Who we are: who cares?



Paper jam (courtesy of nanny snowflake
and used under creative commons)

One of my colleagues, Mrs P, is currently campaigning against the ‘Who we are and what we do’ paragraph that seems to start every department’s intranet page.

We’ve got something similar on the website. It’s a waste of space because basically, most users don’t care about the history of the department, who was appointed when, or your strategy for waste disposal. That’s not how your service users are going to get their job done. And all that descriptive padding and self-congratulation just gets in the way of people finding the useful information.

Intranet navigation shouldn’t be department-based because, for example, not everyone knows instinctively that it is IT who fix networking issues with the photocopiers, but if you have run out of toner cartridges, you have to log a call with Facilities instead.

People shouldn’t need to know who to ask to get a job done.

It’s even more important on a public website. How is a member of the public going to know that they’ll find information about their asthma clinic under the Specialist Medicine department’s page?

In theory, no matter how the navigation is structured, you’d hope that search would help. If you search ‘photocopier’ or ‘asthma’, you’d expect to find your answer.

But often departments are so busy describing themselves in important-sounding management jargon, that the simple keywords for their services are missing entirely. Or they are hidden on the fourteenth sheet of a gaudily-designed and poorly-constructed Excel document named ‘Useful Information v2.0’, where they are mentioned in a couple of FAQs.

So Mrs P and her team are re-focusing the intranet content around Services (things people can help you do) and Tools (things you can do for yourself), and keeping department information down to a minimum.

Please look for this ego-fluffing guff on your website or intranet, and consider whether it adds any real value for your users. If not, it’s most satisfying to hit delete... and wait to see if anyone actually notices.

Six unwelcome words and phrases

Every pixel of your website is precious. But we often waste space with filler words and phrases that make our sites look tired and don't help our users.

The words I'm shooing off my pages are:

1. Welcome

There's nothing more cheesy than a 'Welcome to my website' message.

It's old-fashioned and naff.

Instead of: 

Welcome to the Members’ area

Make your heading: 

Members’ area

2. Note

'Note' is a waste of space when used as a heading or in bold at the beginning of a paragraph. Readers scanning the page will only see the word note and will miss the subject of your Note. 

Note: cheques should be made payable to the Fund of Elizabeth.

or

Cheques should be made payable to the Fund of Elizabeth. 

This also applies to NB.

3. Please (excessively and ungrammatically) 

Be polite but don’t tie yourself in knots. Give straightforward, direct instructions.

Readers are reminded to please take their bags with them. 

Can quite easily become:

Please take your bags with you.

It also makes you sound desperate if you have to plead with your users:

Please download the booking form.

Instead, make the first word the instruction. You'll also be front-loading the action keyword and making your text easier to scan:

Download the booking form.

4. Thank you

Say thank you when someone has actually done something. For example, after a web form has been submitted, a thank you message can confirm that they have completed the task, and can tell them what will happen next.

But there’s no need to thank people just for coming to your website:

Thank you for visiting the organisational intranet. We hope you find it useful.

Use the space to highlight some top tasks or features that the user might be looking for. They have come to your site to do or know something, not to read inanities.

5. On this website you will find...

If your content and navigation is any good, you can drop this phrase.

Instead of:

On this website you can find out about the role of dental nurses, get information on how to train, and the career options available.

Get your teeth into some decent menu headings and links:

• What dental nurses do
• Training
• Careers

Don’t waste your homepage repeating the menu links. Highlight something fun or useful instead. 

6. Coming soon

Never load a blank page and say that the content is on its way.

What a horrible disappointment for your user. And when is soon, anyhow? 

Strip out the wasted words

All these phrases and words are really easy to fall back on - like FAQs - when you are in a rush or can't be bothered to have a fight with a content author. But they're all unhelpful bits of padding. Let's show them the door.

The question I’m most frequently asked

In some circles I have a reputation for hating FAQs (frequently asked questions). This is why.

FAQs often creep in because people are too lazy to write proper web pages or are too scared to say no when departments say they want them. HR and IT people are particularly fond of them.

And there’s no need. They are easily re-written. Just change the questions to headings.

e.g. “How do I book a course?” becomes “Book a course”. 

FAQs are bad for many, many reasons. Some of the main ones are:

• They don’t front-load the keywords that you want people to see – your eye is drawn to the What, Why and How in the question, rather than the important words (e.g. in the above example, you want people to see the word “Book”). People scan rather than reading every word online, and this format doesn’t help them find the information they want quickly.
• They are often repetitive. The same answer is given to multiple questions.
  e.g. “How do I do thing x ? Contact person y. How do I do thing z? Contact person y."
  Instead, just have a clear heading at the top or bottom – “Contacts”.
• They create grammatical headaches. Should it be “How do I…” or “How do you…” ? They are hard to write well, and also hard to read, because the user is distracted, thinking about what is meant by “I” and “you”.
• They don’t lend themselves to a logical layout. Due to the endemic laziness of the format, you often find them listed by date issued, rather than grouped together by subject. There may also be multiple answers to the same questions, issued on different dates. It is better to have a simple heading and the correct, current, information under it.
• There are lots of extra words when you try to write in Q&A format. But online, less is more. People won’t read long sentences and paragraphs online. Be less chatty and more direct.
• They often end up as a single, very long page – again, really hard to read. Better to break the information into logical sections and multiple pages.
• FAQs aren’t good for SEO (search engine optimisation) either. There is unlikely to be a good summary of the content at the top of the page if the key information is scattered throughout a number of answers.
• They’re old-fashioned. This doesn't reflect well on the rest of your website.

The general rule is that if you need FAQs, the rest of your content is structured badly. I grinned when the lady running my recent GDS style training said something similar. It's worth noting that FAQs are banned on www.gov.uk and these guys base their style guide not only on theoretical best practice, but on user feedback and testing.

What have I missed?

No e-news is good e-news...

"You know about websites – you can set up an email newsletter, can’t you?"

If you’re thrown in the deep end of news-by-email and email marketing, here’s a buoyancy aid.

Before you start

• Have a clear purpose. What’s the business goal? This sets the content agenda.
• How will you measure success? Generate custom URLs to track website traffic coming from your mailing.

Content

• Make your subject line interesting and relevant to your subscribers. Not ‘Issue 12 of the hospital newsletter’ but ‘A&E waiting time improvements, beating superbugs, and more’. If you have a system that tracks opening rates, try two different subject lines on a sample of your mailing list, and mail the remainder with the best-performing hook.
• Choose the right From address for extra impact. Are you more likely to open an email from a real person, or from ‘Hospital News’?
• Content needs to be relevant to the business goal – think twice about issuing a re-hash of your latest press releases.
• Keep it brief.
• Make it easy to browse. If there are multiple articles, include a contents list that will be the first thing people see when they open the email.
• Follow normal writing for the web best practice. Chunk text using headings and bullet points and write meaningful hyperlink text.
• Proofread.
• Set a sustainable schedule if you’re aiming for regular mailings, especially if you need to get others to contribute or sign off content.

Data protection (stay with me)

• Where did you get your mailing list? People need to agree to you using their information for this specific purpose.
• Include a privacy statement saying how you will use and store personal details.
• Make it clear how to subscribe and unsubscribe.
• BCC. Don’t share your mailing list with everyone on it.

Design and technical bits

• Branding should be consistent with your corporate identity and ideally with your website – especially if you’re linking from your email to your site.
• Use HTML email for designed elements. Styles needs to be applied in-line rather than using something like a stylesheet.
• Make sure the email can be read as ‘text-only’ – some email systems don’t allow graphics and HTML or give users the option to turn them off.
• Don’t clog up inboxes with large emails.
• Avoid attachments, because they can get your email caught in corporate spam filters.
• If you’re using an third party system to send emails on your behalf, make sure the provider has whitelisting measures in place to ensure emails are not flagged as spam.
• If you’re using a mailing system that is pretending to come from your corporate email domain (‘spoofing’), tell your network team to ensure your own colleagues can receive your emails.
• Test on all different types of email – from Outlook and Hotmail, to how it appears on smartphones.

Finally

Keep evaluating against the business goals. Innovate, iterate, and enjoy.