Click #16
Bloggers solve murders. Law professors make techno. Illustrators draw on rubbish.
There is a shift from professional to DIY happening all over the web.
The creative urge
Clever websites tap in to this.
eBay lets you play at being a shopkeeper (the line between play and reality quickly blurs). Wikipedia invites you to read (like a conventional encyclopaedia) but you can write it too. Boing Boing and CollegeHumour have content submitted by thousands of volunteers, edited by a small core team.
Easy self-expression
It isn’t always obvious how to let your customers stick their heads above the parapet. This site for world environment day does it well.
Mint are making a site which lets you adopt an olive tree. Our favourite idea is an interactive map that lets you check out all the orphan trees. When you adopt a tree you’ll upload a message - ‘Happy birthday, gran’, ‘Freddie Flintoff ate my hamster’ or whatever. This messages will become part of the map - defining neighbourhoods and influencing future adoptive parents.
We are currently reworking Matt Weston’s BusinessBricks. The aim is to create easy - but meaningful - ways for readers to interact. When we get the infrastructure right there’s lots of scope for a community to flourish.
Let 1000 customers bloom
Ten years ago, you sat there while TV bludgeoned you over the head with advertising messages. The internet - especially the way it has developed over the 18 months - lets much more interesting interactions happen. How can you let your customers bloom?
Cycling back from Pecha Kucha, I stopped at the lights in Parliament Square.
This huge American couple approached. The woman was taller than me and twice as wide. The man was much, much bigger.
‘Excuse me, where’s the Big Ben?’ she asks.
‘Up there’, I point. (It was less than 50m away and directly visible.)
‘Oh, I was expecting it to be big.’
Nowadays Aussies gloat over a draw.
Walter Kirn is a guest writer at www.andrewsullivan.com. Blistering.
Read the Guardian’s over-by-over Ashes coverage.
Intimate, informal and current - great web writing. This is their desciption of Warne’s wicket last Sunday:
WICKET! Australia 220-9 (Warne hit wicket b Flintoff 42)
Freddie does it again, albeit in bizarre circumstances. Flintoff speared a swinging yorker in towards Shane Warne’s leg stump, it missed by quite a way, but Warne did a Cruyff turn on his off stump and sent it flying. You couldn’t make it up, and luckily you don’t have to. Priceless slapstick.
(There’s two types of writing. Know which you’re about.)
We’ve just launched two new sites
Our most pared back ever: Taranto Consultancy
And our most colourful: James Byrne
Click #15
This Click is about the art of creating enjoyable journeys through websites. Check these examples:
1. BustedTees thank you page
Thank you pages are usually dull. This hip made me smile.
2. PledgeBank email confirmation
It is a hassle being forced to enter a username and password. PledgeBank gives you the opportunity not to bother. What joy!
3. Getting Real sign up
This page has one function: to get you to sign up to a mailing list. The copy is over-sized. I got a silly spark of happiness when I entered my name and it was big too.
4. Gmail threaded conversations
This is a lovely way to display an email conversation. Grouping conversations makes them easier to manage. Colour improves the page’s usability.
Why this matters
Offline there is a disconnection. Say you see a cracking advert for a mobile phone network and the next day you have a miserable experience with that firm (maybe you get put on hold for 30 minutes then the line goes dead). Your brain separates out the two. The benefit of the lovely advert isn’t totally obliterated by the terrible service.
Online it is different - the brand message and the customer service are the same thing. The user’s experience becomes a concrete expression of the brand. So creating pleasant interactions will pay dividends.
Great to see that there’s a move to start a UK organisation to protect digital rights: http://www.pledgebank.com/rights
The flowering of creativity that results from open source thinking means this organisation could be a valuable counterweight against the lobbying power of old media. Hope they get to 1000 pledges.
