New Website! Or, I Am My Own Worst Client

Today I officially announce the launch of my new-and-improved, new-look-same-great-taste, satisfaction-guaranteed-or-your-money-back personal website. There are a few more things to do (updating my email signature and Twitter avatar, perhaps business cards) to make the rest of my online presence consistent with the new site, but I feel comfortable enough with it to release it into the wild (comments and feedback are, as always, welcome and appreciated).

Before

The old site, which launched in late 2007, was showing its age, and badly, with some of the web 2.0 cliches of its era (I'm looking at you, orange.) The new one cleans up the information architecture and rolls out a new look that I think fits better with my "personal brand" (or, as they used to call it, my "personality"). In some ways, the new look harkens back to my very first freelance website from 10 years ago... but no Papyrus on this one, thank you very much.

I had actually been working on this relaunch for quite some time. It's a common lament among designers that creating one's own identity pieces is surprisingly hard; after all, how do you visually communicate your ability to create visual communications? And while they say you are your own worst critic, I've decided that I am also my own worst client. Consider the following list of sins that every designer dreads encountering in a client:

• I changed my mind on designs that I had already signed off on, for reasons that were largely arbitrary.
• I ignored deadlines that I had set for myself.
• I flaked out and abandoned the project for months at a time.

I'm sure that if I had been charging myself, I probably would have been late with payment, as well. But this self-branding exercise is helpful for all designers to go through. The skill at the core of good design, I believe, is empathy -- the ability to put oneself in the shoes of, say, a website's users or a customer's clients. I think we've all had clients where we just don't understand why it's so damn hard for them to make a decision, or to provide content they promised by the date they themselves suggested, or whatever. Being our own client, however, reminds us that these things are not always as easy as we might think.

What Do Mobile Users Want?

(cross-posted at the University of Chicago Law School Electronic Projects Blog)

Optimizing the Law School’s website for mobile devices is one of those things that has been on my to-do list since just about the day I started here. But it is, alas, one of those long-term projects that continually gets pushed to the bottom of the list due to more immediate, deadline-driven concerns. The new website we launched last summer -- built, as it is, in a generally web-standards-compliant fashion -- is somewhat more mobile-friendly then the previous version, but we did not have the budget or time to build in a mobile-specific site to that project.

This summer, however, I am determined to make some headway in this area, particularly after catching Justin Gatewood’s very helpful presentation on using CSS for this purpose at the 2010 eduWeb conference. Before I dive into the CSS, however, I need to figure out what it is that UChicagoLaw’s mobile are (or would like to be) using our site for.

Enter Google Analytics. We’ve had Analytics installed on the Law School’s website for a while now, and I browse our stats periodically, especially looking for broken links) but digging deeper into all of the tools that Analytics has to offer has been yet another one of those projects that winds up tabled in favor of dealing with more immediate concerns. However, after a little stumbling blindly around the site, I was able to create an “Advanced Segment” that would separate mobile users out from the rest of the site’s users.

Here is what I was able to discover about our mobile users over the time period roughly corresponding with the 2009-2010 academic year:

• Visits by mobile device users comprised just over 1% of total visits.
• Pageviews by mobile devices comprised less than 1% of total pageviews.
• iPhone, iPad, and iPod users were by far the most frequent viewers of the site, making close to 80% of all visits. Android users were a distant second, at just over 10% of visits.
• To my surprise, over a third of our mobile pageviews appeared to have been by prospective students (i.e., within the prospective students section of our site), with the page containing the link to allow them to check their application status being accessed even more often than the site’s home page.
• By contrast, pageviews of pages clearly identifiable as being of interest primarily to students made up just 10% of the total.
• Internal search resulted in almost exactly 1% of pageviews, with course-related information being the most commonly sought data.
• Most external searches (i.e. via Google) were for some variation of the school’s name, followed by the status checker and assorted other admissions-related items.
• There were few visits to our contact/directory page and very few searches (internal or external) for the terms “directory” or “contact”  This was also suprising, as I would expect that users on their mobile devices might frequently be looking for phone numbers or email addresses.

What does all this mean? To my mind, it indicates that prospective students should be the primary audience toward whom the mobile version of our site is aimed. Of course, current students and staff use the site via mobile devices as well, but not nearly as much as I might have expected.The information geared towards those internal audiences should, it appears, be primarily related to courses.

Wrangling the Octopus

Yesterday, I gave a presentation at the eduWeb conference entitled "Wrangling the Octopus: Managing Your Social Media Ecosystem." In the presentation, I outlined the tools that I use to keep content flowing to the University of Chicago Law School's many social media outlets.  The Cliffs Notes version:

• I try to operate under two general principles: automate as much as possible, but don't lose the human touch.
• Using Yahoo Pipes, I create a master feed that aggregates all of our syndicated content (blogs, podcasts, news items, etc.).
• That master feed is fed into Feedburner, in order to maintain a single static URL and to ensure that the feed validates. Feedburner also creates an animated gif of the feed that can be added to HTML emails.
• The Feedburner feed is fed into dlvr.it, which sends content out to Twitter and Facebook.
• We use CoTweet to share our primary Twitter account among team members, and Echofon to monitor Twitter in real time.

My Prezi "slides" are embedded below:

Managing Your Social Media Ecosystem on Prezi

@lougan caught a minute or so on video (embedded below), and @omahaNE posted his notes and audio on Livescribe.

Establishing an Institutional Presence on Goodreads

If there's a mantra for organizations or institutions in social media, it's this: connect with your users where they are. Or, I would add, where you think they'd like to be. That's why at UChicagoLaw, we decided to launch an institutional presence on Goodreads, a social network focused around books. Founded in 2006, Goodreads allows users to keep track of books they've read or would like to read, post reviews and read the reviews of their friends, form book clubs, interact with authors, and more.

Our goal was twofold: to maintain engagement with alumni, and to promote the work of our faculty to the world at large.

We're not sure how many of our alumni are already on Goodreads, but we're pretty sure that a lot of them would like to be if they knew about it. If you're familiar with the University of Chicago, you probably know that most folks affiliated with it are unabashedly geeky about something, be it 12th century Portugese literature or the intricacies of the anatomy of sea slugs of the genus Dunga, and the Law School is no exception (check out our course offerings on subjects like Admiralty Law and Ancient Roman Law if you don't believe me). And along with that geekiness naturally comes a love of books. So while Goodreads remains a niche site, we're fairly certain that it's a niche site that suits our audience well, and confident that we can begin to get them engaged there.

Since Goodreads does not currently have an equivalent of Facebook's Pages (or Public Profiles, or whatever they're calling them this week), building an institutional presence required a little creativity. Here are the steps we took:

1. Created an account with the username "UChicagoLaw," uploaded avatar photo, filled out info, etc.
2. Created "shelves" for the categories of books we wanted to highlight, and added books to those shelves; in this case, "Faculty Books" (all books by current faculty); "Faculty New Releases;" "The Illustrious Past" (books written by deceased and former faculty while at the Law School); "Law School Classics;" and "Faculty Recommendations" (based on responses to our annual questionnaire to faculty about what they're currently reading).
3. Added our faculty members as our "favorite authors."
4. After adding 50 books to your profile, you can apply to become a "librarian;" this gave us the opportunity edit the author pages for faculty, including adding photos, bios, and blog feeds. You can also add YouTube videos to authors' pages.

That got us to the point that we felt comfortable launching. Plans for the future include reviving a dormant alumni book club using the site, as well has getting some of our faculty involved in Q&A's about their recent works.

We've built it; now we'll see if they come.

Twinfomercials

Those of you on Twitter are doubtless all too familiar with the thousands of spam accounts set up to pitch porn, Viagra, and  get-rich-quick schemes. Recently, I came across a more insidious form of Twitterspam created to sell, of all things, an alt.country band.

I had stumbled across the @AltCountryMusic feed via a TweetDeck search for "alt.country" (as many of you know, I'm in an alt.country band myself, which also has a Twitter presence). At first glance, I thought this might be a useful feed to follow to keep up with what's going on in one of my favorite genres. There were lots of links along the lines of "awesome alt country music group live" (with a link to a YouTube video), "Great alt Country music band on facebook" with a link to the band's page, and so on. After clicking on a link or two, however, I realized that all of these links were to material by the same band. To top it off, the band has at least one more generic front feed (@CountryMusicNow), in addition to a feed for the band itself. Unsurprisingly, I lost all interest in the band upon learning I'd been tricked into listening to their material.

These sorts of feeds are not unlike infomercials: blatantly sales-oriented, under a thin veneer of being helpful or entertaining. They are, in many ways, an abuse of trust -- no one really believes that Mr. T thinks the Flavorwave Oven is really that great, and the fact that we know he's lying to us creates an instant distrust of the product. The road to success in social media is, I think, exactly the opposite of that of the infomercial: earn peoples' trust by proving yourself helpful or entertaining, and people just might be interested enough in what you have to sell to consider buying it. Trying to force it the other way will only turn people off.