When airports shut down 30 June 2007

I used to work in an office which was based at Glasgow Airport, although it was not part of the airport’s operations. Because of our unique location, employees had airport ID badges, airport emergency training, and were dependent on the airport for utilities, IT, and security. (Useless trivia: I know which terminal has a special door which can convert it into a hermetically sealed morgue.)

In time I inherited the HR role within the company and began my HR audit by conducting an inventory. I was amazed to find that there was no single list of employees which could be used in an emergency and no business contingency plan. Even the payroll system lacked a means to generate one simple list including names, home addresses, home phone numbers, spouses and partners, NI numbers, and so forth. Every company needs an emergency plan, and the thought that a company based within an airport’s boundaries lacked both a plan and an employee list was astonishing. In the event of an emergency, I would presumably grab the two huge metal fireproof file boxes this information was stored in, along with the keys, and run for the evacuation point with heavy steel slashing my legs open. If the emergency happened out of hours or at the weekend, I’d have to find employees using the yellow pages. If, in a worst-case scenario, I needed to contact an employee’s spouse or partner, and that person did not share the employee’s name, how would I know what their name was or where to begin looking for them?

And with the airport responsible for IT, that meant the airport owned our network server.  In the midst of total chaos, would we stand a chance of getting our data back?  Were there backups on and offsite?  Nobody knew.

Before tackling IT, I set about to create a simple spreadsheet containing the vital information we’d need to contact employees in the event of an airport emergency. While most staff were happy to comply, one notoriously toxic individual used it as an opportunity to stir up trouble. This person began to ask loudly whispered questions about why I was looking through people’s HR records and why I was asking personal questions. They twisted the issue so that my initiative was not seen as common sense or security; it was seen as digging for gossip and trying to build an empire for myself.

I never did finish that list, and it wasn’t long until I found myself handing in my airport ID badge and hitting the want ads.

Since I left the company, there have been two occasions - most recently today - when both the airport and the roads leading to it have been completely shut down. When these incidents have happened, I’ve had to chuckle out loud, and that’s not meant as disrespect to those affected by the incidents. If nothing at the company has changed since I was there, all employees’ basic contact information is still locked away in fireproof boxes, and the company and its employees have no standardised way to communicate outwith business hours. If the airport is forcing the company to stay closed tomorrow, they would have to find it out from the news, not the management.

Cynicism tells me, though, that the troublemaker probably finished the employee list after I left and took credit for the idea.

Do you know how to reach your staff out of hours?
Can your staff reach you out of hours?
What would happen in an emergency?
Who would take charge in a crisis situation?
Could your business run without its physical premises?
Are there secure copies of your vital records offsite?
Are there personal issues which have prevented precautions from being taken?
Could your staff put the company over their egos in a crisis situation?
For UK companies, do you take the concept of HR seriously? What objections do you have to it?
What elements of your company’s culture need to change to make a role for HR?

Passing the buck 30 June 2007

There comes a time in the afternoon when I wonder what’s on TV tonight. For years I had Yahoo UK’s TV listings page bookmarked in my personal toolbar, making the information one click away. The page was customised via a cookie to display my local listings for the five UK terrestrial channels. The page was very simple and dull, largely unchanged from mid-1990s design, but it did what it was supposed to do at one glance.

One day I clicked on the link as usual and got an odd error page. I scrolled to the main Yahoo TV page and the whole TV section been completely redesigned. What had been a simple table of listings was now a Myspace wannabe with polls, animations, celebrity gossip, contests, and visitor opinions. (See for yourself at http://uk.tv.yahoo.com/)

I couldn’t give two BEEPs about celebrity gossip, reality shows, or the txt spk opinions of avatars. I just want to see what’s on the bloody telly. So I found the “What’s On” portion of the page and clicked on it. It gave me the full listings of every possible configuration of UK TV, along with a dropdown menu to choose the date and time. It had everything, except one: an option to choose my region. The page’s default, London, was the only option there was! TV programmes vary widely across regions and London’s listings are so irrelevant to Scotland they might as well be New York City’s listings.

This can’t be right, I thought. I went back, I went forwards, I clicked on various tabs and links, and I tried the site in another browser. The option to choose a region was just not there. Before I knew it I’d wasted fifteen minutes with a plume of smoke coming out of my ears trying to find out how to get my TV listings back.

I clicked on the tiny Help link at the bottom of the page. It took me to a menu of frequently asked questions about the Yahoo TV page, but none of them had been updated to reflect the new site. The question about how to choose my region was useless. The bottom of each page has two option buttons: was this helpful, click yes? if not, click no to contact customer care. I clicked no. The browser then redirected me to - you guessed it - Yahoo US TV listings contact page. The form there was customised for the US, not the UK, and was linked to Yahoo’s US TV site, an entirely different thing. I didn’t bother proceeding with my question, because I knew how a cubicle hamster in California would react to a message coming in from Scotland complaining about getting listings for BBC London. He’d tell me to contact Yahoo UK TV help. And I’d tell him that I’d clicked on the link and been redirected to Yahoo US. And he’d make a grunting noise and that would be the end of that.

Having now lost a half an hour on an obsessive tizzy about TV listings, I finally stopped to question why this was getting me so worked up. I’d looked at that Yahoo page every day for years, and I felt a habitual loyalty to it. But the company I was being loyal to had broken something that didn’t need fixing, and wasn’t interested in listening to what customers have to say. So I did a quick web search and found a better site at http://www.tvguide.co.uk/. It’s all my TV listings in one click, customised for my region and our TV setup. I’ve not looked at Yahoo TV since.

Those of us who live outside London have long suspected that Londoners live in a bubble where everyone in the world is a Londoner, and the regions outside are strange foreign places where eskimos throw pointy sticks at hairy beasts. Taking a web site that used to be useful and restricting it to people who live in London doesn’t dissuade those suspicions one bit. If that’s their attitude, why should I give them my custom?

In writing this blog entry I went back to Yahoo UK TV. There is still no visible option to customise your viewing area. And although their Help menu has now been updated, the question about how to customise the viewing area has been removed entirely. There’s the latest BB gossip, though…

In planning your web site, do you fit the content around the structure or the structure around the content?
Do you test your web site from a range of perspectives and assumptions?
What options do you give customers to contact you if they need help?
Do you only accept certain questions or problems from visitors needing help?
Does your help team know what’s going on with your main product?
Do you outsource customer service to another office? Another country?
If so, are they aware of what’s going on? Are they prepared to answer questions from another country?
Is it right to create a flawed product and pass the responsibility for complaints to another division?

Building the Business Case for Your Web Site 28 June 2007

I’ve recently created a worksheet which you can use during the planning phase to build the business case for your web site. This is something I feel very strongly about, so I’m reproducing it here. This is something that needs to be shouted from the rooftops because so many businesses, groups, and organisations overlook this step altogether.

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Normally when a potential customer goes to a web designer and says “I need a web site”, the web designer jumps in the air and does a little dance. At Idea15 Web Design, we do things a little differently. We say: “You need a web site? Are you sure?” And here’s why.The things you associate with web sites - codes and graphics and search engines - are only part of a web site project. Strong web sites are not built on designs or colour schemes; they’re built in the planning phase. Web designers can’t make companies set clear goals and objectives, determine lines of communication, and plan for the future, but we certainly feel the brunt of it when they don’t. So on your side, there are a few things that need to be established about your web site before a single word of content is written.

Call it due diligence, call it building a business case, call it hitting all the bases – whatever you choose to call it, experience has shown time and again that skipping the business case will turn the best-intentioned web site project into a white elephant. And it’s a mistake made by huge companies as well as small organisations.

It’s simply not enough to say “we want a web site because…well, I say so.” If you don’t determine what your web site will mean to your customers, how it will stand amongst your competitors, how it will take up your time and budget, and most importantly, whose responsibility the web site is, you’re going to end up having a very expensive consultant spell it out to you in six months’ time after your web site has devoured your marketing budget and burnt out half of your project team.

Sit down with everyone in your company who has a say in your web site project, including the boss and the boss’s boss. Give these questions some thought, get some answers down on paper, and discuss your answers. If your understanding of the web site project differs from your colleagues, discuss why. But don’t even think of proceeding until every question has an answer which has been discussed and agreed upon by everyone involved.

Investing a few hours of your time now will save you from losing weeks of time and tears down the road. Pour yourself a strong cuppa and let’s go. And then when we say “you need a web site? Are you sure?” You can reply: “Absolutely! And here’s why…”

Site Need
• Why do we need this web site?
• Why do we want this web site?
• Do our customers need this web site?
• Do our customers want this web site?
• What do we want from our customers on this web site?
• What are the goals of this web site?
• How do we reach those goals, and how do we measure our progress towards them?
• What do we do if our web site doesn’t reach its goals?
• What happens if we don’t make this web site?
• If we have a web site already, what are the metrics from it? Are our customers using it? Where do the hits come from? Are we tracking this information at all?

Site Ownership
• Who makes the decisions about web sites within the company?
• Who does the actual work related to web sites within the company?
• Who is allowed to contribute material to the web site?
• Who has the final say on what material goes on the web?
• Who is responsible for putting material on the web?
• Who inherits the web site workload if a team member leaves the company?
• If we have a web site already, what ownership issues have been identified with the current site? (If you’re not comfortable discussing this within your company, it’s not your web site that’s the problem!)

Our Competition
• What sort of web sites do our competitors have?
• Are their web sites successful or not?
• What are they doing that’s better?
• Why will our web site be better than theirs?

Time and Money
• How much money do we have to spend on a web site?
• How many customers we expect to get from the web site?
• Divide the first number by the second – is each potential customer worth that much to us?
• What’s the source of our web site budget?
• How will changes in our web site budget be communicated to us? To the web designer?
• How long do we expect this web site to “last”? What happens then?

Web Site ClusterBEEP 28 June 2007

A few years ago I attended a seminar where the official Glasgow Museums web site was held up as the paragon of accessible, compliant sites. This family of sites ticks all the boxes for being accessible to people with disabilities, and in that respect, they’re excellent.

I recently re-visited the site not as designer, but as a regular viewer, to check the opening hours for one of the museums. I almost got vertigo:

http://www.glasgowmuseums.com/venue/index.cfm?venueid=4

I’m speaking, of course, of the twenty-five beige category boxes on the bottom, the fourteen museum boxes and six funder logos on the left, and the three separate horizonal navigation menus on the top.

Click on any beige box and you get a vertical content menu on the right hand side.

http://www.glasgowmuseums.com/venue/page.cfm?venueid=4&itemid=53

Accessible as it may be, this web site is an information clusterBEEP. I’m not reading the information I came to the site to find; I’m trying to understand the site’s architecture so I know where on earth to go looking for it.  I’ve got to dig that deeply because the whole site is an inflexible database that doesn’t allow for one line of “free” text.

Sadly the Museums site is what happens when you design a site to meet checklists, not real people. If web sites could be all things to all people, we wouldn’t need web designers. We’d just feed data into giant content machines. This web site has lost the human factor from its designers and for its audience. And what focus group member said “I prefer to see at least twenty five options at once, and read them all?”

I’m off to find the aspirin.

Self-emasculation 28 June 2007

There is a peculiar grammar convention in the West of Scotland which reduces people’s names to their marital status, first initial, and last name. IE, who’s your man and who are your people.

I hate it.

It’s strange picking up the phone and asking to speak with D Jones or Mrs R Smith. Hello, D! How are you, Mrs R!

And in the bastions of old fashioned sexism that many workplaces in the West of Scotland are, seeing a man in a three piece suit barking at Miss Guthrie to get him a coffee is just stomach-turning. (Miss Guthrie is actually incredibly capable and full of potential, but being constantly accused of having ideas above her station got to her, and she now meekly makes Kenco.)

Last year I applied for a job that would have had me reporting to the principal of a local university - essentially the university president. This was a serious, all-absorbing job that would suit me for ten years or more. In preparation for the interview, I went on to the university’s web site to do some research about my potential boss. This turned out to be a university-level research task. While most academics are quite happy to play themselves up, finding any information about the university’s management was incredibly difficult. I finally found ONE page on the whole web site for the university’s management team. It was a list of names. And not even names, just that naming convention. My potential boss was:

Prof J Bloggs

That was it.

No name, no photo, no background, no biography. The university is run by a letter.

Who is this person? What’s he or she like? Where’s he/she from? Why is he/she qualified to run a university? Does he/she have any experience outside academia? Is he/she a career public sector hack? What is he or she a “prof” of? Do we have any common ground? What about the rest of the team? Have they been there since time began? Are they new, indicating a recent clean sweep? Am I reporting to the old boys’ club or a diverse group of real people? Are they administrators or professors?

And why all the secrecy? Why the near-confidentiality of the people responsible for one of our major universities? In Scotland, universities are publicly funded, so these people are technically public servants. If I’m paying their wages, why am I not entitled to know who they are?

Aha, I thought, I’ll be clever and see what I can find in their last annual report. I surfed to the pages for their PR office and downloaded the PDF. At the back, sure enough, I found…the same list from the web site. Principal Prof J Bloggs.

I didn’t get the job, and I’m glad for that. And even if I had, how would you know? I’d have been absorbed into the collective, leaving my identity and my own name behind. My work would be a special secret not for discussion, apparently conducted from an underground bunker with people like D, J, and M.

As I do with any job rejection, I wrote back asking for constructive feedback as to why I’d not been selected. I received no response, which made me even more glad I wasn’t signing away ten years of my life to them.

On your web site, you’re competing for business with the rest of the world. Your visitors, whether they’re potential employees or potential customers, want to know why they should give you their time and money. They want to know what sets you apart, what gives you the edge, what qualifies you to do what you do.

If you’re afraid to tell the world what your own name is - much less why you’re qualified for the task - go right ahead. Your competitors will move ahead, proud to trumpet their names and backgrounds, and your company will be left with the insular, old-fashioned reputation you apparently want to cling on to at all costs.

What information about your company do you put in the public eye?
What information isn’t shared?
Do you come across as competent or confidential? Secure or secretive?
How do you think you appear to potential employees?
Is your management team close to or far away from your customers?

The advances of an unwanted suitor 28 June 2007

There is an initiative run by the Scottish Executive (Scotland’s government) which I deeply, vehemently disagree with. The initiative is not grounded in reality, it’s grounded in pipe dreams and a completely flawed understanding of how this issue actually works on the ground. (I have experience in it; the people running the initiative don’t.) The initiative is actively encouraging people to make life-changing decisions using incomplete knowledge cobbled together by career civil servants who have no experience in anything remotely related to the issue. OK, I’m ranting, which tells you how strongly I feel about it.

About a year ago I sent the Scottish Executive my thoughts via the big sexy web site they’d set up for this initiative. They never responded. They never commented. They never acknowledged it.

What they DID do is add me to their mailing list. From then on I received occasional nauseating, cheerful, PR-garbage emails and press releases about how gosh darn golly great this initiative is. Some of the emails were tailored in a way which makes me suggest that they’ve categorised me as a stakeholder, not a complaining taxpayer.

Last month I received an invitation to a seminar in Glasgow discussing the issue this initiative deals with, although this seminar had nothing to do with the problems I’d raised. As the email was mass BCC’d, I wrote back asking “excuse me, why did I receive this email?” Again, no response.

I’ve made efforts twice now to have myself deleted from their mailing lists. Let’s hope the second time works.

When someone makes their views known to an institution - whether it’s a constituent complaining to a government or a customer complaining to a company - the least they can expect is an acknowledgment that their concerns were read and taken seriously. No response is not acceptable. No response tells the complainant that the institution believes their own publicity and nothing else.

But to follow up no response by putting the complainant onto a feelgood PR mailing list - forcing them to receive the material they were complaining about in the first place - is just idiotic. It shows just how out-of-touch the institution really is. When that institution is your government, and they’d rather stick their fingers in their ears and yell “nyah nyah, I can’t heeearr you!”, what hope do any of us have.

When a customer complains to you, do you take them seriously?
Do you ignore bad news?
Do you respond to customer concerns with bullet points from your marketing department, or do you respond to the questions they’ve actually asked?
Do complainants vanish into a database?
Do you make an effort to follow up with complainants in a few months’ time?
If not, what are you so afraid of?