Internet Marketing Start to Finish, by Catherine Juon, Dunrie Greiling, and Catherine Buerkle, aims to provide some relief. Designed to outline “a breakthrough system for attracting more customers on the Internet,” the book lays out an online marketing strategy from beginning to end. It shows you how to gather and interpret data, plan and implement your marketing strategy, and evaluate and adjust your methods. Everything is covered, from search marketing to usability to CRM and analytics.

What I Like

The authors really know their stuff. They have over 48 years between them in Internet and marketing experience. Together they work as a team at Pure Visibility, a successful marketing firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Full disclosure: I am acquainted with another person at Pure Visibility who did not author this book, and I’ve attended a workshop that they led.)

Internet Marketing lays out a complete, end-to-end strategy that is flexible enough to be adapted to businesses of all sizes and stripes. It includes tons of terrific resources and steps you through several processes in great detail. Case studies help illustrate concepts and an appendix shows a fictional company’s implementation of the concepts that are discussed throughout the book.

The authors have created a resource that is targeted toward veterans as well as beginners who haven’t a clue how to start an online campaign. No matter what your experience in online marketing, Internet Marketing can be a great resource.

What I Don’t Like

However, it has its difficulties as well. Although it can be a great resource for anyone at any level, its depth of information can also be pretty overwhelming for beginners. Ideally, I’d like to see this book split into two: one that serves as an introduction to online marketing, and another that digs deeper into the nitty gritty details. Internet Marketing does both, which may occasionally alienate beginners just looking for the basics.

The quality of writing also leaves something to be desired. The style is uneven at times (probably the result of a team effort) and occasionally unclear. The first two chapters are downright confusing due to poor organization and need of an editor; but because they serve as introductory material, the rest of the book is still a great resource. I recommend giving the first two chapters a quick read and moving on to the meat of the book in chapter 3 and following. Most of the writing issues can be easily resolved by a solid copy editor, and I look forward to hearing of a second edition one day.

What I Recommend

Internet Marketing Start to Finish is written by experts in online marketing, not in manuscript editing—they provide an excellent resource for those who want to learn basic Internet marketing concepts as well as in-depth strategy. Readers should be prepared for a book that isn’t the easiest to read, but it can serve as an indespensible tool for building a complete, end-to-end online marketing strategy for your business.

Photo credit: Carrington Vanston

You know how there’s always That Guy at the party? He’s the guy without a sense of personal space who keeps butting into other people’s conversations and derailing them with slightly inappropriate stories and way too much personal information. Well, I hate to break it to you, but your content may be That Guy.

We want our content to get noticed, but it shouldn’t ever butt in where it doesn’t belong. Do we have a good understanding of where our content doesn’t belong? No one likes the guy at the party who keeps butting into other people’s conversations, and your users resent it when your content is That Guy, too.

This is the sixth in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is necessary for your content. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the fifth principle of good design:

Good design is unobtrusive. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Who, Me Obtrusive?

What does it mean for content to be unobtrusive? I think Dieter Rams meant that design shouldn’t be so decorative that it gets in the way of usability. That’s valuable, but I don’t think it’s often an issue for  technical content. So what does it mean for technical content to be obtrusive? Obtrusive content:

• Butts in where it isn’t wanted. This third wheel pops up (literally) out of nowhere and inserts itself where it wasn’t invited. It’s distracting, annoying, and sometimes jarring. Offenders: tips of the day, splash screens, pop-ups, Windows confirmation dialogs.
• Interrupts your work. Just when you start finding your groove, this content interrupts what you’re doing and redirects you through several pages or links you didn’t want to go to. Your work is crawling along and you’ve wasted a chunk of the day. Offenders: any website or help system that makes you click all over the place to find the information you need.
• Doesn’t understand personal space. Garish content like this tends to yell in all caps and throw itself in your face with bold highlighted text. It’s often very animated, perhaps because it’s afraid if it gives you any breathing room you’ll take off. Which you will. Offenders: long form sales sheets, MySpace, flashing ads.
• Doesn’t know when to shut up. Like the guy you hate asking open-ended questions to, this content just keeps going and going. Guilty of information dumping, or just plain wordy, the monologue never seems to end. Offenders: text-heavy websites, padded business reports.

Unobtrusive content is functional, but never gets in the way. It’s a tool that’s there when you need it while giving you room to do what you want. You might not even notice it unless you look for it. It’s restrained, helpful, and never self-seeking.

Respecting Personal Space Where There Is No Space

There’s one context when it’s especially critical to keep your content unobtrusive: mobile apps. These little guys are tricky—apps can vary significantly from one to the other, which means you won’t always know what to expect. So you often need some level of instruction to get started, or labels for elements on the interface. Sometimes, you need even more than just basic information. But the real estate on a mobile device is so tiny, it doesn’t take much for your content to get in the way.

Here’s a few examples of using content in a mobile app (click to view full size):

Google Voice Search (left) gives you usage examples that you can view by scrolling horizontally, or you can tap to watch a video in a separate web browser. SoundHound (center) displays tooltips that you can show or hide (although notice the ugly ad above, which is a bit obtrusive). Quickoffice’s help content (right) fails the unobtrusiveness test: The app requires a minimum of five taps before you reach the actual help files. It may be tucked out of the way, but its demands on my effort are quite obtrusive.

How Then Shall We Design?

Make sure you design your content so that it doesn’t get in the way. It should be readily available and easily accessible, but never intrude or take the user away from his or her workflow. Obtrusive content isn’t just annoying, it’s actually a bit unhelpful. Companies that design their content to be unobtrusive create a more rewarding user experience for their customers.

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]
• How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It) [Good Design #3]
• Why the iPad User Guide Matters [Good Design #4]
• Air Guitars and Keeping Loyal Customers [Good Design #5]

He had fun with this Air Guitar, but the instructions were nearly indecipherable. The content itself wasn’t bad (although it really wasn’t good, either). In fact, although the content itself was pretty clear, it took great effort to undertstand the instructions. The culprit was poor design—it hindered the content. Like nonverbal cues in spoken dialog, design carries great responsibility for communicating the written word.

This is the fifth in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is necessary for your content. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the fourth principle of good design:

Good design makes a product understandable. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

At first, this principle seems like a no-brainer. Of course well-designed content should make a product understandable—that’s what it’s there for! But in our case, the product we’re designing is the content itself. Good content design makes your content understandable. This means you can’t rely on your words alone to communicate—effective writing goes far beyond your choice of words.

Confuse Them and Lose Them

Here’s a copy of the Air Guitar instructions (click to expand). These instructions are on a single sheet of paper, a little smaller than standard U.S. letter size. Don’t ask me why they refused to use the reverse side.

Here’s just a few design flaws that make the content difficult to understand:

• The font size looks like it ranges from 2 to 8 points. Way too small! And the size varies without apparent reason (except to fit it all on one page?).
• There’s so much crowding of text that the eye gets stressed just glancing at it.
• The black triangles with numbers don’t make any sense. Do they indicate steps? Sections?
• The images aren’t bad, but the largest one at the top is too small to read clearly.
• There’s no sense of flow from one section to another—what order should I read these instructions in? Or is that what the black triangles are for?

I could go on, but you get the idea.

If the Air Guitar were my toy, I would have taken one quick glance at the instructions and tossed them out. Luckily, it’s an easy toy to figure out without a user guide, but what if it weren’t? In that case, I might give up and return the product for a refund. Or I might go online and search for help from other users, but I wouldn’t look for help from the company.

In fact, that’s exactly what millions of users do every day. Rather than go to the company for help, customers often seek out other users. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when your documentation is so poorly designed that it drives your customers away, you’ve got a problem. Your customers don’t trust you, or they don’t want to bother with you.

It’s also common for customers to return items simply because they couldn’t figure out how to use the products, and that’s costly to your business.

On the other hand, if you provide well-designed content that’s easy to understand, you’ll boost customer loyalty and trust. Supplement your documentation with  user feedback and contributions, and you’ve created a support community of excited users and loyal customers—and you cut down on your own support costs. Talk about a win-win solution!

Win-Win-Win

There’s a marketing benefit to good design, too. Smart companies are realizing the tremendous value of designing their technical documents to impress customers and give the best user experiences possible. Some are even beginning to use their user guides as marketing materials—something I’ve advocated several times (including here and here).

When you give your user guides this kind of priority, you empower your customers to get to know your product more fully, even before they buy. It’s a rewarding experience for your customers, and if the technical documentation is designed well, it also serves as effective marketing material.

How Then Shall We Design?

Remember, good design isn’t the same as a slick layout or cool graphics. You can have a cool looking document but still have poorly designed content. Good design is anything that makes your content understandable. When producing content, keep these four areas in consideration:

1. Organization. Not just a lack of disorganization, but the proper organization. Should the content be organized hierarchically or have a flat structure? What should the user see first? Can the user find information easily? Are topics organized in a way that makes sense and is usable?
2. Layout. Robin Williams uses for basic principles for designing layout: color, repetition, alignment, proximity. I highly recommend her book, The Non-Designer’s Design Book. In addition, consider your typeface, and use bullets and numbering in a consistent manner.
3. Media. Use images or videos to break up the monotony of text, to make instructions easier to understand, and to keep readers’ interest. Don’t overuse media, and only use images or video if you can justify their usefulness. If it doesn’t help improve understanding, don’t use it.
4. Simplicity. The more complex you get, the easier it is to lose your users. Simple design enhances the content, but complex design can often interfere with the message.

The design of your content is a big deal. Without giving it the proper attention, you can easily create content that is hard to understand and causes your customers to become frustrated. Frustrated customers will abandon you by returning your product or turning to others for help. Either way, you lose their trust and loyalty. Be sure your content strengthens customer loyalty by taking the time to design every piece of content.

Don’t have the time to devote to designing your content? Talk to us! We can help you create compelling, authoritative content your customers will love.

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]
• How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It) [Good Design #3]
• Why the iPad User Guide Matters [Good Design #4]

Photo Credit: Elmo H. Love

Scott says:

When organizations showcase their technical communication products on the web, in the way that Autodesk and ExactTarget do today, they experience many benefits, including deep knowledge about their customers that allow them to make valuable incremental improvements to the customer experience.

Organizations like iFixit.com are taking that approach a few steps further by creating technical documentation that is designed to sell products.

Intext Writing has been serious about this all along. When you hire a technical writer to create your content, you harm your business if that content isn’t designed to sell and doesn’t improve customer experience.

Officially, this is an aside to our Good Design series, but Scott’s article is a great example of the importance of good design in content writing. We’ll pick up the series again shortly.

This is the fourth in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is necessary for your content. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the third principle of good design:

Good design is aesthetic. The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Your Brand Depends on Aesthetics

This principle applies as much to your content and technical documents as it does to your product. Technical documentation in particular is often seen as the ugly stepchild of product development, and so of course it ends up looking ugly. But this has ramifications. It affects how your customers view the product and your company.

Everything your customer sees will influence his or her opinion of your company. If your content is ugly, it sends a message about your company itself. Even if your customers never take the time to read the content, they’ll see it. And a quick glance is enough to shape their opinions.

Need more reasons to create aesthetic content? Here are three more:

• We trust what is aesthetic. Aesthetic designs are seen as more trustworthy. Again, think of Apple’s products. Psychology supports this, too—we trust beautiful people more easily than homely people. Companies that are trusted are also seen as thought leaders. So if you want to gain trust, make all of your content aesthetic.
• We like what is aesthetic. Humans are naturally attracted to beauty. We’re designed to seek it out. So when your content is aesthetic, your customers will like it. They’ll enjoy seeing it, and they’ll be more likely to use it. They will also be more likely to associate their enjoyment of the content with their opinion of your company. Don’t miss this point: your customers’ opinion of your content will influence their opinion of your company. Message boards are stuffed with users who resent companies for their crappy manuals. If you want your customers to love your company, give them reasons to love your content as well.
• We remember and understand what is aesthetic. Aesthetic content inherently makes more sense than ugly content. And because aesthetic content is more likeable, they will spend more time viewing it, which leads to greater retention and understanding.

A Word of Caution

Don’t fall in love with aesthetics for their own sake. Good design is built on functionality. Beautiful content ceases to be well designed when its aesthetics get in the way of its usability.

How Then Shall We Design?

Often, little changes can make a big difference. A good starting place is the book The Non-Designer’s Design Book  by Robin Williams. If your content needs more than just a tweak here and there, or if you want an aesthetic design that’s impressive and comprehensive, it can create a drain on your resources—especially during the learning curve phase. Evaluate your resources before you begin the project.

Many of our clients come to us looking for exceptional writing that is also visually appealing. Their past content has been anything from unremarkable to embarrassing and they want their materials to reflect their company’s leadership in the industry. These clients continue to use Intext Writing for authoritative and compelling content  that they can proudly give to customers, investors, and partners.

Whether your materials just need a bit of tweaking or an overhaul from a professional content writer, make sure they’re well designed and aesthetic. The impact on your customers will be worth it!

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation?
• How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It)

Photo credit: The D34n

Sometime when you need a good laugh, do a Google search for “worst instructions ever” and see what turns up. Among the bounty of hilarious posts and scathing reviews (note that: it’s not just your product that’s being reviewed too!) is a common theme: unusable instructions make a product unusable.

Most of the instructions in my Google search were bad because a blind monkey translated them into something resembling English, but often the culprit is bad content design.

This is the third in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is important for content writing. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the second principle of good design:

Good design makes a product useful. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Make It Useful, or Don’t Make It

Technical writing and content writing have a double purpose: they’ve got to emphasize the usefulness of the product, and the content itself must be useful. It’s not enough to have accurate content or even well-written content—good design is critical to usefulness.

My six-year-old’s birthday was a real pain for me this year. The in-laws gave him some Transformers^TM that were approved for ages 5+, which was probably true if that means that a kindergartener won’t to try to eat the toy or flush it down the toilet. But if it means that the kid should be able to transform it from a car to a robot, then you can just forget it. Besides the fact that the toy’s parts had to be smashed into place (bad product design), the instructions were so hideous, they were incomprehensible. Were they complete? Yes, I believe so. Were they accurate? From what I could tell, probably. But the content was so poorly designed that it made the toy useless. The toy sits, unplayed with since his birthday, in a corner of my son’s closet. Good content, without good design, is no good. Overlook content design, and you could do real harm to your product’s usability!

That’s a pretty extreme example, but I hope you get the point. The Transformer was a difficult toy to begin with, but if the content had been designed well, my son could have enjoyed a sub-par product and we would have had a much better opinion of the manufacturer. What a difference good design can make!

How Then Shall We Design?

To design good content that will enhance a product’s (and the content’s) usefulness, ask questions about what will make the content more usable. Here are a few questions to ask as you’re designing your content:

1. What format will be most usable for the customer? PDF/print? Online help? Wiki? FAQs on website? Tool tips only? Video/animation?
2. How should I structure the content so that information is easy to find?
3. Illustrations: how many? How large? Should I use photos, screenshots, illustrations, or CAD? Where should images be placed on the page? Should I use callouts? If so, what kind of style?
4. Would video add value?
5. What kind of writing style is appropriate?

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]

First, some thoughts about what good design is not. Good design isn’t cool graphics or a sleek look. Design in this context means form that follows function. It describes the “shape” of your content—all the visual aspects of it, including media format, layout and structure, style and tone, typography, flow, and more. It speaks to usability and user experience.

So let’s look at the first principle of good design.

Good design is innovative. The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Get Innovative! Maybe.

In the earliest days of the Web, documents were on one page—often, a very long one that required lots of scrolling. Then HTML came along and introduced the <a> tag, and suddenly you could link several short pages instead of having one long one. As technology grew, so did capabilities for websites, and multimedia was introduced through Flash and MIDI files. Later, DHTML and Java script were introduced, and the web became interactive—elements like expanding text created opportunities for web content and online help. Today, HTML5 is rolling out, with new capabilities that will allow content writers to do new things with mobile devices and web pages. As technology advances, so do the opportunities to be innovative in designing content.

Each of these evolving technologies has provided opportunities for innovative design. The best designs made it easier to use the web, find help, or watch video demos instead of reading procedures.

But just because an innovative design is possible, that doesn’t mean it should be used. Design for its own sake only gets in the way of a positive user experience. That’s why website splash pages have become so widely detested, and why you’ll never see a bubble mouse trail again (except perhaps on MySpace). While it might impress your customers to show off a new design feature, the novelty will quickly wear off; if the design doesn’t actually yield greater usability or create better understanding, your customers will tire of it and become resentful that you weren’t more thoughtful of their needs.

But when innovative design improves a user’s experience, it should be seriously considered. I’ve already mentioned collapsing/expanding text on web pages. This advancement allowed technical writers to create sleeker, crisper online help topics. Nonessential information could be hidden, but still easily available to users; they could dig deeper without navigating away from the topic.

How Then Shall We Design?

The challenge for content writers and technical writers is threefold:

• Stay current on developing technologies. This is easier said than done, since you never know which technology will lead to new design possibilities. The key is to keep your eyes open and be always learning from a wide variety of sources.
• Find innovative ways to apply new capabilities in content creation. This involves practicing disciplines that develop your creativity. Allow yourself to be bored. Cut out stuff that produces a distracted life. Keep asking foundational questions like Why and What If. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a lie—everything is broken at some level, in some way.
• Differentiate good design from bad design. This is tricky, because an innovation can be a good design in one context but horrible in another. QR codes are an example of an overused innovation that has a limited value. In some contexts, it’s clever and helpful; in others, it’s just clever-ish and trendy.

Technology is always evolving, and with it come new opportunities to improve content design. It is the task of content writers and technical writers to keep pushing the envelope—not for the sake of innovation itself, but for the sake of our readers. Innovative design is only good when it improves the user’s experience.

Photo credit: Shahram Sharif

Dieter Rams's Braun SK 4 Phonosuper Record Player

Everything is designed—few things are designed well. Unfortunately, poor design can be detrimental to your business.

The master of good design is Dieter Rams, who developed the 10 principles of good design (also called the 10 commandments of good design). Rams is a German industrial designer who worked with Braun from the 1950s until 1995. His designs include coffee makers, calculators, shavers, radios, and office equipment. They are marked by elegance and simplicity, marrying functionality and beauty.

Rams’s famous 10 principles are usually applied to products (most notably Apple products like the iPod), but they can be co-opted for technical content as well. I would even argue that you cannot have good technical content apart from these 10 principles.

So let’s look at Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design.

Good design:

Is innovative. The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Makes a product useful. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Is aesthetic. The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Makes a product understandable. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Is unobtrusive. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Is honest. It does not make a product more innovative, powerful, or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

Is long-lasting. It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years—even in today’s throwaway society.

Is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Is environmentally friendly. Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Is as little design as possible. Less, but better—because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

Can you see the connection to technical content? Think of technical content as part of the product itself—in fact, often the best technical content is integrated directly into the product. But even if the content is in a printed user guide or on a separate website, the goal is to make the instruction as seamless as possible so that use of the product is interrupted as little as possible. To do this, the content must be designed, and designed well.

This isn’t a call for beautiful content—good design and beauty are two different things. Design starts with functionality and purpose, and beauty ought to flow out of that. Good technical content (as with good design) is elegant, useful, and crisp.

On the contrary, badly designed content makes a product more difficult to use and less understandable, is ugly and a chore to read, is obtrusive, leaves out details, and often is bloated with unhelpful information. Badly designed technical content interferes with the product itself and makes the user’s experience more punishing than rewarding.

I’ve written before about technical content that is true, good, and beautiful. Dieter Rams captures that perfectly in his 10 principles. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to find examples of badly designed content, but Intext Writing is committed to good design in everything we do.

Photo credit: Nick Wade

This was the challenge our first client faced. Community Spice provides affordable website templates and hosting for churches and other non-profit organizations that don’t have technical expertise or a budget that allows for a high-end web presence. Their templates provide several tools for incorporating multimedia into the websites, but Community Spice’s typical customer wasn’t even savvy enough to upload files.

Community Spice wanted to fully equip its customers without overwhelming them. They had tried writing their own procedures for tasks like adding images and creating external links, but they found that many users were still having trouble grasping the concepts.

We decided to create a series of screencasts—video tutorials that walk the user through the steps in a simple, easy to understand manner. Because many of their users operate computers with no speakers, narrated videos weren’t an option. So the trick was to use callouts that would explain each action in a simple way. While a narrated video can be chatty, the callouts had to have very few words and also clearly describe the step.

The result was a set of minimalistic videos that gave instructions for very specific tasks. For example, “Uploading” was separated into “Uploading a file” and “Uploading an image,” even though the tasks were very similar and could otherwise be combined into one procedure. The videos are slow-paced to reduce the chance of confusion and the instructions are written very simply.

Here’s one of the videos. What do you think? Did we accomplish the goal?

(Click to play)

This is what Shawn Quinn, Owner and CEO of Community Spice, had to say:

Bill with Intext Writing quickly got to the bottom of exactly what we were looking for in creating instructional videos for our technology. The process was refreshingly both extremely smooth and efficient. And the final video and content quality exceeded our expectations.

As George Lucas has taught us (several times), it’s not how flashy your product is that matters. It’s how well you tell the story.

One of the most perplexing crimes in the English language is abuse of the apostrophe. Its rules are simple enough once you know them, but for some reason even otherwise respectable businesses brutalize this poor glyph—to the detriment of their own reputations!

Nothing makes an exceptional business look mediocre like the neglect of basic punctuation. It efficiently distracts from the message you mean to send and replaces it with messages of sloppiness, incompetence, and apathy.

Don’t let simple grammar mistakes send the wrong message to your customers. Here’s a couple quick videos that’ll help you master the apostrophe’s role in your materials.

Cute but quite helpful:

An educational rant. But DO NOT follow his last bit of advice. It’s morally questionable.

And here’s a bonus must-view that will ignite your passion for the apostrophe.