Google’s Expected to roll out their “PowerPoint” killer soon, if not today. Even though I was one of the engineers on Harvard Graphics (PowerPoint was called the “Harvard Graphics Killer”) I am really a advocate leaving slides out of meetings. It’s far too easy to create slides. You need people staring at you at a table giving you feedback with their body language, good and bad.

When someone gets out a projector at a brainstorm meeting, I know the spirit is lost. Powerpoint presentations in general can be good or bad (and some say hugely wasteful) but their use can sap the spirit from meetings. I’m fine with using them to show user interfaces, or to surf the web in front of a group, but that’s about it. (more…)

I loved this.

Partially because I’ve got some of these obsessive/compulsive tendencies when I see stuff like this wrong in the world, too. Partially because it is a good idea. And partially because I know companies ignore stuff like this when they should pay attention to it - in fact, this is great marketing material (e.g. “the little things that make Subway better.”)

While I was born inherently visual, I think it’s partially Donald Norman and Seth Godin’s fault, though for making it nearly impossible for me to walk out of any establishment without a mental “improvements” list I’d like to send the proprietor. I think the only places I go where such rarely happens are Disney, BMW service centers, Starbucks, and McDonalds.

Postscript:Â From the lefthandedtoons.com blog, even more goodness.

My mother’s father had a limp earned from a huge hunk of falling coal that pinned his leg against a machine deep underground. His arm was broken by Kentucky State Troopers during a coal strike. My Dad’s Father’s hands were so rough that it hurt when he held mine sometimes and he had a photograph of UMWA President John L. Lewis beneath a painting of Jesus in his living room.

I’m absolutely sure the mines contributed to their causes of deaths. My dad worked 7 days a week in the mines when I was a child. They always came home dirty, exhausted, sleeping whatever hours of the day were opposite their shifts. We had to be quiet as kids, to play outside. The UMWA provided a good salary and good benefits for the family. But they were always gone. I regret that.

I work sitting in an Aeron chair with three large flat screen monitors. I’m never dirty at the end of the day unless I’ve spilled my coffee. I use my brain all day but never break a sweat. I see my kids all the time. I get to make a huge number of choices about what I do each day. I choose my clients. No whistle blows.No timecard. No boss. I get excellent job satisfaction out of helping companies succeed and terrific feedback from them. It’s hard to tell where work ends and fun begins sometimes.

Yet sometimes I catch myself answering “yes” to the question “Have you been working hard?” … I’m going to try to answer that differently, “I’ve been very busy.” might work. But Grandad and Pappaw and Dad knew/know hard work.

I honor that work today

Because as a child growing up in Kentucky in the 1960s, there were few other options for attaining a middle class lifestyle without formal education. Through this achievement I was able to leave Kentucky at age 11 and attend vastly better schools of Illinois, attain my Bachelor’s degree and begin the career that led me to the lifestyle I enjoy.

Managed rights photo shops, such as Getty Images are bound to protect the rights of photographers, illustrators, and videographers in order to preserve the value of their work. Especially in light of an ever increasing level of choice and quality from the very low cost stock photography sites such as istockphoto.com, they are seeking to offer the professional media producer a reliable way to make sure they’re paid each time their work is used in print, online, and elsewhere.

These folks employ a variety of tools, including picscout, to crawl the net looking for unauthorized uses of their work in websites and blogs. Through image recognition and invisible watermark technologies, the crawler seeks out and reports on locations where their photography exists, and then compares the locations to the licenses on file. If a disparity is found, it is reviewed and then action is taken on the website or blog owner. Expensive action sometimes, without a trace of a C&D. I’m certain that at this human-point of the activity there is discretion applied about how to handle it.

For those of us managing dozens or even hundreds of sites, it is very, very easy for an unauthorized image or illustration to make its way into a website. While most have absolutely no intention of defrauding the artist or the stock photography shop, some may find a bill in the mail for hundreds or even thousands of dollars showing spider-finds of photographs on websites. For the hundreds of thousands of sites built upon web templates or the packs of 250,000 images for $99.95 on ebay, you could be tagged at any moment.

As also pointed out on the Signed Media blog, it’s the era of the era of user-created-content. I have a client using a CMS system to provide websites to over 250 individual users. Other clients edit their sites regularly and post images. These newbie users, despite our best attempts, do not think twice about grabbing an image from another website or from Google Images. Too often, these are images from a managed rights photography shop. We remove the image as soon as we can, scold the site owner, but it’s a formidable task. We have taken “reasonable steps’ as requested by the DMCA procedures to inform users of the policy. I try to tell them it is the site OWNER who will receive the letter/fees, but that doesn’t always help. They see a kitten, they post the kitten, kitten photographer be damned. (more…)

Many web merchants rightfully worry customers won’t see the value of their products due to an inability to touch and feel the quality. It’s impossible to bring that experience to today’s web surfing experience in the traditional way, but using well-captured experiences one can get close.

But here is an example  that bridges the gap, giving the viewer a near-tactile experience. I don’t have access to the performance numbers of this ad (would love to see them) but have a hunch this is the wave of the future. The ad was not easy to make, and they are out on a limb with it. But can you think of a better way to demonstrate the virtues of the product visually, with humor, to a mess mass audience? I mean, it’s a freaking floor mat - what’s duller than that?

(Ps: you need to get through 30 seconds before the ad gets cool. I would definitely have changed that if I were designing it. Move some of the ‘facts’ and ‘intro’ script into the interactive stuff so you lose fewer people while she’s talking it up at the start. But that’s just my opinion. And she definitely should have liked one of the messes - maybe the ice cream.)

And not just on the desktop-web this type of thing has legs (rimshot!). Think about an LCD touchscreen on the shelf next to the products, activated by customers. A small linux-driven LCD photo frame type display with a motion detector would do the trick. How about a proximity bluetooth ad which displays on a mobile device?

You probably have some ideas too, even though you may not be able to put your finger on them right now.

You know, sometimes business secrets don’t require much effort to find. The fruits of dozens of locations, millions of dollars in training development, and years of experience can focus on a single experience that’s presented right in front of you. And you are permitted to take notes.

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What would happen if you were named in a frivolous lawsuit? And what then if you lost, and a criminal plea bargain saved your business, your home, or perhaps even your freedom? You’d have a record. Just like that. What if you were accused of something, and the arguments were drawn out and ugly, even if you “win.”?

Depending on your state and your industry, the Attorney General, circuit court, city government, or other websites (usually high authority) could post every decision (or even accusation) for Google to crawl. If your name was even slightly unique, you’re hosed as these would almost always come up on page 1 (if not position 1) for searches under your name, even if the event occurred 10 years ago. I’m no expert on this stuff, but found my lightweight journey into this world enlightening - ps: I encourage you to grab a copy of Radically Transparent, a new book by Andy Beal  and Dr. Judy Strauss - and possibly to attend their webinar. I encourage you to help me correct any errors here - I am not a lawyer.

So… let’s dig in just a tad….

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The majority creating new websites:
I will create a georgous bucket, with sparkles and a golden handle.
IÂ will find an empty patch of flat ground to put my bucket.
I will watch the sky, and admire my bucket.
I hope it rains soon.

A few who understand:
I will plan an aqueduct and dig a reservoir.
I will test the water sources in the hills.
I will gather the lumber and pipe.
And route the flow to my basin.
While I work on my georgous new bucket.

Jakob Nielson’s latest Alertbox is the longest-read enewsletter in my list. The writeups are focused and brilliant. I only wish I were skilled enough to translate them into convincing arguments when talking to clients. That’s me, not Jakob, who’s needing refinement I know.

In the latest Alertbox (June 25) He writes, in the Pros/Cons of Whether Designers and Developers Should Do Usability this, as a “Con”…the Lack of Objectivity:

“If you test your own design, however, you might be less willing to admit its deficiencies. Designers can be too willing to dismiss user complaints or problems as minor or unrepresentative, when in fact the test indicates the need for a deep redesign. Also, designers can get so caught up in their own theories about how users ought to behave that they forget to test for cases in which people behave differently. “

Here, my interjection for multivariate testing data serving as the myth-buster for such activity. When a designer or developer gets a particular idea in their head about how something should be done, well developed testing that polls users’ behaviors via well-designed software systems and test suites should be able to close the gap and remove this “Con” from the table.

But as Nielson Points out, who’s writing the tests, and are those tests focused on the particular pet-peeves of the designer or developer? In my examples, are the variables we’re testing too focused on that designers favored bits?

I’ve found the rather mechanical process of creating on-line multivariate tests tends to remove some of the favoritism. It makes you think in segmented parts, and while you might still have a bit of ego invested in a design, you become more objective in the whole thing once you start taking it apart for testing. Could it be that such testing neutralizes this “worry” when it comes to designers testing their own designs? Should variable definition be more of a part of the web design process?

I find myself thinking hard about the variables I’m going to have to test when I’m brain-mapping a layout. Headlines, navigation, visual elements, flow, buildup, call-to-action, and so forth. But “pure designers” do not seem to do this. Flow might be on their mind, but it’s more a concern about “general fluidity” than tilting the entire thing towards a specific action. I’m usually in the game to make money with my clients, not to impress visitors as much - and I’m sure this changes the entire thought process. I’ll bet a middle ground would be ideal here.

It seems that Yahoo is in a Predicament in the PPC share.

So as I work on some Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns this weekend I was thinking about Yahoo!’s woes and come to think of some features that might help Panama for advanced PPC campaign managers, ground level. Others have come up with some excellent big-picture ideas, but mine are more nitty gritty, from the trenches stuff. While I’m kinda nervous about making the comments, I do have some faith in the folks at Y!, and have had great results on their system once I get a campaign going. So with dirty fingernails and weary fingers…here goes.

1. Make it easier to split adgroups, selecting which keywords go with which split. Advanced PPC marketers know that in order to succeed on PPC, especially in a new campaign, you must first fire up a large-ish group to determine the impression data and then begin the process of splitting thematic searches into buckets (adgroups) with their own targeted ads and keyword groupings. Trouble is, the PPC engines do not support this mechanism very well. It’s too many steps, and for a busy Search Marketer, I’m sure that some campaigns operate less-than-optimally because of simple “hours-in-the-day” issues. Since Yahoo wants to report improved performance, this is one way to get that done!

2. Offer the ability to auto-insert analytics tags of your own, account-level definition. Allow a search marketer to define analytics tags when they set up their account. Campaign, adgroup, keyword, etc. are all consistent during marketing. Once set up, these could then be auto-filled by the engine so that analytics information from YSM flows into whatever tool we use easily. Google doesn’t do it, even though they have their own analytics tool, so this could be a small, but big leap forward.

3. Create a robust, lightweight desktop campaign editing tool that helps people not go postal. It just took me an HOUR to get a spreadsheet of campaigns uploaded into Yahoo! - 14 tries, each one frustratingly time consuming.  Make something that doesn’t require endless repetitions and downloads of zip files with errors. Yes, I know you have an API, but for many who don’t use it, simplify the process of uploading campaigns, adgroups and so forth via files. Report on import errors on the screen, not in a file, and possibly even let us make tiny fixes mid-upload. How about a simple desktop application? And please don’t make it as fat and slow as Google’s version.