I tell non-profits to “cheat” by watching the big companies we know are doing a ton of testing. If they all adopt something, consider it for your site. Even if you have money and time for your own tests, you can pick up good direction.
Interpreting what you see isn’t always straightforward, though. Infinite scrolling is a perfect example — some big sites are using it, but a lot aren’t. Here’s my take on what that means for the rest of us:
Thank you to everyone who attended my session at NTEN’s conference last weekend — the questions and conversations were great! It was inspiring to hear that my experience at EDF sounded so familiar to you, and that lessons learned could translate to other organizations.
Several of you asked for slides, which are posted below. more…
I’ve watched election returns mostly online since my long-ago start in the Washington Post’s online newsroom. The online geek in me loves seeing how different outlets handle the data almost as much as I like learning the results.
This year, the leap in sophistication of data visualization was particularly fun. There were lots of good lessons, and the New York Times really set the standard. more…
EDF got nice attention lately for our apparently ground-breaking use of responsive design. Ironically, that came just as we started to think about screen resolution in a new way.
Jakob Nielsen recently wrote about screens getting bigger over time (right). Useful data, but it only goes so far. Just because we can view Twitter feeds at 1920×1600, do we?
It turns out that we might not.
We don’t always keep our browser window at the maximum size. We change it as we click around. And some of us use toolbars, which shrink the actual space available to see sites. With all the variation, how are people are really seeing our sites?
I suspect the reason that Nielsen didn’t address this question is that it’s hard to get the data, particularly historically. Out of the box, Google Analytics tells you only the physical size of the screens your visitors have. When I asked EDF’s super-developer, Patrick Cranston, for help getting beyond this limitation, he turned up this method for capturing actual dimensions. Now, we can measure the true size of viewing area.
Our awesome analyst Mathew Grimm sliced some of the early data, and the results are fascinating (click for a larger version).
The larger the circle, the more visitors saw the site through that size. See below for a note on the red square.
The biggest takeaway — it would be almost impossible to design one site that works well at this huge variety of sizes. Responsive design looks like an increasingly important solution. Other observations:
There’s a lot more to explore here. For example, a substantial number of visitors re-size their browsers during their visit to our site, and we want to look into when and in what direction.
I’m looking forward the next generation of EDF’s responsive design, informed by this new generation of screen size data.
I usually post about putting things online — but this post is about taking them offline.
If you live in DC, you might know already about Artomatic. In short: 1,300+ artists and performers take over an 11-story building, filling it with art, performances and activities for five weeks. It’s completely volunteer-run, and a pretty mind-blowing experience of unfiltered creative endeavors.
I’m part of the marketing team, and I also contributed an installation, called “Click to Print.”
Why? Browsing through the iPad app for The New Yorker, I found myself wondering what it would look like if I cut up an actual magazine and arranged the pages the way the app does. What happens if you take things from the digital world and try to bring them back into the physical world? Do they make any sense?
If you can’t give that a try at Artomatic, I don’t know where you could!
The installation has three parts:
New Yorker for iPad. This is both the app that sparked the idea and the gold standard for magazines on the iPad. I love reading the print edition of the magazine and wanted to work with it somehow. (In fact, I also have a blog about reading the New Yorker…)
However, the original cutting-up-a-magazine idea didn’t work. The issues I wanted to try it with are not available anymore, no matter how nicely I begged the woman in charge of selling back issues, and when I calculated how much space I’d need to display a whole magazine, iPad-style, it was way too long for even my giant 20-foot wall space.
So instead, I picked my favorite articles about the online world and printed out the actual iPad screens for them. It turned out better this way.
Washington Post on Twitter. My first job was at the Washington Post, helping to launch their first web site. I liked the idea of un-digitizing something that I helped seed online.
I chose the Twitter feed because it seemed an appropriate answer to the worst fears of the people who ran the paper back then: “You thought college-kid editors would subvert the news judgment of a venerable paper with real-time updates to the web site? Well, look at this!”
The big surprise as I worked on this one: The pieces I cut out of the paper looked really bland compared to the online-only features I printed. So few images, nothing embedded or related, just 450 words of plain newsprint.
Facebook “What I do” meme. I also wanted to take something that had no offline equivalent and see what it looked like in the real world. This was a late inspiration and the most fun (making an intentionally awful painting is extremely liberating!).
Since I saw a ton of these ones and it was even written up on one of the Post’s blogs, I figured it would be recognizable to lots of people. And it seemed like an natural to make into collages, since “What I do” collections are essentially digital collages. I wanted a topic that would make sense to the majority of Artomatic visitors, so I bent the meme a little and featured Artomatic itself.
Happy moment as I was finishing the installation: An artist whose 2008 postcard I had incorporated into one of the collages came by for a look. She’s not on Facebook, so I wasn’t sure if it would work for her. She pointed and looked for a bit, and then asked, “Can I like it??” I told her of course she could, and she flipped the “like” counter under the collages, becoming th third “like.” User testing success!
If you’re in the DC area (or can get here between now and June 23), please come by! You shouldn’t miss Artomatic in any case, and I would love for you leave comments in my comment book.
This week’s switch to the new timeline format is forcing us to confront a puzzle we’ve been putting off for a while: How and when do you retire a Facebook presence?
At EDF, we’re fortunate not to have many old Facebook pages hanging on, but the few we do have are awkward baggage. One goes back to the early days of Facebook when we were still working out our strategy for what gets its own page. Another was for a campaign that we thought would continue, but didn’t.
These pages have a few thousand likes each, and still get a little activity. We can’t message the fans, as we could with a group. And there’s no direct successor to these pages that we can point people to, so it doesn’t seem worth posting announcements.
We quietly redirect or replace web pages all the time. But something about hitting the “delete” button on a page with 3,000 fans seems like much more of a waste! What if we have a reason to communicate with them someday?
On the other hand, letting the pages sit there moldering away doesn’t seem like a great representation of our brand, either.
How have you solved this challenge? If you have a graceful strategy for retiring old pages, I’d love to hear!
M+R has lots of smart people on their team, so I always get excited when they release new studies and research. Their recent white paper on storytelling is a case in point.
Do we really need yet another piece about storytelling and fundraising? Yes, we do.
more…
Lab Day is over! It was hard to really focus on it as much as I wanted to, what with a couple people being out of the office and vote going on in the U.S. House. I’m happy we did it, and looking forward to hearing about the rest of the Web team’s experiences.
Lessons learned about Tableau Public:
The web team here at EDF, inspired by Google’s “20 percent time” (and lobbying by web producer Porter Mason), is experimenting with setting aside occasional Lab Days. The goal is to allow our producers to experiment with new tools, build new skills, and otherwise do cool stuff that wouldn’t fit into a regular work week.
Today is my first Lab Day, and I decide to recreate (or create) some maps we’ve worked with using Tableau Public, which I learned about at a really good data visualization session at last year’s NTEN Conference.
And here’s my first map! more…
Beaconfire just posted about the new responsive design on the Boston Globe‘s site. The site adapts to the width of your browser. Well, they’re not the only ones — EDF’s site also uses a responsive design.
And our design firm, Headscape, added a twist that none of us had seen before. Our home page responds to both the width and height of your browser window. Here’s why we did it this way. more…