearly losing out.

People want to speak to you on the phone, visit your premises and meet you in the "real world". It is increasingly evident that many businesses are neglecting the need for "offline" activity in a bid to do everything online. Clearly that's not what people like. Indeed, the figures show a slight increase in the desire for offline connections, instead of online methods.

So, what does this all suggest for your website? It means that your phone number, address, directions to shops and offices and so on, must all be visible for everyone who lands anywhere on your website. That means on EVERY page. Making people locate this information within your site will slow them down and increase their level of frustration with you, producing negative thoughts about your company.

It's also a good idea to have all your contact information on every page, since studies have shown that when you identify your business as "real" you increase levels of trust in your website visitors. Companies who effectively hide their contact information are perceived as less trustworthy. So, there is a "double whammy" impact of having full contact details on every page - you increase levels of trust AND you immediately provide the offline information most searchers are actually looking for.

But whatever you do in terms of providing those offline points of contact, what is clear from this new research is that the online world is actually only of marginal importance to people. We all live in a physical, three-dimensional world - and that's the world your customers expect you to inhabit. Ignore it at your peril.

Postal strike shows online retailers don't think deeply enough

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Your local postie is dong you a favour if you are in online retail. Every day their cheery face brightens your morning as you open the door to be handed your letters and parcels. They have been an essential part of the UK community for over a century. Yet their impending strike is threatening many businesses - online retailers in particular who depend upon the Royal Mail for their deliveries.

Ideas about delivery have changed little since the early days of the modern Post Office

This comes at a time when internet shopping is already being put under pressure by the High Street, which is currently eating in to the sales made by the online world. A postal strike merely reduces the confidence of buyers as they are not sure if their goods will be delivered. So, many shoppers are returning to the bricks and mortar stores to get their goods, rather than worry whether or not their online shopping will be delivered.

Internet retailers are responding by falling back on contingency plans to use courier firms and other delivery companies. However, on BBC Breakfast this morning the Newbury-based costume retailer, Jokers Masquerade, revealed that the last time there was a strike their additional delivery costs were £47,000. Clearly the Royal Mail either provides excellent value for money, or has consistently been too cheap compared with other ways of delivering items.

Yet, whatever the online retailers do this strike reveals one other thing. It shows that Internet shops are not thinking deeply enough about delivery mechanisms. All they are considering doing is replacing one door-to-door system, the Royal Mail, with another that is essentially the same, such as CityLink. This might help overcome distribution difficulties during the strike, but is hardly a creative solution.

People lead extraordinary lives these days. Instead of going to work just a few miles away and being home at 5pm, tea on the table, millions of people travel large distances often to different places each day. We are a hugely mobile society with working patterns that are varied. Equally, gone are the days when there was always someone at home to take in a parcel. Delivering to people's homes 9 to 5 is no longer an option.

Companies like Amazon realised this a while ago and offer delivery to alternative addresses, even multiple addresses for the same order. Tesco, too, know that you are not always in during the day and will deliver very early in the morning or late at night. But these are still based on the notion that delivery means getting it to your home.

In reality, delivery is about getting to to you - wherever you may be. The postal strike should provoke online retailers into considering other ways of getting their goods to you, rather than merely replacing the Royal Mail with a directly comparable alternative. After all, delivery companies have GPS in their vans and many people have GPS in their mobile phones. That means it is perfectly possible for delivery drivers to pinpoint you exactly and deliver straight to you. They could also set up a locker-based system at motorway service stations, protected by pin codes. Your parcels are delivered to your locker and you pop in to the services on your way to work and collect your items.

There are dozens of other ways of delivering goods to people, yet what this strike is doing is merely getting online retailers to think of replacing one tired old fashioned system with another. If you sell items that are delivered directly to people, it's time to put your thinking cap on. It looks like the striking postal workers have not actually caused a problem for online retailers at all; instead it is entirely possible this could be the trigger for creative thinking that brings about brand new delivery solutions that make online buyers happier.

Internet use boosts your brain

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

People who have never used the internet before get a significant brain boost once they start going online. New research from UCLA shows that internet "newbies" have dramatic increases in brain activity bringing them up to the levels seen in internet "savvy" people - all in the space of a week. This is the first evidence that online activity actually boost your brain.

Your brain could be boosted by the Internet

The research shows, in particular, that the brain's areas of decision-making and reasoning are the ones that get most of the impact as a result of going online. Volunteers were tested using brain scanning equipment as they used the web. Those individuals who had never used the internet before achieved the same patterns in the brain scans as those seen in regular internet users after just a week of internet use.

What's important to note is that prior to the use of the internet, the brain scans of the "newbies" showed less brain activity in the decision-making areas or the reasoning region. This suggests that for many people, daily life doesn't need as much complex reasoning or decision-making as is needed online.

Of course, even though this study shows that using the internet is beneficial to your brain, it also suggests an alternative viewpoint. The fact is that prior to use of the internet, the "newbies" got along just fine with the world without having to get their brains to go into overdrive. Now, once they have come online, they need to engage those decision-making areas and the complex reasoning parts of the brain much more than ever before.

Now, whilst they can do this - and seem to benefit from it - it does suggest that the whole way we arrange things on web pages is too complex. If we are asking our users to get more of their brain going, simply to use a website, then we are probably doing it wrong. And almost certainly we are.

Even though, broadly speaking, most websites have top or left-based navigation, none of them look the same very much. Each time we see a menu, we have to review what it does compared with the last web page menu we saw. In the real world, we don't have to do that. You get in any car you like, big, small, petrol or diesel, you'll know exactly what that wheel in front of you is for, without really looking at it. Yet, in every car they are different; the similarities are greater though. Car designers don't ask too much of us in terms of refamiliarising ourselves with our environment. Web designers do.

In newspapers, too, the headlines may all be different, but they are generally in the same place, roughly the same size as the competing newspaper's and generally next to a picture. Newspaper designers all follow the same broad set of design rules so that we don't have to refamiliarise ourselves with each and every newspaper we pick up. Yet that's what many web designers are asking us to do by using such a wide variety of layouts and systems.

One of the reasons for the popularity of blogging software, such as WordPress, could well be due to the fact that in spite of some minor thematic changes, many WordPress blogs look like other WordPress blogs. When we engage with them we don't have to think too hard to find our way around.

The dramatic increase in the brain activity upon the onset of internet use could well be down to the variety of design, the prevalence of non-standard systems and the constant need to refamiliarise ourselves with navigation systems. The result is our brain needs to do more complex reasoning and more decision making.

This new study may well hold out hope for people who are worried that their aging brain may go into hibernation without some kind of stimulation. But it also is something of an indictment of the mess we have all helped to create online.

Website eye tracking studies are fooling internet business owners

graham@grahamjones.co.uk (Graham Jones) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Web designers are keen to explain the predominance of the "letter-f" approach to the internet. This comes from eye-tracking studies which show the way we look at web pages follows, broadly, an f-shape. We start in the top left hand corner, scan across and down with a quick glance across the middle.

The perceived wisdom is that we are checking for things like navigation, headlines and signs of trustworthiness. All of that is true, but the concentration on getting your website into an F-shape for usability purposes could be working against you. That's because new research shows that it is not what we see in our central vision that is important. Psychologists from Kansas State University have revealed that our peripheral vision plays a much greater role than previously thought.

The research showed that if you delete the information from our central vision, we can still work out what we are looking at very quickly. It seems that our peripheral vision is playing a much greater role in helping us assess the overall scene we are looking at, while our central vision merely helps us concentrate our visual input into the area we are interested in getting more detail about.

Prior to this study, our peripheral vision was thought to be just that - on the boundary, not of central importance. But this new research suggests it is actually fundamental. For website design this new research has major implications. It means that all those eye-tracking studies and usability tests are pushing us in the wrong direction.

True, they demonstrate where we focus our attention. True they tell us where we visit on a page. True they help people improve their web pages. But by concentrating our minds on the F-shape or on visitor page pathways it means our design decisions fail to sufficiently take into account the periphery of the page. It is this peripheral area which is vital in helping people determine what kind of website they are on.

So, for instance, if your are a "newsy" kind of website, merely presenting your news in the letter F shape won't help people realise, using their peripheral vision, that you are a news-based site. Your peripheral parts of the web design need to send the message "this is a news page". Equally, if you are a site that is meant to be information based and independent, a raft of adverts in the peripheral parts of the page suggests "we want your money", which may not be the message you wish to convey.

In other words, this new research suggests that the parts of your website that don't get looked at are potentially as important - perhaps even more important - than the areas that do get the greatest attention. The f-shape heatmap may well help you determine some aspects of your design and improve your usability, but this new study should act as a reminder that you should not neglect the other parts of your web page. They could prove to be much more important in user engagement.