Today I found myself in the opulent surroundings of Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel for a breakfast seminar, run by Precedent, on creating dynamite campaigns. The following are some of my notes.
The seminar was lead by John Campbell and Mark Baillie, and John began by considering the good, the bad and the ugly. Examples of good campaigns included:
Coca-Cola’s 80s/90s “Can’t Beat the Feeling” adverts – a tune that many of us still recognise today and an excellent example of strong branding.
The University of Birmingham’s Circle of Influence campaign to raise £60 million. Astonishingly, they’ve already reached the £50m mark, combining online strategies with a more traditional print campaign.
Drinkaware’s drink diary, which allows you to monitor your drinking and compare with friends, adding a social element to the mix. You can even download a phone app. I couldn’t help thinking this could backfire though – imagine people using the diary to compare how much they could drink in a week and actually trying to beat each other!
Volkswagen’s Fun Theory website, featuring various viral videos aimed at making people change their behaviour for the better:
John notes that common factors to all of these successes were creativity and innovation.
I heard this evening that fellow Accessify Forum moderator, accessibility advocate and all round good guy Jack Pickard has passed away. The numerous expressions of shock and sadness, both on the forum and on Twitter, are a testament to how highly he was regarded. He will be sorely missed.
Jakob Neilsen has just announced his 10 best-designed Intranets for 2010, and as always it’s a goldmine of information and advice. I haven’t yet forked out for the full report, but the summary alone offers plenty to think about.
One particular point that will raise eyebrows is the continued advocacy of separate sites for mobile devices. There is an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of such an approach, brought to the fore by Neilsen’s post last February comparing Mobile Web 2009 with Desktop Web 1998, and concluding that a separate site is best. Many of us were not convinced, and as Henny Swan argued at the time:
It also hints at repeating the mistakes of desktop web design circa 1998 where we thought the answer was to design for one browser, use proprietary technology, build text only websites for disabled users…the list goes on. So let’s not make that same mistake and instead fast forward to one of the principles of good web design that dug us out of the dark hole of 1998: progressive enhancement.
Henny described how a ‘one site fits all’ approach can be achieved using media queries, and it’s certainly a far more attractive solution than designing and maintaining separate sites.
But this all relates to websites in general, rather than specifically to Intranets, and I was interested to look closer at the suggestion of a separate mobile Intranet.
Yesterday, the Google Code Blog announced Google Browser Size. It’s a handy little tool which allows you to take a contour visualisation of common browser sizes and overlay it onto your own sites, to easily spot which areas people can see without needing to scroll. So for example, here’s my site with the overlay applied:
Earlier today I went along to the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh to attend the launch of a new project aimed at getting young people talking about policies and laws which affect the Internet, to channel their ideas to the policy makers.
According to the delegate pack, the HUWY (Hub Websites for Youth Participation) project believes that young people are valuable expert stakeholders in current Internet governance issues like:
cyberbullying
child abuse and child safety
freedom of speech and censorship
privacy and phishing, security, identity, hacking, e-commerce
Just a quick post to point out a very interesting post over at the official Google Blog, where they’ve announced that automatic captioning is coming to YouTube. This is really exciting news for anyone who uploads video content to the platform and wants to make sure their content is accessible, and is a really welcome move by Google towards promoting and advancing accessibility. The announcement also describes auto-timing, which makes it easier for people to add captions by simply uploading a transcript which is then synchronised to the video.
I hope to have a closer look at these features in the near future, especially as I’m currently involved in putting sign language videos onto YouTube. For now, though, have a look at the video below for more info.
Last week I got the BSL videos from our audio/visual unit, with all the audio editing complete, bringing us a step closer to getting them online. All I needed to do was add the captions and run them past our BSL expert one more time, to make sure nothing had been lost in translation.
With impeccable timing, Henny Swan blogged about captioning earlier today so I’d encourage people to read her post too as I’ll be referring to her findings here as well.
In summary, part of a multi-million pound advertising campaign by Christian charity Alpha International has potentially backfired when an online poll on their website, asking whether people believed in God, showed an abnormally high 98% saying ‘No’ (source: The Register).
Mandatory form fields are a real bugbear of mine. Whilst sometimes appropriate, they are all too often a classic example of the needs of the website owner being given priority over the needs of the user. In many cases, as well, they can easily lead to a reduction in conversion rates, so there are strong business arguments against them too.
The only legitimate uses of a mandatory field is to collect information that is essential to processing the request. So for example, when you are purchasing something online you need to put in all of the relevant credit card details. It shouldn’t be used for anything else, for the reasons explored below.
